Abstract: This chapter applies the art historical notion of the picture plane to contemporary digital cinema in order to address the emerging spatial complexities which result from the dematerialization of the frame, the camera, and the lens in the digital age. Analyzing instances in which digital films oscillate between visually representing the picture plane as a diegetic surface (e.g., the trope of blood spatter on the camera lens) and visually representing the dissolution of this surface (e.g., trompe l’oeil, negative parallax), it argues that: (1) the picture plane has become an arbiter of cinematic immersion, and (2) its porous, virtual nature in dematerialized digital cinema reconfigures and renegotiates spatial relations on screen, and between screen and spectator.

Keywords: digital cinema, spatiality, materiality, aesthetics, media archeology

This chapter is concerned with the art historical notion of the “picture plane,” insofar as it relates to the configuration of immersive spatiality in an increasingly dematerialized digital cinema. The picture plane has largely been framed as a pedagogical concept rather than as a theoretical one, first in terms of how it is taught today, as an entry principle to students of the plastic arts, and second in terms of its historical invention, attributed to the perspectival thinkers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as an optical tool to aid in the accurate rendering of objects in space as they are transcribed and projected from real-world three-dimensionality into pictorial two-dimensionality. The concept of the picture plane thus already has a polyvocal meaning, simultaneously referring to both the physical devices of artistic observation which make this graphic projection possible—Leon Battista Alberti's veil or drawing grid, Albrecht Dürer's draughtsman's net or sheet of glass, or Filippo Brunelleschi's tavoletta, for example—and the optical-mental processes that render perspective legible for the spectator.

When it comes to cinematic images, we rarely speak of a picture plane proper; instead, its role seems to have been usurped by theorizations of the frame and of the lens or of the screen and of the spectator's gaze. But today, with the dematerialization of many of cinema's devices and materials and with the rise of films created by increasingly digital means, these elements, their codes and uses, and the relationship between them are shifting.