Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- General Introduction: Media Archaeology: Foucault’s Legacy
- I Early Cinema
- 1 Film History as Media Archaeology
- 2 The Cinematic Dispositif: (Between Apparatus Theory and Artists’ Cinema)
- II The Challenge of Sound
- 3 Going ‘Live’: Body and Voice in Some Early German Sound Films
- 4 The Optical Wave: Walter Ruttmann in 1929
- III Archaeologies of Interactivity
- 5 Archaeologies of Interactivity: The “Rube” as Symptom of Media Change
- 6 Constructive Instability: or: The Life of Things as Cinema’s Afterlife?
- IV Digital Cinema
- 7 Digital Cinema: Delivery, Event, Time
- 8 Digital Cinema and the Apparatus: Archaeologies, Epistemologies, Ontologies
- V New Genealogies of Cinema
- 9 The “Return” of 3D: On Some of the Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the Twenty-First Century
- 10 Cinema, Motion, Energy, and Entropy
- IV Digital Cinema
- 11 Media Archaeology as the Poetics of Obsolescence
- 12 Media Archaeology as Symptom
- Media Archaeology – Selected Bibliography
- Index of Film Titles
- Index of Key Words
- Index of Names
- Film Culture in Transition
10 - Cinema, Motion, Energy, and Entropy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- General Introduction: Media Archaeology: Foucault’s Legacy
- I Early Cinema
- 1 Film History as Media Archaeology
- 2 The Cinematic Dispositif: (Between Apparatus Theory and Artists’ Cinema)
- II The Challenge of Sound
- 3 Going ‘Live’: Body and Voice in Some Early German Sound Films
- 4 The Optical Wave: Walter Ruttmann in 1929
- III Archaeologies of Interactivity
- 5 Archaeologies of Interactivity: The “Rube” as Symptom of Media Change
- 6 Constructive Instability: or: The Life of Things as Cinema’s Afterlife?
- IV Digital Cinema
- 7 Digital Cinema: Delivery, Event, Time
- 8 Digital Cinema and the Apparatus: Archaeologies, Epistemologies, Ontologies
- V New Genealogies of Cinema
- 9 The “Return” of 3D: On Some of the Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the Twenty-First Century
- 10 Cinema, Motion, Energy, and Entropy
- IV Digital Cinema
- 11 Media Archaeology as the Poetics of Obsolescence
- 12 Media Archaeology as Symptom
- Media Archaeology – Selected Bibliography
- Index of Film Titles
- Index of Key Words
- Index of Names
- Film Culture in Transition
Summary
For nearly one hundred years, we have been discussing cinema primarily from the perspective of photography. Organizing our questions and theories around iconic realism and the indexical-physical link that ties a photograph to that which it represents, we have debated cinema in terms of truth and illusion, image and representation, and we have considered cinema as a primarily ocular dispositif, theorized either in terms of projection and transparency or a recording dispositif, to be understood in terms of imprint and trace.
If the problem of a history of cinema is that it relies almost exclusively on photography as its founding genealogy, then what we might need is a different ‘archaeology’ to enable a different future: one that not only goes beyond the ‘death of cinema’ but also acknowledges the changing function of the moving image for our information society, our service industries, our memory cultures, and our ‘creative industries’ more generally.
A Different Media Archaeology of Cinema?
Until the 1990s or so, the foundational genealogies of cinema would have been organized around the persistence of vision, photography, and the projection arts. From today's perspective, not only are these three lines of descent inaccurate and lacunary; perhaps more importantly, they are non-foundational and contingent.
To give one example from the so-called “persistence of vision”: the impression of movement in cinema is not based on a retinal afterimage but on one of the many perceptual illusions (rather than optical illusion) by which our brain tries to anticipate the future. When shown two images in quick succession, one of a dot on the left of a screen and one with the dot on the right (as on electronic noticeboards), the human brain sees motion from left to right, even though there was none. The human visual system apparently construes scenarios of continuity, reconciling jagged images by imputing motion. Because it takes the brain at least a tenth of a second to model visual information, it is working with old information to give meaning to new information. By modelling the future during movement, it is “seeing” the present.
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- Film History as Media ArchaeologyTracking Digital Cinema, pp. 301 - 328Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016