At once both timely and historically grounded, From IBM to MGM: Cinema at the Dawn of the Digital Age explores the history of cinema's earliest encounters with computers, as film-makers responded to the flurry of digital devices that emerged in the post-war decades. Capturing the fervour and fears, hysteria and hyperbole, technophilia and technophobia of a crucial period of digital revolution, film-makers in a range of contexts sought to respond to the computer as a new technology, one with profound significance for cinema and the wider world.
Whether in films in which computers 'starred' on screen (from Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey to Walter Lang's Desk Set and Michael Crichton's Westworld) or in those produced using this same technology (the films of John Whitney, Stan VanDerBeek and other pioneers), what the cinema of this era shared was a willingness to engage with the computer head-on, exploring and exploiting the essential qualities of new tools as connections were forged between the worlds of cinema and computing.