Breakout Session Panels

The early writings of Sheldon Renan, Jonas Mekas, and Gene Youngblood in the mid-1960s sketched an ambitious horizon for expanded cinema. That promise has largely been obscured by the weight of Structuralist cinema’s formalist experimentations. As Dudley Andrew has noted, “academic cinema studies took off around 1968”—with a mix of Greenbergian medium-specificity dictums, film-indexicality theses, and theoretical frameworks adapted from literary studies. The dominant narrative of expanded cinema that has accumulated over subsequent decades may justly be characterized as an overwhelmingly Euro-American history of formalist and materialist investigations.

Since the 1990s, against the formalist ambitions of that decade’s numerous moving-image exhibitions (to name but two: Passages de l’image, Centre Pompidou, 1990; Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1965–1977, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2001–02) another discourse has coalesced around expanded cinema, moving beyond formalism. The artists concerned with the “new” expanded cinema hail primarily from the global South, and their works engage disciplinary crises of identity across cinema and moving-image art at the end of the twentieth century while tracing contemporary globalized crises of cultural difference and their mediation within the representational spaces and institutions of art.

Drawing on a year-long research fellowship at the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Media and Performance Art, I focus on selected works by Amar Kanwar, Raqs Media Collective, and Walid Raad. I offer a preliminary account of how (re/dis-)located subjectivities and problems of location figure in recent moving-image art to introduce new lines of thinking about expanded cinema in the twenty-first century.

Mixing fact and fiction, narrative and iconography, location and quotation, re-enactment and archive, evidentiary footage and found sound with the fantastic and poetic, John Akomfrah’s thirty-year plus oeuvre approximates the essay film. Like the essay film, his work negotiates the subjective and objective, delivering its content in a non-logocentric structure, yet forging distinct paths of free association. While Akomfrah’s works have continuously adopted the essay form, it is his precise workings of the multi-screen installation apparatus itself that morphs the essayistic into new affective, political, and theoretical registers, ones that approximates thought itself.

At the same time, Akomfrah’s on-going art of projection mixes and negotiates a highly modernist, incisive archaeological practice with stylized narrative re-enactments, often repurposing western culture, both high (from to Milton to Virginia Wolfe) and popular (from techno to Afrofuturism), while habitually remediating cinema’s celluloid past. Yet he conjures uncertainty through a computer-based algorithm and the constant interlacing of geopolitical, historical, and textual layers that privileges our encounter with the earth. Eschewing the single spatio-temporal construct for multi-screen projection, Akomfrah de-centralizes the viewer, fostering a more open-ended consideration of habitus beyond the sublime. While exploring the precise machinations of his recombinant practice of bricolage, this paper will explore an emerging complementary aspect to Akomfrah’s constantly evolving practice, one that can be traced from Peripeteia (2010) to the three-screen installation Vertigo Sea (2016), culminating in a full-on engagement with the Anthropocene. Indeed, I would argue that since The Nine Muses (2012) earthly presence has undergirded his projects and attendant aesthetic principles evinced in the trope of detritus, and is realized most notably in Purple (2017), a six-screen site-specific rumination on the planetary implications of climate change. Constructed as six interconnected movements, Purple offers six meditations on what Jane Bennett has called “the adventures of vibrant matter.” The work uncannily brings to mind Bennett’s injunction to think about the complex ways in which organic and inorganic objects relate to one another in our fragile ecology of the Anthropocene.

In addition, I will argue that unique temporality of Akomfrah’s work, fostered by the conjoining of his evolving multi-screen signature and the installation apparatus, elevate the senses as a primary mechanism for an embodied engagement with his consistent themes of global modernity under the vicissitudes of capital. More specifically, I suggest that this renewed ecological aesthetic offers a constellation where the ontological, the aesthetic, and the political coalesce. Akomfrah is celebrated for mining the cinematic archive, but never to nostalgic ends. As I will argue, Akomfrah’s most recent multi-screen installation, Precarity (Prospect 1V, New Orleans, 2017), which harnesses the affordances of projection, archival footage, and the tableau effect, serves his on-going re-evaluation of our global present on the interconnectedness of things in our new ecological sensorium.

The paper proposes to look at the various “ends” of cinema through one of its aesthetic figures—the POV. POV is an expression that refers to the cinematic technique used to generate images which simulate the movement of an actor within a space, creating a sense of continuity between viewers and what is viewed, as if viewers are ‘embodied’ in them. In cinematic POV, the viewer sees what the character sees from the character’s perspective. Within the broader attempt to elaborate a phenomenology of the POV, the paper proposes to frame POV as a “dispositive” (Agamben, 2009) grounded in the very origin of any regime of visibility (as quantum physics demonstrates), and aims at transforming it into a neglected category of representation which leaks out from its original medium of reference (cinema) into the history of visual culture—from Egyptian painting to perspective to new technologies of vision. Moreover, the paper suggests to look at the cinematic technic of POV as the inner engine or “end” of cinema itself. According to this vision, the difference between cinema and photography has to be re-thought in relation to the emergency of POV from the movement of the camera. When the camera—as it happens in cinema—is capable to express the subject’s movement in time, it becomes effectively able to express a POV. POV is the place where photography become cinema, and cinema become life. The history of cinema can be read as the history of the technics designed to hide the emergency of POV, hiding the human presence from behind the camera. In this sense, tripods, cranes, and drones have a similar “end” – that of masking the role of POV as the inner engine or “end” of cinema. End of cinema intended both as aim – POV as the secrete cinematic engine – and as the figure of a cinematic apocalypse. POV proliferates becoming one of the most common interface across multiple online-offline platforms, and one of the most contested political-aesthetic battlefields of our times. Digital technologies and algorithmic interfaces such as the Google Gaze circuit (google technologies of vision such as google 360, google glass, google car, google maps) re-invents POV and turns it into an aesthetic format enabling forms of bio-tracking and data-veillance (Clarke, 1988). Thus, from being the embodied heart of cinema, POV becomes a predictive surveillance mechanism – as it happens in the case of the Algorithmic Facial Image (Azar, 2017). The CCTV-opticon inspired by Bentham turns into a POV- opticon (Azar, 2017).

At the same time, POV mobile phones images uploaded online becomes the available format for people to perform their political subjectivity in the context of social unrests and protests (such as in the case of the so called Arab Spring), opening towards an understanding of the emancipatory nature of POV images, always suppressed since the beginning of cinema. In the current technological landscape, the “end” of cinema seems indeed that of finally express the subversive nature of POV images by reconnecting them to an effective political subjectivity, able to hack processes of POV datification (Azar, 2015).

Artificial intelligence (A.I.) has been a cinematic mainstay of science fiction since genre’s conception. Inherent in these depictions is an underlying threat to the primacy of the human, and a fear that artificial beings may usurp our position as the master species. Male-gendered A.I. characters are numerous in the sci-fi canon, and most tend to outfox their human counterparts using their computer-generated capacities for reason, as well as their machinic, near-unkillable bodies (Terminator and RoboCop are notable examples) Female A.I. figures, on the other hand, become repositories of emotion, and are emblematic of the intersections between digitality and materiality, as well as sexuality and technology. Sexuality is the locus of the threat in female A.I., beginning with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to the present. In this paper, I will examine two recent depictions of female cyborgs in cinema, Her (Spike Jonze 2013) and Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve 2017) alongside phenomenological and affective models of subject formation derived from Silvan Tomkins’ “machine that can feel” and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “body schema.” These depictions follow in the tradition of the female cyborg as being both an emotional and sexual suture to the male subject, but are distinct in that they lack a corporeal “body” or container. These representations make visible our changing affective relationship to technology, and raise increasingly pertinent questions regarding female subjectivity in the digital age. These examples are instructive in conceptualizing the female body within an ever-shifting cinematic landscape, and provide an account of the elasticity of feminine subjectivity in the digital turn.

Since the Harvey Weinstein scandal erupted in October 2017, the sexual harassment scandals have been a fastmoving tsunami that has swept through the industry and into other workplaces and professions, prompting a wider social conversation about sexual harassment, violence against women and gender inequities, not just in the United States, but now increasingly in other nations around the world.

But does the hopefulness of Oprah Winfrey’s speech at the Golden Globes and the rhetorical force of the Times Up campaign offer the promise of the end days of a certain form of Hollywood, or are the firings and erasures of creative personnel like Kevin Spacey merely forms of corporate damage control?

This paper will historicize the role of scandal in the Hollywood industry, with particular reference to the sex and drug scandals of the twenties and the McCarthy/HUAC hearings in the forties/fifties, and consider some of the parallels and differences between earlier moments of national attention on the Hollywood industry and the contemporary situation, from the circulation of the term “witch hunt” (Woody Allen) to the problems of anonymity, scapegoating and blacklisting, to #OscarsSoWhite. It will consider the degree to which the decentralization and circulation of crowdproduced information in the era of social media might also raise important rhetorical issues of difference from these earlier scandals, particularly around ideas of the individual and collective, that the echoing resonance of the name #Metoo underscores; and finally, explore what Meghan O’Rourke has recently called the role of “a productive redistribution of uncertainty.”

My paper re-examines French filmmaker Claire Denis’ use of color as an immanent phenomenon and material medium which operates through the logic of resistance to the technologies of production and the constraints of the social gaze. Drawing on notions that color is indexical in nature – it signals and intensifies the act of looking – I identify two key aspects of the theory Denis articulates in her films “Beau travail” (1999) and “Vendredi Soir” (2002). From the deserted, dissonant landscapes to the fantasy-inducing memories of color rendered inert in her films, first, I argue that color is identified in a transhistorical image-economy which reflects contemporary gender and racial anxieties as always already exhausted by a movement between reality and pure stylization. Second, I argue that Denis’ treatment of color and aesthetics is an attempt to rethink the category of female authorship and subjectivity within an indeterminate political sphere.

On the level of criticism and scholarship, my paper intervenes on two fronts: first, in debates over the notions of activity and passivity, or ethics of looking and how to look at images, especially with regards to the emphasis of the racialized-sexualized images coded in terms of color; and second, in the contemporary debates about pessimism and anxiety on a larger political scale as well as directed to artistic practices, forms of production and distribution – the transfer from analogue to digital cinema would be one of these concerns.

Over the past fifteen years, various film scholars have noted the emergence of a new cinematic extremism identified with provocateurs such as Catherine Breillat, Michael Haneke, Gaspar Noé, and Lars von Trier. Whereas this scholarship has located the “unwatchable” as a facet of twenty-first-century arthouse cinema, this workshop emphasizes the concept’s broader import at a time when viewers encounter difficult content across a wide range of spaces and media forms—from film and television to smartphones and social media platforms.

Michael Gillespie focuses on Ja’Tovia Gary’s experimental film, Giverny 1 (Négresse Impériale) (2017), which remediates the Facebook Livestream video of Philando Castile’s murder. Challenging Mary Ann Doane’s notion of television catastrophe, Samuel England examines a viral clip from an Arabic-language cooking show, Sufra Dayma, wherein a Sunni Egyptian chef launches into impromptu anti-Shi’i tirades. Finally, Alex Bush explains her inability to watch news coverage of melting ice caps, historicizing her paralysis by spectacles of climate catastrophe through the archive of silent films depicting polar exploration.

Framed by comments from Nicholas Baer and Maggie Hennefeld (co-editors of a forthcoming book, Unwatchable [2018]), the workshop will raise a number of questions for broader discussion: Is the current aesthetic of extremism a response to a competitive media environment in which graphic images of violence and catastrophe circulate as never before? What lens does the digital or “post-cinematic” offer not only on the history of media, but also on current threats to marginalized subjects and the prospect of an “end” to an inhabitable planet?

From Plato to Nietzsche and beyond, philosophy is obsessed with tragedy. What would it be like to have a philosophy, instead, of melodrama? —Steven Shaviro

This paper builds on Peter Szendy’s claim that Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011) exemplifies the “after all”—that is, the time after cinema’s end—by positing the film’s response to “loss” as a response conditioned by melodrama, specifically melodramatic affect. The film begins with an eight-minute Prologue in which the Earth as well as a previously unknown planet, Melancholia, move across the screen in what can best be described as a kind of cosmic opera. As the Prologue reaches its climax, the previously unknown planet smashes into the Earth, yet the violence of the Earth’s destruction is oddly deflationary. When the catastrophe finally happens, we are left with the unresolved drama of the two female protagonists Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). There is no attempt on the part of the characters to prevent the catastrophe, nor is there any possibility of humanity surviving in a post-apocalyptic future. If the catastrophe proves important to the narrative at all, it is only to suggest that the real catastrophe has already happened. Bookended by the discovery of the unknown planet on the one hand and its eventual collision with Earth on the other, Justine and Claire dwell in the unresolved—never to be resolved—space of affect and suspense, knowing full well that from a certain perspective, the end of the world has already happened. In terms of genre, then, Melancholia can best be described as a melodrama. It is a melodrama of extinction. To describe von Trier’s film as a melodrama is to move away from any pejorative characterization of the genre and to realize instead that on the most basic level melodrama, as Stanley Cavell has argued, is about the relation of life and death, sound and vision, and knowing and not-knowing—all of which pertain to what film “is” ontologically and how film responds to the “loss of the world” that Cavell calls skepticism. In this paper, I argue that Melancholia offers a melodramatic and uniquely feminist response, centered on affect, to the “loss of the world” described by Cavell and Gilles Deleuze, and that it frames the “ends of cinema”—the film’s final shot visualizes the Earth’s total destruction, for example—as the spectral post-vital condition of life and cinema in the Anthropocene.

Off the assembly line and into the mind – Mirroring the Fordist assembly line, the classical production of cinema, energized by capital flows of the Hollywood machine, embodied the logic of a (dream) factory. Unit production functioned to standardize studios’ working processes, while the logic of the assembly line saw films pumped out like so many other commodities. Cinema today, however, in its digital abstraction claims its liberation from its historical apparatus of production, distribution, and exhibition. YouTube, for example, emerges from (or irrupts into) this history as a crystallization of the very cinematic apparatus, rebranding its capitalist nucleus as an innovative, democratic institution. These newly insidious methods of capture and control function as an exploitative recombination of what Marx called the “general intellect.” Freed from the factory, the “creator” is instead voluntarily mined for content creation 24/7; one remains constantly on the clock as self-producer, actor, editor, distributor, and spectator. An insidious mutation of labor arises in the guise of daily vlogs, food reviews, unboxing videos, and how-to tutorials. With these changing structures of production and labor arising in the era of post-Fordist labor, hierarchies proliferate, but so too do territories of resistance. Félix Guattari asked whether one should remain nostalgic about the alleged “good old days” of media–when images were not simply strings of ones and zeroes. A false problem for Guattari–mediation has always-already abstracted the subject from truth. Yet, these innovative technologies alternatively “foster efficiency and madness in the same flow,” and so demand molecular alternative practices, wresting the revolutionary potential of the technological medium from its conservative impetus. The precariat arises, cell phone in hand.

At the end of Weekend (1967), the title card famously declares “the end of cinema,” signifying Jean-Luc Godard’s disillusionment with narrative cinema. Weekend, however, was also a beginning, an early example of a new political modernist cinema in Europe and Latin America critiquing ideology through intensified formalism.

In subsequent decades, this intensified formalism is evident in the experiments in durational aesthetics and extreme long-takes found in a range of filmmakers. My presentation examines director Theo Angelopoulos whose style is the apotheosis of this long-take political modernism. Though he earned his international art cinema reputation in the seventies with his Brechtian representations of Greek history, his final films from the nineties and the 2000s are considered less successful for their flawed attempts to represent the broader histories of Europe and post-communist identity.

My paper analyzes these late films for their collision between Angelopoulos’s post-1968 political modernism, with its narrative of history as ideological conflict, and the destabilizing effects of financial capitalism in post-communist Europe. In particular, I focus on recurring images of refugees and border crossings in these films to trace the breakdown of Angelopoulos’s political modernist style. I also discuss the treatment for his final, incomplete project The Other Sea (2012) which would have dramatized the social impact of austerity and the financial crisis on Greece. In doing so, I speculate on what the belated modernism of Angelopoulos’s late style suggests about the future of formalist critiques of ideology in the age of post-cinema.

Inspired by the ongoing effort to employ cinema’s digital turn as what Thomas Elsaesser describes as a “reflexive turn in thinking about cinema,” my paper suggests how we might harness the sense of upheaval currently associated with screens by employing them as a matrix through which to reconsider cinema’s historical dispositifs. Work in film and art history has elucidated the heterogeneity of cinema’s dispositifs by exploring how screen practices in areas such as early cinema, “useful cinema,” and the historical avant-garde diverged from those of classical Hollywood. Building on that work, my paper draws on extensive archival research to show how a focus on screens’ spatial formations also enables us to reconsider the dispositif of theatrical Hollywood cinema in the classical era.

Such a focus reveals relationships among domains that are usually considered in isolation from (or opposition to) one another, including theatrical and nontheatrical exhibition, mainstream and avant-garde cinema, production and exhibition, and cinema and television themselves. Examining how screen practices bridged these areas makes it possible to chart how a crucial component of the apparatus participated in diverse but overlapping sets of discourses and practices. Doing so reveals the fluidity and porousness of that apparatus even in the context of Hollywood, thereby presenting the heterogeneity and openness of cinema’s dispositifs as a pervasive and persistent part of film history rather than a product of Hollywood’s “others” or an outcome of digital technologies.

How do film archives behave in the digital era? Traditionally film archives preserve and give access to films that have ended their commercial lives. Archives keep these films in their historical format in order to be able to present these films in their original form and to re-recreate an original, authentic experience. Today, films are often digitized and consequently stripped of their analogue objectness and presented in all kinds of formats that have nothing to do with the dispositif of the traditional cinema. Many notice the alienation between the material object and its digital double and this explains the wide interest in the materiality of film, the tactility of the material object and the photochemical means of expression. The discussion about resolution and image quality is not anymore at stake, the question is now whether digital films are a new medium, a medium that mediates different than analogue film. It brings to the foreground that film is not only about representation and storytelling, but it is also a medium of attraction and sensation with regard to its photochemical materiality and its dispositif. In particular experimental film makers and artists have demonstrated this in the past and the question is whether the loss of these characteristics does justify the proposition that de cinema is dead. To paraphrase Svetlana Boym’s words “technology and nostalgia are about mediation”, one could also say that there is no mediation without technology. If technology is an essential element of cinematic mediation, then digital film is a different medium.

When Catullus wrapped his confusion and anguish over a lost lover into two lines of exquisitely worked poetry, Vergil’s work did not simply come to an “end.” We can observe that certain conventions lose their power for certain groups, without requiring an “end.” I say this because in 1969 I presented a senior thesis on similarities between epic oral poetry vs. neoterics (νεωτερικοί) & Hollywood vs. underground filmmakers – grand tales and colossal productions vs. personal and minutely crafted films.) Tools for film analysis lacked precision and filmic focus.

We have developed a suite of analysis tools to enable close structural analysis of the time-varying signal set of a movie. We take an information theoretic approach – message is a signal set – generated (coded) under various antecedents – sent over some channel – decoded under some other set of antecedents. Cultural, technical, and personal antecedents might favor certain message making systems over others; the same holds at a recipient end – yet, the signal set remains the signal set.

Starting with Hitchcock, moving through Looney Tunes and numerous feature films, and fine-tuning with Warhol and Vertov, we honed ways to provide pixel level analysis, forms of clustering, and precise descriptions of what parts of a signal influence viewer behavior. These can be used across critical platforms.

Analysis of the signal set across the evolution of film from Edison to Hollywood to Brakhage to cats on social media, yields a common ontology with instantiations -responses to changes in coding and decoding antecedents.

In her Dictionnaire des Intraduisibles, Barbara Cassin elaborates on the difficulties of translating the German notion of “Stimmung”. The word seems to manifest an interesting and complex combination between its musical sense (stimmen often means “to tune an instrument”) and a mental disposition. In other words, “Stimmung” may indicate a state of harmony or attunement between outside (the environment) and inside (body/mind). The goal of this presentation is to analyze the usefulness of a theory of “Stimmung” (or “ambience’) in the field of film studies. The critical approach of “reading for Stimmungen”, as proposed by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht in his most recent works, seeks to explore the ‘material dimension’ of the artwork, by engaging with its sensible rather than hermeneutical facets. Contemporary culture, argues Gumbrecht, is characterized precisely by its orientation towards non-hermeneutic readings and the fascination with the sensorial/sensational facets of the artwork. In that sense, Gumbrecht’s ideas seem to be particularly fit for the analysis of cinematic works that Joan Hawkins, among others, identify as pertaining to the complex category of “body genres” (horror, pornography, science-fiction etc). Facing the lack of a proper aesthetic distance, a trademark of “degraded cultural forms”, the spectator feels directly affected by the images at a corporeal level. These traits could also be indicative of a certain “end of cinema” in contemporary entertainment culture (at least, of cinema as we traditionally understand it). By means of a careful reading of certain films, I intend to show how Gumbrecht’s non-hermeutic techniques reveal important aspects of filmic experience nowadays.

As the 21st century nears the end of its second decade, a multitude of writers both academic and popular have made claims that cinema has died at the hands of digital technologies. Though traditional forms of media certainly find themselves in the middle of a transformative era, digital technologies have done anything but cause the end of cinema. Instead, virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV have aided in the creation of new forms of cinematic performance as seen in the cyborgian performances of the theatre troupe: A Stage Reborn. Drawing on interviews and six months of ethnographic data in the virtual world of Final Fantasy XIV, this presentation offers up one potential answer to the question, “Whose cinema is ending?” and its implicit opposite, “Whose cinema is thus beginning?” Utilizing an adaptation of Haraway’s concept of the cyborg, I will argue that the digital has not killed cinema, but rather partially reinvented this form of media as something between the human and the machine, the actual and the virtual. This cyborgian form of cinema may, if one is particularly optimistic, mark the end of white, male and Western- centric cinema by broadening accessibility to the role of both performer and audience member to more geographically and demographically diverse populations. By exploring the intertwining of digital and cinematic, this presentation not only reflects on past understandings of technology’s impact on media, but also highlights a new avenue for research in the modern era: Cyborgian Cinema.

Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk sees a tension between an immersive experience, enhanced by its use of 70mm IMAX film, and temporal disruptions in the film’s narrative structure. Christopher Nolan famously proclaimed that the film’s experience is akin to virtual reality without the goggles (“Spitfires”). Thus, as reality becomes more mediated and war becomes increasingly a representation, Nolan’s use of the film object, a thing reputed to be dying or even dead, is most peculiar and pertinent in how it is involved in a representation of past warfare.

As Theodore Martin stresses in Contemporary Drift, the contemporary is a “strategy of mediation” since it allows the consideration of “the politics of how we think about the present” (5). I agree and seek to hold Dunkirk up as a mirror of how the past is shaped, via representation, for the present. I intend to close read the film for its realistic and immersive portrayal of warfare, one that takes advantage of the qualities of real film as well as the large-scale IMAX format, and the tension this creates with Dunkirk’s time-shifting narrative structure. By doing so, the anxieties of the contemporary world regarding death and bodily harm can be seen, for the film offers three different temporal vantages as different representations of battle. These vantages are formalized through camerawork that emphasizes the film object and IMAX experience. Thus, a dialectic between the immersive and asynchronic experiences creates anxiety that can only be eased by looking into the past, not towards the future.

In the so-called post-cinematic age, an established film distribution system associated with film reels and movie theatres is complemented by streaming. This does not necessarily mean free flow of moving images.

My paper focuses on what I call “fortress formats”. These are film formats based on digital rights management systems such as Apples “fairplay Streaming DRM”. They try to determine the way how users can circulate film. Another concept is connected to so- called media eco systems. Here, the formats are not necessarily protected, instead the infrastructure and the devices where film can be viewed are used as fortification systems. These formats are protected by an interplay of formats and infrastructure, e.g. the ever-changing standards and protocols in the amazon eco system.

I argue that “fortress formats” are not unique to the post-cinematic age but can be traced back throughout film history. From this perspective, film theatres and the box- office can be understood as architectural fortresses that prevent access to people without tickets. I explore the notion of fortress formats to better understand the contemporary shifts in film culture. The relation between “fortress formats”, the highly restricted and protected formats and “infrastructure formats” that rely on infrastructure control, is ever shifting and enables us to describe and distinguish more precisely between different phases in film- and media history. This research contributes new findings to research on digital film distribution, format theory, and proposes to use concepts from information systems and STS for film studies.

Scholarship on cinema in the digital age has tended to emphasize cinema’s expansion from the movie theater, onto various devices and into private, mobile spaces. This narrative of expansion is also found in scholarship on blockbuster cinema—the dominant form of cinema today—which focuses less on the traditional cinemagoing event and more on the enormities of production budgets, transmedia narratives, merchandising campaigns, corporate tie-ins, and onscreen spectacles. This presentation, however, repositions the theatrical exhibition of the blockbuster as a crucial economic and cultural moment by calling attention to its temporal features—the ways in which time is molded, stretched, and organized during blockbuster distribution and exhibition. Pairing twenty years of box office data with an analysis of Warner Bros. campaign for Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, this presentation conceptualizes four dominant temporal structures of cinemagoing today: acceleration—of both the theatrical window and the pace of theatrical earnings—anticipation—which intensifies with the franchising and “sequelization” of Hollywood cinema—ephemerality—which is harnessed in promotional campaigns to structure audience sensations of exclusivity and prestige—and synchronization—which emphasizes social connection, bringing forth the notion that audiences all around the world are connected in time. Specifically, I contend that these temporal strategies construct the practice of cinemagoing as a distinct “event” set apart from today’s “anytime-anywhere” media environment. With this analysis of these temporal structures, I open an exciting new space for media scholarship to explore the relationships between temporality, industry practice, audience experience, and cultural events.

It is said that globalization has rendered the first word in the term “national cinema” obsolete. The same is said about cinema due to digitalization, and the proliferation of screens. Both statements seem to be particularly true with regard to Japan. As Alexander Zahlten shows, Japanese cinema has been transformed from a culturally recognized brand, into various compromised consumer products of much lesser importance. However, a new local grassroots phenomenon that embraces watching films in theaters has recently emerged. This does not mark a simple return to the notion of cinema before its alleged “end,” but rather its recreation as a new participatory form. Film theaters taking part in this phenomenon encourage audiences during screenings to get up from their seats, to sing, dance, shout, and interact with one another— indeed, much like in The Rocky Horror Show screening events. In sharp contrast to the cult film, however, the genres of the films chosen for such screenings in Japan seem random: Disney animation and locally produced anime, sexploitation/horror films, as well as Bollywood productions. While the venues themselves may be thought to be technologically anachronistic, smart-phones are sometimes used to enrich the “watching” experience, and promotion for screenings is done almost exclusively via social media outlets.

While I agree that this new formation of cinema reaffirms the notion of an end to a previous conception of the medium, I argue that such communal participatory practice of watching films also enables considering the reemerging of a Japanese cinema.

Digital technologies challenge the theoretical bond between copy and reality and seem to have vitiated Bazin’s ideas: the ability of the photographic image to indicate an original object and the history of film as a progressive movement toward realism. Scholars have been stressing the disappearance of the mimetic and indexical character of film. Lev Manovic declares the death of cinema as the art of the index and suggests that digital film has reversed the traditional relationship between photography and animation. Is Manovic right? Do we no longer put faith in the truth-value of images? Doesn’t film always involve manipulation? Were there ever any ontological distinction between a true and a false image? Aren’t these discussions often implicitly based on an originary and essentialist ground?

The purpose of this presentation is to investigate the ontological effects of digital technology. Cinema is an ever changing medium and theory is always struggling to catch up. That is what we are set out to do, revisiting Bazin’s realism, its psychological aspect and the hypothesis that the world of simulacra we inhabit today seem like an ironic fulfillment of his myth of total cinema. In the end, digital images are underlined as perfectly real, and adequately grounded in and of themselves, and film did not become a type of animation; it was always animation, marked by the malleable nature of its elements and procedures, where bodies, characters, objects, landscape, emotions and dramas are always in formation, in a continuous birth of matter, form and meaning.

Contemporary video games like L.A. Noire (2011), Beyond: Two Souls (2013), and Until Dawn (2015) have taken up the mantle of cinema in their emphasis on storytelling, reduction of action-based gameplay, photorealistic graphics, and casting of recognizable actors appearing in their own digital likeness. Consequently, they have often been labeled (or disparaged as) “interactive movies.” In an era in which the industrial, technological, and aesthetic barriers between movies and video games are breaking down, these games demonstrate an interesting hybridization between cinematic and gaming conventions. Accordingly, the player/viewer’s relationship to these media must be rethought, as both films and games expect some alteration between activity and passivity, control and submission.

Focusing on Quantum Break (2016) and Until Dawn, this paper examines the aesthetic implications of the merging of video games and cinema. While a fairly standard third-person shooter with a time-manipulation twist in terms of its gameplay, Remedy’s Quantum Break experiments with media convergence by including a television series within the game that is responsive to decisions made by players. Supermassive’s heavily cinematic Until Dawn remediates the slasher genre, while toying with the player’s sense of control over the events of the narrative. The paper concludes by arguing that the experience of these games is not so different from the playful spectatorship encouraged by other contemporary media in the digital age.

Figures like David Cronenberg fit uneasily in discussions of the digital revolution in narrative cinema. On the one hand, he belongs on neither side of the oversimplistic binary that pits proponents of the new technology like David Fincher against analog purists like Quentin Tarantino. Yet on the other, many of his films and his two digital features in particular seem to do more to investigate and incorporate the aesthetics of digitality than anything by torchbearers like Fincher or Steven Soderbergh. While the digital works from these latter figures are often period pieces whose warm color palettes attempt to conceal their technological base, Cronenberg’s last two features embrace what many scholars refer to as the “clinical coldness” of digital cinematography. This paper looks at three phases in the filmmaker’s 21st century career. The first is typified by his short film Camera which juxtaposes DV with analog cinematography and reads like a visual meditation on Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. Next, I turn to his mainstream phase and specifically A Dangerous Method, Cronenberg’s last feature shot on film and one that I interpret as a swansong to analog technology and classical cinema. Finally, I look to Cosmopolis and Maps to the Stars which signal his complete break with analog cinema and his reinventing himself as a moving image maker. I ultimately argue that if we are to learn anything of the value of medium specificity for narrative cinema in the digital age, it is directors like David Cronenberg that we should turn to.

This presentation shows how early Weimar German film culture may be read to theorize the death of cinema as concerning the existential ontology of the film medium. While it draws from known discourses that describe film as having to do with animation and vital life, the presentation also looks at writings on the cinema such as Stefan Zweig, Arnold Zweig (no relation), Friedrich Sieburg, and others, while referencing films such as The Golem (1920) and Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921), to argue that the language of inanimacy and mortality implicitly accompanies that of life. This analysis reveals the relevance of the classical Latin formulation, nascentes morimur (“from the moment we are born, we begin to die”), to the ontology of cinematic life. Grounding this ontology further, the presentation draws from Weimar writings by Simmel and Heidegger that coincidently reference this Latin phrase and seem to be informed by the experience of loss and the thinking of mortality following WWI.

This paper concludes by considering the implications of these insights around mortality and endings in contemporary culture. In a context where moving images stream endlessly, demanding that they be experienced without sleep, the finitude of film reminds us of the ontology of moving images in general as implicated in the lived experience of time. This critical explication of time proposes a new ethics between humans and our precarious technologies of the moving image.

Louis Lumière famously initiates the spectral discourse around cinema almost as soon as the medium appears with his declaration that it is an “invention without a future.” The question that emerges now, in the midst of cinema’s “death” is: does the medium still lack a future? And what lessons might this invention that lacks a future have for a world where the future feels increasingly tenuous, or at least uncertain? I argue that cinema is a late medium, forever displaced from its own time, never of its moment. Lateness expresses something that is outdated, past, obsolescent, dead, but also what is most up-to-date, most recent, and most fashionable. While distinct, these versions of lateness share a particular relation to time. Specifically, lateness signifies excessive time; it is time that is exhausted, has no purpose, lacks a crucial element, or exists solely for itself. Using examples from Robert Smithson and Michael Snow, I argue that an ongoing project of the cinematic avant-garde is the production of an excess temporal reserve. This excess cinematic temporality, this cinematic lateness, provides the ground for beginning to think about the possibilities for a future after the end of history. This cultivated excess temporality offers the possibility of a way forward, and not just beyond the present instance of cinematic death, but past the ahistorical flux of contemporaneity and its foreclosure of the future.

While the concept of the Anthropocene may be up for debate, it undoubtedly presents historians of cinema an opportunity to rethink our perspective on historical time. The Anthropocene* forces us to think about time in terms of geological rather than human history. In the context of climate collapse, the end of cinema may seem trivial, but I want to make a case that a new ecologically-informed historiography of cinema can help us envision the future in this era of many deaths. From the perspective of the Anthropocene, 123 years of cinema history look like a small moment in time. But as many commentators have noted, it is very difficult to see and comprehend the scope and scale of the Anthropocene. What we can see is the environment on display in countless films shot on location in the outdoors across film history. Today, old films about ecosystems take on new meaning. Early classroom films are particularly interesting, for many of them document landscapes, animals, and ecosystems that are now threatened or on the verge of obliteration. Using visual examples from 1930s educational films such as An Alaskan Glacier, Four Seasons: Summer, and Nature’s Handiwork, and drawing from work on the philosophy of history by Reinhart Koselleck and Manuel De Landa, this presentation aims to develop an ecologically-inspired nonlinear historicism that can help us rethink the so-called end of cinema. As it heralds new forms of media, perhaps this end of cinema can also help us shift into a new mode of thinking to meet the challenge of living with limited possibilities.

Post-cinema has expanded the forms of cinema and audiovisual culture in general with the introduction of new image and media technologies. No longer contingent on profilmic reality or continuity editing, post-cinema allows for a new image of time beyond that of indirect and direct images of time, q.v. Gilles Deleuze’s work on cinema. This article investigates how post-cinema thinks about contemporary audiovisual culture through new forms, arguing that the new media machines of post-cinema produces other thoughts than articulated in Jean Epstein’s The Intelligence of a Machine. These post-cinematic thought forms are crucial to understand how the 21st century is organized.

Three forms are detailed — animacies, capture, and flows — showing how digital workflows revise earlier versions of cinema, producing new insights into how our world is organized, suggesting that post-cinematic media are what Carol Vernallis term unruly: accelerated soundimages that induce new sensations of life and control. The fourth form, plastic temporalities, challenges classic cinematic time as reaching beyond continuity through contiguity, suggesting instead that time has become increasingly flexible to adapt to a new spatiotemporal organization. In other words, time has become a resource, more than simply the labor time of value that Mary Ann Doane argues for in The Emergence of Cinematic Time — today, the plastic temporalities have become techniques of control. Post-cinematic works allow us to think through this redistribution of the sensible; a new spatiotemporal regime and episteme of what we might call post-capitalism, following Mckenzie Wark, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, and Paul Mason.

Many wars have been fought by “image shots,” in the double meaning of “war against images” and “war through images.”

“War against images,” whenever the diffusion of any type of visual material capable to testify the unsaid of the news—mostly flawed or incomplete—has been hindered.

“War through images,” whenever the only re-construction of the event was made possible thanks to the free circulation—generally forbidden—of non-professional images.

My speech is neither a “war against images” nor a “war through images.” Nor does it want to be a close examination of the processes underlying the contemporary “society of images.”

Starting from a few clarifications regarding the current status of images, the intent of this presentation is to show the peculiar power electronic images have, in an eminent way, to “make judgment”—a judgment no longer conveyed only through an aesthetic or political-aesthetic code—that is today’s faculty of “judging via images.”

This original (but not unknown) faculty, ruled by a “new” mechanism which we will call “Imaginativity,” creates new forms of art, the most eminent of which being to show itself and the reformulation of its ontological status in the next-generation cinematographic products.

Starting from the killing of Neda, we will verify how (and increasingly so) an image, a frame frozen by the disturbing sequence making up the video of the killing of a young woman, fascinates us to the extent of including it into the World of Art, the seventh art, modifying and dislocating its registers, spaces and methods of execution and enjoyment.

Drawn from my current book project of the same name, this presentation identifies the goals or ends of cinema as artistic humanistic expression. It attends to the recent Black-centered film 12 Years a Slave (2013) to address what it terms the “tyranny of realism” and the sociologically-driven criticism that misrepresented the film’s goals and successes. By tracing a history of Black artists’, activists’, and humanist scholars’ complications of the singular Black Self in modern Western thought, the paper mobilizes a tradition of Black aesthetic theory to give a better account of Black cinematic representation as art, unbeholden to the limitations of realist aesthetics. Informed by the recent work of Michael Boyce Gillespie and Kara Keeling as well as that of earlier scholars such as W.E.B. DuBois and Zora Neale Hurston, the argument rallies against a realism-based liberationist politics in order to make visible and legible a truly free Black Western cinema that rejects the stultifying aesthetics of verisimilitude. Through this new lens, 12 Years a Slave is regarded as an artwork that comments stylistically, formally, and philosophically on its material and existential conditions of production. Far from being a poor depiction of enslavement and Black survival, 12 Years is in this paper revealed to have activated expressionist techniques to expose the enduring isolationism, tokenism, and racially-inflected capitalism that have shaped and continue to influence Black existence in the modern industrial West.

Written with uppper and lower cases, to indicate the interweaving of disctinct materialities that, however, transform themselves into an organic unit, as a result of the complex relation in which both loose their individual meaning, in a sort of transformative symbiosis. The concept allows to discuss a wide range of audiovisual processes, from early cinema to audiovisual performance. This presentation will propose a repertoire of examples that suggests an archaelogy of image and sound relations. Considering audiovisual montage as a broader repertoire allows to identify dialogs among 16th’s century opera and avant garde music theatre, early cinema attractions and VJ sets, essay films and music videos, and so on. A critical and cronological overview of iMaGeSouNDS, as a category that renders isolated understandings of audiovisual languages such as cinema or videoart obsolete, proposing a transversal look that also shifts aways from the focus on narrative that more often than not tends to obstruct more adventurous engagments in the means of audiovisual montage.

In 2016, the Star Wars franchise once again pioneered a breakthrough in cinema technology. Using highly detailed 3D modeling and animation, the producers recreated the character of the Grand Moff Tarkin just as it looked in the first film, almost forty years ago. Even though the CGI techniques employed in this process haven’t been strange to Hollywood for more than a decade, it was the first time they were used to achieve a reasonably credible synthesis of a specific human person, moving freely. The result was so convincing that most specialized media outlets discussed the feat as a sort of resurrection of Peter Cushing, the defunct actor who originally represented Tarkin.

The prospect that the movie industry has finally overcome the uncanny valley could represent the end of mainstream filmmaking as we know it. A large number of productions already employ digitally composited backgrounds even for seemingly banal scenes. With the widespread use of 3D models for the photorealistic representation of characters, human or otherwise, the medium could move away from the vestigial theatrical stage and even from optical capture altogether.

This presentation examines how current forms of volumetric imaging, a number of which focus on the quantification and reenactment of facial features, signal towards this colonization of filmmaking by digital animation and computerized postproduction. Based on the analysis of both commercial services and tech demos, it asks the audience to consider what it means to further decouple a person’s cinematic presence from their bodily existence and performance.

Cinema hasn’t ended, it has expanded. “Art will not disappear into nothingness, it will disappear in everything,” as Julio Garcia Espinosa declared in his 1979 essay, “For an Imperfect Cinema.” I am interested in the edge of cinema, where tools of production, projection, and dissemination collapse through ubiquity and are instrumental in recalculating audience relationships with narrative. The roots of this interest can be found in the revolutionary claims for cinema from Dada, Surrealism, and Situationist International as a call to audience empowerment, permeability of public space, street performance and political disruption. In this presentation, I will look at the contemporary use of guerrilla projection for resistance actions, which open public space as theatrical frame and scaled, site-specific spectacle. I will also develop the idea of light brigades as sequential narrative performance which coexists with projection actions and correlates to a history of cinematic expansion, specifically regarding embodied text as witness. Finally, I will discuss the “pixel stick,” a programmable blinking wand of light that “washes” an image as it is walked over a specific space, hidden to all but a still time-lapse camera, readable only through the lens, revealed through post mediation. This is particularly interesting within protest work as it affords asynchronous revelation of content based upon synchronous and embodied theatrical performance. Such tools place cinema beyond the question of its end through exhaustion, but help it “disappear into everything,” where we are able to reappear as highly visible in our “fight with light.”

This paper proposes that an historical examination of Indian popular cinema’s entanglements with religion and technology is key to understanding contemporary digital cinema and its split from a knowable, observable reality—a separation that has induced much anxiety leading to hyperbolic proclamations of cinema’s demise. If religion and technology are to be seen as mediating between the visible and invisible, “Bollywood films are a technology of religion,” claims Arjun Appadurai. Indian popular cinema revels in inexplicable miracles and divine interventions rendered through overt technological manipulations. This paper develops a cosmopolitical aesthetic framework via Indian popular cinema. For example, I analyze the coinciding of the luminous and the numinous in films like Amar, Akbar, Anthony (Manmohan Desai, 1977) which uses the superimposition of two candle flames over one’s eyes to convey the miraculous restoring of the blind mother’s eyesight. Cosmopolitical aesthetic emphasizes the importance of relational thinking between humanity and the cosmos, highlighting the importance of cinema technology in audio-visualizing this relationship. The term cosmos is understood as an assemblage of the knowable and unknowable, and politics exceeds a finite exchange between humans, so as to accommodate multiple ontologies and epistemologies of cinema without deferring to geopolitical and aesthetic hierarchies. In contradistinction to Frederic Jameson’s “geopolitical aesthetic,” cosmopolitical aesthetic contends with the notion of Indian popular cinema as emblematic of a national cinema. Ultimately, this paper provides a response to the question: What can Indian popular cinema add to contemporary debates on cinema’s shift to the digital?

Most of the lands in the central region of Salvador were (and still are) owned by the Catholic Church, and it is interesting to note that one of the first places to have a regular cinema program in the city was the Recreio São Jerônimo Cinema, founded in 1911 in a room inside the old archdiocese of Salvador (Sé).

The argument I develop in this article seeks to understand the complexities of Salvador’s religious, administrative and commercial center through the rise and fall of film projection activity, which began with public presentations of pioneering inventions such as Fotoveramovel, Catoptricon and Bioscope, among other novelties.

Considering their influence on the traffic around the squares, the rhythm of pedestrian movement and the normalization of daily habits, cinema and cathedral, film and mass, spectator and believer are figures that alternate and complement in the “holy of Cinelandia”, to use the expression by Vilém Flusser. Salvador did not even have its “cinelandia”, like Rio or Sao Paulo, however the cinemas that were opened around its central region during the 20th century numbered almost two dozen, and the role of religious orders in their maintenance and management is not small.

In this article I investigate ways in which the relationship between church and cinema has developed in the capital of Bahia, and how the liturgical functions of the two confuse and overlap in a blatant or subliminal way in the region of Sé, with its varied screenings ranging from religious films to pornography.

The turn of the twenty-first century saw the emergence of two separate, funereal scholarly ideas: post-cinema and the postsecular. While post-cinema refers to what Casetti calls the “persistence” of the cinematic across various new media and platforms in the wake of the alleged “death” of film, the postsecular refers to a wide-ranging critique of the received wisdom that “secularization” spelled the ultimate decline of religion from the public sphere. This paper reads these two fields—emerging in the same cultural moment, buttressed by comparable narratives of loss and decay—alongside each other. What might a post-cinematic postsecular look like?

Cinema, as it emerged at the turn ofthe twentieth century, was a model technology of secularism. Formally negotiating between the trick and the actuality, faith and skepticism, early cinema became a training ground for belief in a secular age. And in the contemporary work of Bill Morrison—which digitally preserves the degradation of early film—we see that cinema remains just as revelatory a secular technology. In Just Ancient Loops (2012), Morrison edits high-resolution scans of early nitrate films alongside contemporary digital animations. The film ends with an extended sequence drawn from a print ofFerdinand Zecca’s 1907 Passion Play film, each frame of resurrection and ascension transfigured by bubbling decay. The material spectacle of time’s ravages converging with early cinema’s miraculous “tricks” converging with the miracles of the gospels converging with the promise of digital wizardry—this, I argue, is what the post-cinematic postsecular might look like today.

In its classical formulation, cinematic realism is based in the photographic ontology of film, i.e. in the photograph’s indexical relation to the world, which grants to film its unique purchase on reality; upon this relation also hinged, for many realist filmmakers, the political promise of realism. Digital media, meanwhile, are widely credited with disrupting indexicality and instituting an alternative ontology of the image. David Rodowick, for example, argues that the interjection of digital code disrupts film’s “automatisms” and eradicates the index in favor of the symbolic. But while such arguments are in many respects compelling, I contend that the disruption of photographic indexicality might also be seen to open up spaces in which to explore new automatisms that communicate reality and/or realism with and through post-indexical technologies.

Whereas André Bazin privileged techniques like the long take and deep focus for their power to approximate our natural perception of time and space, theorists like Maurizio Lazzarato and Mark Hansen emphasize post-cinematic media’s ability to approximate the sub-perceptual processing of duration executed by our pre-personal bodies. The perceptual discorrelation of computational images gives way, in other words, to a more precise calibration of machinic and embodied temporalities; simultaneously, the perceptual richness of Bazin’s images becomes less important, while “poor images” (in Hito Steyerl’s term) communicate more directly the material and political realities of a post-cinematic environment. As I will demonstrate with reference to a variety of moving-image texts employing glitches, drones, and other computational objects, post-cinematic media might in fact be credited with a newly intensified political relevance through their institution of a new, post-cinematic realism.

In film and media studies, the notion of post-cinema has been identified with changes in cinema technology and spectatorship that manifested in the 1990s with the introduction of digital delivery platforms that enabled viewing motion pictures independently of the classical cinematic apparatus. Scholars who explored the history of such changes in the status of cinema (notably Anne Friedberg’s pioneering work) uncovered a longer trajectory of transformations, pointing at cable television and the VHS as important antecedents to digital media. In this paper, I argue that the history of the notion of post-cinema may be traced further back to the 1920s and 1930s, as I focus on the first attempts at televising feature films during television’s experimental era. These early broadcasts of films preceded the launch of regular television services and primarily functioned as part of technical tests or demonstrations of transmission capacities. Nonetheless, they marked a largely forgotten media-historical turning point as the first instances in which motion pictures were effectively dissociated from film and from the environment of the movie theater.

Drawing on examples from the industrial and critical discourses that surrounded these experimental transmissions, I will show how their historical moment – most commonly typified by the dominance of classical Hollywood and the emergence of classical film theory – already rehearsed some of the concerns that came back to haunt cinema at the end of the twentieth century. Specifically, I discuss how the remediation of motion pictures and the creation of special adaptations of films for the purpose of televising prompted speculations about subjects such as the impending demise of cinema, the erosion of cinema’s distinguishing media traits and need to re-define its uniqueness, the site-specific significance of the movie theatre, the creation of new spectatorial protocols, and the possibility of retaining cinematic essence when films are “relocated” or “reformatted” to the television screen.

In 2017, the third season of Gomorra – La serie was released in Italy; during the week of the season premiere, three days before the day of the television broadcast, two episodes of the new season have been screened in movie theaters, reporting a record number of spectators. From different points of view, Gomorra – La serie offers an interesting perspective to analyze what happened to the audiovisual format in the last 10 years: based on the well-known book of Roberto Saviano, Gomorra has been first a movie, then a tv shows that gained a lot of popularity thanks to the interactive-ludic practices of social networks (YouTube and Facebook). Why going back to theaters? Moving from this very specific example the paper intends to analyze the relationship between cinema and what it is today generally considered the most popular form of moving-images, tv series. Are tv series bringing a definitive end to cinema? Or do they lead to a new rebirth?

Against the backdrop of a specific understanding of cinema, the paper will propose three arguments:

– Despite their name, tv-series are a very effective example of audiovisual relocation through the web. Series, legally and illegally, circulate online and spectators find in the web the natural environment to share and examine their favorite shows (the cases of Game of Thrones and, more recently of Westworld are very relevant from this point of view).

– The case of the screening of Gomorra – La serie in theaters suggests that a completely new experience of theater is possible because of tv series and that movie theaters can become an “augmented version” of the online forum and website for file sharing and debate.

– Series have an effect on film production itself; is it possible to combine the focus on characters and narrative with a peculiar work on images? The paper will propose a positive answer to this question, discussing specific examples (like Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, 2017).