Elsaesser Film History as Media Archaeology

Tracking Digital Cinema
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-90-485-2996-4
Verlag: Amsterdam University Press
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 50, 341 Seiten

Reihe: Film Culture in Transition

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Elsaesser, Thomas

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmtheorie, Filmanalyse

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
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
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?
“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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Trains of Thought
Digital 3D: Case Already Closed?
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
A Different Media Archaeology of Cinema?
Cinema and Energy: A Multiple Agenda
Movement: Analytic and Synthetic
Still/Moving
Five Types of Energy
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

Über Autor(innen)

Elsaesser, Thomas
Thomas Elsaesser (1943-2019) was Professor of Film and Television Studies in the Department of Art and Culture at the University of Amsterdam.

Thomas Elsaesser is professor emeritus of film and television studies in the Department of Art and Culture at the University of Amsterdam.