May 6th, 2013 / 8:01 am
Film

Animated Gifs as Cinema

oprah-bees

I was planning to put up the next installment in my experimental fiction series today (part 1, part 2), but school has interfered. (I’m writing a paper on Dickens’s use of the narrative present in Great Expectations, plus grading 40-something research papers written in response to Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men: And the Rise of Women.)

In the off chance that you’d like to read something new by me, I recently published an article at the film site Press Play, “Are Animated Gifs a Type of Cinema?” Since then, Landon Palmer has responded with an article at Film School Rejects (“Animated Gifs are Cinematic, But They’re Much More Than Cinema“), as has Wm. Ferguson at the 6th Floor, the New York Times Magazine‘s blog (“On the Aesthetics of the Animated GIF“). I’m planning a follow-up post as well as an interview with Eric Fleischauer and Jason Lazarus, the directors of the gif anthology film twohundredfiftysixcolors, whose premiere I managed to catch a few weeks back. And the Press Play article is itself a follow-up to two articles I posted at Big Other in early 2011: “How Many Cinemas Are There?” and “Why Do You Need So Many Cinemas?

I’m only just beginning my studies on the gif, so I appreciate any and all feedback.

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7 Comments

  1. Matt Rowan

      Can I just say this particular animated gif is amazing? How have I missed this in all my years on the internet, doing things?

  2. Matthew Salesses

      this gif wins the internet. so ashamed of myself for never having seen it before.

  3. Justin Sirois
  4. A D Jameson

      Then if nothing else, I have been a vehicle for that.

      This gif is included in twohundredfiftysixcolors, alongside 2999 others. Another reason to check that film out!

  5. Monday | Joe Sutton

      […] Animated GIFs as Cinema? […]

  6. A D Jameson

      Thanks!

  7. A D Jameson

      You were the reason why “gif” became the Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year in 2012! (Thanks!)