Since cinema has entered the digital era, its very nature has come under renewed scrutiny. Countering the 'death of cinema' debate, Film History as Media Archaeology presents a robust argument for the cinema's current status as a new epistemological object, of interest to philosophers, while also examining the presence of moving images in the museum and art spaces as a challenge for art history. The current study is the fruit of some twenty years of research and writing at the interface of film history, media theory and media archaeology by one of the acknowledged pioneers of the 'new film history' and 'media archaeology'. It joins the efforts of other media scholars to locate cinema's historical emergence and subsequent transformations within the broader field of media change and interaction, as we experience them today.
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- General Introduction
- Media Archaeology: Foucault’s Legacy
- Film History as Media Archaeology
- Is Media Archaeology a Supplement to or a Substitute for Film History?
- Walter Benjamin and the Modernity Thesis
- Noël Burch and “Primitive Cinema”
- The Legacy of Michel Foucault
- Media Archaeology by Default as well as by Design
- Media Archaeology and the Digital Turn
- Four Dominant Approaches
- Media Archaeology and the Museum World
- The Amsterdam Media Archaeology Network
- The Deep Time of Media, or the Place of Cinema in (Media) History
- The Archive: Crises in History and Memory
- The Crisis in Narrative: Transmedia Studies and Participatory Culture
- The Limits of Media Archaeology
- I – Early Cinema
- 1. Film History as Media Archaeology
- Introduction
- Early Cinema as Key to the New Media Paradigms?
- The Cinema of Attractions: Early Cinema, Avant-garde, Post-Classical, and Digital Media
- Media Archaeology I: Film History between Teleologies and Retroactive Causalities
- Media Archaeology II: Family Tree or Family Resemblance?
- Media Archaeology III: What is Cinema, Where is Cinema, and When is Cinema?
- 2. The Cinematic Dispositif
- (Between Apparatus Theory and Artists’ Cinema)
- “M” is for Media Archaeology
- The Dispositif Cinema: Conditions of Possibility, Definitions
- The Cinematic Apparatus Between High Theory and Media Archaeology
- Dispositif Mark 1: What was Cinema?
- Dispositif Mark 2: Early Cinema
- Dispositif Mark 3: Installation Art and the Moving Image
- Dispositif Mark 4: Encounter and Event
- The Dispositif as Interface?
- Vanishing Points: Infinity versus Ubiquity
- II – The Challenge of Sound
- 3. Going ‘Live’
- Body and Voice in Some Early German Sound Films
- A System of Double Address
- Das Lied einer Nacht: Modernism versus Modernization
- Horror Vacui or Ontological Vertigo?
- Radio and Cinema
- Going Live as Staying Alive
- 4. The Optical Wave
- Walter Ruttmann in 1929
- The Film Industry and Avant-garde
- International Cooperation against National Profiling
- Painting with Time: Ruttmann and the Physiognomy of the Curve
- “Sound film is the topic of the day”—the pivotal years: 1929-30
- 1929 Melodie der Welt
- The Film Author and the Commission: Ruttmann and the Industry
- Ruttmann Believes It
- III – Archaeologies of Interactivity
- 5. Archaeologies of Interactivity
- The “Rube” as Symptom of Media Change
- Attention – Problem or Solution?
- The Rube Films: Towards a Theory of Embedded Attention
- The (Extra-)Diegetic Spaces of Early Cinema
- The Return of the Rube
- Towards a New Reflexivity
- 6. Constructive Instability
- or: The Life of Things as Cinema’s Afterlife?
- Here-Me-Now
- Constructive Instability
- Performed Failure: Narratives of Collapse
- The Honda Cog
- Der Lauf der Dinge
- Around the World in Eighty Clicks
- Cluster and Forking Path “Rube Goldberg”
- Cluster and Forking Path “Pythagoras Switch”
- Cluster and Forking Path ”Domino Day” and Celebrity TV
- Between Epiphany and Entropy
- IV – Digital Cinema
- 7. Digital Cinema
- Delivery, Event, Time
- Deconstructing the Digital
- Digital Delivery and Film Production
- Cinema: The Art and Act of Record?
- Television and the Media Event
- Cinema as Social Event and Site
- The Digital Media as Event
- The Digital as Cultural Metaphor
- 8. Digital Cinema and the Apparatus
- Archaeologies, Epistemologies, Ontologies
- Can Film History Go Digital?
- It’s Business as Usual
- As Usual, It’s Business
- The Digital: Technological Standard or Epistemological Rupture?
- Cinema: An Invention that Has No Origins
- Film in the Expanded Field
- 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
- Trains of Thought
- Digital 3D: Case Already Closed?
- The Counternarratives
- The Tail Wags the Dog
- Playing Catch-up to the Revolution in Sound?
- The Many Histories of 3D—and a Different Genealogy for Cinema
- What is an Image Today?
- To Lie and to Act: Operational Images
- Enlarging the Cast of Actors, Interacting
- 10. Cinema, Motion, Energy, and Entropy
- A Different Media Archaeology of Cinema?
- Cinema and Energy: A Multiple Agenda
- Movement: Analytic and Synthetic
- Still/Moving
- Five Types of Energy
- Assemblages (of Man-Machine-Metropolis)
- Energy Exchange: Physical, Physiological, Psychological?
- Towards a Holistic Theory of Energy: Humans and Things
- Cinema and Entropy: The Human Motor and Fatigue
- Workers Leaving the Factory: Cinema, the Disease of which it Pretends to be the Cure?
- From Energy to Information: Attention, Affective, and Perceptual Labor
- VI – Media Archaeology as Symptom
- 11. Media Archaeology as the Poetics of Obsolescence
- Media Archaeology: Making the Past Strange Again
- Obsolescence as Meta-Mechanics
- The Ends of History or the Borders of History?
- Media Memory as a Challenge to History
- Obsolescence Begets Scarcity, and Scarcity Creates Value
- The Museum: A Politics of Obsolescence
- The Artist: A Poetics of Obsolescence
- 12. Media Archaeology as Symptom
- Media Archaeology as Crisis Management
- Alternative Genealogies: Friedrich Kittler
- Two Kinds of Media Archaeology
- Mobility, Portability, Commodity
- Geometrical Optics and Physiological Optics
- Media Archaeology as the Ideology of the Digital?
- Media Archaeology – Selected Bibliography
- Index of Film Titles
- Index of Key Words
- Index of Names
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