Before making HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA,’ at the end of the 19805, Jean-Luc Gadard tried out the aesthetic conception in the electronic short J'VISSANCE DE LA PAROLE (1988), shamelessly taking full advantage of a commission by the French national telephone system for a commercial. In the prologue, the film-maker is heard voice-off to a picture of the revolving spools of a film editing machine: ‘In the entrails of a dead planet, a worn-out mechanism shudders. Tubes reawaken, emitting a pale vacillating light. Slowly, as if reluctantly, a commutator changes position... just a nostalgic farewell, so it would seem, to a hundred years of cinema history, or might it also mark possible transitions to what will come or even pinpoint new begirmings that could be connected to a changed position?

The debate on the proliferating and rapidly advancing apparatus of the media and its relationship to both the condition and the perspective of that which we have been taught to call culture, threatens to degenerate into a cold war of opposing beliefs at this fin de 20ieme siecle. Euphoric endorsement of the expanding machines and their programmes in telecommunications, especially in the form of the globally wired computer and data networks, is assuming more and more metaphysical or even missionising features; in Europe, with the politico-strategic slogan of the ‘information society', it exhibits overt ideological traits. In the opposing camp, the champions of the classical media - including traditional technical production of sounds and images - declare their instruments, their systems of describing and of viewing, to be an irrefutable holy mythos. In the case of film, for example, this applies to its production and even more to its classical venue, the cinema.

The crux of the matter is the dualism between analogue and digital media. Although in this debate as a rule both properties tend to be defined in images and not technologically. Analogue stands for the traditional mechanical and photochemical processes of production and reproduction; digital stands for electronics and the future. The value or moral judgement implied by the deliberately pointed emphasis of my title for this chapter, in fact refers to fundamental psycho-technical distinctions, as were assigned to different physical frames of reference by Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld in their famous work The Evolution of Physics: ‘We assume, therefore, the existence of one co-ordinate system (CS) for which the laws of mechanics are valid.