The Past and the Posthumous

In 2007, through circumstances not entirely of my own choosing, I found myself resurrecting a family ancestor, my grandfather, the architect, Martin Elsaesser. I was asked to write a biographical essay for a catalogue accompanying a retrospective of his work at the Deutsche Architekturmuseum Frankfurt. The exhibition honoured him as one of the chief city architects in Frankfurt between 1925 and 1932, during the peak years of what came to be called Das Neue Bauen. His key building from the period, the Frankfurt Central Market, had been acquired by the European Central Bank in 2004 as the site of the Bank's new headquarters. Although a listed building and therefore protected as a national monument, the Grossmarkthalle was under threat: the plans envisaged by the Central Bank – along with the notoriously deconstructionist impulses of the star architect designing the ensemble – meant that the integrity of the building, and thus its value as a historical landmark had to be sacrificed. The general context of the retrospective was therefore as much an act of compensation or restitution as it was of celebration and recognition: the temporary nature of the exhibition and the online existence of the Foundation had to substitute for the physical survival of the architect's most famous building.

(These are the key points of Thomas Elsaesser's introduction to the film in October 2018 at Gdansk University and then at the Essay Film Presentation at the cult bookshop in Amsterdam on 2 December 2018, <https://perdu.nl/ nl/r/a-day-on-the-essay-film-visual-erosions-sprouting-words/>)

• 1. The opening magnificently builds up the blend of a contemplative-reflectiveretrospective mood (Primrose in the boat), and a state of abjection and imprisonment (the somnolent and comatose Temeraire, staring straight at us from behind bars): this foreshadowing the tense psychological encounter between these two characters, clearly heading for a confrontation.

• 2. This human drama is set off against a serene, breathtakingly beautiful, but mercilessly indifferent natural landscape – a perspective to which the film returns at important moments: it gives us both relief from the tense drama, and it gives us the sense of a larger frame of reference, within which the heart-breaking tragedy of the woman and the abject state of the man are an insignificant blip.

• 3. In fact, the landscape translates into visual metaphor the enigma of Primrose’s repeated phrase: ‘I’m not your darling’. Nature, too, is not your darling: so that Primrose's gesture of forgiveness, grace and mercy (if that is what it is) is not the response of a weak woman, giving in, because she is needy for human contact and male companionship at whatever cost, and instead, it is the result of her agency as woman who is also a ‘force of nature’.

• 4. Charmaine delivers an extraordinary performance throughout. She really brings to life the meaning of this character and conveys the complexity of her actions: its ethical as well as political project. Endlessly watchable, she carries the film. Better even than she was in Suitcase.

• 5. Charmaine's spellbinding presence throws into sharp relief the fact that Eddie has failed to flesh out or develop his character. He is disappointing, especially if one knows his extraordinary performance in Escape, and his equally riveting play in Suitcase. This is a drunken, senile loser, unimaginable that he might once have consorted with the white elite, or that he had the women at his little finger. Once he is tied to the chair he does a better job, but that's not too hard.

My several years researching, writing and directing the documentary essay film The Sun Island have led me to reflect on the connection between my theoretical interests and my practical experience. Involving many moments of doubt, but also of sudden elation and creative energy, the creative process was challenging and, as it turned out, philosophically unsettling.2 I was therefore delighted when asked by Agnieszka Piotrowska to show my film, and was honoured to be one of the keynote speakers at the conference ‘Creative Practice Research in the Age of Neoliberal Hopelessness’ organised by her at the University of Bedfordshire in May 2018. I was also daunted by the task, not least because Agnieszka – in her call for papers – introduced me with a raft of questions she wanted me to address: ‘Elsaesser, after a lifetime of books and papers, has turned his hand to the making of a personal documentary featuring his family's archive. Why did he decide to include practice in his work? What has he learnt that he can share? Can a theorist analyse practice and how?’

In order to respond to at least some of these questions, I decided to divide this account into several parts. First, a few remarks about the external circumstances that brought me to making this film; then some ideas on the topic of creative practice research under neoliberalism, paying due care to the tension that creativity finds itself today not (only) between hope and hopelessness, but also between autonomy (that is, creative independence and authorship) and automation (academic bureaucratic systems on one side, algorithms and search engines automating research on the other). These reflections will bring me back to my practical experience during the years of researching and putting together The Sun Island, which will lead to some concluding remarks that address the question: ‘what has he learnt that he can share?’

EXTERNAL CIRCUMSTANCES AS IMPEDIMENTS OR INCENTIVES?

First, then, the external circumstances that led me to make The Sun Island: perhaps the most banal, but in this academic context not unimportant, circumstance is that my retirement from the University of Amsterdam was mandatory when I turned sixty-five in 2008. As a significant turning point in anyone's life, it proved a useful moment to reflect on both my professional career and my personal life.

After some fifty years of diverse and prolific production, post-1968 West German filmmaking is still mostly associated with the star directors of the New German Cinema, especially Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, and several women directors such as Margarethe von Trotta, Helma Sanders-Brahms, and Doris Dörrie. Even in the communitarian 1960s and 70s, when the “death of the author” was the politically correct motto, the precarious ness of film exhibition in West Germany and the system of municipally funded art house venues (the “Communal Cinemas”) required independent distributors to market virtually all their productions under a director/author label, with filmmakers often travelling with their films, like musicians.

These programming exigencies obscure the fact that most Western European filmmaking has, for the better part of four decades, been dependent on the large national television networks: for finance, production facilities, and even exhibition, in the form of scheduled broadcasts.This was particularly true of West Germany, where the various state subsidy systems for filmmaking were tied to, and synchronized with, the television networks to such an extent that one had to ask: was television putting its resources into supporting a national cinema, or had the nation’s filmmakers put themselves in the service of television?

A particularly illuminating case not only of the West German filmmaking community’s interpenetration with television but also proof of its vulnerability when it came to targeting domestic television viewers (while still envisaging a national or even international cinema audience) was a relatively short-lived but historically important experiment conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the so-called Arbeiterfilme (workers’ films).It was the first time since the birth of the New German Cinema (or “Young German Cinema,” as it was known between 1962 and 1970) that a group of films made by independent directors was launched specifically as a genre, rather than under the then so powerful and almost magic banner of the Autorenfilm (authors’ films). In what follows, I will sketch some of the thinking behind the decision to revitalize and at the same time radicalize the concept of genre, by making it productive not in its traditional context of the cinema but for television, where it represented a useful halfway house between the information-and-issue orientation of the docudrama and the entertainment-and-spectacle orientation of classical genre-cinema.

For nearly a century, we have been discussing cinema primarily from the perspective of photography. Organizing our questions and theories around iconic realism and the indexical-physical link that ties a photograph to that which it represents, we have debated cinema in terms of truth and illusion, image and representation, and we have considered cinema as a primarily ocular dispositif, theorized either in terms of projection and transparency or a recording dispositif, to be understood in terms of imprint and trace.

If the problem of a history of cinema is that it relies almost exclusively on photography as its founding genealogy, then what we might need is a different ‘archaeology’ to enable a different future: one that not only goes beyond the ‘death of cinema’, but also acknowledges the changing function of the moving image for our information society, our service industries, our memory cultures, and our ‘creative industries’ more generally.

A Different Media Archaeology of Cinema?

Until roughly the 1990s, the foundational genealogies of cinema would have been organized around the persistence of vision, photography, and the projection arts. From today's perspective, not only are these three lines of descent inaccurate and lacunary, perhaps more importantly, they are non-foundational and contingent.

To give one example from the so-called persistence of vision: the impression of movement in cinema is not based on a retinal afterimage, but on one of the many perceptual (rather than optical) illusions by which our brain tries to anticipate the future.

“M” is for Media Archaeology

While changes in basic technology, public perception, and artistic practice in sound and image media may often evolve over long historical cycles, there are also moments when transfer occurs in discontinuous, unevenly distributed fashion during much shorter periods of time and with mutually interdependent determinations. Today one can identify two such relatively abrupt periods of transformation taking place across a broad spectrum of media technologies and social developments: the period between the 1870s and 1900, and the period between 1970 and 2000.The first witnessed the popularization of photography; the emergence of cinema; the international, transatlantic use of the telegraph and the domestic use of the telephone; and the invention of radio and of the theories as well as basic technology of television. The second period saw the consolidation of video as popular recording and storage medium and avant-garde artistic practice, the rise of installation art and its hybridization with cinema (of which more below and in a separate chapter), the universal adoption of the personal computer, the change from analogue to digital sound and image, the invention of the mobile phone, and the emergence of the Internet and the world wide web.

A key characteristic of such periods of rapid media change is the volatility, unpredictability, and contradictory nature of the dynamics between these technologies’ practical implications (such as industrial uses and the resulting potential for economic profit), their perception by the popular imagination (in the form of narratives of anxiety, of utopia, dystopia, and fantasy) and the mixed response (eager adoption or stiff resistance) from artists, writers, and intellectuals. These shifting configurations among different agents offer a rich field of investigation for cultural analysis, posing methodological challenges and requiring specific case studies.

For nearly one hundred years, we have been discussing cinema primarily from the perspective of photography. Organizing our questions and theories around iconic realism and the indexical-physical link that ties a photograph to that which it represents, we have debated cinema in terms of truth and illusion, image and representation, and we have considered cinema as a primarily ocular dispositif, theorized either in terms of projection and transparency or a recording dispositif, to be understood in terms of imprint and trace.

If the problem of a history of cinema is that it relies almost exclusively on photography as its founding genealogy, then what we might need is a different ‘archaeology’ to enable a different future: one that not only goes beyond the ‘death of cinema’ but also acknowledges the changing function of the moving image for our information society, our service industries, our memory cultures, and our ‘creative industries’ more generally.

A Different Media Archaeology of Cinema?

Until the 1990s or so, the foundational genealogies of cinema would have been organized around the persistence of vision, photography, and the projection arts. From today's perspective, not only are these three lines of descent inaccurate and lacunary; perhaps more importantly, they are non-foundational and contingent.

To give one example from the so-called “persistence of vision”: the impression of movement in cinema is not based on a retinal afterimage but on one of the many perceptual illusions (rather than optical illusion) by which our brain tries to anticipate the future. When shown two images in quick succession, one of a dot on the left of a screen and one with the dot on the right (as on electronic noticeboards), the human brain sees motion from left to right, even though there was none. The human visual system apparently construes scenarios of continuity, reconciling jagged images by imputing motion. Because it takes the brain at least a tenth of a second to model visual information, it is working with old information to give meaning to new information. By modelling the future during movement, it is “seeing” the present.

Deconstructing the Digital

Our current uses of information technology and our commerce with images do not always depend on digitization. They often pre-date it, or in any event require a wider context in which digitization is merely one factor, however crucial. The ‘convergence’ argument around the digital media as the ‘motor’ gives a false impression of inevitability and with it a sense of disempowerment that overlooks a number of salient forces also shaping the current situation. For instance:

• * it underestimates the impact of economic concentration on a global scale, which started before the digital revolution and involves major innovations in technologies as different as jet propulsion and satellite technology, containerization, fiber optics, and the transistor.

• * it ignores the geo-political realignments of the recent decades since the oil crises and the collapse of communism, with the move from ideologically opposed power blocs to neo-liberal, capitalist trading blocs, leading to the emerging markets of Asia and Latin America, decenterizing Europe and reorienting the United States towards the Pacific Rim.

• * it does not take into account deregulation (i.e. legal and institutional changes) and its effects on national television industries and statecontrolled or corporate telecommunication monopolies in the developed countries.

When we use the computer to generate letters of the alphabet, few of us seem particularly vexed. When we listen to digital music and sound, again, there is a large degree of acceptance; it is only when digitization generates images that something akin to a cultural crisis appears to occur, with exaggerated claims being made by some, and acute anxieties being voiced by others. This is all the more surprising given that the majority of cinematic digital techniques are modelled on tricking the eye with special effects, something that has been practised since Georges Méliès, Fritz Lang's DIE NIBELUNGEN, Walt Disney, and KING KONG. Are we simply witnessing a new round in the bout between the advocates of ‘realism’ and the perfectors of ‘illusionism’? Or is something more at stake, something to do with a major change in cultural metaphor away from ‘representation’ to ‘simultaneity’, ‘telepresence’, ‘interactivity’, and ‘tele-action’? Media gurus even speak about ‘preparing mankind to accept its own obsolescence’, as homo sapiens hands the planet over to artificial intelligence organisms, at which point the computer and digitization start lending support to wild evolutionary speculations but also to a skewed history of the media.

If media archaeology has been a catchword in the fields of film studies and media studies for almost three decades now, then the amount of attention and degree of acceptance accorded to it has increased exponentially over the past ten years. The essays presented in Film History as Media Archaeology – Tracing Digital Cinema cover general reflections and specific case studies written over a period of some twenty-five years, often tackling similar questions, exploring them from different perspectives, but always keeping at the center of media archaeology cinema as an extraordinary mutable phenomenon, impossible to fix and yet firmly established in our culture and its imaginary for at least one hundred years. What I want to conclude with is a recapitulation of some of the main arguments by way of an epilogue, which turns out to be also something of a retrospect, in the sense that media archaeology's own status—as method, as practice, as a potential discipline—may have to come under scrutiny.

During those twenty-five years, a number of books have been published carrying Media Archaeology in its title, notably Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka's edited volume Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications and Jussi Parikka's What is Media Archaeology. Several books by Siegfried Zielinski (Audiovisions, Deep Time of the Media) can also be considered to directly contribute to the question “what is media archaeology”, and so does a collection of essays by Wolfgang Ernst entitled Digital Memory and the Archive. In recent years, the number of articles, book reviews, and special issues on media archaeology have augmented the scope and intensified the debate.

Casting one's net a little wider, one should add that some of the most intensely read and extensively reviewed books in recent years, such as Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer, Mary Ann Doane's The Emergence of Cinematic Time, and Jay David Bolter/Richard Grusin's Remediation as well as Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media all breathe the spirit of media archaeology even if they do not carry the words in the title or indeed use them in the text.

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.