Academy by R. Luke DuBois

As included in Casey Reas’s course 50 Years of Software Artists at UCLA as a standout example of computer film, specifically digital video, Academy compresses seventy years of film history into the length of a seventy-six-minute film. Presented at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, the piece takes the first seventy-five years of Oscar-winning Best Picture films from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and condenses each into a single minute per film, displayed in chronological order. DuBois uses frame-averaging and time-lapse phonography to distill each film’s essence, allowing viewers to observe the evolution of cinematic techniques and themes over decades. Academy challenges our perceptions of film history and canon by asking questions about the implications of the digital on film, expressed through digital media itself.