Post-Cinema and Godard's Histoire(s)

During the last decades, new relations between film and the visual arts have been established, some of them incited by a wide range of phenomena that have been labelled by critics and theorists with the umbrella term ‘post-cinema’. At the end of the twentieth century, theorists, artists and filmmakers came to realise that cinema had a history, that it had become a medium of the past. In spite of the huge quantity and diversity of films still being made, some even spoke of the ‘death of cinema' and film's centenary celebration in the mid-1990s often went hand in hand with a feeling of nostalgia.

The idea that cinema had come to an end was triggered by various factors. From a macro-historical perspective, it is beyond question that cinema was the paradigm medium of the first half of the twentieth century. Textbook film history teaches us that the classical Hollywood system, for instance, had reached its apex in 1946 — the year that saw the highest number of film productions as well as an unsurpassed box-office record. That era was also marked by the breakthrough of alternative modes such as Italian neorealismi and thus the beginning of a modernist cinéma d'auteur or the so-called art house cinema. In the late twentieth century, however, after the breakthrough of television and the rise of so-called new media, cinema was no longer the most important, let alone an exclusive visual medium both in terms of information and entertainment. Moreover, digitalisation disconnected film from the specific material of celluloid. Taking an altered position vis-à-vis reality, the digital image has been closely linked to the post-modern logic of the simulacrum.