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:

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.