自上世紀90年代末開始,數字技術的迅猛發展致使電影的制片與觀看方式發生深刻變革,但數字媒介的特異性所造成的一系列電影本體之問仍未得到確切答案。羅多維克在《電影的虛擬生命》中,以其高度的媒介自覺質詢并推演了數字電影是什么,并進一步探討了它所負載的真實性與主體性問題。羅多維克嘗試在技術、審美、倫理、文化的交叉線索中不斷回歸數字電影本體,在媒介層面比較膠片影像和數字影像的差異與同一、潛能與限制,并在"人的延伸"層面探討媒介變遷對觀看者的影響。羅多維克跨過兩種媒介異質性的斷裂,在《電影的虛擬生命》中客觀地回應了數字技術究竟如何改變了電影及其研究范式。

Since the end of the 1990s, the rapid development of digital technology has led to profound changes in cinema production and viewing. However, a series of ontological problems caused by digital media specificity have not yet been answered accurately. In the book The Virtual Life of Film, D. N. Rodowick questions and deduces digital cinema with his consciousness of medium, and further explores realism and subjectivity of its load. Rodowick constantly returns to the ontology of digital cinema in the cross-logic of technology, aesthetics,ethics and culture: at the media level, he compares differences and identities, potentials and limitations between analogical image and digital image, and at the "the extension of man"level, he discusses the influence of media transformation on viewers. Striding over the gap of heterogeneity between the two media, Rodowick in The Virtual Life of Film objectively responds how digital technology has changed cinema and its research paradigm.