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
General Introduction: Media Archaeology: Foucault’s Legacy
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
Film History as Media Archaeology
Anyone speaking about cinema today must be in a retrospective and prospective frame of mind at the same time. There is general recognition that cinema has been an enormous force in the twentieth century—it is the century's memory and its imaginary—but there is far less consensus on what its role, survival, or impact will be in the twenty-first. Even if the ‘death of cinema’ has been much exaggerated, the focus of interest has shifted—twice over. Popular stars-and-genre cinema continues to be taken for granted as the mass entertainment of choice for an evening out with friends or a partner (occasions for which Hollywood still provides the weekly new releases), but the cultural status once enjoyed by European art and auteur cinema has shrunk and all but disappeared. In its place are the emerging film-producing countries in Asia and Latin America (and to a lesser extent Africa) whose sites are the national, international, regional themed film festivals and whose topics are often the social consequences and family dislocations following globalisation.
As crucial as the geopolitical shifts in the cinematic landscape, is the fact that much of the intellectual attention has undeniably moved to digital media, comprising digital television, computer games and handheld communication devices, mobile screens, and virtual reality. Scholars and the general public are especially taken by the social media and other participatory forms of engagement with sound and images, which both affect and connect many more people than cinema and which pose serious political and ethical issues around direct democracy and political activism;—concerns about the protection of privacy; the tracking and monetizing of our feelings, our likes, and desires; the threat of total surveillance by the State, and, last but not least, the criminal exploitation of our online vulnerabilities.
For those committed to the idea that cinema has a future, several options present themselves. Some are happy to draw a firm line in the silicone sand and devote themselves with renewed vigor to the aesthetic promises and possibilities of (past) cinema by reviving, in a different key, the old question of ‘Is cinema an art?’ and answering, full-throated, in the affirmative.
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- Information
- Film History as Media ArchaeologyTracking Digital Cinema, pp. 17 - 68Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016