Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema

Description

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. 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 VI Media Archaeology as Symptom 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