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
8 - Digital Cinema and the Apparatus: Archaeologies, Epistemologies, Ontologies
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
Can Film History Go Digital?
The specter stalking film history is that of its own obsolescence. However, it is not at all obvious that digitization is the reason why the new media present such a challenge, historically as well as theoretically, to cinema studies. Is film history vulnerable because it has operated with notions of origins and teleology that even on their own terms are untenable in the light of what we know, for instance, about early cinema? This chapter takes this question as its working hypothesis. I want to start by identifying typical attitudes among film scholars since the 1990s when it comes to responding to the new media or digital media.
In 1995, Jean Douchet, a respected critic in the tradition of André Bazin, thought that the loss of the indexical link with the real in the digital image presented a major threat to mankind's pictorial patrimony as well as to a cinéphile universe, of which he felt himself to be the guardian:
The shift towards virtual reality is a shift from one type of thinking to another, a shift in purpose, which modifies, disturbs, perhaps even perverts man's relation to what is real. All good films, we used to say in the 1960s, when the cover of Cahiers du cinéma was still yellow, are documentaries, … and filmmakers deserved to be called `great’ precisely because of their near obsessive focus on capturing reality and respecting it, respectfully embarking on the way of knowledge. [Today, on the other hand], cinema has given up the purpose and the thinking behind individual shots, in favour of images–rootless, textureless images–designed to violently impress by constantly inflating their spectacular qualities.
At the limit, digital media for Douchet was a revival of the old futurist and fascist obsession with speed and kinetics, the most superficial kind of activism, kinetic avant-gardism, and sensationalism, making digital effects a childish toy, a grimace disfiguring the face of the seventh art.
On the other side of the silicone divide stood those for whom, with the promise of ‘virtual reality’, Bazin's prediction of an age-old dream was finally fulfilling itself, that of man creating his own immortal double.
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- Information
- Film History as Media ArchaeologyTracking Digital Cinema, pp. 253 - 266Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016