Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema 9789048529964

Table of contents :
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
Film Culture in Transition

Citation preview

Film History as Media Archaeology

Film History as Media Archaeology Tracking Digital Cinema

Thomas Elsaesser

Amsterdam University Press

Front cover illustration: Hugo, 2011. Director: Martin Scorsese. Paramount / GK Films / The Kobal Collection Back cover illustration: ‘Le voyage dans la lune, en plein dans l’œil!!’, a drawing by Georges Méliès of the vessel landing in the moon’s eye in the film Le voyage dans la lune (1902). Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 94 6298 057 0 e-isbn 978 90 4852 996 4 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789048529964 nur 670 © Thomas Elsaesser / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2016 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

The notion that there was some exact instant at which the tables turned, and cinema passed into obsolescence, and thereby into art, is an appealing fiction that implies a special task for the meta-historian of cinema.1

1 Hollis Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses,” Artforum vol. 10, no. 1 (September 1971): 35.

Contents Acknowledgements 13 General Introduction

Media Archaeology: Foucault’s Legacy

17

Film History as Media Archaeology 17 Is Media Archaeology a Supplement to or a Substitute for Film History? 22 Walter Benjamin and the Modernity Thesis 26 Noël Burch and “Primitive Cinema” 30 The Legacy of Michel Foucault 32 Media Archaeology by Default as well as by Design 35 Media Archaeology and the Digital Turn 38 Four Dominant Approaches 44 Media Archaeology and the Museum World 46 The Amsterdam Media Archaeology Network 48 The Deep Time of Media, or the Place of Cinema in (Media) History 56 The Archive: Crises in History and Memory 58 The Crisis in Narrative: Transmedia Studies and Participatory Culture 60 The Limits of Media Archaeology 65

I  Early Cinema 1. Film History as Media Archaeology 71 Introduction 71 Early Cinema as Key to the New Media Paradigms? 74 The Cinema of Attractions: Early Cinema, Avant-garde, PostClassical, and Digital Media 77 Media Archaeology I: Film History between Teleologies and Retroactive Causalities 80 Media Archaeology II: Family Tree or Family Resemblance? 86 Media Archaeology III: What is Cinema, Where is Cinema, and When is Cinema? 94

2. The Cinematic Dispositif

(Between Apparatus Theory and Artists’ Cinema)

101

“M” is for Media Archaeology 101 The Dispositif Cinema: Conditions of Possibility, Definitions 106 The Cinematic Apparatus Between High Theory and Media Archaeology 107 Dispositif Mark 1: What was Cinema? 115 Dispositif Mark 2: Early Cinema 120 Dispositif Mark 3: Installation Art and the Moving Image 124 Dispositif Mark 4: Encounter and Event 127 The Dispositif as Interface? 130 Vanishing Points: Infinity versus Ubiquity 134

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

139 139 141 145 147 151 155

The Film Industry and Avant-garde 155 International Cooperation against National Profiling 158 Painting with Time: Ruttmann and the Physiognomy of the Curve 170 “Sound film is the topic of the day”—the pivotal years: 1929-30 176 1929 Melodie der Welt 178 The Film Author and the Commission: Ruttmann and the Industry 183 Ruttmann Believes It 185

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?

191 191 198 203 205 207 209

Here-Me-Now 209 Constructive Instability 211 Performed Failure: Narratives of Collapse 213 The Honda Cog 214 Der Lauf der Dinge 216 Around the World in Eighty Clicks 219 Cluster and Forking Path “Rube Goldberg” 220 Cluster and Forking Path “Pythagoras Switch” 221 Cluster and Forking Path ”Domino Day” and Celebrity TV 222 Between Epiphany and Entropy 223

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

231 231 232 237 240 243 247 250

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

253 253 254 255 257 258 263

V  New Genealogies of Cinema 9. The “Return” of 3D

On Some of the Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the TwentyFirst 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

269 269 270 273 273 278 280 287 293 297

10. Cinema, Motion, Energy, and Entropy 301 A Different Media Archaeology of Cinema? 301 Cinema and Energy: A Multiple Agenda 303 Movement: Analytic and Synthetic 306 Still/Moving 308 Five Types of Energy 309 Assemblages (of Man-Machine-Metropolis) 314 Energy Exchange: Physical, Physiological, Psychological? 314 Towards a Holistic Theory of Energy: Humans and Things 316 Cinema and Entropy: The Human Motor and Fatigue 317 Workers Leaving the Factory: Cinema, the Disease of which it Pretends to be the Cure? 322 From Energy to Information: Attention, Affective, and Perceptual Labor 324

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

331 333 334 337 339 341 343 346

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?

351 360 365 369 373 376 383

Media Archaeology – Selected Bibliography

389

Index of Film Titles

397

Index of Key Words

399

Index of Names

403

Acknowledgements Some f ifteen years ago, I published a book in German Filmgeschichte und Frühes Kino – Archäologie eines Medienwandels, thinking it would be followed up with an English version. It never was, as my ideas about media archaeology evolved, as the challenges of the digital turn became more urgent, and as I increasingly felt myself intrigued by the presence of cinema in art spaces and museums. Film History as Media Archaeology – Tracking Digital Cinema is the outcome of this enlarged scope of the topics first explored in Film History and Early Cinema – An Archaeology of Media Transfer, which was itself a follow-up to Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative. None of the chapters from the German book appear in the present volume. But by participating in conferences, accepting speaking invitations and contributing to multi-authored volumes I have had many welcome opportunities to share my views and benefit from wide-ranging discussions. Inevitably, it also means that the book, now that it finally appears, may labour in places to maintain the coherence of purpose that gave rise to it, while it also bears the traces of the different occasions where some of its chapters were first presented. The opening chapter is specifically written to provide the necessary contexts. By contrast, the concluding chapter, more polemical in tone, wants to offer points of contention, stimulate debate and hopefully intervene in the ongoing discussion over the future of cinema as prefigured in its several pasts. My thanks, in the first instance, go to the conference organizers, university hosts, editors and facilitators who over the years have pushed me to formulate my ideas, and whose comments have often helped me clarify them. They are, in no particular order: Siegfried Zielinski, Harun Farocki, André Gaudreault, François Albera, Maria Tortajada, Dominique Nasta, Stefan Andriopoulos, Bernhard Dotzler, Klaus Kreimeier, Anemone Ligensa, Margrit Tröhler, Jane Gaines, Tom Levin, Charles Musser, Geert Lovink, Pelle Snickars, Patrick Vonderau, Vinzenz Hediger, Marc Furstenau, Ben Roberts, Mark Goodall, Tom Mitchell, Christiane Voss, William Uricchio, Jussi Parikka, Eivind Røssaak, Roy Grundmann, Tom Gunning, Trond Lundemo, John Ellis, Eszter Polonyi, and many others. As the introductory chapter makes clear, much of the intellectual impetus behind the book is owed to the years of teaching and collaborating with my Amsterdam colleagues, most especially Wanda Strauven and Michael Wedel. Not for the first time, my warm thanks go to Warren Buckland,

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who read and commented on many of the chapters and opened up the pages of the New Review of Film and Television to a pre-publication of the final chapter. Especially on this occasion, my deep gratitude goes to Floris Paalman’s unstinting engagement. He read and critically commented on all the chapters—even those that for reasons of space had to be dropped during the last round. I also much appreciate the support the book received from the staff and freelancers at Amsterdam University Press, and in particular from Jeroen Sondervan, the best commissioning editor that I could wish for, both as author and as general editor of Film Culture in Transition, the series which this, its fiftieth volume, is meant to celebrate. I also acknowledge prior publication of the following chapters: Chapter 1. First published as “The New Film History as Media Archaeology,” in Cinémas 14, nos 2-3 (Printemps 2005): 75-117. Chapter 2. First published as “Between Knowing and Believing: The Cinematic Dispostive after Cinema,” in F. Albera and M. Tortajada (eds.) Cine-Dispositives. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014, 45-73. Chapter 3. First published in Dominique Nasta and Didier Huvelle (eds.), Le son en perspective/New Perspectives in Sound Studies. Bruxelles/Bern/ Berlin: Peter Lang, 2004, 155-168. Chapter 4. Co-authored with Malte Hagener and originally published in German in Stefan Andriopoulos and Bernhard J. Dotzler (eds.), Das Jahr 1929: Beiträge zur Archäologie der Medien. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2002, 316349. The translation is by Alexander Holt. Chapter 5. First published in K. Kreimeier and A. Ligensa (eds.), Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture. New Barnet: John Libbey, 2009, 9-22. Chapter 6. First published as “‘Constructive Instability’ or the Life of Things as the Cinema’s Afterlife”, in G. Lovink and S. Niederer (eds.), Video Vortex Reader. Amsterdam: Institute for Network Cultures, 2008, 13-32 and subsequently in P. Snickars and P. Vonderau (eds.), The YouTube Reader. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009, 166-186. Chapter 7. First published in Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann (eds.), Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? – The Screen Arts in the Digital Age. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998, 201-222. Chapter 8. First published in B. Bennett, M. Furstenau, and A. MacKenzie (eds.), Cinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories, Practices. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2008, 226-240.

Acknowledgements

15

Chapter 9. First published in Critical Inquiry vol. 39, issue 2 (Winter 2013): 217-246. Chapter 10. First published in a different German version: “Leben als Bewegung: Kino, Energie, Entropie,” in Maria Muhle und Christiane Voss (eds.), Black Box Leben. Berlin: August Verlag, 2016. Chapter 11. First published in At the Borders of (Film) History, Udine: Forum, 2015. Chapter 12. First published in The New Review of Film and Television, vol. 14, issue 2 (March 2016): 181-215. This book is—finally and forever gratefully—dedicated to Silvia.



General Introduction Media Archaeology: Foucault’s Legacy

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

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of ‘Is cinema an art?’ and answering, full-throated, in the affirmative.1 Others are discovering (or rediscovering) the challenges that cinema poses for philosophy—for the philosophy of mind and the nature of consciousness, for phenomenology and theories of the embodied mind; others are re-describing and analyzing cinema by posing specifically epistemological and ontological questions.2 Often the object of study is ‘cinema’, rather than individual films, making moot its purported death or afterlife. Yet others are happy to use films (especially contemporary ones) as symptoms, as raw materials, or as illustrative examples for a whole range of diagnostic purposes covering politics, identity, sexuality, gender, ecology, disability, the man-machine symbiosis, animal studies, and architecture. Generally, the point of view is that of the audience or the subjectivity of the spectator rather than the producer, artist, or auteur: what is of interest is the affective, bodily, or cognitive response, engagement, or comprehension.3 Under the heading of ‘cinematic experience’, we can return to Walter Benjamin (and his sophisticated but productive distinction of experience as split between Erlebnis and Erfahrung), or we can turn to the methods of the neuro-sciences and their experimental findings, hoping to generate new knowledge about the recipient as spectator, subject, consumer, participant, or player. But we also need to ask ourselves ‘Knowledge for what?’. To celebrate cinema as a unique cognitive and affective experience, or to instrumentalize cinema and help better deliver its audiences to the aggregators, the data-miners, and monetizers? There is, however, another way of acknowledging the air of obsolescence that hovers over cinema as a creative practice while relinquishing neither the awareness of its cultural importance nor the belief in its future potential. 4 It 1 Dudley Andrew, the indefatigable advocate for cinema as art, turns André Bazin’s question mark in “What is Cinema?” into an exclamation mark: What Cinema is! (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). 2 In the wake of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books, there have been lively debates around the idea of cinema as a ‘philosophical’ machine and of films as modes of thought. Among many possible references, one article arguing the pro and one arguing against is Stephen Mulhall, “Film as Philosophy: The Very Idea,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society New Series, vol. 107 (2007): 279-294; and Paisley Livingston, “Theses on Cinema as Philosophy,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 1, Special Issue Thinking through Cinema: Film as Philosophy (Winter 2006): 11-18. 3 See Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 4 There is a paradox involved here, insofar as cinema’s purported ‘death’, ‘obsolescence’, and diminished cultural relevance in the digital age is what has turned it into a kind of meta-medium, making it available as a media interface of digital media (Lev Manovich) or as metaphor and allegory, as in many of the books devoted to film as philosophy mentioned above. Much of this volume is devoted to exploring this paradox, i.e., of how obsolescence, either real or posited, can become a source of special aesthetic value and of philosophical attention.

Gener al Introduc tion

19

is the one explored in this book, and I am calling it “film history as media archaeology”. This stance may seem more retrospective than prospective, but in fact archaeology wants what it finds to be maintained, defined, and carried forward. It touches on the arche (origin, first principle, authority), it asks about the status of the cinematic ‘archive’ (the physical and virtual location of the documents, films, and objects that make up cinema’s heritage), but the use of the term ‘archaeology’ is not solely metaphoric, because it also aims to present and preserve this heritage. It significantly differs from some of the responses and options just mentioned, not least because it does not insist on cinema’s uniqueness as an art form and its specificity as a medium. Instead, it sees cinema’s past as well as its future firmly embedded in other media practices, other technologies, other social uses, and above all as having—throughout its history—interacted with, been dependent on, been complemented by, and found itself in competition with all manner of entertainment forms, scientific pursuits, practical applications, military uses. To arbitrarily and ahistorically cordon off these other uses of the cinematic apparatus and manifestations of the moving image would, from today’s position, not only block understanding of how cinema came about; it would also risk misunderstanding some of the key developments under way, especially when dismissing contemporary cinema as a travesty of a oncegreat art, thereby making the ‘death’ of cinema a self-fulfilling prophecy. For how could we possibly write a history of cinema today—separate from all the other media that complement it for the users—and enrich or refine the experience for the spectators and open up new venues for the makers of films? But then, how can we possibly write a history of all these media without resorting to bland generalities? Historians have tried to undertake a synthesis, none with greater understanding than Asa Briggs and Peter Burke in their Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet5 or Armand Mattelart’s Networking the World.6 Yet in their histories, cinema occupies a very small place compared with print media, radio, television, or the Internet. This book is about cinema, and in several chapters that follow I shall be arguing that cinema has become invisible as a medium because it has become so ubiquitous, meaning that its specific imaginary (its way of ‘framing’ the world and us within it and also separate from it) has become the default value of what is real—to us. It is why I touch 5 Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (London: Polity Press, 2002). 6 Armand Mattelart, Networking the World, 1794-2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

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upon the question of cinema as art and of its specificity as medium only as some of the ideological frames within which films have been discussed on and off for much of their history (though not all). The book does, however, set itself the task of asking how this imaginary has come about and where cinema fits into larger cycles and determinants that have so far been the engines of change in modern societies: cinema and film history but also cinema and film in history. Can media archaeology, then, assist in this task, and does it have to?7 The term itself connotes different things to different people: “What is it that holds the approaches of media archaeologists together, justifying the term?” ask Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, and they speculate: “Discontent with ‘canonized’ narratives of media culture and history may be the clearest common driving force.”8 For Siegfried Zielinski, who was one of the first to define ‘media archaeology’, it is an activity (Tätigkeit) that conducts “probes into the strata of stories, [that make up] the history of the media [and] a pragmatic perspective [that seeks] to dig out secret paths in history, which might help us to find our way into the future.”9 “Media archaeology is […] a reading against the grain,” avers Geert Lovink, “a hermeneutic reading of the ‘new’ against the grain of the past, rather than telling of the histories of technologies from past to present.”10 For Lori Emerson, “Media archaeology provides a sobering conceptual friction to the current culture of the new that dominates contemporary computing,”11 while Jussi Parikka argues that “Media archaeology sees media cultures as sedimented and layered, a fold of time and materiality where the past might be suddenly discovered anew.”12 Huhtamo and Parikka again: “Media archaeologists have begun to construct alternate histories of suppressed, neglected, and forgotten media that do not point […] to the present media-cultural condition as their ‘perfection’. Dead ends, losers, and inventions that never made it into a material product have important stories to tell.”13 But media archaeology can also be the method 7 The first archaeology of cinema is C.W. Ceram’s 1965 study by that title (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World). C.W. Ceram is otherwise known as K.W. Marek. 8 Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, introduction to Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 2-3. 9 Siegfried Zielinski, “Media Archaeology”, Ctheory.net (07/11/1996) http://www.ctheory.net/ articles.aspx?id=42 10 Geert Lovink, My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition (Rotterdam: nai010 publishers, 2003), 11. 11 Lori Emerson, “Media Archaeology/Media Poetics” (https://mediarchaeology.wordpress. com/class-description/). 12 Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012). 13 Huhtamo and Parikka, 3.

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and goal of those who shy away from the term or shun it altogether or who, like Timothy Druckrey, may even voice their discontent with those whose media archaeology is the expression of their discontent: The mere rediscovery of the forgotten, the establishment of oddball paleontologies, of idiosyncratic genealogies, uncertain lineages, the excavation of antique technologies or images, the account of erratic technical developments are, in themselves, insufficient to the building of a coherent discursive methodology [for media archaeology].14

Such a warning also has my ‘film history as media archaeology’ on notice, and one response is a more restricted focus that puts cinema tactically at the center while extending the scope of the medium in new directions: I no longer just ask ‘What is cinema?’ or ‘What was cinema?’. As important is the question ‘Where is cinema?’ (at public screenings in purpose-built movie theatres or also on television screens, in galleries and museums, as well as on portable devices?). I also want to know ‘When is cinema?’: not merely performances at fixed times but an evening out with friends or lovers, irrespective of or in spite of the film; cinema as a state of mind or ‘mankind’s dream for centuries’? Is cinema an irreversible flow and thus a submission to the tyranny of time, or is it an experience that the viewer can control and should manipulate at will? Yet beneath these questions lurks another one that this book is delicately trying to formulate, namely ‘Why is cinema?’ or ‘What is/was cinema good for?’. What role has cinema played—and is still playing—in the larger development of mankind, or more specifically, in our Western modernity and post-modernity? Before getting to any of these weighty matters, however, a historical and inevitably biographical account is in order, because the present study is part of a thirty-year trajectory that began with an essay reviewing half a dozen books, which then led to an international conference and an edited collection of essays. In the most direct sense, Film History as Media Archeology – Tracking Digital Cinema is therefore the continuation and reflexive extension of my earlier publication entitled Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative,15 which built on an eponymous conference co-organized in 1986, as well as several years of teaching advanced courses

14 Timothy Druckrey, foreword to Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), ix. 15 Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (London: BFI, 1990).

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on early cinema at the University of East Anglia, followed by more years of teaching media archaeology at the University of Amsterdam.

Is Media Archaeology a Supplement to or a Substitute for Film History? For some twenty-five years, then, I have been arguing for an ‘archaeological’ approach to film history.16 This is mainly in light of two major insights and develop­ments: first, the realization that the early period of cinema was considerably richer, more developed, and more diversified than film historians gave it credit,17 and second, the awareness, following the changes brought by digitization and the new media, that certain implicit assumptions made by film historians about the presumed evolution of the form of film and the goal in cinema history had become untenable.18 To these must be added a third development that reinforced the archaeological impulse: the migration of cinema—both mainstream and experimental—from movie theaters to museums and art spaces in general. While cinema has also migrated and relocated to other sites and platforms since the 1990s, its passage and entry into the contemporary art museum has often taken the form of appropriation, self-reference, and re-enactment whose media archaeological alignment can best be described as a revaluation of obsolescence as the new authenticity of the avant-garde.

16 My first mention of media archaeology in print was in the introduction to Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative entitled “Early Cinema: From Linear History to Mass Media Archaeology”. Although my introduction was a mix of several discourses (“from …to”, “mass media”) that would subsequently be deconstructed, what I had in mind was a “new archaeology […], because of the fundamental changes that film had brought to the notion of time, space and material culture.” (p.1) Especially the emphasis on cinema under the aspect of material culture would become a major preoccupation of media archaeology. 17 The realization of the richness and diversity of early cinema is generally dated to the synergies that formed between film archivists and film historians during and after the 1978 Brighton FIAF conference and its symposium on surviving films from 1900-1906. See Roger Holman (ed.), Cinema 1900-1906, Vol. 1: An Analytical Study (Brussels: FIAF, 1982) and a discussion of FIAF Brighton in the final chapter. 18 Evidently, film historians did not have to wait for digital media to critique the shortcomings of standard film histories. Speaking personally, Michael Chanan’s The Dream that Kicks: The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain (London/Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) was a key text for rethinking the ‘origins’ of cinema, as were the interviews assembled in Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), both of which I read around 1980.

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Faced with the historical evidence that had become available, for instance, one could no longer credibly maintain the idea that cinema was progressing towards greater and greater realism thanks to the incremental addition of sound, color, and scope, or even that the goal was the gradual self-realization of the medium’s ‘essence’ (the modernist telos of specificity). It even seemed altogether wrong-headed in historiographical terms, if one wanted to comprehend the nature of change itself, when studying the technical media of sound and vision. The forces at work in technological change operate neither incrementally nor organically: one needs to factor in contingent events and recognize that even the continuities are due to a change of default values and that the digital turn but also political events brought about radical breaks during the last decades of the twentieth century. One also has to account for the reversal and rewinds taking place in the art world. Is it more than common sense, when tracking changes in the media, to guard against seeing these changes either as steady progress and improvement or as a narrative of impoverishment and decline? The corollary is that neither technological determinism nor evolutionary selection provides the underlying conceptual matrix, while unintended consequences and events that did not happen may also deserve to be considered.19 My ‘archaeological’ perspective was therefore initially intended to distinguish itself both from chronological history (especially the infancyadolescence-maturity-decline narrative) as well as the nothing is new under the sun approach, where one finds precedents in the past for every innovation in the present. But it also differed from the way the label ‘archaeology of cinema’ had been current at the time, namely as an account of the so-called pre-history of cinema, or ‘pre-cinema’. The first ones to use the term in this sense were C.W. Ceram in 1965 and Jacques Perriault in 1981.20 Ceram’s study was a well-researched but straightforward linear history of many of the animation, imaging, and projection devices that had, more or less inevitably, led up to the cinematograph. His archaeology ends in 1897 and lines up the inventors and technologies deemed necessary for cinema to be “born”. Perriault, too, concentrates on the prehistory of the medium, pointing to philosophical toys, the developments in photography and chronophotography, 19 The idea of counterfactual history gained (at)traction for me after seeing Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollow’s It Happened Here: The Story of Hitler’s England (1964). The rationale, heuristic gains, and limits of taking into account also what did not happen are explored in Niall Ferguson (ed.), Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London: Papermac, 1997). 20 C.W. Ceram, Archaeology of the Cinema (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965) and Jacques Perriault, Mémoires de ombre et du son: Une archéologie de l’audio-visuel (Paris: Flammarion, 1981).

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the different techniques of projections, and everything else necessary to produce an illusion of movements prior to the advent of cinema. Theirs is still both a single-medium ‘archaeology’ and a story with a goal in mind and a happy ending, whereas one of the major lessons of ‘early cinema’ studies has been that it is best to avoid all forms of teleological narratives when it comes to f ilm history. Also, besides the history of photography, the histories of the telegraph, the radio, the gramophone, and the telephone have always been much more intertwined with that of cinema than the specialists of the respective media felt comfortable with. A closer (but also more comparative) look at the period between the 1870s and 1900 in both the US and in Europe has shown that cinema (or rather: what would become cinema) had neither one specific origin (too many, and too arbitrarily fixed) nor purposive eureka moments (too serendipitous) or pre-ordained goals (too contradictory and too quickly obsolete). Under such circumstances, an archaeological account—in the first instance, in Michel Foucault’s sense (“no origins”, “questioning the already-said at the level of its existence”, “practice as discourse/discourse as practice”)—may initially have seemed to be no more than a holding operation. It discouraged the search of a single foundational moment or event and encouraged one instead to look for key trigger configurations or telling patterns. For instance, if one starts from a non-media specific vantage point, as Jonathan Crary has done in his Techniques of the Observer—an art historian’s re-examination of theories of perception in the nineteenth century21—one can uncover links previously missed. Challenging linear accounts of the cinematic apparatus, Crary highlights the importance of two devices, usually discussed as ‘pre-cinematic’ or ‘proto-cinematic’ but which in his account belong to other histories as well, where there is nothing pre- or proto- about them. Influential well beyond art history, Techniques of the Observer became a major resource for media archaeologists because Crary’s main thesis, namely the emergence of embodied modes of perception that challenged Cartesian and Newtonian optics, was backed by a close examination of the phenakistoscope and the stereoscope. For film historians, his reconstruction of the extraordinary rich and above all popular culture of optical toys in the second half of the nineteenth century was a significant ‘media archaeological’ intervention. Rather than being able to draw, as had been assumed, a straight line of descent from the camera obscura to the projected image on a rectangular screen, which aligned cinema with the separation of the image from the beholder, historians must 21 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).

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reckon with a rupture that occurred between the monocular perspective as developed during the Renaissance and the cinematic apparatus as it became standard in the early part of the twentieth century. If quite different ways of perceiving images, of reproducing images, and of configuring projected images in public or private displays existed in the nineteenth century, then the role of the magic lantern must be rethought within a visual culture that included the stereoscope and the phantasmagoria, neither of which could be straightforwardly appropriated as a ‘precursor’ of cinema. Indeed, they might come to be regarded as ‘rivals’ or ‘alternatives’, displaced at the time but not dead, and instead biding their time and awaiting their return. This also raises the question why these once-popular practices and their technological traces were so quickly ‘forgotten’ with the ‘invention’ of cinema. If one adds to these considerations the other ad-hoc, piecemeal, and serendipitous experiments that took place simultaneously but independently of each other in quite different parts of the globe in order for images to create the impression of movement, then the invention of cinema turns out to be both mysterious and preordained as well as more fortuitous and far from inevitable. It is the very disparate and the dispersed nature of the inventions, intentions, and implementations we now associate with the projection and display of photographed and electronically transmitted moving images that endows cinema’s past with its many still-not-exhausted futures. The activity of recovering this diversity and to account for such multiplicity, to trace these parallel histories and explore alternative trajectories, is what is meant by “film history as media archaeology”: not just the excavation of manifold pasts but also generating an archaeology of possible futures. Respect for these once possible (or still virtual) futures as well as for any past’s singularity, alterity, and otherness also disabuses one from drawing straight lines to the present or from running straight lines from the present to these pasts. It thus makes us more cautious and refrain from claiming that, once we identify precursors, we may readily adopt them as our ‘(grand) parents’ and freely appropriate their work for our own ends. The answer, therefore, to the question ‘Is media archaeology a supplement or a substitute to film history?’ has to remain an open one. As a supplement, it may be able to tackle the intrinsic historiographical problems that film history has either overlooked or has raised but not been able to solve. Media archaeology would then be something like a revision of (as well as an extension to) classical film history, with a wider scope of pertinent phenomena and more inclusive in its understanding of the visual and material culture that is relevant to a historical analysis of cinema. It may even look like the old, but would come

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to these old questions with new default values and a distinctly contemporary vantage point. So different could be its new frame of reference that media archaeology might as well consider itself a substitute for film history. Yet as a substitute it could end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and, as we shall see, bypass cinema altogether or marginalize it even further when focusing its archaeological gaze on the origins and command (arché) of the digital media, and therefore concentrate mostly on electricity, electromagnetic waves, mathematics, algorithms as the material and conceptual infrastructures of contemporary media when determining media archaeology’s agenda. This is certainly the view of someone like Wolfgang Ernst when he declares: Media-archaeological analysis […] does not operate on the phenomenological multimedia level; instead it sees all so-called multimedia as radically digital, given that digital data processing is undermining the separation into the visual, auditive, textual, and graphical channels that on the surface (interface) translate data to human senses. By looking behind the human-machine interfaces (such as the computer monitor) and by making invisible communication processing evident, an archaeology of media, as the notion implies, follows Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge in […] reconstructing the generative matrix created by mediatic dispositifs.22

Walter Benjamin and the Modernity Thesis I also follow Foucault, but in a different direction, backtracking to the moment when The Archaeology of Knowledge was indeed being read but when the idea of all media being “radically digital” would not yet have made sense, and thus the frames of reference were correspondingly different. When I first suggested the phrase “film history as media archaeology” in the late 1980s, my main intellectual references were Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault. They proved useful, even necessary at a point in time, when I encountered problems of (film) historiography, which meant that I came to media archaeology through two related avenues. One was the desire to locate my then primary field of study—Weimar cinema—more concretely within the broader lineage of “modernity”.23 Modernity was 22 Wolfgang Ernst, “Media Archaeography” in Huhtamo and Parikka, 252. 23 For a discussion of modernity in the context of film studies and film history (notably the influence of Walter Benjamin), see Thomas Elsaesser, “Modernity: The Troubled Trope” in D. L. Madsen and M. Klarer (eds.), The Visual Culture of Modernism (Tübingen: Narr, 2011), 21-40.

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synonymous with the city experience, as found in Georg Simmel’s The Metropolis and Mental Life,24 Siegfried Kracauer’s The Mass Ornament, and Sigmund Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life (with echoes of the urbanist transformations of Vienna as well as Freud’s asides about the dislocating and uncanny effects that modern forms of transportation had on perception and cognition). Additionally, and given the multi-media character of early cinema, it seemed appropriate to connect the emergence of cinema with the various tropes that Walter Benjamin had identified with the city and modernity in his Passagenwerk (the Arcades Project, known to me in the 1980s as Paris: Capital of the 19th Century).25 The other opening to media archaeology was a related insight, namely that cinema had brought about a change in the experience of time, its reversibility and retroaction within the irreversibility of time’s arrow, but also that cinema was to effect an interlocking and mutual interdependence of work and leisure.26 This insight came from studying the work of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, whom I had initially taken to be the joint precursors of the industrial uses of the cinematograph—time and motion studies—until more detailed work on Marey and the publication of Anson Rabinbach’s The Human Motor27 persuaded me to see Muybridge and Marey as belonging to distinct traditions and divergent trajectories rather than as complementary.28 A further corollary of cinema’s intervention in our notion of time is that it was closely aligned with changes in people’s sense of space, location, and locomotion, of movement and mobility, and with the associated means of A critique of this use can be found in D. Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 140-147. For a general terminological clarification, see Peter Osborne, “Modernity Is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category: Notes on the Dialectics of Differential Historical Time”, in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (eds.), Postmodernism and the Re-reading of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 23-45. 24 Key texts are Georg Simmel, Die Großstadt und das Geistesleben (1903) and Siegfried Kracauer’s Das Ornament der Masse (1927). 25 I first read Benjamin in an essay entitled “Paris: Capital of the 19th century” New Left Review, March-April 1968: 77-88. 26 The interdependence of work and leisure as well as the alignment of cinema with different modes of transport is examined in more detail in the chapter “Cinema: Motion, Energy, Entropy”. 27 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 28 For more on Muybridge and Marey, see the chapter “The Cinematic Dispositif (Between Apparatus Theory and Artists’ Cinema)” in the present volume. See also Marta Braun, Eadweard Muybridge (London: Reaktion Books, 2010) and Laurent Mannoni, Étienne-Jules Marey. La mémoire de l’oeil (Milan: Mazzotta, 1999).

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transport and propulsion, i.e. the railways, the automobile, the aeroplane, and the ocean liner. This would be the other paradigm of “modernity” complementing the trope of the city, and it would add two more authors who encouraged me to think of cinema outside and beyond its technological, optical, and narrative determinants, even though neither deals directly with cinema: Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century and Disenchanted Night,29 along with Christoph Asendorf’s Ströme und Strahlen.30 Schivelbusch’s books have become classics first, of how the railways imposed standard timetables and synchronized time in all walks of life, with speed of transport making space a variable of time (as it also was to become in cinema, through editing), and second, how ‘projection’ (in cinema) has to be understood as part of a broader dynamic of re-distributing sensory stimuli between night/ darkness and day/artificial light in late nineteenth-century urban centers. Asendorf, by contrast, drew my attention to all the micro-energies passing between art and the beholder, which I translated into the screen-space and auditorium-space relationship, and how this dynamic supports, modulates, and layers the perceptual, bodily, and auditory registers of the spectators. Walter Benjamin included cinema as an essential element of modernity in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, which is still the foundational text for the ‘cinema and modernity’ approach embraced by so many scholars, both in cinema studies and cultural studies. The issues raised by the ensuing debate (also known as the ‘modernity and vision’ controversy)31 run parallel to and intersects with my media archaeological research, without directly converging, since my goals are different and I do not have a similarly polemical investment.32 As part of my Weimar cinema studies I had, already from the mid-1970s onwards, given seminars and lectures in the US and the UK on Kracauer, Benjamin, 29 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986; first published in German in 1979) and Disenchanted Night: Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; first published in German in 1983). 30 Christoph Asendorf, Ströme und Strahlen: Das langsame Verschwinden der Materie um 1900 (Giessen: Museum der Alltagskultur des 20. Jahrhunderts, 1989). 31 Polemically argued between David Bordwell and Tom Gunning. See, for example, the entry “Attraction,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, edited by Edward Branigan and Warren Buckland (Abington: Routledge, 2014), 45-49. 32 See my essay “Modernity the Troubled Trope” (footnote 23), where I discuss the ramifications of the debate. The Chicago School of Film History, which since the 1990s had formed around Miriam Hansen, Tom Gunning, and Yuri Tsivian, was probably more representative of this modernity configuration than I was.

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and the Frankfurt School, as well as published a number of essays in the early 1980s that have since contributed to the revival of Kracauer studies. Together with Miriam Hansen and David Bathrick, I was also co-editor of a special issue on Kracauer for New German Critique.33 If Benjamin was not exactly news to me, when the great Benjamin revival eventually got underway, his rediscovery was nonetheless important also for media archaeology. This is because his newly established and seemingly unassailable authority within the humanities helped prize cinema away from the debates around ‘Is it art?’ and ‘What is its media specificity’ (which had dominated the field into the 1950s) or ‘Is it a language and what is its ideological form of address and interpellation?’ (which had dominated the debates in the 1960s and 70s)—and instead reminded us of its technomaterialist underpinnings. For many of us, Benjamin also put a swift end to positivist history as well as to classic Marxian dialectical materialism. His “Theses on the Philosophy of History” as well as his allegorical readings of the political and social history of Paris from the 1848 revolution to the Days of the Commune and beyond were like a vast secret text that had to be deciphered layer by layer, across enigmatic incidents and poetic fragments. It was a tremendously appealing and inspirational form of research and writing, not least because Benjamin was also a media historian—with his short history of photography, his essays on surrealism, and last but not least, his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (or Technical Reproducibility)”. Benjamin’s interpretation of photography and film, of images in general and their singular material traces, seemed especially germane to media archaeology, since allegory connotes both loss and recovery, both fragments and gaps, both mortality and ‘otherness’. Applied to film history, such an allegorical-archaeological gaze sharply contrasted with the vision and method of such eminent film historians as Paul Rotha, Terry Ramsaye, Arthur Knight, and William Everson. Even Jerzy Toeplitz and Eric Rhode— with all their merits—had largely ignored or dismissed the first twenty years (and part of cinema’s prehistory) as aesthetically negligible because it was primitive, lacking purpose and stylistic signature. The general picture was of a murky sea of moving images on which floated a few masterpieces, 33 Thomas Elsaesser, “Social Mobility and the Fantastic”, Wide Angle 5, no. 2, (1982): 14-25; “Film History and Visual Pleasure: Weimar Cinema”, in P. Mellencamp and P. Rosen (eds.), Cinema Histories/ Cinema Practices (Frederick: University Publications of America, 1984), 47-85; and “Cinema: The Irresponsible Signif ier or ‘The Gamble with History’: Film Theory or Cinema Theory”, New German Critique no. 40, Special Issue on Weimar Film Theory (Winter 1987): 65-89.

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while a succession of pioneers was able to pass to each other the baton of the art of film to come. This unsatisfactory state of affairs was the starting point (around 1985/86) of the so-called “revisionist” film history, for which I coined the label ‘The New Film History’ in a review essay of several books that had all appeared around the same time by Barry Salt, Steve Neale, Douglas Gomery and Robert C. Allen, John Belton and Elizabeth Weiss, as well as David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s Classical Hollywood Cinema.34

Noël Burch and “Primitive Cinema” The review essay mentioned, only in passing, the single most important source for my turn to media archaeology, namely Noël Burch’s essay “Porter or Ambivalence” published in Screen in 1978.35 To my knowledge, Burch was the first to posit a decisive rupture between early cinema up to 1917 (he called it ‘primitive cinema’) and the classical narrative cinema under Hollywood hegemony. He intended to break with forms of history writing that had relied on underlying notions of chronologically ordered succession, organic growth-and-decay cycles, dialectical reversals, and teleological inevitability. Taken out of its ‘primitive cinema’ frame of reference and applied to film historiography more generally, Burch’s call to arms challenged the traditional narratives of progress, (technicist) self-improvement, and (modernist) self-reflexivity but kept to vestiges of the great man theory, except that Edwin S. Porter replaced D.W. Griffith. Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, Sergej Eisenstein, and Jean Renoir were still the masters of modernist film form. However, their ‘f irsts’ and ‘masterpieces’ did not advance either ‘technical perfection’ or ‘greater realism’ but made cinema a medium of abstract forms and conceptual thought. At the same time, Burch effectively replaced the steady progress narrative of film history with a much more lacunary version: he pointed to gaps, false starts, and dead ends, isolated experiments and contradictory conjunctures. But he also argued the case for distinct logics that separated the different periods of filmmaking and of cinema history, especially for the first decades of cinema but also for the 34 Thomas Elsaesser, “The New Film History”, Sight and Sound 55, no. 4 (Fall 1986): 246-251. In retrospect, it might have been better to speak of “new cinema history” because some of the revisionist historians I discussed were decidedly more interested in cinema (as urban sites, as business, as industry, as institutions) than in actual films. 35 Noël Burch, “Porter, or Ambivalence,” Screen 19, no. 4 (Winter 1978/79): 91-105.

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practice of the (Russian) avant-garde and of European art cinema (Fritz Lang, German Expressionism). Not all the scholars who—following Burch—deconstructed the premises of the canonical film historians just mentioned (to whom one should add Georges Sadoul and Jean Mitry) shared Burch’s Foucaultian perspective. More often they came from different intellectual traditions, such as Marxism (Charles Musser) or Russian formalism (David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson), Walter Benjamin (Gunning) or Siegfried Kracauer (Hansen). In the case of Barry Salt, he rejected all of these intellectual ‘fashions’ in favor of ‘scientific realism’. Yet when Burch in his 1978 essay played off Porter against Griffith as the true pioneer of early cinema, he spoke above all in the name of a filmaesthetic avant-garde who wanted to go back to cinema prior to Griffith (much the way the Pre-Raphaelites in Britain in the 1850s had gone back to Giotto and medieval art)36 in order to challenge, both politically and conceptually, the dominance of the narrative feature film (and of Renaissance perspective) but also to prove that there had been historical precedents for the avant-garde, with examples like Tom Tom the Piper’s Son, The Big Swallow, or The Ingenious Soubrette: all made by practitioners and showmen of popular entertainment, rather then ‘auteurs’. The discovery of a ‘primitive mode’ (analogous perhaps to the discovery of ‘primitive art’ in high Modernism) with its own internal logic, rules (and sophistication) seemed like a vindication of more than fifty years’ indefatigable efforts on the part of the avant-garde in both North America and Europe, to rethink the basis of ‘film form’. It raised hopes of finishing once and for all with the notion that the development of cinema towards fictional narrative and representational illusionism was its pre-ordained destiny. Speaking perhaps more presciently than he knew at the time when he said ‘[the development] of cinema could have been otherwise [than Aristotelian narrative]’, Burch might find himself vindicated (if probably against his stated intentions) by the proliferation of non-linear storytelling in contemporary cinema, not to mention the interactive architecture of video games or the re-use of old movies in found-footage films and installation art. None of the books I reviewed for “The New Film History” essay specifically dealt with the early years of cinema or its pre-history. It was Burch 36 One is reminded of the pre-Raphaelites and their preference for Giotto’s complexly spatialized narratives in his frescos at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Coinciding with the rise of photography and antedating Cubism, they used Giotto in order to declare war on the perspectival, theatrical, illusionistic pictorial space of the Renaissance and Baroque.

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(and in a more local British context, Michael Chanan)37 who allowed me to see not only how much a more detailed and closer look at the films that had survived from the 1890s to the eve of WWII revealed special pleasures and rewards but also how these small masterpieces could become exciting conceptual tools and theoretical objects with which to gain leverage against traditional accounts of cinema, both historical and theoretical. This is why I was not overly concerned by subsequent debates as to whether Burch ‘had got it wrong’ in the details and the dates, or even whether the choice of the word ‘primitive’ was unfortunate.38 He was able, within a few short pages, to sketch such a vibrant and convincing vision of an altogether different cinema, and of a different course that cinema might have taken, while drawing exciting parallels between this ‘primitive cinema’ and modernist art (without getting boxed in by the films of the historical avant-gardes) that I could suddenly see a whole new conceptual landscape that was well worth exploring and mapping, and in this way both rediscovering for myself and helping to rescue and redeem for film history.

The Legacy of Michel Foucault The philosophical support for this conception of early cinema as distinct and self-sufficient came from Michel Foucault’s work, which felt rigorous and conceptually rich enough to buttress the historiographical challenges. A sign of the times as much as an inevitable disciplinary choice, Foucault was read selectively, and I took from him only what was of immediate use: his deconstruction of linear causality, the myths of single origins, and his distrust of all teleologies of historical progress, including Marxist ones. ‘Media archaeology’ is thus directly inspired by Foucault’s use of ‘archaeology’ in the title of two of his books, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences and The Archaeology of Knowledge.39 He had introduced the term in his analysis of the different regimes of knowledge from the Classical Age to the Modern. One important misunderstanding—one that 37 Michael Chanan’s The Dream that Kicks: The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain (London/Boston, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). 38 See David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s somewhat uncharitable attack on Burch: “Linearity, Materialism, and the Study of Early American Cinema,” Wide Angle 5, no. 3 (1983): 4-15. A more even-handed treatment of Burch can be found in Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, 83-114. 39 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970); The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).

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is shared by Burch—is that each regime or episteme connects to the next (contiguous or successive) mainly across radical breaks, and that it is the task of the archaeologists to retrace these underlying ruptures rather than attend to the apparent continuities. 40 Foucault is often ambiguous on this point but sometimes tries to clarify his position: Archaeology disarticulates the synchrony of breaks, just as it destroyed the abstract unity of change and event. The period is neither its basic unity, nor its horizon, nor its object. […Thus] the Classical age, which has often been mentioned in archaeological analyses, is not a temporal figure that imposes its unity and empty form on all discourses; it is the name that is given to a tangle of continuities and discontinuities. 41

The misunderstanding had the advantage of supplying a strong polemical argument against linear chronology, which was needed to exert some leverage on traditional accounts. Thus the idea of ‘early cinema’ constituting a distinct discursive formation we not only owe to Foucault; if need be, the idea must be defended against Foucault. Likewise inspired by Foucault was the emphasis on institutions, customs, habits, and unwritten rules as historical agents, invariably expressing relations of power. It highlighted for instance, in the case of early cinema, the power struggles between exhibitors and producers, fought out over the length of films, the programming of screens according to the ‘numbers’ principle, and the adoption of multi-reel films, sustained by a single narrative: connections between film form and the material conditions of cinema as a socio-economic institution that might not have been made without Foucault’s mindset and method. Nonetheless, there is a further terminological issue, since Foucault at a certain point abandoned the word archaeology and returned to the Nietzschean formulation of a genealogy in order to emphasize underlying power structures. I initially used genealogy in the sense of reverse chronology, i.e. as a mode of thinking about the past that substituted an associative-generative chain for the causal nexus rather than breaking with it, with genealogy thus halfway between chronology and archaeology. Perhaps one can think of it as a dual process, whereby a genealogical mode 40 The issue of rupture versus continuity is one that initially distinguished Foucault’s archaeology from the work of the Annales School in France (notably Ferdinand Braudel’s writings). For a more complicated conception, notably of ‘multiple historicities’, see Barbara Klinger, “Film history terminable and interminable: Recovering the past in reception studies”, Screen 38, no. 2, (1997): 107-128. 41 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 176.

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of reasoning firmly separates cause and effect, accounting for origins in a non-chronological way and allowing for non-linear clusters of events, and thus of continuities as well as breaks, repetition as well as rupture. As Foucault himself envisages the dynamics of historical change: To say that one discursive formation is substituted for another is not to say that a whole world of absolutely new objects, enunciations, concepts, and theoretical choices emerges fully armed and fully organized in a text that will replace that world once and for all; it is to say that a general transformation of relations has occurred, but that it does not necessarily alter all the elements; it is to say that statements are governed by new rules of formation, it is not to say that all objects or concepts, all enunciations or all theoretical choices disappear. On the contrary, one can, on the basis of these new rules, describe and analyse phenomena of continuity, return, and repetition. 42

An archaeological approach aligns itself with this model, describing and reconnecting historical phenomena in a different conceptual space, either by positing distinct epistemes and discursive formations or by a conjuncture or a constellation that ‘makes new sense’ explicitly from the point of view of the present. The links to the past are weaker than causal connections but stronger than mere correlations, since one would still want to claim that such archaeology could uncover evidence that testifies to determination and control and speaks of domination and legitimation. 43 Media archaeology would thus be something of a hybrid, its ‘archaeology’ in part borrowed from Foucault’s ‘political-polemical’ definition but partly also consonant with the more common-sense, literal definition of archaeology as the discipline that studies past human activity through its material culture, physical remains, and symbolic artefacts. In a way, the practice of archaeology today mirrors the situation in film history to the extent that several tendencies appear to oppose or compete with each other: the objective of an archaeological dig can be to find, reconstitute, and display individual artefacts as artworks and precious objects, but it can also have another purpose, namely to collect fragments and unearth traces from the 42 Ibid., 173. 43 “The Anglo-American tradition has valorized Foucault as a thinker who emphasized the role of discourses as the loci where knowledge is tied with cultural and social power. Material bodies, events, and institutions are all conditioned by discursive formations. The effects of ‘hard’ technology are considered secondary to immaterial forces that differentiate and mediate their uses.” Huhtamo and Parikka, introduction to Media Archaeology, 9.

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dust and residue of fireplaces, burial grounds, or waste grounds that serve above all to visually re-present or discursively infer a whole way of life, the spiritual beliefs, or nutritional habits of a people—in short, the material and mental ‘world’ of a community. In the first case, the master discipline is art history, while the second procedure is interdisciplinary, ranging from anthropology and the history of religion to biology and medicine, also making use of geology and genetics as naturally as of art history and traditional archaeology. While the former would argue that such interdisciplinarity ends up trying to combine incompatible disciplines and research procedures, the latter holds that any meaningful reconstruction of the past requires such incompatibilities, not least to flag that any reconstruction has to remain inconclusive, incomplete, open to revision and reinterpretation.44 As the editorial of the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology’s special issue on media archaeology puts it: “[one may] wonder whether this might be one of those opportunities that invite archaeologists to develop new ways of attending to contemporary assemblages that produce space and time in ways that are profoundly different from the spatio-temporalities of, say, structured deposition.”45

Media Archaeology by Default as well as by Design Translated into f ilm history, the same tension can be observed in the archival policy and preservation practice of the past thirty years between those archivists who are above all interested in restoring ‘masterpieces’ that can be ‘rediscovered’ at festivals, shown during retrospectives, and celebrated in glossy publications, 46 and those archivists who are more concerned with cataloguing, interpreting, and thus rescuing the decaying remains of nitrate tins, the hitherto unidentified ‘bits-and-pieces’ of their

44 See, for instance, Alice Beck Kehoe, Controversies in Archaeology (Berkeley: Left Coast Press, 2008). 45 Angela Piccini, “Media Archaeology: An Invitation”, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 2, no. 1 (2015): 1-147. 46 An example would be Enno Patalas and the Munich Film Archive, which undertook costly restorations of German classics by Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, often having to rely on incomplete or less than optimal copies. Patalas was also responsible for the restoration of S. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, which premiered at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival. https://www.berlinale. de/en/archiv/jahresarchive/2005/08_pressemitteilungen_2005/08_Pressemitteilungen_2005Detail_2047.html

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collection, 47 the so-called ‘orphans of the cinema’, in order, for instance, to study the coherence of particular forms of ‘programming’, or to date the historical consolidation of stylistic ‘norms’, identify studio styles of set designs, camera placement, and figure blocking. For these ‘archaeologists’, the masterpieces are less telling and valuable than more ‘run-of-the mill’ studio productions. 48 During the 1970s and 1980s, scholars of early cinema had to become archaeologists almost by necessity, given the sheer number of incoherencies, inconsistencies, and errors in the traditional accounts of cinema’s first decades. These could not be rectified merely by adding more research; the whole film-historical enterprise had to be recast. It implied a new self-reflexivity about (and eventual change of) method, which in turn introduced quite different levels of argument in order to deal with the incompatibilities of previous accounts. By contrast, until quite recently, contemporary historians of new media rarely took the time to be reflexive with respect to method and seldom felt the need to adopt an archaeological approach. Often enough, a posture of tabula rasa prevailed, not least because of the strategic advantages of legitimizing the ‘new’ without too much ballast from the past. It was—among many others—one of the great virtues of Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media49 that it provided a credible cinematic genealogy for some of the key features of new media—montage, multiple screens, compositing, scalability, etc.—while also reconstructing the diverse and quite distinct origins, for instance, of the (computer) screen in impeccably archaeological fashion.50 Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema does not pretend to take up or extend Manovich’s agenda.51 Instead, it proceeds from the opposite direction, approaching digital media practice by having cinema 47 For a detailed analysis of the Jean Desmet Collection at the Dutch Film Museum, see Ivo Blom, Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003). 48 Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs’ Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) and David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s Classical Hollywood Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) both make a strong and explicit case for seeking out and analyzing the ‘average’ studio production. 49 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001). 50 Lev Manovich, “Towards an Archaeology of the Computer Screen”, in Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann (eds.), Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), 27-43. 51 Lev Manovich’s Software Takes Command (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) represents an extension but also a radical rethink especially of the central idea of his previous book, namely that the (history of avant-garde) cinema effectively constitutes the (media) interface for many of the day-to-day encounters with new media.

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firmly in mind—its apparatuses, its affordances, its supposedly defining characteristics. Nonetheless, the book offers suggestions and gives concrete examples of how and why the study of digital cinema can benefit from both the reflexivity and the discursiveness that film history as media archaeology can bring to the field. Foucault’s legacy is still relevant, since it helps to stake a claim for the special epistemological importance of this early cinema and, by extension, for cinema as such within the several histories of modernity. Not only to counter or nuance the notion that cinema is above all a narrative medium and the inheritor of the nineteenth-century novel but also to support, from a historical perspective, the increasingly recognizable argument that cinema can be a form of thought—or, as I would prefer, a form of thought experiment.52 Such epistemological claims are complex and not uncontested. Initially, they were suggested to me by various sources, apart from the readings of Foucault and several essays by Burch. With other early cinema scholars, notably Tom Gunning and Charles Musser, I shared an interest in the New York avant-garde (Ken Jacobs and Michael Snow were especially important here), while my involvement since the mid-1970s with the work of Harun Farocki introduced me to another version of media archaeology. Apart from practicing a Bert Brecht-inspired ‘blunt materialism’, Farocki highlighted the need to investigate what he would subsequently call “operational images”, which alerted me to the importance of the non-entertainment uses of the cinematic apparatus, especially in the fields of scientific experiment and medicine, heavy industry and factory work, surveillance and military operations, which in turn drew my attention to the extraordinary (and extraordinarily multi-medial and multi-functional) career of Oskar Messter, a previously largely forgotten German multimedia entrepreneur. As a writer on German cinema, my “German media theory” was derived from Farocki and Siegfried Zielinski rather than from Friedrich Kittler, while Paul Virilio and Gilles Deleuze provided conceptual support for the essays on the different “S/M” practices of the cinematic apparatus, one of which (“Digital Cinema and the Apparatus: Archaeologies, Epistemologies, Ontologies”) is reprinted below. One can see why Foucault was so suggestive for scholars of early cinema, because he allowed us to argue that ‘early cinema’ was a separate episteme with its own internal logic, and therefore radically distinct from so-called classical cinema. This meant that the purpose of early cinema studies was to 52 The case for cinema as thought experiment is argued in Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema and Continental Thought (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming).

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identify the discourses—the institutions, the practices, the power-relations, the competing objectives, and interest groups involved in cinema, or what was to become cinema. And we used Walter Benjamin to read individual films as the allegories of these larger discursive formations: We did not—as previous historians had done—judge these films in relation to canons of realism, as a mimetic representation of reality, or by the standards of novelistic narrative and storytelling but as encoded social texts and complex artefacts, which had to respond to certain external forces and address specific publics and audiences but also tried to find compromises and creative solutions to these different demands and pressures. One of the clearest examples of how early cinema studies differed from conventional history was around the question of why cinema became a storytelling medium, i.e. whether cinema had to become predominantly a narrative medium, or whether cinema had always been something else besides – a claim persistently maintained by the avant-garde, as well as by many theorists and philosophers. At the same time, the Lumière cinematographe and the Edison kinetoscope had become embedded in the wider developments and popular awareness of other media of communication and transport, of display, education, and entertainment. It meant that film history as media archaeology had to look beyond the usual genealogies that were cited in order to explain the ‘birth’ of cinema, such as shadow plays and magic lanterns, persistence of vision and the invention of photography, which, in the conventional account, all somehow miraculously converged in the cinematographe–as if that was their obvious destiny, like tributary streams coming together to form one single river: cinema. As it turned out, there was no such river but rather a striated and layered landscape, more like a battlefield than a natural formation, pacified by truces and compromises rather than by harmonious convergence.

Media Archaeology and the Digital Turn If Foucault has without a doubt been the formative influence on virtually everyone engaged in media archaeology, his Archaeology of Knowledge gave ‘archaeology’ perhaps too deceptively familiar a ring, as if we all knew what was meant and how the term could be applied productively. The problem for his disciples in film studies was that Foucault showed little (professional) interest in cinema (other than seeing it as a problematic vehicle for false popular memory). And while he wrote with passion and insight about painting, he never seriously engaged with the technical media (his ‘archives’ were

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predominantly of written and printed documents). On the other hand, his writings on surveillance and spatial control, on self-monitoring and forms of visual coercion, on the body as a site of inscription and disciplinary regimes proved enormously influential. In fact, his importance continues to grow in the digital realm, partly because some of his main insights were so succinctly summarized by Deleuze in his “Postscript on the Societies of Control”.53 But the new century is also Foucault’s because of the exponentially increased capabilities for surveillance that our widespread use of the Internet, global positioning systems, and mobile communication devices have given to corporations, to legal and illegal spy agencies, and to national governments. The adoption of ‘media archaeology’ as an analytical concept and a practice among (film) historians was, however, due to more than Foucault’s intellectual groundwork. Besides early cinema, the factor that favored the rise of a new approach to history—and, some would argue, the reason for the surprising popularity of media archaeology, at least since the new century—was the suddenness of digital media’s appearance, their broad appeal and quasi universal acceptance in so many areas of daily life—not just in cinema, music, or writing (i.e. the education and entertainment media) but for busi­ness transactions, global finance, and cross-border commerce. The almost overnight presence of digital tools—hardware and software—in work and play, information and communication came for many media scholars as a shock. How could so many different technologies, industrial processes, bureaucratic practices, daily habits, and media histories converge so quickly into one all-embracing ‘digital machine’ that swept everything before it? How did all these changes come about? Was it an act of liberation (“information wants to be free”) or was it a capitalist plot (“American tech companies’ takeover bid”)? The fact that some of these devices, gadgets, and applications seemed to possess quasi-magical powers all contributed to a kind of astonished turn towards the past—“Where did all this stuff come from?” As a result, the idea of media archaeology, in the sense of presupposing a discontinuous, heterogeneous, differently caused, and interconnected emergence for digital media, seemed easier to accept, more intuitively plausible than linear histories and mono-causality. A strict cause-and-effect logic, where each technology’s trajectory through time would have had to be mapped separately, did not readily explain how so many of these media technologies and ingenious inventions—with quite different characteristics, origins, and pedigrees such as digital photography, 53 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3-7.

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wi-fi connectivity, computer software, miniaturization, silicon chips, track pads, touch screens—could suddenly come together (‘converge’) in word processing, digital imaging, seamless scalability, mp3 music files, digital video, non-linear editing, voice-recognition, and instant transmission. There was thus a distinct need for explanation, a rethinking of time frames in order to accommodate all these transformations but also to reconsider the very nature of change itself. Traditional notions of history and causality just did not seem to apply any more. There had to be room for coincidence and contingency, for the ‘six degrees of separation’ and ‘small world syndrome’. ‘Conjuncture’ and ‘correlation’ became as important as causation and consequence, and accident and chance needed to be recognized as real world agents. Change was precipitous: scarcely had one become used to new inventions when they had already become obsolete (think videotape and videorecorder, think Walkman replaced by mp3 player and iPod, think DVD replaced by download and streaming video). The vocabulary of choice was ‘creative destruction’ and ‘disruptive technologies’. Terms that Foucault had used in the context of revolutionary actions that were meant to overthrow the ruling order—rupture, epistemic break, etc.—were suddenly being used by neo-liberal entrepreneurs and capitalist ideologues. When Apple proudly proclaimed in 2015 that “the only thing that has changed is everything”,54 it was meant to signal not only that capitalism and technology are still the most revolutionary agents around but that the tech companies have successfully co-opted change itself (i.e. history) along with the erstwhile anti-capitalist opposition: the dissenters, the hackers, and the disruptive forces of the counter-cultural movements. With respect to digital media, then, conventional notions of history were also not adequate to explain the changes one was witnessing, and something like archaeology—i.e., a spatialized concept of time and transformation— seemed more promising and appropriate. In other words, it was as if media archaeology had to step into the breach and—at least temporarily—fill this gap in explanation, confronting bafflement and possibly even panic, fuelled by these ominously short life cycles of almost every device connected with digital media. Computer hardware becomes obsolete almost as fast as operating systems have to be reinstalled, while dedicated software dictates the rhythm of the update and the beat of the upgrade. It leaves users fighting the distinct sense that even the recent past is receding faster than one could either envision the future or make sense of the present. Wolfgang Ernst 54 Tim Cook, Apple Developers’ Presentation, San Francisco, Sept 16, 2015 http://dailyflickk. com/the-only-thing-that-has-changed-is-everything-tim-cook/

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calls media archaeology “a kind of epistemological reverse engineering”, but might ‘archaeological’ approaches to contemporary media history not just as well be seen as attempts at reverse engineering the future, made necessary in the face of a bewildering proliferation of digital media phenomena and, even more importantly, in the face of a future that has already been colonized and predetermined by global companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple, whose promise is always for more of the new? If film studies in the 1980s initially came to media archaeology in large part because of the veritable explosion of interest in early cinema and the decades preceding the 1890s, digital cinema often became the explicit reference point in the present from which to seek out precedents and parallels across a hundred-year span. The need for some historical distance was the more keenly felt, especially by those for whom digital media were front and center and who began to distrust the boosterish discourse of the ‘new’ in ‘new media’ or doubted the capitalist fantasy of unlimited growth and the promise of perpetual improvements fostered by the tech world. It called for intellectual resistance and political rebellion, for which media archaeology became the code word and the rallying cry. Science fiction author and cyberpunk writer Bruce Sterling put it most pithily when he called for a dead media handbook: What we need is a somber, thoughtful, thorough, hype-free, even lugubrious book that honors the dead and resuscitates the spiritual ancestors of today’s mediated frenzy. A book to give its readership a deeper, paleontological perspective right in the dizzy midst of the digital revolution. We need a book about the failures of media, the collapses of media, the supersessions of media, the strangulations of media, a book detailing all the freakish and hideous media mistakes that we should know enough now not to repeat, a book about media that have died on the barbed wire of technological advance, media that didn’t make it, martyred media, dead media. The handbook of dead media.55

For the lovers of early cinema, however, the medium was very much alive! Those freshly restored nitrate copies, sometimes in mint condition, had an eye-popping vitality and shiver-down-your-spine presence. At annual 55 Bruce Sterling, The Dead Media Project: A Modest Proposal and a Public Appeal (1995) (http://www.deadmedia.org/modest-proposal.html). See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Dead_Media_Project and Garnet Hertz’s “In Memory of the Dead Media Handbook” (2009) http://www.conceptlab.com/problems/.

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festivals such as the Giornate del cinema muto in Pordenone, or Il cinema ritrovato in Bologna, one discovered cinema when it was vigorous, vital, and surprisingly self-assured. Tim Druckrey’s irritated diatribe (cited above) seems aimed at Sterling’s ‘paleontological perspective’, and so it is perhaps small wonder that media archaeology found itself quickly splintering into several strands and factions, including the disavowal or rejection of the very name ‘media archaeology’. In film studies, locutions such as Gunning’s ‘cinema of attractions’ superseded Burch’s ‘primitive cinema’ and all but replaced ‘early cinema’. In media studies, Siegfried Zielinski preferred the term ‘anarchaeology’ (a play on words to indicate that media developments are ‘leader-less’)56 before settling on ‘variantology’ (to indicate his preference for metaphors drawn from paleontology, and pointing to species diversity), while disciples of Friedrich Kittler such as Bernhard Siegert opted for the deliberately pleonastic compound ‘cultural techniques’ as a way to distinguish a conceptually more rigorous media philosophy from media archaeology, deemed to have become already too fashionable in its hands-on materiality, too encumbered by the free-for-all uses of the word ‘media’, or too contaminated with Foucault’s own terminological vacillations between ‘archaeology’ and ‘genealogy’. Wolfgang Ernst—Kittler’s successor at Humboldt University in Berlin—calls his media archaeology ‘archivology’ and defines it as “epistemological reverse-engineering”. Ernst downplays the human subject as agent of historical and technical change and instead wants to uncover the “nondiscursive infrastructure and (hidden) programs of media” that determine the scope of what humans can think and do.57 His archival media materialism is based on diagrams, data, code, programs, and numbers rather than on specific media technologies or obsolete machinery. It is not surprising, therefore, that Vivian Sobchack, in a benevolent afterword to Huhtamo and Parikka’s collection, calls media archaeology “an undisciplined discipline that assiduously avoids totalizing theory”.58 Initially, film history as media archaeology was a deconstructive enterprise and tried to disassemble set preconceptions—about film history 56 Zielinski points out that the Greek word archos can also mean ‘leader’, yet when studying media and their ‘inventions’, we need to get away from any ‘great man theory of history’. Deep Time of the Media: Towards an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 26. 57 Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive (edited and introduced by Jussi Parikka; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 55, 59. 58 Vivian Sobchack, afterword to Huhtamo and Parikka (eds.), Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 328.

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and the nature and forces that drive historical change in film style, modes of production, institutional organization, and business models. It targeted with its deconstructive efforts above all the wide­spread (ab)use of organic metaphors and teleological narratives that appropriated the past in order to self-congratulate the present. Or, to quote Druckrey once more: An anaemic and evolutionary model has come to dominate many studies in the so-called media. Trapped in progressive trajectories, their evidence so often retrieves a technological past already incorporated into the staging of the contemporary as the mere outcome of history. These awkward histories have reinforced teleologies that simplify historical research and attempt to expound an evolutionary model […]. Anecdotal, reflexive, idiosyncratic, synthetic, the equilibrium supported by lazy linearity has comfortably subsumed the media by cataloguing its forms, its apparatuses, its predictability, its necessity. Ingrained in this model is a flawed notion of survivability of the fittest, the slow assimilation of the most efficient mutation, the perfectibility of the un­adapted, and perhaps, a reactionary avant-gardism.59

The counter-offensive against these “anaemic evolutionary models” was staged from a vantage point of non-linearity and a certain pleasure in disorderliness and creative chaos, as tokens of a wished-for ‘openness’. It reflected a preference for becoming over being, of hybridity over specificity—paradigms that became pervasive also in critical theory and cultural studies. Beyond that, media archaeology aspired towards technical description rather than interpretation, and it set the notions of networks and nodes against ‘vertical’ causality and ‘linear’ chronology. Horizontality and connectivity became the ‘vectors’, ‘engines’, and ‘rhizomes’ that operated as dynamic forces also in the sphere of the arts, creativity, and culture. Media archaeology has therefore been called “an anti-hermeneutic approach to media history that prioritizes the role of instruments, techniques and machines in producing cultural logics”.60

59 Timothy Druckrey, foreword to Zielinski, Deep Time, vii. 60 Bernard Dionysus Geoghegan, “After Kittler: On the Cultural Techniques of Recent German Media Theory”, Theory, Culture and Society 30, no. 6 (2013): 66-82.

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Four Dominant Approaches Despite the impossibility of neatly delineating or demarcating the various schools and tendencies of media archaeology as they have emerged (and are consolidating them­selves) since the 1990s, some broad distinctions can nonetheless be drawn. Wanda Strauven, for instance, has detected four distinct strands: media archaeology, rather than being one school, consists of various schools, not only in terms of (trans)national borders, but also and especially in terms of methodology. To simplify the rather complex picture of a discipline that is still in formation, I identify four dominant approaches for the media-archaeological project […] adopted by key figures of the field, which consist in seeking: 1) the old in the new; 2) the new in the old; 3) recurring topoi; and 4) ruptures and discontinuities.61

She explains that the old in the new goes ‘from obsolescence to remediation’, citing Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s Remediation as an example, which reworks Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that “the content of any medium is always another medium” into ‘remediation’, the “formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms”.62 Strauven associates the new in the old with Siegfried Zielinski, whose “anarchaeology”, “variantology”, and “deep time” promote a media archaeology that “refers to geological time and its measurement by analysing [media as if they were] strata of different rock formations. What is crucial […] is that these strata do not form perfect horizontal layers one on top of the other, but instead present intrusions, changes of direction, etc.”63 Applied to the study of media, this means that, according to Zielinski, the “history of media is not the product of a predictable and necessary advance from primitive to complex apparatus,” from which it follows that the “current state of the art [in media developments] does not necessarily represent the best possible state”.64

61 Wanda Strauven, “Media Archaeology: Where Film History, Media Art, and New Media (Can) Meet,” in Julia Noordegraaf, Cosetta G. Saba, Barbara Le Maître, and Vinzenz Hediger (eds.), Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: Challenges and Perspectives (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 68. 62 Bolter and Grusin, quoted in Strauven, 69. 63 Strauven, 69. 64 Zielinski, Deep Time, 7.

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The Recurring Topoi or The Eternal Cycle of the Déjà Vu is Strauven’s paraphrase of Erkki Huhtamo’s approach, who borrows the notion of topos from Ernst Robert Curtius’ study of the literature of the Latin Middle Ages. Translated into the terms of media archaeology, identifying topoi is a “way of studying the typical and commonplace in media history–the phenomena that (re)appear and disappear and reappear over and over again and somehow transcend specif ic historical context” (1996: 300). Their trans-historical recurrence, however, does not preclude these media clichés from being themselves “cultural, and thus ideological, constructs”. For Strauven, Huhtamo’s media-archaeological project, which looks back into the past from the perspective of the present, recalls Tom Gunning’s “uncanny sense of déjà vu”65 that overcame him in the face of new media, because he noted the same mixture of anxiety and optimism surrounding the new technologies that Freud had observed at the end of the previous century around telephones and railway carriages. Emphasizing Ruptures and Discontinuities is how Strauven characterizes “Foucault’s Legacy”, by which she alludes to the Amsterdam project as I conceived it in the mid-1990s, where a media-archaeological approach means the revision of “historiographic premises, by also taking in the discontinuities, the so-called dead-ends, and by taking seriously the possibility of the astonishing otherness of the past”.66 As already discussed, there are in Foucault’s thought conceptual ambiguities of how apparent continuities might be hiding breaks and disguising changes in default values or shifts in the frames of reference. But such changes ‘inside out’, as it were, where the new looks like the old—or even disguises itself as the old—are crucial to understanding how different epistemes connect to each other, while still needing to be thought of as distinct. For instance, for most moviegoers, the change from analogue film to digital film and from celluloid projectors to digital beamers was barely perceptible, while ‘behind the scenes’ the changes were momentous (the shifting frame of reference to all things digital; postproduction and special effects as the default values even of cinematic realism; the battles over digital projection standards). This is why I argue that ‘digital cinema’ is both a contradiction in terms and an accurate description of how ‘everything changes and everything remains the same’.67 65 Tom Gunning, “Heard over the Phone. The Lonely Villa and the de Lorde Tradition of the Terrors of Technology,” Screen 32 (Summer 1991): 185. 66 Strauven, 70. 67 Thomas Elsaesser, “Digital Cinema: Convergence or Contradiction”, A. Herzog, J. Richardson, C. Vernallis (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 13-44

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As to the “astonishing otherness of the past”, media archaeology, revealing and naming the particular mindsets or thought processes that produced a certain device or dispositif can show how materially and conceptually different the past is from the present, even in its apparent similarity, which in turn leads one to speculate what might have been and could still be, along with what has been, has been forgotten, or is poised to return.

Media Archaeology and the Museum World Before describing in more detail this Amsterdam project—which Strauven herself joined in 2002—it is worth mentioning “media archaeology as media art” (Strauven) as the third site (along with early cinema studies and the digital turn) that both favors and necessitates media archaeology. One of the remarkable events in the mediascape of the 1990s is the migration and displacement of cinema and the moving image into the museum. Media archaeology would in this case be one of the practices (rather than historiographical reactions) that responds to the more general dislocation and re-location of cinema around the centenary of cinema itself, an occasion which, emblematically, was seen as the change of default value from photographic to post-photographic cinema, notably with the release of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), Pixar’s Toy Story (1995), and James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), three films that introduced computer-generated special effects to a mass audience. But 1995 was also the year that was the start of a ten-year series of major exhibitions dedicated to cinema, held by prestigious museums including the Hayward Gallery in London, the MoCA in Los Angeles, the Whitney in New York, the MuMoK in Vienna, the Centre Pompidou in Paris. These were all institutions that had until then fought shy of giving cinema proper art space or anything more than a cinema screening room on their lower floor or basement. The question that arose was whether the art world was now celebrating cinema all the better to bury it (the mid-1990s were, as mentioned, the moment of major public figures declaring the “death” of cinema), or was it commemorating cinema by way of a hostile-friendly takeover bid? Was it that cinema in its agony was ready for a cultural upgrade, the trade-off being that the museums, especially the museums of contemporary art, would acquire cinema’s mass public appeal and the extraordinary cultural memory that its 100-year history represented as future assets? The gamble seems to have paid off. The museum’s archaeological impulse in media and installation art was partly focused on the popular memory of

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both Hollywood and the art and auteur cinema (with many a major auteur turned into a modern artist), but it was partly also specifically targeted at a selective appropriation of the film avant-garde of the 1970s, which—as already mentioned—had at the time been quite hostile to the museum for a variety of reasons. Filmmakers such as Michael Snow, Dan Graham, Ken Jacobs, and Anthony McCall but also video artists (who in the 1970s had been shunned by filmmakers and vice versa) were co-opted and re-introduced as installation artists. Thanks to bridging figures such as Bill Viola, the transition was smooth, spectacular, and almost imperceptible in its inner contradictions, as was the migration into biennales and documentas of established filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman, Harun Farocki, Peter Greenaway, Ulrike Ottinger, or Johan Grimonprez. But the media archaeological impulse was also carried by an increasing number of established and younger artists, the latter already trained and versed in digital cameras and non-linear editing, who became invested in analogue film technology, old 16 mm projectors, carousel slide projectors, photocopiers, fax machines, and 16mm film stock. Among the established artists are James Coleman, Rodney Graham, and Nan Goldin, while Tacita Dean, Zoe Beloff and Rosa Barbra are part of the next generation of mediaarchaeological installation artists. One way to characterize this art-space media archaeology is to speak of it as a “poetics of obsolescence”, meaning that artists are rediscovering in formerly useful objects and functioning practical devices the strange beauty of the recently useless. Such work often manifests an affective empathy with the discarded and the disfigured, reviving an aesthetics that is receptive to the lacrima rerum of the damaged and the broken. Not unlike the Romantics’ investment in Gothic ruins and the Surrealists’ passion for objets trouvés (found objects), the poetics of obsolescence embody and express a love for ‘dead media’, ‘degraded media’, or ‘dirty media’, and with respect to cinema, excavates and samples ‘found footage’—film material from often anonymous sources that can be brought back to life, proving that celluloid cinema is at once irresistibly inviting in its transparency and luminosity and preciously perishable in its materiality, and giving a new meaning to the notion that cinephilia is also in part a kind of necrophilia. On the other hand, media archaeology—as practiced by installation artists and filmmakers exhibiting in art spaces—covers a wide spectrum of agendas.68 The discarded can still be operational, bricolage-fashion, and 68 See also Matilde Nardelli, “Moving Pictures: Cinema and Its Obsolescence in Contemporary Art”, Journal of Visual Culture 8 (2009): 243-264.

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the useless can liberate other energies than those of the beautiful: it raises challenging questions around temporality and functionality and reinstates the category of ‘play’ in its increasingly problematic relation to ‘work’, not only in the so-called ‘creative industries’. Some of these issues are discussed in the chapter headed “Media Archaeology and the Poetics of Obsolescence”.

The Amsterdam Media Archaeology Network To summarize, then, there are three major impulses to which media archaeology owes its prominence since the 1990s: early cinema, digital media, and media installation art. Of these, the two that preoccupied me initially, because they were at the center of the enterprise I was most closely associated with, were ‘early cinema’ and ‘digital media’, with ‘digital cinema’ a potent oxymoron, as I try to demonstrate in my essay entitled “Digital Cinema—Convergence or Contradiction?”69 But in the course of Imagined Futures and my subsequent teaching, cinema as media installation art has gained in importance.70 That these three intersect in various ways and comment—sometimes retroactively—on each other is inevitable, since each provided a perspective from which the other could be made to appear strange and once more unfamiliar. As digital media transformed the way we processed, accessed, and experienced both still and moving images, along with the printed word, music, and speech, it proved both reassuring and exciting to be able to return to a situation—seemingly equally in ferment as ours—that prevailed a century earlier, when the telephone and the telegraph, photography and chronophotography, sound recording on wax cylinders and the typewriter as text-machine all competed with each other. If around 1900 it seemed that cinema was to emerge victorious in the realm of mass entertainment, by the 1990s, its future was no longer assured. At all events, one way of moving forward into the digital age, was to look back, not nostalgically or by way of a retreat, but in a parallax fashion, keeping 69 The third impulse identified within media archaeology—media installation art—has also been central to a course on “The Moving Image in the Museum” which I taught at Yale University and Columbia University between 2013 and 2016. 70 See the chapter “Media Archaeology as the Poetics of Obsolescence” in this volume. Under the auspices of the Imagined Futures research group, important work in this area has been done by Pepita Hesselberth, Cinematic Chronotopes – Here, Now, Me (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) and Jennifer Steetskamp, “Lessings Gespenster. Die Zeiträume der Bewegtbildinstallation” (PhD, University of Amsterdam, 2012), as well as Edwin Carels, Animation beyond animation: A media-archaeological approach (PhD, Ghent University, 2014).

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two viewpoints or periods firmly and simultaneously in focus: the ‘episteme 1900’ and the ‘episteme 2000’. If in the rediscovery of the first decades of cinema the digital turn had a subordinate role in the background, it was nonetheless present: What struck me, for instance, was how much easier it had become, in light of current upheavals, to ‘understand’ early cinema as a distinct epoch or episteme, which is to say, how one felt curiously ‘at home’ in the world of the films and filmmakers from the 1890s and from around 1900. This strange but pleasing familiarity was no doubt in part illusory as subsequent corrective maneuvers would show, but it was also due to the fact that, with the ‘conceptual rupture’ of the digital in the new millennium, it was possible to formulate newly pertinent questions and address them to an earlier period of major media change, prompted by the awareness of how an otherwise quite slowly evolving media landscape could suddenly experience very radical and multi-level changes. In my personal case, making direct contact with early cinema not only altered my intellectual outlook on film history and film theory. It also led to a change in career and location because it took me from the University of East Anglia to the University of Amsterdam—via an unexpected detour to a place that for two generations of film scholars is now all but synonymous with the serious study of ‘silent cinema’: the Verdi cinema in the Northern Italian city of Pordenone. There, as already mentioned, the annual festival known as the Giornate del cinema muto has been held since 1985, and it was in Pordenone, during my first visit there in 1989, that I made the acquaintance, among others, of scholars, archivists, and film specialists from Amsterdam whose film museum was to play a major role in the rediscovery of so many unique films from the period between 1907 and 1917: crucial years, as it turned out, of cinema’s consolidation and internationalization. My move to Amsterdam, tasked to initiate a film and television studies department at a university, proved to be an opportunity to put the study of early cinema and of digital media on an equal footing.71 In due course, thanks to two international MA programs (“Film and Media Studies” and “Presentation and Preservation of the Moving Image”) where junior faculty co-taught with me a mandatory module on “Media Archaeology”, several joint research enterprises (which included PhD students) began to take shape around the examination of possible parallels between early cinema, 71 I was greatly helped in this by my then PhD student Michael Punt (now Professor of Digital Art and Technology at Plymouth University, UK) who came with me to Amsterdam from East Anglia.

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digital cinema, and—somewhat later—archive-based installation art.72 From 2005 onwards, the main research project was called Imagined Futures (iFut)73 and was convened by myself, Wanda Strauven,74 and Michael Wedel.75 Given the number of researchers, not all the projects associated with or affiliated to the Amsterdam network pointed in the same direction, nor would everyone recognize their work as an integral part of media archaeology.76 As was to be expected, some cinema historians located in Amsterdam felt less close to the project than others, while film scholars working geographically further afield felt more sympathetic and were eager to join.77 The broader alliances are, however, reflected in another aspect of the Amsterdam network, i.e. the substantial number of monographs and collected volumes in the area of early cinema/media archaeology that were published over the years by Amsterdam University Press in its series “Film

72 Starting in the mid-1990s, we were able to invite as distinguished visitors and research fellows David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Robert C. Allen, Lev Manovich, and Jussi Parikka, among others. 73 The Imagined Futures research group, apart from its three coordinators, consisted of seven PhD students and was affiliated with the Gradisca Spring School, organized every year by the University of Udine. Exchange visits were also established with several international research networks, notably the GRAFICS group around André Gaudreault and Viva Paci, Université de Montreal, and the team led by François Albera and Maria Tortajada at the Université de Lausanne. A similar research project (“Film 1900”) had been formed at the University of Siegen, led by Klaus Kreimeier, Joseph Garncarz, and Anemone Ligensa. There were also joint meetings in Amsterdam with colleagues from the University of Utrecht, notably William Uricchio, Frank Kessler, and Nanna Verhoeff. 74 Wanda Strauven’s first major publication was devoted to F.T. Marinetti and his work across several different media, including cinema: Marinetti e il cinema. Tra attrazione e sperimentazione (Udine: Campanotto, 2006). 75 Michael Wedel has published an exemplary media archaeological study of sound and (early) cinema, Der deutsche Musikfilm: Archäologie eines Genres 1914-1945 (Munich: text + kritik, 2007). 76 The Dutch film historian Karel Dibbets, together with Bert Hogenkamp (and loosely associated scholars such as Ansje van Beusekom, Ivo Blom, Huub Wijfjes, Judith Thissen) had been working on an extensive database to catalogue Dutch film culture, audience studies, and the history of cinema theaters, using digital tools and specially developed software. While there were personal and professional contacts with our Media Archaeology group, a difference in research methods and goals precluded a more formal affiliation. 77 Mention must be made of another Amsterdam institution, De Balie, where Eric Kluitenberg organized the symposium “An Archaeology of Imaginary Media” in February 2004. A crucial collaborator and media archaeologist extraordinaire is Edwin Carels, nominally working in Ghent but omnipresent, including in Amsterdam and for many years now at the Rotterdam Film Festival: http://expertise.hogent.be/en/persons/edwin-carels%28edd99c20-4c0a-41d79944-44a9864fad20%29.html

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Culture in Transition”.78 The present essays add another volume while serving as a retrospective re-assessment of this two-decade-long endeavor. The (provisional) culmination of the Amsterdam media archaeology project, which started around 1993 and concluded in 2011,79 remained Imag­ ined Futures which was concerned with the conditions, dynamics, and consequences of rapid media transfer and transformation. While ‘media’ in principle encompassed all technical media of image and sound, cinema continued to provide the conceptual starting point and primary historical focus. Changes in basic technology, public perception, and artistic practice may often evolve over long historical cycles, yet the project’s main assumption was that there are also moments when transfer occurs in discontinuous, unevenly distributed fashion during relatively short periods of time and with mutually interdependent determinations. Imagined Futures initially identified two such periods of transformation taking place across a broad spectrum of media technologies: the period from the 1870s to 1900 and from 1970 to 2000. The first witnessed the popularization of photography, the emergence of cinema, the global use of the (wireless) telegraph, the domestic use of the telephone, and the invention of radio and of the basic technologies of television; while the second saw the consolidation of video as a popular storage medium and avant-garde artistic practice, the universal adoption of the personal computer, the change from analogue to digital sound and image, the invention of the mobile phone, and the development of the internet and world wide web, leading to an information and communication infrastructure dependent on the digital

78 The series was initiated by me and I have remained its general editor. From 1994 onwards, we published A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decade (eds. Elsaesser and Michael Wedel), Film and the First World War (eds. Karel Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp), Cinema Futures: The Screen Arts in the Digital Age (eds. Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann), Film Front Weimar (Bernadette Kester), the English translation of Audiovisions (Siegfried Zielinski), Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade (Ivo Blom), Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood (Kristin Thompson), The West in Early Cinema (Nanna Verhoeff), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (ed. Wanda Strauven), Films That Work (eds. Vinzenz Hediger, Patrick Vonderau), Cinema Beyond Film (eds. François Albera and Maria Tortajada), Mapping the Moving Image (Pasi Väliaho), Victor Sjöstrom in Hollywood (Bo Florin), The Cinematic Dispositive (eds. François Albera and Maria Tortajada), and Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity (Michael Cowan). To these should be added several other volumes, also published by Amsterdam University Press, in a different series: Julia Noordegraaf, Cosetta Saba, Barbara Le Maitre, and Vinzenz Hediger (eds.), Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art; Giovanna Fossati, From Celluloid to Pixel; and Nanna Verhoeff, Mobile Screens. 79 Wanda Strauven and Alexandra Schneider subsequently coordinated the research group “Recycling Media” http://asca.uva.nl/research/magic-constellations/content/recycling-mediareading-group/recycling-media-reading-group.html.

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computer, telephony, radio waves, and satellites more than on the camera, photography, or moving images. A key characteristic of such periods of rapid media change is the volatility, unpredictability, and even contradictory nature of the dynamics between the practical implications of the new technologies (their industrial applications and economic potential), their perception by the popular imagination (in the form of narratives of anxiety and utopia, panic and fantasy), and the mixed response (eager adoption or stiff resistance) they receive from artists, writers, and intellectuals. These shifting configurations among different agents offered a rich field of investigation for cultural analysis, posing methodological challenges and requiring specific case studies. But equally inspiring was the hope that, by studying the emergence of cinema in situ rather than in statu nascendi, i.e. not as something just being born, but fully functioning in itself, while still open on all sides, one would get a better grasp of the direction of the changes we were witnessing in digital cinema, where the old ‘birth’ metaphor was even more inappropriate than it was a hundred years earlier. For these changes there was as yet no reliable compass other than to attentively observe this particular period of the past around 1900, as if its similarity to ours was both imaginary and real but further estranged by the fact that their future was not identical with our past, and most certainly their imagined future was not our present. In most other ways, the Amsterdam Media Archaeology network, by concentrating on cinema, was part of the mainstream revival of early cinema in film studies to which scholars all over the world contributed, both inside and outside the academy, comprising at least two generations. While it would be invidious to list all those who have and are contributing to this still lively field, one name stands out in retrospect: that of Tom Gunning, who has been especially prolific, erudite, and detailed in his analysis of almost every significant aspect and phenomenon of nineteenth-century visual culture, recorded sound, and early cinema. With his felicitous coinage “the cinema of attractions”, Gunning has done more than anyone else to propagate and popularize the period of the 1870s to 1900 and beyond, investigating an enormous range of media practices, aspects of cinema, and specific films. In 2006, the Amsterdam project paid homage to Gunning’s stature and achievement by publishing an ‘anniversary’ volume called The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, initiated and edited by Wanda Strauven. Reconstructing the genesis of the 1986 article which introduced the term, it also gives due recognition to André Gaudreault, who collaborated with Gunning for a time and who has a prominent place in the francophone world among scholars of le cinéma des premiers temps, along with a senior

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curator of the Cinémathèque française, Laurent Mannoni, whose book entitled The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema (2000, originally 1994) provides an extraordinarily detailed and informed history of optical media from the twelfth to the twentieth century, but whose subtitle ‘archaeology’ refers mainly to what is more often called ‘pre-cinema’. My own ambitions were both less grand and more meta-historical. Besides trying to direct attention to early cinema in Germany (which had suffered even worse neglect than the first decades elsewhere) with a multiauthored collection of essays (co-edited with Michael Wedel) on what I called ‘Wilhelmine cinema’, along with studies of the German detective film, the director-producer-inventor Oskar Messter, and Franco-German film relations, I was above all interested in issues of film historiography and the challenges an archaeological approach posed to (film) history. I therefore began thinking of the wider implications of what it meant to revise and rewrite traditional film histories, not simply by adding more ‘facts’ or adopting newly rediscovered films into the canon but by setting out to change the very framing of film and cinema within different intellectual, cultural, socio-economic, and technological histories, while positing that at each point in time, starting with the 1890s, one was dealing with an already fully constituted art form with its own logic and rules. As argued above, this made the turn to Foucault and his archaeological method almost inevitable, and also forced me to be quite self-critical regarding my ulterior motives and goals. Was this return to cinema’s ‘beginnings’ fuelled by nostalgia; was it the sheer challenge of helping to chart what appeared to be ‘no-man’s land’ or ‘virgin territory’; or was it to map the discourse of my fellow scholars of early cinema and materialist historians and thus to write a chapter in the intellectual history of my discipline? If one answer was: ‘all of the above’, another had to do with thinking more deeply about causation, contingency, coinci­dence, and conjuncture, about counterfactual history and more generally about the contemporary status of history. Under the impact of digital media, ‘memory’, ‘trauma’, and the ‘archive’ emerged as concepts somehow more authentic and useful than history, which as Foucault (via Nietzsche) taught us was above all a discourse of power, and as Benjamin argued was usually written by the victors. All this made it easy to conceive of media archaeology, when applied to film history, as an anti-history or at least as a counterhistory. One could think of oneself as deconstructing the orthodox discourse of film history while at the same time resisting hegemonic forces (notably those of a once-again-global Hollywood of blockbusters), and thus imagine oneself to be engaged in a political task: championing these early films and their

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apparently experimental freshness fostered the hope that one might reinject some of that diversity bordering on chaos and disorder also into the present situation, when the avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s seemed to have run out of steam or had simply been killed off by the combined effects of multiplexes and commercial television. Early cinema became a proxy avantgarde: preferably anonymous but bristling with resistance, with oddity, and showing an awkward but bracing indifference to what later became the norms of ‘proper’ cinema. By shifting the emphasis from films as authored autonomous works, to films as the material manifestations of a range of contradictory exigencies, scholars of early cinema began comprehending cinema very concretely as a system of interlocking institutions, a mesh of heterogeneous agents in competition with each other. Specific films, if ‘successful’, came to be interpreted as the optimal solution or compromise formations to problems of technology, social class, audience expectations, physical conditions in the theater, or properties of the cinematic apparatus which one could trace or reconstruct in the different genres, the film forms, and even national styles. This particular hermeneutics appealed to me, and I wrote a number of such studies, of which the analysis of Franz Hofer’s Weihnachtsglocken in its genre hybridity serves as example.80 One can call the method materialist in that it tries to reconstitute the material conditions—in the widest sense—that have given rise to a given film, or one can call it allegorical in that it takes the film as an allegorical ‘working through’ of all the forces external to it, which act on it as constraints and affordances but also produce gaps or displacements that need to be interpreted. In order to read these gaps, I invoked Conan Doyle and his theory of ‘the dog that did not bark’ as my own media archaeological method. Several articles that follow bring Sherlock Holmes’ forensics of negative evidence to bear on certain moments in the history of cinema: the reasons why certain events did not occur are telling us something important about what did happen, and what may have been forgotten or seemed to have failed also belongs to history. It is an approach that situates itself between what I have referred to as counterhistory and ‘counterfactual history’, counterfactual history being a method that, by extending the range of possibilities (or enlarging the context), forms a conjecture of what—with the intervention of some set of equally probable circumstances or a contingent incident—might have happened instead of what actually did happen. The purpose is to 80 Thomas Elsaesser, “Sounds Beguiling: On the Origins and Transformations of Music Genres in Early German Cinema,” L. Quaresima, A. Rengo, L. Vichi (eds), La Nascita dei generi cinematographici (Udine: Forum, 1999) 391-406.

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come to a more complex understanding of why certain key events took place by speculating on the factors necessary for there to have been an outcome different from the one that did in fact occur. Certain kinds of media archaeology—for instance, when the impulse is to argue that “things might have been different”—are close to counterfactual history, but my own “dog that did not bark” forensics has a slightly different aim. For me, the challenge is to try and give back to a particular past—say, the 1890s or the 1910s—its own future: not the one that history subsequently conferred on it, which in the case of early cinema had been an impoverished and selectively appropriated one, but a future that was imagined (in popular magazines), predicted (by self-promoters like Edison), and fantasized (as in Albert Robida’s mock-dystopic Le Vingtième Siècle, la vie électrique).81 These ‘futures’ were in some sense realized in films that were deemed lost or had been poorly understood and on being rediscovered now look remarkably modern and sophisticated. Other historical moments still retain an underappreciated potential (disclosed by the ingenuity of some inventor, the sacrifices of some bricoleur, or the risks taken by an entrepreneur), previously dismissed as failures or dead ends. An apparent ‘loser’ in his time—Georges Demenÿ might be an example—could, in light of a mediaarchaeological rescue mission, turn out to have ‘anticipated’ uses of the cinematographe in the fields of science and education that would make him a ‘winner’ today. Likewise, an idea, whose ‘time had not yet come’ (e.g., the fantasy Edison’s telephonoscope drawn by George du Maurier for Punch’s Almanack for 1879) can be recognized as an uncannily prescient prototype of a video-voice communication system like Skype, adding to counterfactual history the pleasures of anachronism. Such conjectures also draw attention to what exactly had been anticipated at the end of the nineteenth century, what hopes had been invested in new media, and how these expectations came to differ from what eventually became a reality, once more making 81 Calling our media-archaeological research group “Imagined Futures” was intended to make room for the fantasies, dystopias, and anxieties always associated with technologies that are acting in proximity with the body and the senses but also to give due respect to absent causes or that which had not (yet) taken place. In this respect, we were in tune (even if we did not actively collaborate) with Eric Kluitenberg’s Amsterdam project of an “archaeology of imaginary media”, which investigated the role of non-existing media as imagined by futurologists and science-f iction writers. Also of interest to us was Jeffrey Sconce’s book on Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000) as well as media panics and media fantasies, such as Friedrich Kittler’s extrapolation from horror stories and vampire tales, notably Bram Stoker’s Dracula. See Kittler, Draculas Vermächtnis (Leipzig: Reclam, 1993), 11-57.

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what did not happen also part of a history, or at least part of a historical imaginary, recoverable as and by media archeology.

The Deep Time of Media, or the Place of Cinema in (Media) History Such recovery work need not restrict itself to a single country and not even to the century of cinema. On a grand scale of some two thousand years of media tools and technologies, Siegfried Zielinski’s The Deep Time of the Media82 sets out to document the practical experiments and fantasy design of all those he calls “the dreamers and modelers” of media devices throughout the ages. Among them are Chinese scientists, Arab mathematicians, Greek philosophers, Renaissance alchemists, Jesuit priests, speculative thinkers from the Baroque period, all the way to Russian avant-gardists from the 1920s. Zielinski’s deep time presupposes an enlarged horizon and thus a time frame and historical space that, if one tries to make his method fruitful also for cinema, not only goes beyond the hundred years that film history considers its proper domain but extends further even than the early cinema period, which had already included most parts of the nineteenth century as belonging to cinema’s pre-history. Zielinski’s book posed a further challenge: if film history as media archaeology is to be more than the name of a nostalgic look back at a lost Eden of optical toys and vision machines, and more than cinephilia turned necrophilia (however innocent the beauty of schlocky B-pictures, or however attractive in their uselessness, the dead pieces of film technology displayed as sculptural objects now appear to us), then its practitioners face some intriguing and even disturbing questions. Foremost among them for me was why historians, philosophers, and thinkers of contemporary media tend to regard cinema as almost irrelevant within the larger histories and big-tree genealogies they now sketch for the technical media: a bias that echoes and confirms the diminished status of cinema with which I began this chapter. On the other hand, if some of the urgency behind the turn to media archaeology has come from needing a more complex historiographical model for understanding digital media, then where are we to locate the relevant epistemic breaks that separate the genealogy of cinema from that of digital media? And what would be the appropriate level of generality at which commonalities and differences should be discussed? 82 Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media.

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The chapters “Cinema Motion Energy Entropy” as well as “Media Archaeology as Symptom” want to offer provisional answers. Some scholars have tried their best to save cinema for the digital age and even make it the latter’s foundation. I have already mentioned Lev Manovich and his The Language of New Media, an early and highly successful intervention in the debate, in which Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera emerges as the film that now appears at the cusp of cinema’s multiple destinies and at the intersection of distinct cinema futures. Yet even Manovich has since moved on (to software studies), and now rarely refers to cinema. Others have been a good deal more radical and have come to the conclusion that cinema amounted to an aberration in the long history of technical media, that it was at best an “intermezzo” (Siegfried Zielinski), and at worst a “detour” (William Uricchio), delaying the development of what should have been the medium of modernity already in the 1920s: television. For Zielinski, the level of generality that assigns to cinema such a minor role is determined by all those who over millennia have tried to bridge distance, connect what is separate, and capture and preserve on a suitable material support what the human eye sees and the human ear hears—priorities more germane to television and the video recorder than cinema.83 Uricchio also considers bridging distance and connecting people as one of the key motors of modern media but regards ‘simultaneity’ as the ultimate driving force behind many of the developments that have helped digital media to their dominance. For him, too, television is the more foundational media machine than cinema. Zielinski and Uricchio are not the first or indeed the only scholars who have been eager to find an overriding force or dominant impulse that can unify the field and give a central motif or theme to their media archaeological investigations. Other media archaeologists, even more explicitly concerned with tracking the digital rather than either cinema or television, have gone back to the origins of mathematics as mankind’s alternative attempt (alternative to language, that is) first to understand but then to mould and model the real world, thanks to the abstract magic of algebra and geometry, of “quantity, structure, space and change”, of zeros, ones and equations, of Boolean operators and algorithms. Friedrich Kittler, after 83 With respect to an ‘archaeology of television’, William Uricchio has done valuable research around the origins of television in Germany. See his “Television, Film and the Struggle for Media Identity,” Film History 10, no. 2, (1998): 118-127. A broadly conceived ‘archaeology of television’ is sketched in Andreas Fickers and Anne-Katrin Weber’s editorial for their special issue of View – Journal of European Television History & Culture vol. 4, issue 7 (2015) http://journal. euscreen.eu/index.php/view/article/view/JETHC076/194.

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first introducing cybernetics into literary studies and driving the human out of the humanities, returned later in life to the Greeks, to “mathematics and music”, in order to decipher the meaning and origins of digital media, and so left cinema—even in the form of Plato’s Cave—to one side, more intrigued and convinced by Heraclites and Pythagoras than by Plato or Aristoteles. His disciple Bernhard Siegert—also looking for what he calls “the passages of the digital”—has been studying the emergence of the postal system in the nineteenth century, the bureaucracy of the population census, double bookkeeping, and the biopolitics practiced on Spanish galley ships sailing to South America. More recently, he has re-interpreted the discovery and properties of electromagnetism, focusing attention on Michael Faraday and the induction experiments of James Clerk Maxwell and Nicola Tesla, as the basis for today’s electronics of grids, switches, and relays.

The Archive: Crises in History and Memory The contest between teleological and archaeological models of media history highlight the fact that digital media have also revolutionized our concepts of storage and retrieval, of access and dissemination, and thus have automated both memory and recall. It is therefore not surprising that another point of origin, cited for the digital world we live in, is said to be the Memory Arts (the ars memoria, or mnemotechnics), possibly inaugurated by Chinese priests, systematized by the Greeks (Simonides of Ceos), and turned into a political instrument by the Romans (Cicero and Quintilian) before being revived by Christian monks—each time based on visualization as spatial orientation, on the loci (the places) and testes (witnesses), whereby recollection happens along the paths and perambulation through imagined but highly ordered and organized spaces. The revival of the memory arts goes hand in hand with the rise of the concept of the archive, itself a reflection of the importance of databases, of networks and nodes, of stochastic movement and random access. It is the archive that has become the locus of power and agency: both emblem of and counterforce to machine memory, both avatar of history and its inheritor. The archive now shapes our view of the past more decisively than history, since the archive allows us at all times to revisit and thus to rewrite the past, to reverse engineer our present, and thus to fashion out of the archive also a different future. In this sense—and now we return to both Foucault and Benjamin but add Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever

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(and thereby Sigmund Freud)84—the archaeology and the archive are very closely aligned, given that the Greek word arche, besides ‘old’, also means: first principle, the source of action, command, governance, and authority. It is the place, the space, and the realm that is intangible and undefined in itself, but as such, the arche provides the conditions of the possibility of any given phenomenon or thing to exist. What the extraordinary interest in the archive signifies is that media archaeology is thus also a symptom of a general distrust in history, of impatience with linear narrative, and of changes in our concept of causality. For instance, we now tend to consider memory more authentic than history and trauma more typical of human memory than objective recall. Not only because of all the historical traumata of the twentieth century (our immediate history and still, for some, events in living memory) but possibly also because human memory finds itself increasingly compared to and measured by machine memory. Machine memory may well be part of the reason we are so obsessed with trauma, because it seems that in almost every way other than trauma, machine memory is superior to human memory, while at the same time, paradoxically, machine memory does share certain features with trauma: for instance, repetition and randomness—in one case, random access, in the other, random return. If media archaeology can be seen as part of a crisis in our understanding of history itself, then it also responds to an altogether too ready reliance on certain kinds of narrative as a mainstay of (cinema) historiography. In the 1970s, Hayden White’s Metahistory demonstrated that since the middle of the nineteenth century, recurring rhetorical and narrative tropes have been at the core of the argumentative modes that for historians secured plausible historical explanations.85 Perhaps no more: the days may not be far off when narrative—not only under pressure from game theory—comes to be seen as only one of several possible ways, even if widely used, of ordering or organizing perceptual data, actions, and events in a comprehensible and easily communicable way. At which point history, already besieged by memory studies and the archive, may have to be rethought even more radically than I am doing here, especially in the light of media arts and the manner in which history now oscillates with obsolescence. Obsolescence, as I show in the chapter 11, is itself filled with ambiguous potential, having become the reference point of so much media art, where it finds itself configured 84 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever – A Freudian Impression (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996). 85 Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1973).

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as a form of retroactive anticipation, which is itself a particular form of narrativization in the register of revisable and reversible temporalities.86

The Crisis in Narrative: Transmedia Studies and Participatory Culture One of the tasks of media archaeology, so the argument has been, was to be an alternative to—or the deconstruction of—traditional film history. But besides attacking the teleology implied by classical historiography, media archaeology has also promoted itself, when focusing on early cinema, as a challenge to the normativity of linear narrative. In this, it was supported by two historical factors. First, a majority of early cinema films was non-, para-, or barely narrative: views, comic sketches, actualities, phantom rides, etc. And second, the turn to narrative was by no means a natural or inevitable progression but came about through a complex set of social, demographic, and economic factors.87 Among these was the economic need to attract middle-class audiences and thus better paying patrons, as well as the desire to move cinema from fairgrounds and musical halls into the vicinity of shopping streets and bourgeois theaters, mirroring middle-class tastes and catering to aspirations of refinement.88 Robert C. Allen, Charles Musser, and Tom Gunning, among others, debated these issues around narrative versus spectacle, distribution versus exhibition, sometimes quite polemically.89 It was Gunning who eventu86 On obsolescence and contemporary art, see “Obsolescence: A Special Issue” October 100 (Spring 2002), notably the Roundtable Discussion, “Obsolescence and the American Avant-garde Film” (pp. 115-132) and Matilde Nardelli, “Moving Pictures: Cinema and Its Obsolescence in Contemporary Art”, Journal of Visual Culture no. 8 (2009): 243-264. 87 For some of the economic and demographic data on the turn to narrative, see “The Transition to Story Films, 1903-04,” in Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 337-369. 88 See Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992) and Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes, and Robert C. Allen (eds.), Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema (Exeter: Exeter University, 2009). 89 Internal to the emerging institution of cinema was another development favouring narrative, namely the conflict of interests and the struggle for control between distributors and exhibitors, which the former were able to decide in their favor, partly thanks to introducing longer films, made irreversible and non-interchangeable through coherent narratives. Some of the key arguments of this debate can be found in “Story Films Become the Dominant Product, 1903-04,” in Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 235-290.

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ally carried the day with the coinage ‘cinema of attractions’ (originally an elegant alternative to exhibitors’ control, contrasted by Gunning to the ‘cinema of narrative integration’, indicative of distributors’ control). His term thus not only underlined the non-narrative character of early cinema, but also—in the way it began to be applied to contemporary Hollywood, to video games, and digital media more generally—revived other challenges to linear narratives by reinserting the 1970s avant-garde debate about anti-illusionism and non-narrative forms of cinema into the discussions around contemporary cinema and media, where interactivity, non-linearity, navigability, spectacle, and scripted spaces became key words, often (problematically) subsumed under the umbrella term ‘attractions’. Within the wider debate around the future of narrative across the different platforms of digital media—ranging from television series, feature films, essay films, and documentaries to interactive games, alternate reality games, animation films, comic book graphic novels, art installations, and YouTube clips—the term that is in the process of replacing “cinema of attractions” seems to be the coinage ‘transmedia narratives’, inaugurated by Henry Jenkins in his influential Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.90 Just as the ‘cinema of attractions’ summarized the different debates around early cinema in a resonant formula, ‘transmedia narratives’—itself a sub-category of what Jenkins calls “participatory culture”—subsumes some of the decades-old debates around intertextuality and intermediality, along with multimodality, i.e. the way narratives can migrate across media. Other relatively new locutions such as “additive comprehension” and “narrative world-building” try to go beyond (narratological) categories such as ‘metalepsis’ and ‘paratexts’ (Gérard Genette’s terms for narratives crossing textual boundaries), expanded cinema (Gene Youngblood’s term of cross-media cinema), or the idea of extended diegesis (the ‘here-me-now’ discussed in one of the essays below). Jenkins’ terms also want to address the questions of audience engagement and subject positions, of how to maintain narrative coherence across different platforms, the phenomenon of narrative expansion in serial formats, as well as how to differentiate between the ‘viral’ propagation of stories and video clips, and the promotion of brands and the marketing of commodities—all of which takes place across social media as the channels of choice. Again, there are many examples of boundary-crossing modes of reception in early cinema and of interactive participation (e.g., film quizzes and 90 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

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puzzle film)91 and para-textual commentary (e.g., the lecturer).92 Once regarded as trivial and transitional by film historians, these phenomena are being re-evaluated in the light of contemporary practices, enacted at a vastly expanded scale and driven by solidly organized corporate interests but also—as Jenkins insists—supported by solidly organized fans and digitally native ‘prosumers’. It would allow transmedia studies to be more inclusive, bringing together the fan bases from film and television (Jenkins’ textual poachers), with gamers, software developers, and hackers to create communities of content providers, net activists, and cultural producers. Jenkins has recently proposed to reframe his transmedia studies and participatory culture within the larger context of “media archaeology”, which he sees—similar to the perspective here adopted—as neither focused on the technology nor determined by specific narrative formats. Instead, a media archaeology of participatory culture would elaborate and excavate what he calls “the 200 years of grass-root movements trying to gain access to the tools of cultural production” by tracking the cultural technologies that have enabled content (stories, images, ideas, etc.) to circulate by means of “systems of spreadability”, his term for mechanical mass reproduction.93 Not surprisingly, the Gutenberg printing press and texts in the vernacular are among his examples, too, so that the printing press becomes (jokingly, one hopes) “web minus 10.0”—a neat example of teleology in reverse and thus perhaps not the most persuasive proof of media archaeology (as defined in this chapter). More promising but similarly dictated by hindsight is the assumption, regarding the history of cinema, of a change in default value. Starting from contemporary evidence of transmedia and interactivity, Jenkins would argue that audio-visual media like cinema have always been potentially or actually participatory. This would make the period of classical narrative cinema—i.e. the projection of moving images in purpose-built theaters with a darkened auditorium and separate séances—a relatively short interlude 91 Michael Cowan “Learning to Love the Movies: Puzzles, Participation and Cinephilia in Interwar Film Magazines,” Film History 4 (2016): 1-45. 92 Andre Gaudreault, “Fonctions et origines du bonimenteur du cinéma des premiers temps”, Cinémas (vol 4, nr 1, Autumn 1993): 132-147. 93 Henry Jenkins et al., Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013). See also Fabrice Lyczba, “Conference Report: Contemporary Screen Narratives” (University of Nottingham, 2012), InMedia 2/ 2012 http:// inmedia.revues.org/482. A book inspired by Jenkins and using the term ‘archaeology’ is Carlos Scolari, Paolo Bertetti, and Matthew Freeman (eds.), Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

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lasting from 1917 to 1977, i.e. some 60 years, out of a history of projected spectacle that roughly goes back to the late eighteenth century.94 What speaks for such a limited periodization is that contemporary cinema has seen a proliferation of locutions indicative of a crisis in linear narrative: modular narratives, multi-character narratives, forking-path narratives, multiple draft narratives, fractal narratives, database narratives, multiple choice narratives—not to mention puzzle films, mind-game films, or the complexly interwoven and criss-crossing storylines of US quality television series such as Lost, The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Homeland, or House of Cards, commissioned with high production values by cable networks such as HBO and Bravo or a streaming service such as Netflix. Yet especially in these large-budget television series, narrative as a vital cultural form has not disappeared, however much it might be under siege, and on the contrary, has merely gained in complexity, layeredness, and intricacy. From within a media-archaeological perspective one can usefully cite a few of the pros and cons of narrative that both keeps it alive and predestines it to change. Narrative has been mankind’s privileged storage mode for at least 5,000 years, modelling itself on the human experience of time as a succession of sequenced events and thus following the logic of the “post-hoc ergo propter hoc” (what follows x is caused by x). Narrative often takes as its dramatic arc, as well as its default value, the life cycle of beginning (birth), growth (change, transformation), middle (maturity), and end (death), and proceeds from a steady state, interrupted by a disturbance, which necessitates actions (moves and countermoves) until a new equilibrium is re-established. Why is this model so prevalent and so persistent? There are some evolutionary reasons. Humans are creatures of anticipation: knowing what happens next is a matter of survival; we are goal-oriented and purposive, i.e. we internalize thinking in terms of means and ends and project these along linear trajectories; we rely on causality, and our actions are shaped by anticipated consequences; we live and experience time’s arrow as irreversible. All this predisposes us to narrative as a way of organizing information, and to linear narrative as its main vector, since physiologically, we have an upright-forward orientation, and we speak of time (especially the future)

94 The first fully documented phantasmagoria presentations date from around 1797. See David J. Jones, Gothic Machine: Textualities, Pre-Cinematic Media and Film in Popular Visual Culture, 1670-1910 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012).

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in spatial terms, as in ‘going forward’, ‘the years ahead of us’, ‘the decisions facing us’, etc. What, then, are the countervailing forces that have put narrative into crisis? We are also creatures of mimesis, of learning by imitating: we ‘mirror’ one another. We may wish our life to progress in a steady and straight line, but we know it to be full of accidents and random events, which can radically change our course. Also militating against linearity is the fact that we rely on memory for our sense of identity; but memory is backward-oriented and is moreover non-linear, intermittent, traumatic, compulsive, prone to repetition, but also dependent on place and space. Yet the challenges to narrative also derive from less anthropological factors and reflect our environment and the technologies we utilize to communicate and to orient ourselves in space and time. Living in cities means a different kind of ‘cognitive mapping’ than in a village built around the church: the modern cityscape necessitates both different motor skills in order to navigate successfully a densely built-up environment and other perceptual skills for mastering its multi-directional movement and flow of people and vehicles. The mind-machine symbioses also militate against the linearity of print: database logic is non-linear and thus challenges narrative as a medium of storage and access of information. Machine memory and search engines work most efficiently through batch, sort, and sample rather than with sequential and causal links. Our brains, considered as neural networks, rely on connections, nodes, conjunctions, as do other kinds of networks: what counts is not causality but connectivity, not consequence but correlation. Similarly non-narrative or anti-narrative are the feedback systems that regulate so many of our sensory responses and input-output interactions with the environment, whose dynamic real-time tracking is the object of intense technological and economic investment. As I have argued else­ where,95 positive and negative feedback loops are increasingly important also in understanding how contemporary media function in the competitive commercial world of the Internet, where the kind of information gathering, storage, sorting, and retrieval made possible by digital tools has enhanced the value and purpose of feedback loops for tech companies, social media aggregators, and online retailers. However, just as one might think that the scales are tipping in favor of non-narrative forms of storing, organizing, and accessing information, the strengths and advantages of narrative make themselves felt once more. 95 Thomas Elsaesser, “Reflexivity, Feedback and Self-Regulation,” in The Persistence of Hollywood (New York: Routledge, 2013), 319-340.

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Not only, as pointed out above, does narrative provide the time-space coordinates and linguistic markers (shifters) where readers, viewers, users, and players can insert themselves as unique and singular ‘subjects’. Narratives, by eliminating ‘noise’ and by linearizing the perceptual field through suspense and anticipation, also act as ‘filter’ mechanisms that allow us to process data and to cope with the sensory overload that the mechanical and electronic media have brought into the world of human perception. While filters other than stories are conceivable and are being applied, narrative’s persistence as storage medium, as protective shield, as mode of address, as form of recall, and as mnemotechnic device suggests that the multi-functionality of narrative will be hard to match in economy as well as in efficiency. Narrative is thus one of those areas where the deconstructive fervor of media archaeology risks overreaching itself, and where the conviction that media archaeology is either a liberating force or a method that produces new knowledge must be weighed against the possibility that it is itself no more than the ideology of the present: reflecting but also disguising the material conditions of our digital culture and its technical-technological infrastructure.

The Limits of Media Archaeology Is media archaeology then merely the positivist ideology of digital media, while it mistakes itself for their critique? In the mode of retrospectively discovering—or setting out to prove—that ‘we have always been digital’, media archaeology would indeed, possibly unwittingly, draw its own limits as a critical intervention. Or can it serve as a placeholder in the current turf war between the human and the machine? Similar to Walter Benjamin’s ‘allegorical’ method discussed earlier, for whom revolutions came to be seen as the ‘emergency break’ applied to the express train called ‘progress’, the media archaeological method might act as the emergency break whose friction of resistance causes some sparks to fly between the tracks and the wheels, where machine logic and algorithms are rushing to model the world (of experience and of action) in their image and according to their priorities. This would confirm the perspective taken in the subsequent chapters. There, cinema remains the central reference point, even where—as digital cinema—it redefines itself as a thoroughly hybrid and impure medium, one that preserves the associationist, interactive, connectivist dimension of living organisms that stand in a feedback relation to their respective environments. Nourished by very diverse aesthetic, psychological, physiological,

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and scientific problems and inquiries, cinema is no longer (just) an art form; it approximates a life form whose time is yet to come—in the age of electronic machines and artificial intelligence. While the very question of what is a life form is being urgently posed by both the humanities and social sciences (not to mention biology or chemistry), cinema is part of this spirit of the time and yet it also resists this spirit of the time, which may actually mean that it is also ahead of the game. Thus, rather than being overly concerned by it being deemed obsolete, we might consider the possibility that precisely because cinema is no longer the vehicle of so many of our current commercial priorities, political ideologies, and technological utopias, it can emerge as pivotal: especially if media archaeology has as one of its ambitions to help shape a different future out of differently understood pasts. My particular form of media archaeology therefore does not revel in chaos and chance per se as much as it pleads for connectivity and interaction, often on the basis of what could be called antagonistic mutuality, rather than relying on either collaboration or convergence: that is, seemingly antagonistic or heteronymous forces can nonetheless work in ways that jointly reinforce underlying tendencies of a more general—epochal or epistemic—sway. In fact, such antagonisms may turn out to be working in separate spheres but produce similar results: for instance, both the filmic avant-garde and mainstream cinema since the 1970s have been expanding or subverting what we understand as classical narrative and perspectival space, as I try to show in the chapter entitled “The Return of 3D”.96 I want to resist a media archaeology that mainly concerns itself with the retroactive recovery of the past for the immediate (practical) uses of the present. We would indeed be ‘forgetting’ the past if we thought we ‘owned’ this past, just as we would be forgetful of the present if we could not see ourselves in some constellation with a past. It brings me to a suitably paradoxical but in the end also quite logical conclusion, namely that film history as media archaeology is not an attempt to talk up cinema in order to restore it to its former glory but a way of fully embracing the possibility of its diminished significance. In the digital media landscape of today, so apparently forgetful of cinema, cinema may itself be ‘the dog that doesn’t 96 I shall return to this point in the concluding chapter when discussing some of the commonalities, such as the exploration of different modes of causality and the extension of temporalities backwards, sideways, parallel, and forward. The (re-)conversion of technology and industry into culture (Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler) and of culture into nature (ecology) are part of a similar realignment where formerly opposed spheres and categories are regarded as complementary in their very antagonisms.

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bark’ but whose presence at the scene provides a clue to the identity of the ‘villain’, in this case the source and the agency behind the momentous changes we have been witnessing. On the one hand, in the essays that follow, I shall be arguing that sometimes cinema is most prominent where it has become invisible and ubiquitous—or rather, it is invisible because its presence has become ubiquitous. This invisibility, on the other hand, requires media archaeology to become once more palpable and traceable, across the parallax of untimeliness and the interference of obsolescence. It was Nietzsche who argued that only untimeliness allows us to understand the present because only those who are untimely (unzeitgemäß) can “act counter to our time and thereby act on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come”.97 Giorgio Agamben, who in a somewhat different context also rediscovered the topical uses of Nietzsche’s untimeliness, takes this idea into the social and the political realm. The untimely, the obsolescent, and what he calls ‘inoperativeness’ are needed, according to Agamben, to alert us to the timely urgency of our condition: Precisely when something has outlived its usefulness can it be really current and urgent, because only then does it appear in all its plenitude and truth. […] When I speak of the past, I do not mean either a timeless origin or something that is irrevocably bygone, consisting of irrefutable facts whose sequence needs to be recorded and stored in archives. Rather, I understand the past as something that is still to come and that needs to be wrested from the dominant idea of history, so that it can take place.98

Agamben invokes Foucault’s legacy regarding an archaeological perspective and the tactical use of anachronisms as the suitable tools of resistance that preserve the potential for radical change: “Given the interest of the powers that be to put the past into storage in museums, and thereby to dispose of its spiritual heritage, any attempt to establish with the past a living relationship is a revolutionary act. For this reason, I believe with Michel

97 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses of Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 60. 98 Giorgio Agamben, “Europa muss kollabieren”, Interview mit Iris Radisch, Die Zeit, 13. September 2015, http://www.zeit.de/2015/35/giorgio-agamben-philosoph-europa-oekonomiekapitalismus-ausstieg [my translation].

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Foucault, that archaeology—in contrast to futurology, which by definition, is in the service of power—is above all a political practice.”99 Media archaeology could thus be a strategic intervention in further making cinema invisible, to such a degree that it becomes once more critical in the post-Nietzschean episteme of Foucault but also of Jean Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, and Giorgio Agamben–i.e., that of inoperativeness and non-utilitarian existence. To put it in terms of an antinomy: cinema’s strength would be to transform its (media-archaeological) marginality and (ideological) irrelevance into disinterestedness, because that which today thinks itself relevant–digital media with its stretching of the horizon, its colonizing of the future, its relentless projection of the new, of perpetual growth and limitless productivity–may fail us because it is ecologically but also epistemologically unsustainable. In this sense, the most appropriate motto for media archaeology today is the one we owe to André Bazin who, after reading Georges Sadoul’s Histoire du cinéma, wrote: “Every new development [that is] added to the cinema must, paradoxically, take it nearer to its origins. In short, cinema has not yet been invented.”100 Cinema has yet to be invented because what is human may once more have to be invented. Film history as media archaeology is, among other things, dedicated to this invention.

99 Ibid. A similiar thought can be found in T.W. Adorno when he argues that we should ask: “what the present means in the face of Hegel” rather than “the loathsome question of what […] in Hegel […] has any meaning for the present. ” Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969), 1. 100 André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema”, What is Cinema I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 22.

I Early Cinema

1.

Film History as Media Archaeology

Introduction It has become commonplace to discuss cinema as a phenomenon that has introduced a universally comprehensible and yet deeply contradictory logic to the visible—some even speak of a new “ontology”.1 So ubiquitous is the moving image in our urban environment that its impact cannot simply be located in individual films, however many canons of cult movies, classics, or masterpieces we choose to construct. By making ‘visible’ much of life past and present, large and small, animate and inanimate, however, cinema has also created new domains of the ‘invisible’—a point that is becoming increasingly important, both positively and negatively, as we worry about our vanishing ‘privacy’ but also as we realize that what is not caught by a camera simply no longer either matters or even exists. At the same time, key elements of cinematic perception have become internalised also as our modes of cognition and embodied experience, such that the ‘cinema effect’ may be most present where its apparatus and technologies are least perceptible. Cinema’s role in transforming the past and historical representation into collective memory is now a matter of intense debate,2 while its ‘invisible hand’ in our affective life and in our modes of being-in-the-world—our ontologies—has preoccupied both psychoanalysis and philosophy.3 Likewise, theories of cinematic spectatorship, initially elaborated around class and (immigrant) ethnicity, have been extended to 1 André Bazin introduced the term ‘ontology’ in his essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image,’ in What Is Cinema?, Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 9-16. Peter Wollen wrote the influential ‘‘‘Ontology” and “Materialism” in Film,’ Screen 17, no. 1 (1976): 7-25, and since the 1990s, Deleuzian scholars have revived the concept in order to give a philosophical impetus to film theory. Among many other instances, one can cite Rafe McGregor, ‘A New/Old Ontology of Film’ http://www.f ilm-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/article/viewFile/369/872 (from an analytical philosophy perspective) and Stephen Zepke, Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge, 2005) esp. 77-116. 2 See the debate around cultural memory, collective memory, and ‘prosthetic memory’ associated with the re-discovery of the writings of Maurice Halbwachs and the positions taken by Pierre Nora and more recently by Aledia Assmann. In the field of cinema studies, Robert Burgoyne, Alison Landsberg, Marita Sturcken, Susannah Radstone, and Laura U. Marks have significantly contributed to the media and memory debate. I shall return to the issue, albeit from a different vantage point, in the final section of this volume. 3 What could be called the ‘cinema effect’ is one of the many reasons why we cannot go on thinking of film history as the history of films. See the frequent references to cinema in plays, exhibitions, photography (from Cindy Sherman to Andreas Gursky) as well as the different

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gender, race, and other forms of cultural identity. Broadened to encompass issues of modernity, mass consumption, and metropolitan life, research on spectatorship has also been asking political questions about media citizenship or has been worried about the ethics of performativity, where authenticity is ‘hiding in the light’. As a consequence, cinema as bodily perception, thought, and affect, has moved center stage in film theory, debated by followers of Gilles Deleuze as passionately as by cognitivists, while the increasingly complicated relation between “seeing” and “knowing” is at the conceptual core of much of contemporary video and installation art. Perhaps cinema is with us even when we are not at the movies, which suggests that in this respect, there may no longer be an outside to the inside: we have to be careful that we are not already ‘in’ cinema with what we want say ‘about’ it!4 This renewed reflection about ‘what is cinema’–some fifty years after André Bazin last put this question – may initially have been occasioned by the centenary celebrated in 1995 of the first public presentation of the Lumière cinématographe. But it is safe to assume that it is made necessary and urgent also by the growing realization that by the turn of the millennium, the technologies of sound and vision had undergone a decisive shift in paradigm. This shift requires a new mapping of the moving image and a new location of cinema in culture, for which the term ‘digitization’ suggests itself as the most obvious common denominator but not always as the most convincing analysis. For instance, it is widely assumed that the convergence between image, audio, and print media is inevitable, modifying and even overturning our traditional notions of cinema. But the assumption rests on several unstated premises both about this convergence and about the separate histories of cinema, television, and electronic audio-vision. While it may be true that the analysis of digital media cannot simply be treated as an extension of film studies as currently practised, it is not at all proven that digitization is the reason why the new media present such a challenge, historically as well as theoretically, to our idea of cinema. Perhaps it merely forces into the open inherent flaws and contradictions, shortcomings and misconceptions in our thinking of cinema? If so, we need to ask further questions. Does the digital image constitute a radical film genres invoked to describe human accidents (such as Princess Diana’s death) or terrorist attacks (e.g., on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11). 4 Walter Benjamin was well aware of the pervasive impact of film as a mode of being when he quotes in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ the French writer George Duhamel: ‘I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.’ W. Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 238.

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break in the (Western) culture of imaging, or is it merely a technological continuation of a long and complex history of mechanical vision, following a historical logic (of ‘improvement’, adaptation, emulation, and remediation) which traditional film theory has not yet fully encompassed? How aware have we been of culturally distinct modes of representation and the technologies as well as institutions regulating the ‘life cycles’ of these modes? Have we been fixated too exclusively on ‘the image’ and forgotten about sound; have we been concentrating on films as texts and neglected cinema as event and experience? Is film studies vulnerable because its idea of film history has operated with notions of origins and a teleology that even on their own terms are untenable in the light of what we now know, for instance, about the so-called origins of cinema and its early (i.e., pre-1917) practice? In what follows, I want to treat the so-called ‘digital turn’ as a moment of rupture, to be sure. Yet it does not follow that this rupture must be (in the first instance) technological or even a matter of aesthetics. Besides being a powerful device of signal conversion, a new standard in the techniques of information, and a process of inscription, storage, and circulation, ‘the digital’ in this context is also a metaphor: more properly, a metaphor for the discursive space and enunciative position of rupture itself. Rather than directly enter the debate about whether digitization is merely an improved or accelerated technology of the visible and the audible or whether it is indeed a radical, qualitative change in their respective ontologies, I take digital media as the chance to rethink the idea of historical change itself and what we mean by inclusion and exclusion, horizons and boundaries, but also by emergence, transformation, appropriation, i.e., the opposite of rupture. This chance of stepping back permits me to once more query what I think I know already, namely the specificity of film and the role moving images occupy within the history of modernity and the mass media. The digital makes the place from which I speak a ‘zero-degree’ space, at once ungrounded, a return and a new beginning. Due to an apparent intangible ubiquity, the digital is symptomatic of the situation just sketched: there may not be an ‘outside’ to the ‘inside’ from which to derive a fixed position or a critical (di)stance. Without a clean break (since the digital retroactively affects all that has preceded it), we can scrutinize not only the chronological-teleological models of film history we are accustomed to but also their major presuppositions: that there must have been an ‘origin’ of cinema, with ‘fathers’ and ‘firsts’. For reasons that I hope will become clear, I propose to call an alternative approach ‘film history as media archaeology’.

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Early Cinema as Key to the New Media Paradigms? A first step would be to see whether the insights gained over the past twenty years from the study of early cinema could lead if not to new paradigms, then at least to a better understanding of the actual or apparent changes in audio-visual media, on the far side of boosterist future-speak, as well as of an equally blind cultural pessimism.5 For this, I am suggesting, we have to re-examine the idea of continuity and rupture as well as the dynamics of convergence and divergence, of synergy and self-differentiation. To cite an obvious example: given the rupture posited by the New Film History between early cinema (cinema up to 1917) and the classical narrative cinema under Hollywood hegemony (itself replaced by the ‘New Hollywood’ of the 1970s), scholars have been trying to accommodate the continuities as well.6 The vocabulary of postmodernism proved to be one solution because it supplanted the discourses of revolution and epistemic breaks with those of transformations and transitions, of pastiche and parody, of remediation and appropriation. These helped to comprehend, in the study of mainstream cinema, the surprising kinds of survival and afterlife, of recycling and retro­ fitting that seem to have kept Hollywood practice so stable over nearly a hundred years. But is Hollywood changing in order to stay the same (the way Burt Lancaster put it in Visconti’s The Leopard about the bourgeoisie), or have the body snatchers of global finance turned the stars and genres of classical cinema into pod personalities and pseudo events, to the acquiescence of all concerned (as critics of the blockbuster era would have it)? Where are the ruptures, in the light of the interpenetration of cinema, television, and electronic images in mainstream entertainment? If it is easy to yield to the shared presumption of convergence, of multi-, hyper- and intermediality, do we mean by this a new universalism of symbolic languages (or ‘codes’) once more reviving the fantasy of the moving image as the ‘Esperanto of the eye’? Or does convergence merely designate the strategic alliances between the owners of traditional media, where multinational business conglomerates (Time Warner/AOL, News Corporation, Bertelsmann) invest 5 See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, ‘After Learning from History’, in 1926 (Stanford University Press), 411-436. 6 By ‘New Film History’, I am referring to the intervention of a generation of scholars beginning with Noël Burch and Barry Salt and continuing with Charles Musser, Tom Gunning, Andre Gaudreault, Robert Allen, Kristin Thompson, Steve Bottomore, and many others since. Some of the terms of the debate are set out in my essay ‘The New Film History,’ Sight and Sound 55, no. 4 (1986): 246-251, and subsequently in the introductions to the various sections in T. Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (London: BFI, 1990).

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in the print media (newspaper and publishing), in television (terrestrial and cable), in the film business, in audio-recording media and delivery systems such as the internet, expecting to effect ‘synergies’ that will re-establish the old trusts and monopolies of the studio era while further globalizing their reach? Do we see convergence as a broad sweep of universal aspirations of leisure and entertainment, entailing common visual icons and modes of representation? Or do we witness, on the contrary, the emergence of powerful corporate interests, of niche markets, of regional and local enclaves and the ever more self-differentiating trends typical of complex systems and networks? A look at early cinema suggests alternative models of thinking about both change and continuity, both the concentration of power and the very divergent practices adopted by ‘users’. The so-called origins and pre-history of cinema have always attracted scholars because of precisely these debates. On the one side, there has been a debate on the sudden, almost simultaneous ‘birth’ of the movies at the turn of the previous century. On the other, much attention has been paid to the heterogeneity, the long gestation, the uneven developments, and the fact that very divergent conceptions of what cinema was or could be existed side by side, not to mention the co-presence of different media forms and practices such as vaudeville, panoramas and dioramas, stereoscopic home entertainment, Hale’s tours, and world fairs. Both pictures–determinism and teleology here, an almost prelapsarian picture of creative chaos there–have been checked and corrected by a tendency to represent early film history as a series of (more or less) distinct, self-contained moments. Noël Burch’s formulation of a ‘primitive mode of representation’ and an ‘institutional mode of representation’ was part of a trend towards other kinds of boundary drawing, such as European art cinema versus mainstream commercial cinema, ‘classical’ versus ‘postclassical’ cinema, and other bi-polar models. The penchant for emphasizing discontinuity and epistemic breaks was itself a Foucaultinspired reaction against traditional (or ‘old’) film history’s tacit assumption of linear progress, either in the form of a chronological-organic model (e.g., childhood-maturity-decline and renewal), a chronological-teleological model (the move to ‘greater and greater realism’), the alternating swings of the pendulum between (outdoor) realism and (studio-produced) fantasy, or between the ‘realist’ and ‘formalist’ tendencies. Countering these traditional manners of writing film history was one reason why cinema studies in the last decades devoted itself so intensively to early cinema and the ‘emergence’ of the medium. By demonstrating the alterity and otherness but also insisting on the sophistication of early

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cinema, it was possible to disprove implicit notions of infancy, tentativeness, or incompetence found in standard histories. But when Noël Burch in his 1978 essay played off Edwin S. Porter against D.W. Griffith as the true pioneer of early cinema, he spoke above all in the name of a film-aesthetic avant-garde who wanted to go back to cinema prior to Griffith in order to challenge Hollywood’s dominance (and that of the narrative feature film) at least conceptually, if not in practice. The rediscovery of the ‘primitive mode’ seemed like a vindication of more than fifty years of indefatigable efforts on the part of the avant-garde in both North America and Europe to rethink the basis of ‘film language’. It raised the hope of finishing once and for all with the notion that the development of cinema towards fictional narrative in the form of representational illusionism had been its pre-ordained destiny. As Burch liked to say: ‘it could have been otherwise…’.7 The polemic was all the more timely since during the 1970s, speculation was rife about the decline of the hegemony of classical cinema from an altogether different perspective. The changes in film reception (i.e., the dwindling audiences for both first and second-run theaters in the 1960s and 70s) and the parallel re-grouping of the family audience in the home and around television indicated that cinema was indeed being replaced. It was even argued that cinema had become obsolete through the combination of television, the video camera, and the domestic VCR. It encouraged especially left-wing media historians to try and integrate film history (assuming the widely propagated and lamented ‘death of cinema’ as a fait accompli) into the broader cultural and economic context of the entertainment and consciousness industries. For instance, Siegfried Zielinski, a German historian of the video recorder, spoke of cinema quite generally as an ‘intermezzo’ in the history of ‘audiovisions’.8 At the other end of the scale, the revival of Hollywood since the 1980s around the re-invention of special effects and blockbuster spectacle was also interpreted as a breaking away from classical cinema’s form of narrative-realism-illusionism, with its single diegesis anchored in time-space verisimilitude and psychologically motivated characters. What in the very early years of the last century had been the attraction of the technical apparatus itself, with its miraculous capacity to bring images to life and to animate photographed street scenes, panoramic landscape views, 7 One is reminded of the pre-Raffaelites and their preference for Giotto’s complexly spatialized narratives in his frescos at the Arena Chapel in Padua. Coinciding with the rise of photography and antedating Cubism, they used Giotto in order to declare war on the perspectival, theatrical, illusionistic pictorial space of the Renaissance and Baroque. 8 See Siegfried Zielinski: Audiovisions (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999).

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or human beings in their everyday surroundings, became by the end of the century the attraction of digital images and fantasy worlds, which also cast a spell on audiences and drew from them gasps of disbelief. Then, as now, the eye was seeing things that the mind could barely comprehend. As an ‘aesthetics of astonishment’ took over from realism, cinema seemed to be witnessing the return of a ‘cinema of attractions’.9

The Cinema of Attractions: Early Cinema, Avant-garde, PostClassical, and Digital Media By taking up the notion of the ‘cinema of attractions’, the discussion of this contemporary cinema of (digital) special effects found a certain genealogical place and stylistic orientation within an overall film and media history that privileged early cinema.10 Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault had launched the phrase in 1985, in a sense summarizing and condensing the debates between Burch, Charles Musser, and Barry Salt over the kinds of otherness and degrees of autonomy manifested by cinema up to the First World War.11 Opposed to the ‘cinema of narrative integration’, the ‘cinema of attractions’ named the different features of early cinema’s distinctive mode, quickly displacing not only Burch’s ‘primitive mode of representation’ but also Musser’s ‘exhibition-led editorial control’ as well as Gaudreault’s own ‘monstration’ and other, similarly aimed locutions. Not the least of the reasons why Gunning’s formulation won the day was that at the end of his article, he speculated that this mode may offer surprising parallels with contemporary filmmaking, where physical spectacle seemed once more to be gaining in importance over carefully motivated and plotted narrative. Action-oriented heroes predominated over psychologically rounded characters, heralding a performative style, again similar to early cinema practice, 9 Tom Gunning: ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment. Early Film and the Incredulous Spectator,’ in Art & Text no. 34 (1989): 31-45; and ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,’ in T. Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 56-62. 10 For the treatment of special effects as ‘attractions’, see Vivian Sobchack: Screening Space. The American Science Fiction Film, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Scott Bukatman: Terminal Identity. The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1993; Miriam Hansen, ‘Early cinema, late cinema: Permutations of the public sphere,’ Screen 34, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 197-210. 11 See Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008) for a detailed reconstruction of how the term entered the discourse and how it won universal acceptance.

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where spectacular set pieces were responsible for a discontinuous rather than a smooth visual experience. More generally, one could extrapolate from Gunning’s argument that realism in current cinema was subordinated to differently motivated types of fantasy and spectacles of excess, again not unlike the rough-and-tumble of early chase films, farces, and slapstick. What the frantic pursuit or the graphic humor was in early film genres became the roller coaster rides, the horror, slasher, splatter, or kung-fu scenes of contemporary cinema: skillfully mounted scenes of mayhem and destruction. These do not have to build up the classical arc of suspense but aim for thrills and surprise, which in the action genres are delivered at close range and with maximum bodily impact. As in early cinema, audiences expect such set pieces, which suspend or interrupt the narrative flow, and in this sense externalize the action. The cinema of attractions, by focusing less on linear narrative progression, manages to draw the spectator’s attention to a unique form of display.12 Following these thoughts further and extending them to the realm of the digital, it would appear that the electronic, so-called interactive media also fall under the heading of the cinema of attractions by encouraging viewers to immerse themselves in the image as total environment rather than to relate to the screen as a window on the world. ‘Attraction’ also seemed an apposite term to describe the thrills of video games because they, too, foster a different contact space between player and the screen as interface. Finally, parallels could be drawn between today’s Hollywood big-budget feature films as multi-functional, multi-purpose, multi-platform audiovisual products for the global entertainment market (merchandising, music, fashion) and the surprisingly multi-medial and international context of early cinema. For the event-driven appeal of the modern blockbuster, with its ability to colonize social and media space with advertising and promotional ‘happenings’, also has its predecessors from the 1910s onwards. For instance, we see the same kind of thinking behind the very successful Passion films of Pathé, the elaborate publicity around certain films 12 Although, according to Miriam Hansen (see note 8), the historical intermezzo of classical cinema also marks the brevity of mass-culture dominance in the visual media, her position on the break-up of the classical is that it makes room for the diversification and globalization typical of the electronic media. Late cinema thus also means a shift in public spheres and the gender issue of spectatorship first raised around early cinema by Judith Mayne and Hansen herself in Babel & Babylon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). My own position is more cautious with regards to calling the classical cinema an intermezzo, certainly when it implies a ‘return’ of early cinema modes. And as laid out below in the final section, I am more concerned with ‘worlds’ than with public spheres and with diegesis than with technologies.

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specially produced for Christmas release, or the large-scale disaster films that Italian and German producers first specialized in.13 Everywhere, it seems, references to early cinema practice offered themselves, which in turn made these nearly forgotten films appear strangely familiar and even popular once again in retrospectives and at festivals.14 Thus, Gunning’s initial reflections on the relation between pre-1917 cinema and the avant-garde have been used for a much broader hypothesis, suggesting that early cinema, understood as a cinema of attractions, can encourage us to think of film history generally as a series of parallel (or ‘parallax’) histories, organized around a number of shifting parameters which tend to repeat themselves periodically, often manifesting a relation of deviance to the norm, or the subversion of a standard.15 Coming some ten years after ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, which established a gendered opposition between spectacle and narrative and between two different modes of display (voyeurism and fetishism), the ‘cinema of attractions’ took over from Laura Mulvey (whom Gunning cites in his essay) as the magic formula of film studies, the ‘sesame’ opening new doors of perception, critique, and classification. There is no doubt that the binary pairs ‘spectacle/narrative’, ‘numbers principle/linear action’, ‘interaction with the audience/passive reception’, etc. provided a typology, which proved most effective as a conceptual grid for initially sorting and slotting in the new modes of cinema such as blockbusters, but also for post-cinematic media-effects and practices such as video games. It helped to keep the new digital media products within the theoretical reach of film studies and cinema history. But by positing similarities between two ‘cinemas of attractions’ on either side of the classical narrative, this intervention in the New Film History took a further step. The assertion that early cinema is closer to post-classical cinema than it is to classical cinema also reverses the relation of norm and deviance. Now early cinema—flanked by the powerful, event-driven, and 13 For an analysis of early disaster films, see Michael Wedel, ‘Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer. Das Ereigniskino des Mime Misu,’ in T. Elsaesser and M. Wedel (eds.) Kino der Kaiserzeit (Munich: Edition text + kritik, 2002), 197-252. 14 The best-known and most established festivals of early cinema are the Giornate del cinema muto in Pordenone/Sacile and the Cinema ritrovato festival in Bologna, held annually since the mid-1980s and 1990s, but there are other venues now celebrating early or silent cinema. 15 The term ‘parallax historiography’ was coined by Catherine Russell: ‘Parallax Historiography and the Flâneur: Intermediality in Pre-and Post-Classical Cinema’, Scope (July 2000) http:// www.nottingham.ac.uk/scope/documents/2000/july-2000/russell.pdf Originally in French in Cinémas (vol 10, no 2-3, 2000): 151-168.

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spectacle-oriented blockbuster cinema—appears as the norm, making the classical Hollywood cinema seem the exception (or ‘intermezzo’). The ‘cinema of attractions’ thus joins in the attack on classical cinema which, since the 1960s, has been fought in quick succession by the American avant-garde, by Althusserian ideological criticism, by feminist Lacanian film theory, by Gramsci and Foucault-inspired cultural studies, and—as indicated in the reference to Zielinski—by television history and media theory of the kind also represented by Friedrich Kittler. But such a move need not only be taken polemically and as a polarizing strategy. It could lead to suspending all norm/deviancy models of thinking and appending a question mark to all teleological film and media histories. In the spirit of our attempt to treat early cinema studies as a possible template for the study of other periods of film history and other paradigms of cinema practice, this would mean applying even more radically some of the founding gestures of the New Film History. For instance, its break with a linear causality in cinema historiography should also be applied to the argument that the new and old media are destined to converge into a digital ‘hypermedium’. Similarly, the New Film History’s argument in favor of alterity and discrete epistemes should alert us to the non-congruent and a-synchronous moments today. In sum, the problems and perspectives of the digital media perhaps supply more pertinent reasons for returning to early cinema and the methodologies by which it has been studied than any polemical attempt to dislodge classical cinema. Ideally, the task would be to recast film history as a whole: whether this implies setting oneself off from (previous theories of) classical cinema is an important point, but it cannot be the main aim of the exercise.

Media Archaeology I: Film History between Teleologies and Retroactive Causalities One such case where a contemporary media perspective—alerted by the proliferation, rapid change, and competition among different audio-visual dispositifs—has changed the way we regard the past, concerns the question of the ‘emergence’ of cinema. Among proponents of the New Film History, it is now generally accepted that cinema has too many ‘parents’ as well as too many ‘siblings’ for its origins and identity to add up to a single (linear) history. That this insight is owed to our present situation can be seen by a simple test: open any textbook that is older than twenty years and look up the genealogies of the techniques and technologies required for the ‘invention of cinema’. There, the history of photography, the history of projection,

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and the ‘discovery’ of the persistence of vision are listed as the triple pillars that sustain the temple of the Seventh Art. Or, to change to the metaphor: they appear as the three major tributaries that finally—miraculously but also inevitably—join up around 1895 to become the mighty river we now know as cinema. Today we notice above all the other sources upstream that are not included: all that is absent, missing, or has been suppressed in the genealogical chart. Sound, for instance, since silent cinema was rarely if ever silent, in which case: why is the history of the phonograph not listed as another tributary? How about the telephone as an indispensable technology in what we would now understand as cinema in a multi-media environment? Radio waves? Electromagnetic fields? The history of aviation? Do we not need Babbage’s difference engine ranged parallel to his friend’s Henry Fox Talbot’s Calotypes or Louis Daguerre’s sensitized copper plates? These questions in themselves show how much our idea—and maybe even our definition—of cinema has changed without appealing to digitization as a technology, which is nonetheless implicit as a powerful ‘perspective correction’ and thus counts as an impulse in this retrospective re-writing of the past. But what are the consequences? Suppose we took the genealogical chart just quoted and extended it across the different media (cinema, television, internet), by including the telephone, radar, the computer, and all the other technologies said to be driving these media towards convergence. We would then come to something like the following ‘canonical’ account of the different phases: the early, primitive period (of ‘living pictures’) lasted from 1895 to 1917; the second phase coincided with the ‘maturity’ of silent cinema and lasted to 1927. The third period comprises sound cinema, from 1928 to 1948. The post-war years to the mid-1960s are dominated by the twin poles of neo-realism and wide-screen color, after which television takes over as the leading medium. The reign of television lasted until the mid-1980s, when the digital media began to make inroads into both cinema and television. Such a neat periodization sutures a series of clear markers of difference in order to trace a sequence of changes, inscribing themselves in a problematic (because it is both self-evident and self-cancelling) teleology, where greater and greater realism is up against ever more perfect simulation and illusionism, and where live-ness and simultaneity are up against ever more capacious storage media and instant (random) access. While this may be the most commonsensical approach to media succession and is the one still widely prevailing in survey courses as well as popular publications, its flaws for a scholar trained in the New Film History or in the eyes of a media historian are all too evident. The account takes as its main points

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of reference for plotting ‘change’ either the basic technology (sound, color, screen format) or economically motivated legislation (e.g., the Paramount decree, or the abolition of the Hays Code in the case of Hollywood). It adds to it the aesthetic parameter of realism, whose implementation becomes the ever closer, yet also constantly receding telos of moving image history. But if one were to spell out the technologies involved, one would immediately note a radical discontinuity. For instance, the first—cinematic—apparatus is made up by the projected moving image fixed on celluloid and subsequently synchronized by optical sound. The second—televisual—apparatus is an illuminated screen attached to a cathode ray tube. The third—electronic— apparatus focuses on the digitized transmission of the audio and visual signal, processed by a computer and reproduced on a monitor via external or built-in storage devices such as zip-drives, CD-Rom, DVD, or an internally accessed server, online with the world wide web. The telos turns out to need a set of moveable goalposts, chasing the chimera of what—realism? Instant communication? Virtual reality? In other words, not only the chronological stories of successive technologies or devices but also the genealogical charts quickly come to a conceptual dead end. They take little account of the very different institutional histories of the media that arose around these technologies, their uses or implementations: the film industry, radio, television, and the internet all have distinct institutional, legal, and economic histories. Genealogies may register but cannot explain key similarities of ‘content’ across these media. For instance, the persistence of the full-length feature fiction film, which is the basic commodity of the film industry but also serves as the standard currency of television programing and domestic media use, is implied but not named. Nor does such a chart illuminate the vexed question of ‘classical’ cinema already alluded to: its consolidation around 1917 (not a technological point of change or rupture) and its demise or transformation in the 1960s (determined, by common consent, through economic and institutional changes). Moreover, both the succession model and the expanded chart relegate film to the margins and make it a thing of the past, which contradicts the internalized ubiquity of the ‘cinema effect’ mentioned at the beginning. But it also underestimates cinema’s continuing economic significance as a generator of (cultural) capital, where festivals and first releases secure intense media attention and star status for a relatively small number of films, directors, and actors. Yet there are also problems the New Film History finds hard to tackle, once it steps outside its preferred terrain of early cinema. So far, for instance, ‘revisionist’ film historians have not been very successful at picturing the

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relation between the different stages of film form (editing, montage, closeup, insert-shots, deep staging, framing) and film style (all we have are successive movements, cycles of genres, formally defined -isms). Or how can we account for cross-media configurations (adapting or re-purposing the same ‘content’ or stories in different periods or for different media), and how to explain the coexistence, the overlap, and sometimes interference among historically successive or wholly different technologies? Causal models, problem-solving routines, or even evolutionary explanations are of little help. Cinema did not relate to the magic lantern in strictly causal terms, nor did it ‘respond’ to it by solving problems that had arisen in the practice of magic lantern shows. It re-purposed aspects of magic lantern technology and parasitically occupied part of its public sphere. Television has not ‘evolved’ out of cinema nor did it replace cinema. Digital images were not something the film industry was waiting for, in order to overcome any felt ‘deficiencies’ in its production of special effects. Likewise, the coming of sound in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s still poses major problems of how to factor in the ‘media interference’ from radio and the co-presence or competition of the gramophone industry. The same goes for the history of television in the 1950s and its relation to radio, to canned theater or to the more avant-garde or experimental uses of video. In all these cases, the methods of early cinema research have yet to prove themselves as decisive conceptual tools of either historical explanation or informed prediction (with regards to convergence versus self-differentiation, for instance). What help can archivists expect from New Film History when trying to deal with their non-fiction holdings, with industrial, educational, or advertising films? And when will we have theoretically informed accounts of all the (other) non-entertainment uses of movingimage technologies? To deal adequately with these issues, New Film History may have to break with its cyclical models as well as with its genealogical ones, especially when genealogies simply become ways of waiting for the ‘next big thing’ to be declared the implied goal, so that selectively chosen predecessors can then be seen to lead up to just this point. We now have several perfectly plausible accounts of how instant transmission, media networks, and even the Internet have always already been what mankind was waiting for. We also have the wonderfully rich recovery work done by historians on stereoscopy, phantom rides, Hale’s Tours, dioramas, world exhibitions, wax museums, stuffed animals, natural history habitats. David Belasco’s complexly engineered theatrical spectacles have similarly been re-evaluated, in order to provide new genealogies for the present. Wherever New Film History charts its longue durée accounts around ‘multi-medial’,

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‘immersive’, ‘panoramic’, or ‘haptic’ media experiences, it also serves to legitimate a covert but speculative and, in all likelihood, transitory teleology. Such caution may seem ungenerous. After all, these perspective shifts have been salutary: they continue to be immensely valuable in producing new knowledge, in the best historicist tradition. They add unexpected historical pathways to our contemporary visual culture and serve to defamiliarize cinema and thus to refresh our awareness of it. They can put in crisis habitual classifications and categories such as ‘text’, ‘work’, or ‘author’ rather than put the digital forward as a surreptitious (and even more deterministic) new teleology. Studies such as those devoted to the history of movie houses and exhibition practices reaffirm the specificity of the cinema experience. They once more privilege the film theater and the big screen as the normative reception context, as if to counter the urban ubiquity of moving images on big screens or the fact that we are more likely to enjoy our films on monitors and television screens. It points to another paradox, namely that the immersive and transparent experience of the contemporary multiplex screen exists side by side with its apparent opposite: the multi-screen hyper-mediated experience of television and the billboard-and-poster cityscape. On the one hand, ‘virtual reality’; on the other, the website or the computer’s ‘windows’ environment. Can we explain both as versions of the ‘cinema of attractions’ without eviscerating the concept? At the same time, the question of realism has not gone away. Although the prevalence of fantasy genres may prove just how untenable the grand narrative of cinema’s traditional telos of greater and greater realism is, why should fantasy have become the preferred mode since the 1980s? Surely not because ‘realism’ is taken care of by television, whose images are increasingly broken up into multi-mini-screens and a moving frieze of text and figures. The classic evolutionary scheme from silent to sound; from black-and-white to color; from the flat, two-dimensional surface to 3D; from the peephole kinetoscope to the IMAX screen not only does not hold up. We can see how much of it was underpinned by certain definitions of realism, as a technology of panoramic, total perception and transparency. Realism’s invisible underside, so to speak, has been surveillance. The panoptic gaze highlights a key differentiation of cinema history as an apparatus history, often neglected when discussing the realism effect as a subject effect: that between private and public. To the extent that this divide today is threatened, if it has not already collapsed, the distinction becomes relevant also for theory. The separation of cinematic realism from the correspondence theory of truth (anchored in the so-called ‘indexicality’ of the photographic

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image), and its redefinition within a coherence theory of truth (based on trust, belief, and shared conventions) makes it more urgent for us to clarify what we mean by reference, authenticity, and transparency. Once more, the digital plays an odd role in this: it did not cause the rise of the surveillance paradigm, but it certainly made it more ‘visible’: retrospectively proving that in its ‘invisibility’ it had been there all along. If the arrival of the digital pixel ‘created’ the concept of the post-photographic image, the consequence was that it also changed the meaning of photographic realism.16 Such semantic shifts—a sort of constitutive inversion of cause and effect—are well known in media history: black-and-white was an ‘effect’ of the introduction of color, just as the arrival of the compact disk (after the audio-tape) revived interest in gramophone disks and created the concept of ‘vinyl’. Seen from the perspective of this type of Nachträglichkeit, i.e. retroactive causality, Louis Lumière and Andy Warhol have more in common with each other than they have with Georges Méliès and Stan Brakhage. But this is because our present interest in the storage and indexing of time has re-shuffled the categories of documentary, avant-garde, and fiction, seemingly keeping in place and yet also making obsolete such traditional divides as that between ‘realism’ versus ‘fantasy’. It is questions such as these that encourage film historians trained in the field of early cinema to look beyond the boundaries and to extend their competence more generally. For example, early cinema has taught us to no longer think of film history as a collection of masterpieces but to look for normative practices, epistemic breaks, symbolic forms, or distinct modes. Nor do we continue to regard filmmakers as participants in some trans-national baton relay race, where the inventors and innovators pass on the art of cinema from one generation to the next. Rather, the balance sheet of ‘progress’ and ‘pioneers’ is constantly being revised—retrospectively, with ‘undeservedly neglected’ figures being ‘rediscovered’ all the time. The electronic and digital media provide a similarly corrective reference point to the notion of ‘author’ and ‘work’: their products are often presented as ‘worlds’ even more than as stories and as audiovisual events rather than as single ‘works’. As a consequence, new distinctions arise that in turn have repercussions on how we view other periods of cinema. Films now tend to be part of a culture of ‘experiences’ and an economy of spectacle, where neither individual authors nor individual films are placed at the center. But this does not mean there are no iconic figures, such as Steven Spielberg and Martin 16 See Warren Buckland, ‘Between science fact and science fiction: Spielberg’s digital dinosaurs, possible worlds, and the new aesthetic realism’, Screen 40, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 177-192.

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Scorsese, or retrofitted auteurs like Quentin Tarantino or Lars van Trier. But not even for these undisputed creators of personal works is ‘self-expression’ the chief indicator of authorship. Instead of playing the auteur off against ‘the system’ (as was claimed by the auteurists of Cahiers du cinéma), the auteur now is the system.17 Directors have become small-scale or largescale entrepreneurs, image engineers of films as ‘multi-media’ concepts and total environments, with auteurist oeuvres replaced by fantasy worlds and cosmologies (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter). On the other hand, almost the same films (say, Hitchcock’s) that have become part of the world repertoire of cultural commonplaces are also entering the museum, where they are performed, sampled, and displayed, with the full aura of the auteur-artist reinstated. To some of this may apply what Lev Manovich once said about ‘theory’: that it is the funeral of a practice.18 Could the same become true of film history: that it is the (retroactive) resurrection of collapsed distinctions? We care about the indexicality of the photograph because we miss it in the post-photographic pixel. We celebrate the ‘materiality’ of clunky eighteenthcentury stage machinery or the elaborate illusionism of a Pepper’s Ghost phantasmagoria because of the effortless creation of such three-dimensional ‘special effects’ in computer graphics virtual space. We marvel at the sheer ‘diversity’ of nineteenth-century visual culture—maybe because we sense its imminent disappearance into homogeneity and conformism? In which case, ‘convergence’ might be less our inescapable fate than the name of our inadmissible fear, nostalgically but also frantically driving many of our excavation and preservation efforts.

Media Archaeology II: Family Tree or Family Resemblance? How can we begin to ‘think’ of such a changing media landscape, and what implications does it have for our idea of placing film history within the ‘expanded field’ of media practice? New Film History has taken initial steps in this direction, insofar as it deliberately eschews focusing on the ‘origin’ of a praxis or refuses to be exercised by who was the ‘first’ to use such-and-such a device or technique. This procedure is inspired by Michel 17 This is the thesis I put forward in The Persistence of Hollywood (New York: Routledge, 2013), especially 219-340. 18 In a conversation with the author, if memory serves me right. If not, I may have to take responsibility for the phrase myself.

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Foucault, who in his essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ warned the reader to identify Nietzsche’s notion of ‘descent’ with ‘origins’ or ‘inheritance’. Neither should one confuse genealogy with the search or tracing back in time of an unbroken lineage. On the contrary: an examination of descent permits the discovery, under the unique aspect of a trait or a concept of the myriad events through which—thanks to which, against which—they were formed. Genealogy’s […] duty is not to demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present, that it continues secretly to animate the present, having imposed a predetermined form to all its vicissitudes.19

Practically, this means considering the history of image and sound technologies less as something made up of a family tree and more something along the lines of ‘family relations’—belonging together but neither causally or teleologically related to each other. Almost all ‘from… to’ histories have been, as we now realize, in one way or another deeply flawed. In fact, they seem factually so inaccurate as to make one wonder what kind of intellectual sleight of hand or acts of self-censorship must have taken place for so much knowledge about early cinema and so many discourses about color, sound, as well as the experiments with giant screens or 3D glasses to have been ‘forgotten’. Thus, a real challenge even for the genealogical approach is our lack of knowledge about the many interconnections—but even more so, about the gaps—between the media. No medium replaces another or simply supersedes the previous one.20 Today, cinema, television, and digital media exist side by side, feeding off each other and increasingly interdependent, to be sure, but also still clearly distinct and even hierarchically placed in terms of cultural prestige, economic function, and spectatorial pleasures. The question is: how can we describe or analyze these mutual links while also marking the spaces that distinguish each medium without falling back into dividing them up into separate histories? A possible approach would be that of ‘system theory’, which assumes that instead of the different media (say of cinema, television, internet) heading towards convergence, they are moving towards greater differentiation in 19 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 146. 20 It may seem as if silent cinema became obsolete with the coming of sound, but when we think how silent cinema was rarely silent, then this, too, is in fact no exception to the rule.

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both their (pragmatic) uses and their underlying relation to each other. While there has, to my knowledge, only been one serious attempt to apply Niklas Luhmann’s model of media interdependence to cinema,21 one reason why it has not had much follow-up is that classic systems theory may be too rigid for film history, especially since it is designed to exclude not only time and history but also human agency. 22 Again, early cinema studies has shown the way. The film strip’s antecedents are, on the one side of the ‘family’, the industrial production of cellulose sheets (as opposed to the hand-made glass plates of early photography) but also chronophotography, made possible by ‘fast’ emulsions (such as Louis Lumière’s famous étiquette bleu). Yet chronophotography is not cinema: it needed flicker-free projection secured by the mechanical intermittence device that we know as the Maltese cross. This opens up the other side of the family, leading to the screen arts of projection, themselves as different as magic lantern slides, fog pictures, and phantasmagorias. Our two parental genealogies, however, leave out a third, constituting on the exhibition side the very conditions of the cinema as public performance and entertainment form, namely the history of the music hall, vaudeville, and the variety theater. Sound cinema has as one of its ‘parents’ the experiments in synchronization that run parallel to the history of cinema right from its beginnings, with Edison having, as we know, conceived of his kinetoscope as an image device to complement his phonograph (whether these experiments were in each case successful or not is of secondary importance). On the other side of the genealogical tree, sound cinema has to do with the development of the gramophone as a prime domestic leisure commodity and the popular appeal of radio in the 1920s.23 The first successful sound pictures all featured hit songs also marketed as records and played on the radio. At the more directly industrial and economic level, the rapid development of sound equipment and the sound film’s almost instantaneous introduction internationally refers us directly to the power struggles and patent wars

21 The media historian Lorenz Engell has referred himself specifically to Niklas Luhmann in his (untranslated) Sinn und Industrie. Einführung in die Filmgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1992). 22 A discussion of the methodological difficulties of systems theory and possible alternatives such as complexity thinking and a theory of adaptive systems can be found in Floris Paalman, Cinematic Rotterdam (Rotterdam: nai010 publishers, 2011), 81-84. 23 For an excellent account of the respective social impact of new technologies, notably radio, see William Boddy, New Media and Popular Imagination. Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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of the major multinational electricity companies such as Westinghouse, General Electric, Siemens, and AEG. Radio is also a key parent in the history of television, since the scarcity of airwaves as well as the size of the infrastructural investment made television in most countries, and for most of its history, a state-controlled monopoly whose institutional structure (as opposed to its technological infrastructure) had everything to do with national broadcasting corporations and less to do with the film industry, at least until the 1970s.24 Even in the United States, the history of (commercial) television and the history of cinema began to dovetail significantly only in the 1960s and then again in wake of the major takeover and merger wave in the 1970s. The cathode ray tube, on the other hand, and its ability to transmit images was ‘discovered’ at about the same time as cinema and thus cannot be said to be a ‘successor’ to the photographic process: it is quite simply an alternative technology, engaged in transmission rather than storage, valorizing instantaneity rather than permanence, and putting a premium on simultaneity and ‘live-ness’ rather than realism and illusionist presence. As we saw, these distinct properties or ontologies have tended to get lined up in sequence, and in practice may now be spread across several media, but this does not diminish their distinctive histories and genealogies. At the limit and if pressed, one could perhaps name the phenakistiscope—understood genealogically rather than causally—as the common ancestor of both cinema and television, insofar as the optical slit of Plateau’s device is not only repeated in the keyhole principle of Edison’s kinetoscope and then ‘translated’ into the Maltese cross of the projector, but it also ‘anticipates’ the rotation of Nipkow disk, a distant precursor of television. Put differently: cinema and television have at one and the same time absolutely nothing in common and yet are closely related to each other. Only because television has in some respects ‘taken over’ and established itself as the priority medium of moving image-transmission can we now recognize that the phenakistoscope offers itself as the joint ancestor of both:

24 The counterargument might be that since the 1970s, training for both film and television has been taking place in the same film schools and cinema departments. Already in the 1950s and 1960s, technicians worked for both film and television due to partly common infrastructures (film processing labs: 16mm being used in television for inserts and prerecorded programs). Similarly, hardware companies such as General Electric, Westinghouse, and Philips produced equipment for both film and television, and there was an ongoing interaction regarding technical innovations in both fields.

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this would be a case of a genealogical demonstration after the fact, rather than a chronological-causal ‘explanation’ of an eventual convergence.25 Is the question of family relations, networks, and synergies always as fragile as this? Film scholars such as Ann Friedberg have rightly pointed out that certain audio-visual technologies (notably the video recorder and cable television) began to challenge the differences between cinema and television at a point in time when personal computers, fibre-glass optics, or digital images had not yet been introduced.26 If, for instance, one were to argue (as scholars did in the 1970s) that a key distinguishing trait between cinema and television was the fact that the latter was ‘live’, this difference seemed to be eroded with the arrival of the video recorder which, with its ability to store time, also undermined another distinctive feature of television, the ‘schedule’ and the monopoly of programming the nation’s daily attention. One might say that the ‘invention’ of CNN was television’s countermove to the VCR, trying to recover live-ness and the event by ‘covering’ the ‘stories’ of the world as they ‘break’. Yet what brings cable tv and the video recorder close to cinema is the large ‘archive’ of readily available movies. But here the VCR leapfrogs cinema in that the choice and selection become at once customized and arbitrary. It emancipates itself from the schedule, a feature that cinema and ‘live’ television used to have in common. Did not the battle between VHS and Betamax prove that the video recorder began its entry into the world’s living rooms mainly as a playback machine and not as an off-air recording apparatus? What family resemblance there was between cinema and television was thus a consequence of an adjustment of the spectator’s field of vision to the television screen as the default value. Or put more generally, a new definition emerged of the idea of the ‘window’, which already hints at the metaphoric slippage that occurred from film screen towards the computer monitor and its multi-media applications, part of the reconfigured and overlapping distinctions between viewer, participant, and user.27 25 The challenge implied in this genealogical scenario has been taken up brilliantly by Edwin Carels in “The Plateau Effect – Correcting the Perspective on Joseph Plateau”, paper presented at the Archaeologies of Media and Film Conference, Bradford, UK, 4 September 2014. 26 The case for convergence is made by Ann Friedberg, ‘The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change,’ in C. Gledhill and L. Williams (eds.), Reconstructing Film Studies (London: Edward Arnold, 2000), 438-452. 27 Ann Friedberg’s research into the concept of the ‘window’ is relevant here. It began in ‘A Properly Adjusted Window’ in Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), continued in Window Shopping (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), and culminated in The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).

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The TV remote control—developed in the 1950s but an indispensable accessory since the 1980s—changed the structure of television programming at least as decisively as did cable and the VCR, affecting the genres, the pace, and the mode of address of television while indirectly making its impact on film form, as we shall see. Cable and satellite reception also managed to break up the institutional arrangement of television, especially in Europe, not only by extending the overall amount of choice but by taking control of this choice increasingly out of the hands and guidelines of governments, which until then had largely policed access. This push in the direction of commercial criteria for choice and selection brings television closer to cinema once again and aligns it with the Internet, heavily dependent on advertising and monetized choice. A whole range of very different technologies at different points in time and with very different agendas have contributed to changing our idea of the audio-visual media and their respective relation of medium specificity and multi-mediality. It shows how many battles, conflicts, and unresolved incompatibilities run alongside any narrative of media networks. What we can note instead of convergence is a slightly different phenomenon. Since the time that portable video equipment became professionally available during the mid-1960s, each decade appears to have produced a kind of prototype. This prototype captured the imagination of the mass consumer and often initiated a new cultural configuration—an episteme—as well by promising novel uses and leading to changes in lifestyle and leisure. Thus, while not belonging to the ‘digital revolution’, the video recorder and the remote control have helped to alter irrevocably both the structure and uses of television as well as our notion of what watching movies at home would mean. The DVD technologically improved this experience, but can it be said to have added a cultural transformation? Undeniably, the DVD (with its bonus packages and audio commentary) reshaped film culture through vastly extending access to older films. It thus changed film history, while it also initiated new debates about originality (the director’s cut), authenticity (digital remastering), and the relation between text and context (‘the making of’ materials). Yet the Internet, peer-to-peer file sharing, and streaming video portals such as Netflix have made DVDs almost obsolete in little more than a decade. The video recorder never laid claim to authenticity, but it permanently affected our relation to time. With it, time could be stored, reversed, and shifted, which means it became available for other types of measurement, for other kinds of experience, establishing a temporal regime that was actual and virtual just as it was ‘real time’ and ‘stored time’ (and this, again, well

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before the signal or the device became ‘digital’). Its most prominent use now is in surveillance, as the medium for measuring ‘empty time’. Ten years after the introduction of the video recorder, it was the portable personal stereo, better known as the Walkman, that reconfigured the experience of space, self and subjectivity and established a different ratio between private and public, between motion and emotion. The iPod, of which the Walkman can in some sense be seen as the precursor (but certainly not a ‘parent’), has given a further incremental twist to our notions of time and space, of interactivity and mobility. These technologies, so seemingly remote from the film experience and cinema, nonetheless appear to have modif ied our ideas of spectatorship and participation also with respect to the traditional cinematic medium. Laura Mulvey, for instance, has argued that the remote control gave agency to the “possessive spectator” and body to the “pensive spectator”—the latter a term adapted from Raymond Bellour—each redefining fetishism and lending a spatial dimension to duration and restoring stillness to motion.28 One can begin to speculate what the common denominators between these devices are—ease of access, instantaneity, mobility, the combination of personal intimacy and public space, etc.—but it is obvious, once one takes such a longer view, that digitization is not itself the only motor of these changes, which are social and political as well, and whose chief characteristic is connectivity rather than convergence. ‘Digital media’ are, furthermore, themselves hybrid phenomena, when looked at genealogically. The technologies they rely on also have, at first glance, little to do with cinema: the computer was developed for military purposes in order to help break the codes and intercept the messages of Nazi Germany’s ‘Enigma’ machines. The modern monitor screen with its ‘interactive’ potential equally belongs to the sphere of the military and has as its predecessor the radar screen, first devised for scanning the skies and tracking enemy aircraft. Digital media are also associated with the military via the development of the Internet, which relies on the telephone and its extensive and intricate web of worldwide connections. These in turn are supported by satellites orbiting the earth, again a development referring us both to the Cold War and to the fact that advances in audio-visual technology for the entertainment business tend to represent spin-offs or bastard children of military aims and priorities—although the flow of innovations can also travel in 28 Laura Mulvey, “The Possessive Spectator” and “The Pensive Spectator,” in Death 24 X a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 161-196.

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the opposite direction, as has been the case in recent years, leading to the ‘military-entertainment complex’.29 If a genealogical model of film history, whether straightforwardly linear or pictured as a more complexly branching family tree, lands us with far too many black sheep cousins, promiscuous parents, or profligate grandparents to create a credible line of descent, the ‘rupture’ represented by the digital will oblige us to break with the chronological and genealogical model in terms of tracing parentage. Hence my insistence that digitization not only be treated as a new technical standard (which it undoubtedly is) but that it also names the situation which I already hinted at, namely that we seem to be on the inside for which there is no clear outside, and we seem to be in a ‘now’ for which there is no clear ‘before’ or ‘after’. Thus, the move to the digital marks a threshold and a boundary, without thereby defining either. A radicalized version of the genealogical way of thinking, in terms of unfulfilled promises and incomplete precursors, would lead us to a properly ‘archaeological’ perspective, where no continuity is implied or assumed. Archaeological layers recognize the past as at once irrecoverably ‘other’ and separate from us, to be seized only in the spatio-temporality of the ‘now’, which is to say, by way of fragment, metonymies, and an ‘allegorical’ view of the (always already lost) totality of the phenomenon in question—in this case, cinema. The project of a ‘film history as media archaeology’ is thus intended to liberate from their straitjacket all those re-positionings of linear chronology that operate with hard binaries between, for instance, early cinema and classical cinema, spectacle versus narrative, linear narrative versus interactivity. Instead, film history would acknowledge its peculiar status and become a matter of tracing paths or laying tracks leading from the respective ‘now’ to past ‘nows’, in modalities that accommodate continuities as well as ruptures. We would then be mapping media convergence and self-differentiation not in terms of either teleologies or the search for origins but in the form of forking paths of possibility, i.e., as a determined plurality and a permanently open virtuality, where not only the future, but the past, too, has to be invented. For such a program, the current uncertainty around digital media provides a refreshingly provocative opportunity.30 29 See Tim Lenoir and Henry Lowood, “The Military Entertainment Complex”, Stanford University, 2002 http://web.stanford.edu/class/sts145/Library/Lenoir-Lowood_TheatersOf War. pdf. 30 The opportunities are not only a challenge for scholars and theorists. “Every day we read that the internet economy has burst like a bubble. This may be true, considering the many bankruptcies. But the opposite is equally true. The internet, with its untidy economic practice

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Media Archaeology III: What is Cinema, Where is Cinema, and When is Cinema? Thus, given the problematic status of all media genealogies, one has to conclude that even the efforts of New Film History to rethink cinema and its history as a whole have been partial and in any case present us with an incomplete project.31 The provisional and variable nature of pre-cinematic pleasures and attractions (the already mentioned dioramas and panoramas, Hale’s Tours and phantom rides, haptic-tactile images, and bodily sensations) make it evident how much cinema, even after more than a hundred years, is still in permanent flux and becoming. Or, again put differently: given cinema’s opportunistic adaptation to all manner of adjacent or related media, it has always been fully ‘grown up’ and complete in itself. At the same time, it has yet to be ‘invented’, if one is looking for a single ancestor or wonders about its purpose in human ‘evolution’–as André Bazin knew all too well, leaving us with the question ‘What is cinema?’ and having himself speculated on its ‘ontology’.32 has penetrated broad areas of everyday life, and brought a change of the rules, wherever it seemed to the advantage of the shopping and consuming public that has learnt remarkably quickly to become even more choosy, moody and unpredictable, because it suddenly has decided to exercise direct control over more and more aspects of life. […] In contrast to the politicians on television, the public no longer sticks by the rules.” www.perlentaucher.de, 14 September 2002. 31 Using the historical moment of the fin de siecle as our ‘template’, it is fair to say that we are in the midst of a similar moment of turbulence and ferment. Was the digital image a phenomenon whose time had come or one of those accidents of history? Bill Gates’ famous dismissal of the internet as irrelevant uncannily repeats Antoine Lumière’s equally famous prediction of cinema as an invention without a future. Once again, there are uneven developments, configurations that have been quickly abandoned or have yet to show their true potential. Take the CD-ROM. With the internet, the CD-ROM has shrunk to the function of a minor technical aid, a kind of transitional object, in its purpose replaced by the web page, in its storage capacity obsolete. The status of the web page in turn is at once very unstable and yet has already become a fixture as apparently permanent as anything in the field of digital media. But what actually is a website? A personal library or a business card? An advertising billboard or a well-tended secret garden? A 24-hour convenience store or an encyclopaedia? The successor of the CD-ROM, on the other hand, the DVD, is destined for an illustrious future as it changes our film culture, viewing habits, and the production/packaging of feature films at least as decisively as did the video cassette and the remote control. 32 André Bazin, after reading Georges Sadoul’s Histoire du cinéma, was much impressed by the evidence that early cinema was often combined with sound, had used stereoscopic devices, and featured mostly color. ‘The nostalgia that some still feel for the silent screen does not go far enough back into the childhood of the seventh art. […] Every new development added to the cinema today [, i.e. in the 1950s: colour, wide-screen, 3-D] must, paradoxically, take it nearer and nearer to its origins. In short, cinema has not yet been invented!’. ‘The Myth of Total Cinema,’ in What is Cinema, vol. I, p. 21.

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This is why the example of early cinema suggests an approach of selfdifferentiation, along with emergence and complexity, rather than a linear dynamic (the argument from convergence obviously lets linear history in through the back door). Collective organization, the agency of things, and social or technical networks are the most promising conceptual tools for understanding cinema history, preferable even to the sort of dialectic of binary oppositions by which the ‘cinema of attractions’ is sometimes described as both a historically specific period and a recurring phase or phenomenon. The ‘unfinished’ nature of both cinema and the efforts to write its histories help to highlight one of the drawbacks of this seminal concept—its interpretation as a cyclical trope of ‘return’—which in recent film historical work has functioned as a template predetermining the object of study as well as serving as an explanatory model. However didactically stimulating it is to find historical parallels to our own preoccupations and obsessions, the illuminating effect may have to be paid for by circular reasoning by presupposing what it sets out to prove. To mention one instance: the notion that the cinema of attractions can explain post-classical cinema distorts both early cinema and post-classical cinema. There have been other attempts to explain the features said to be typical of the cinema of attractions in the early period. I am thinking of Charles Musser and Corinna Müller’s arguments that the life cycle of short films and the numbers principle (modelled after variety acts) as a programming and exhibition practice in early cinema can best be understood in terms of a set of economic parameters obtaining in the latter part of the first decade of the twentieth century.33 The disappearance of ‘editorial control’ and of variety act programming around 1909-1912 in favor of the longer film would then have to be directly correlated to the conditions necessary to establish the film business as an industry, among which ‘narrative integration’ might be one way of providing a functional equivalent to the numbers principle. Gunning’s binary formula, strictly applied, would screen out the industrial-institutional context that gives his formal distinctions their reality and historical ground.34 33 In The Nickelodeon Era Begins (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) as well as in his other writings, Charles Musser has documented the determining influence of exhibition-led programming on production. A similar argument for ‘editorial control’ retained by exhibitors via the locally customized combination of short films into a ‘numbers program’ is made for Germany from 1902-1912 in Corinna Müller, Frühe deutsche Kinematographie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994). 34 I have tried to specify some different functional equivalents for the same transition in the case of German cinema of the 1910s in my introduction to Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decade (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998).

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Likewise, there are other models of how to explain post-classical cinema, assuming that there is such a thing: for instance, the revival of a numbers principle in modern action cinema has more to do with the fact that feature films since the 1970s were made with a view to their economically crucial afterlife on television. Television, at least in the US context (but increasingly also in the rest of the world), means commercial breaks during the broadcast of a feature film. The ‘return of the numbers principle’ is thus a direct consequence of cinema adapting to its television uses rather than its inherent affinity with early cinema. In other words, too easy an analogy between ‘early’ and ‘post-classical’ cinema sacrifices historical distinctions in favor of polemical intent, too keen perhaps to squeeze the hegemony of classical cinema in a sort of pincer movement at either end of a hundred-year continuum. In the way it is presently employed, the notion of a recurrent or even dominant ‘cinema of attractions’ is thus perhaps both too polemical and yet not radical enough. The fact that in the new century, cable and satellite broadcasters such as Home Box Office (HBO), Showtime or streaming services like Netflix produce feature films alongside highly successful ‘quality’ television series would indicate not only a shift in power relations between Internet content providers, television, and the film industry but also that complex narratives (and “narrative integration”) are redefining what we understand by ‘cinema of attractions’ which now must include duration, iteration, seriality and complexity. A more thoroughgoing revisionism would aim to once more re-assess the relation of cinema—all cinema, including digital cinema and the electronic media—to multiple diegetic worlds, complex narratives, and floating points of view. For these are the main parameters that constitute cinema’s textual and ideological functioning today. They regulate how a spectator is addressed as both (imaginary) subject and physical, embodied presence in a determinate space. It is within what I have elsewhere referred to as the ‘here-me-now’ parameters (i.e., the parameters of space, subject address, and time)—that the changing apparatus and the stylistic mutations can be usefully analyzed within a single coherent conceptual framework.35 Paradoxically, after what has just been said about works and texts, these different tendencies to provide images and sounds with some ‘diegetic’ ground—different in early cinema, in classical cinema, and in the new media objects—can best be studied, in their temporal and spatial coordinates, 35 See Thomas Elsaesser, ‘The Mind-Game Film,’ in W. Buckland (ed.), Puzzle Films – Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 13-41.

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via close attention to individual films or to a particular ‘corpus’. Gunning himself has done so and has robustly defended close textual analysis, and so have others including Yuri Tsivian, Ben Brewster, and Kristin Thompson. I, too, have looked at films from the teens and early twenties by D.W. Griffith, Franz Hofer, Joe May, and Fritz Lang with the question ‘When and where is cinema?’ in mind. Especially the period of the teens is emerging as rich in materials for the idea of an expanded diegesis in relation to narration and commentary, to screen space and auditorium space, but also in relation to reflexivity and self-reference, display and mise-en-abyme. These last two characteristics of the ‘cinema of attractions’ have hitherto been constructed in opposition to narrative, partly I suspect due to the lack of an appropriate concept of diegesis or ‘world-making’.36 In all such instances of early cinema practice, narrative integration is a process that is taking place between screen space and audience space. These interact at all times and cannot be ontologically separated from each other, as would be the case if the oppositional pair of cinema of attractions versus cinema of narrative integration is to be maintained. And just as the shifting parameters of screen space and audience space help redefine the ‘world-making’ of early cinema, while the relations of diegetic, extra-diegetic, and ‘imagined’ sound (i.e., visually represented sound cues) offer new insights into the films especially of the early sound era, so parameters like fixed spectator/mobile view, mobile spectator/fixed view (and their possible permutations) are important indicators for the embodied or site-specific ‘diegetic reality’ of video installations and digital art—which will be discussed in greater detail in several of the following chapters. The question, then, is not so much on one side spectacle, on the other narrative. Rather, we need to ask how cinema established itself as a symbolic form to such a degree that the event character of the film performance (one meaning of ‘the cinema of attractions’) was able to enter into a seemingly natural union with linear, causally motivated, character-centered narrative? This raises a counter-question from the perspective of cinema as event and experience: under what conditions (be they cultural-historical and/or technological-industrial) is it conceivable that the moving image no longer requires as its main support the particular form of time/space/agency we know as classical narrative, and still establish a coherent ‘world’? Are other kinds of diegesis conceivable that similarly accommodate the spectatorial 36 An attempt to re-think ‘diegesis’ in relation to both early cinema and television can be found in Noël Burch, ‘Narrative/Diegesis – Thresholds, Limits’ in Screen 23, no. 2 (July/August 1982): 16-33.

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‘body’ and give the impression of ‘presence’? What forms of indexicality or iconicity are necessary to accept other combinations of sounds and images as relating to a ‘me’—as subject, observer, spectator, user? The answer might be ‘virtual reality’, ‘interactivity’, ‘immersivity’. But are these not mere attempts at re-labelling the question of cinematic diegesis—with the possible disadvantage of being too focused on the single individual and giving priority to only one of cinema’s effects, that of ‘presence’, understood as ‘real-time’? It is thus the question of diegesis (as the combined conjugation of place, space, time, and subject) more than the issue of digitization that requires us to redefine the very ‘ground’ of the moving image in its multiple sites. Media archaeology takes a first step in this direction, since it would try to identify the conditions of possibility of cinema (‘When is cinema?’) alongside its ontology (‘What is cinema?’)—a problematic but necessary term, as indicated at the beginning of this chapter. The concept of an expanded diegesis, with its emphasis on ‘where-here’, helps to imply connectivity and interrelatedness and points to the materiality of place and location, of a network of relations connecting production sites to exhibition sites, mindful of the mobility, modes of transmissions, and nodes of intersection that enable spectators to carry with them this internalized (idea and experience of) cinema across different screens and viewing conditions. While initially, scholars of early cinema had to become archaeologists by necessity as much as by choice if only because of the sheer number of incoherences, inconsistencies, and errors in the traditional accounts which could not be rectified simply by adding more ‘facts’, film historians of other periods, movements, and national cinemas should remain media archaeologists for a variety of reasons. Take, for instance, archival policy and preservation practice of the past twenty years. Just as in historical archaeology, where there is a split between those digging on a site for art works, treasures, and ‘gold’, and those making straight for the rubbish tips and the fireplaces of lost civilizations, so there is a split between film archivists. There are those who are above all interested in restoring ‘masterpieces’ which can be ‘rediscovered’ at festivals, shown during retrospectives, and celebrated in handsome publications, and those archivists who are more concerned with cataloguing, interpreting, and thus rescuing the ‘bits-andpieces’ of their collection. Adding value by calling these bits and pieces the ‘orphans of cinema’, they study what was once thought the detritus of film culture and the cinematic heritage in order, for instance, to focus on what can be learned from ‘programming’ and exhibition practices. Some are interested in dating the consolidation of historical ‘norms’ and identifying studio styles of set designs, camera placement, and figure blocking, and

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others still are mining advertising, industrial, educational, or medical films for the information and data they provide. History as archaeology adds to this a further insight: it knows and acknowledges that only a presumption of discontinuity (in Foucault’s terms, the positing of epistemic breaks) and of the fragment as lacuna (to which may correspond the rhetorical figure of the synecdoche or the ‘pars pro toto’) can give the present access to the past, which is always no more than a past (among many actual or possible historical ‘nows’), since for the archaeologist, the past is made present to the present across nothing more than its relics and traces. Finally, an archaeology respects the inevitable distance that the past has from our present perspective and even makes ‘otherness’ the basis of its methodology. Nonetheless, positing breaks too quickly as ‘epistemic’ invites the charge of formalism. A more rigorous point of view adopted by media archaeologists would assume that such breaks may merely point to gaps in our knowledge, all the while mindful and careful not to simply fill in the blanks with new ‘facts’ without considering that a ‘missing link’ may well have its own meaning, but as a gap, a deliberate or accidental omission. Media archaeology is therefore perhaps nothing more than the name for the non-place space and the suspension of temporal flows the film historian needs to occupy when trying to articulate rather than merely accommodate these several alternative, counterfactual, or parallax histories around which any study of the cross-media moving image culture now unfolds. Next to an aesthetics of astonishment for which Tom Gunning once pleaded,37 there should also be room for a hermeneutics of astonishment, where besides curiosity and scepticism, it is also wonder and sheer disbelief that serve as the impulses behind historical research concerning the past as well as the present. Perhaps it is advisable in the case of cinema and its encounters with television and the digital media to speak not only of a past, a present, and a future but also to investigate the archaeology of possible futures38 and the perpetual presence of several pasts.

37 See note 9. 38 The idea of an archaeology of possible futures featured prominently in a research project entitled “Imagined Futures”, directed by Wanda Strauven, Michael Wedel, and myself from 2006-2010 within the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam.

2.

The Cinematic Dispositif (Between Apparatus Theory and Artists’ Cinema)

“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. 1 The f irst 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.

1 For an explanation of this periodization and its scholarly contexts, see the previous chapter in this volume.

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As far as the earlier period is concerned, our research has identified a number of iconic f igures, 2 and across them their historical contexts: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Italian Futurism (Marinetti and Marconi: speed; radio and the wireless; cinema as the ‘destroyer’ of art and of the museum; cinema, war, and aviation as major agents of modernization);3 Oskar Messter and the three S/M practices of early German cinema (the chief promoter of a film industry in Germany since the 1910s, as well as the first systematic proponent of what I have elsewhere called the three S/M practices of the cinematic dispositif 4—science and medicine, surveillance and the military, sensor and monitor—all of which play their part in the formation of early German cinema, obliging us to recast what we consider its particular identity);5 and Eadweard Muybridge versus Étienne-Jules Marey: photography in motion versus the visualization of data, a project where we compare Muybridge, who initially devoted himself to the art-historical issue of how to represent movement in the still image, and Marey, who was one of the first scientific photographers to capture, record, measure, and represent living phenomena and processes (i.e., biological, atmospheric, geological) in real time, graphically as well as iconographically, with the aid of the cinematic dispositif.6 Finally, our overall project is driven by another consideration: we do not see the need nor the wisdom of making the history of cinema begin in 1895 and end a hundred years later with the dominance of the digital image. In other words, we do not endorse the much-discussed ‘death of cinema’, which assumes the break between photographic and post-photographic cinema to be fundamental. No more than in earlier times, when such breaks were 2 The choice of individual ‘pioneers’ was initially merely a heuristic-didactic device in the context of a broadly based humanities graduate studies research project called “Imagined Futures” at the University of Amsterdam (2006-2010). The emphasis in the actual research was on specific media parameters. 3 See Wanda Strauven, Marinetti e il cinema: tra attrazione e sperimentazione (Udine: Campanotto, 2006). 4 Thomas Elsaesser, “Digital Cinema and the Apparatus: Archaeologies, Epistemologies, Ontologies,” in Marc Furstenau, Bruce Bennett, and Adrian Mackenzie, (eds.), Cinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories, Practices (London: Palgrave, 2008), 226-40; and Wanda Strauven, “S/M,” in J. Kooijman, P. Pisters, and W. Strauven (eds.), Mind the Screen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 276-87. 5 German cinema of the silent period is usually identified with Expressionism and fantasy subjects. For a revision of this perception, see Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel (eds.), Kino der Kaiserzeit (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2002); and Michael Wedel, Der deutsche Musikfilm Archäologie eines Genres 1914-1945 (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2007). 6 Thomas Elsaesser, “Kontingenz und Handlungsmacht,” in Ilka Becker, Michael Cuntz, and Astrid Kusser (eds.), Unmenge – Wie verteilt sich Handlungsmacht? (Munich: Fink, 2008), 157-90.

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posited (several such deaths of cinema have been foretold)—notably with the coming of sound, the emergence of television, or the invention of the video cassette—do we believe that a new technology introduced in one specific area (of what is always a constellation of overlapping, mutually amplifying but also interfering dispositifs) is the cause of radical change by itself. Insofar as such ruptures (of technology or cultural practice) do occur, we believe that they are also welcome opportunities to revise one’s habitual ways of thinking and to test one’s implicit assumptions.7 To give conceptual muscle and a body of empirical evidence to our particular perspective, we have been engaged in three kinds of ‘revisionism’. The first takes the general perspective of ‘media-archaeology’, which entails a re-investigation into the ‘origins’ of cinema and the cultural context of so-called pre-cinema, while also pushing for a history of the discourses generated by the different elements of the cinematic apparatus (‘archaeology of the camera’, ‘archaeology of the screen and frame’, ‘archaeology of projection and transparency’, ‘archaeology of motion and stillness’, etc.). The second revisionism is of a theoretical and conceptual kind. Rereading key thinkers on the cinema such as André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer but also Hugo Münsterberg, Béla Balász, Rudolf Arnheim, Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Epstein, we attempt to recover a more comprehensive view of cinema–whether based on notions of Gesamtkunstwerk or ‘antiart’ on cinematic anthropomorphism or animation; whether committed to formalism and abstraction or to an aesthetics genuinely belonging in the ephemeral, the instant, the contingent, and the multiple (elaborating on Baudelaire’s “riot of details” as well as on Walter Benjamin’s “optical unconscious”). In short, our second revisionism has re-mapped the semantic field of relevant concepts as well as methods in our discipline. Evidently, one can only conduct such a review in the light of the present, which is to say, mindful of the media environment of the twenty-first century.8 Thus, the reading of the ‘classics’ has been complemented by similarly ‘holistic’ or crisis/emergency-driven attempts at reading cinema from within the digital domain by contemporary scholars such as Friedrich Kittler, Lev Manovich, David Bolter, Richard Grusin, Sean Cubitt, Mary Ann Doane, Jeffrey Sconce, Garrett Stewart, and others. 7 For an extended argument, see Thomas Elsaesser, “Early Film History and Multi-Media: An Archaeology of Possible Futures?” in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Tom Keenan (eds.), New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (New York: Routledge, 2005), 13-26. 8 One of the results has been a new approach to (classical and modern) f ilm theory. See Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015).

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Classic texts have to be re-read: they have to be put in dialogue with contemporary practices and re-assessed in a wider conceptual network. This bi-focal perspective on the cultural mesh of cinema around 1900 and 2000 is what we are collectively proposing by studying the ‘history of imagined futures in the past’ and by a ‘rewriting of the past in the light of the future.’ Even as we refrain from identifying ‘the future’ with the ‘digital era’ as such, we think that the inclusion of sound and telephony or the extension of the corpus to scientific and non-fictional films, for instance, significantly enlarges our understanding of ‘what is cinema’. Likewise, special attention to how cinema has affected the perception of time and the experience of place and space allows one to redefine the cinematic dispositif without being either reductive or all-inclusive. The third revisionism concerns the application, appropriation, and implementation of cinematic techniques, technologies, and ways of seeing in fields other than the mainstream of film. While alternatives to the narrative feature f ilm usually see themselves in terms of antagonism, critique, and resistance, our revisionism is less interested in addressing the division between high culture and popular culture (the ideologicalpolemical thrust of postmodernism) or the split between arts and hard sciences (the ‘two cultures’ of C.P. Snow). Instead we focus on breaking down the division between an avant-garde at the margins or in opposition, and the technological-industrial mainstream. What we are trying to explore is how sound and image media and other information technologies have contributed to or even spearheaded changes in the relation between an artistic practice said to be hostile to any kind of application or transfer to the realm of industry, commerce, and functional use and an industrial practice supposedly concerned merely with mass production and maximizing profit. Whether we call it ‘design and advertising’, ‘post-Fordism’, or ‘research and development’, the twenty-first century has seen a shift or even a reversal in the balance of power between an entrepreneurial avant-garde and an avant-garde entrepreneurism. The parallels between avant-garde art and industrial application are often surprisingly evident and direct, just as the marketing skills of artists and curators easily bear comparison with those of industrial conglomerates and commercial companies. We would be arguing—on the basis of the episteme 1900—that cinema needs to be understood in its double role in this respect. It emerged at a time of crisis for the self-understanding of the first industrial revolution, where the spectacle of moving images was meant to mediate between technology, education, and entertainment. Such a division had not existed during the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie earlier in the nineteenth century and may no longer exist

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today. Indeed, one way of understanding the rapid rise of cinema would be to highlight the role it played as both symptom (of the division between education about the world and entertainment extracted from the world) and cure (in that it seemed to heal the breach between work and leisure), a role also played by the large world fairs in London (1851), Chicago (1893), Paris (1889 and 1900), and St. Louis (1904), which sought to reconcile the split between industry, technology, the public sphere, and everyday life. Thus, our third revisionism tries to track a trend that, from the 1970s onwards, has seen these divisions between high tech, entertainment, and information—but also between the avant-garde and the mainstream—as increasingly blurred and merging, ‘returning’ us to the period prior to the 1890s. Although we have not yet fully conceptualized the dynamics and forces that are bringing style, design, advertising, technological breakthroughs, avant-garde, and the mass market together, we note that the result is infotainment, advertising-driven education, design following technology, and ‘theory’ becoming design. To the extent that we are concerned with often counterintuitive associations, heterogeneous networks, and non-convergent connections, we are sympathetic to the idea of re-investigating the concept of dispositif. Its capacity to think in terms of bricolage and assemblages, its renewed regard for the conditions of reception (envisaging ‘agents’ with different roles and functions), and its interest in new pedigrees and genealogies all reaffirm the concept’s value and uses. For instance, the proposal to draw upon genealogies that can “distinguish between successive mechanical and military paradigms and theatrical, libidinal models”9 would seem to be quite close to our aims as well. It is by attending to non-technological factors, drawing connections between agents, sites, and practices usually not associated with each other, that the more recent term dispositif opens up valuable discursive space by identifying common denominators between and across media. However, dispositif—if merely translated as cinematic apparatus in British or American English—is less useful to our research, since it fails to fully account for what we think is the complexity of the present situation. The same goes for the historical period preceding ‘cinema’: only if we think of dispositif as neither synonymous with the technological apparatus nor analogous to the Freudian psychic Apparat and retain Jean-Louis Baudry’s distinction between appareil de base and dispositif, with the latter signifying different kinds of assemblages and arrangements, can we adequately understand 9 François Albera, Maria Tortajada, Call for Papers, conference on “Viewing and Listening Dispositives,” Université de Lausanne, Switzerland, May 29-31, 2008.

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the nature of the interactions, the degrees of antagonism, and the kinds of interdependencies we are tracking for the period around 1900.

The Dispositif Cinema: Conditions of Possibility, Definitions The starting point of our research was another look at the particular ocularcentric arrangement of screen, projector, and audience that goes by the name of ‘cinematic apparatus’. As already hinted, this idea of a ‘basic apparatus’ received intense theoretical elaborations in the 1970s thanks to the writings of Thierry Kuntzel, Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, Stephen Heath, Daniel Dayan, and others.10 In the Anglo-Saxon world, ‘apparatus theory’ is also known as ‘Screen theory’, after the journal that promoted it most actively, or ‘suture theory’ for its explanation of how the spectator identifies with, or is ‘stitched’ into, the cinematic process. Rather than entering into the often fierce ideological and philosophical polemics that apparatus theory gave rise to especially in the US in the 1980s—notably in articles by Noël Carroll, David Bordwell, and Richard Allen11—we focused more on the broader historical assumptions made by apparatus theory (with its genealogy dating to Plato’s parable of the cave, to Renaissance perspective, and from Renaissance perspective to the Freudian unconscious), especially where these continuities appeared to contradict some of the more detailed empirical studies on the emergence of cinema, on theories of optics, and the different traditions of producing the illusion of movement prior to ‘cinema’. Beyond the well-known idea that the optical principles on which cinema (both the camera and the projector) were built favored the central perspective of Renaissance painting, what Baudry elaborated, especially in his second article on the dispositif, was the alignment of this technical apparatus—camera eye, projector beam, auditorium space, spectator eye, and screen—with the psychic apparatus as described by Freud, and later elaborated by Lacan, in such a way that it was no longer a mere metaphor (film was like a dream) but that the alignment elided, suppressed, and made invisible the differences between the functioning of the cinematic apparatus 10 Representative collections in English are Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (eds.), The Cinematic Apparatus (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s, 1980) and Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 11 For a useful summary of the polemics, see Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). But see also Elsaesser and Hagener, Film Theory, 76-79, 112-113.

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and the psychic dispositif, with all manner of far-reaching, counterintuitive, and at first sight non-cinematic implications or consequences. For instance, Baudry derived not only a major ideological charge against cinema (that it was idealist and bourgeois) but also an argument about how to break its spell, how to make the differences once more telling, perceptible, and cognitively apprehensible—referring back to Man with the Movie Camera as the paradigmatic avant-garde effort to render the apparatus visible in the production of sense and in the reproduction of the reality effect as illusionism. When re-examining the arguments advanced for explaining the optical and psychological functioning of this apparatus by reference to the laws of the central perspective, doubts arose whether the historical evidence of how cinema came about did not suggest more a haphazard and contingent, but also more experimental, exploratory, and pragmatic process at work: one that eventually led to cinema’s ‘invention’. There was little in this history confirming the determinism underpinning Baudry’s ideological critique of cinema’s illusionism. Instead, the tight geometrical arrangement typical for cinema projection, which was said to be responsible for film becoming a predominantly narrative medium and in turn predicated the ‘subject-positioning’ of the spectator, seemed more a challenging theoretical construct than a satisfying historical explanation. Almost as intriguing as these conflicting claims about the origins and ideological nature of cinema was the question: why was apparatus theory so successful, or rather, why was it so symptomatically necessary in the 1970s and 1980s? Not only did the new approach to film history point to very different—sometimes admittedly counterintuitive and even arbitrary— ‘enabling conditions’ of cinema; equally odd was the sense that apparatus theory became widely espoused at precisely the point in time when the fixed spectator position stipulated as the basic condition for this ‘reality effect’ to occur was rapidly becoming obsolete or minoritarian, as more and more films were no longer being watched in cinemas projected on a big screen but on television or at home on a video recorder. The paradox was that a dispositif, threatened and embattled in practice, seemed to become—as if to compensate—ever more essentialized in theory.

The Cinematic Apparatus Between High Theory and Media Archaeology Jean-Louis Baudry’s apparatus was itself fixed, fixated even. Some claimed that he had misunderstood Francastel’s theory of perspective (itself a

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response to Panofsky’s famous essay on “Perspective as Symbolic Form”); others maintained, as Gilles Deleuze would also argue in the 1980s, that cinema is movement before it is fixed frame.12 Among art historians, Hubert Damisch became one of the critics of the genealogy that directly linked the camera obscura / laterna magica to Renaissance perspective and Renaissance perspective to cinema,13 as did Jonathan Crary in his Techniques of the Observer, where he proposed a rather different genealogy of vision and visuality in the nineteenth century, documenting the importance of vision as bodily sensation in popular culture as well as science by referring to Goethe and Helmholtz rather than Cartesian and Newtonian optics.14 In the end, our own media-archaeological ‘deconstruction’ of the apparatus (and its theory) took a slightly different route: for instance, I tried to make a case for Freud, a notorious technophobe, as a ‘media theorist’ by once more looking—in line with a number of other writers, including Jacques Derrida and Thierry Kuntzel—at his famous essay on the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’.15 I argued that Freud’s own theory of memory made a clear distinction between the perceptual part of the psychic apparatus (the ‘optical-acoustic part’ of consciousness if you like) and the storage and processing part (the recording and encoding apparatus, which Baudry had ignored or conflated), and that his ‘discovery’ of the unconscious, of repression, and the rhetoric of dreamwork could from today’s perspective be seen as a hypothesis that ‘fills the gap’ which the discrepancy between the two systems left open and exposed. In short, I tried to understand the Freudian Wunderblock as giving us a potential model for comprehending an element of the cinematic apparatus that was not entirely dependent either on the visible, nor referred back to the ‘geometry of representation’ of Renaissance painting, but pointed instead to inscription, trace, and even towards ‘data management’ (using both narrative schema and non-linear ‘programming’).16 Indeed, it was dissatisfaction with Baudry’s sweeping analogies, with its relentless indictment of Western idealism, determined by its dominant 12 Gilles Deleuze, L’image-mouvement. Cinéma 1 (Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, coll. « Critique », 1983). 13 Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). 14 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer on Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). 15 Thomas Elsaesser, “Freud as Media Theorist: Mystic writing pads and the matter of memory,” Screen vol. 50, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 100-113. 16 In the 1970s, Thierry Kuntzel had tried to align the mystic writing pad with the cinematic apparatus, but he did so within a primarily ‘optical’ frame of reference. Thierry Kuntzel, ‘A Note upon the Filmic Apparatus,’ Quarterly Review of Film Studies 1 (August 1976): 266-271.

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technologies of vision, which persuaded a whole generation in the 1980s to turn away from grand theory and look again at the origins of cinema. As already pointed out in earlier chapters, the key figure here was Noël Burch, who played an important mediating role between the originally Paris-based writers on apparatus theory, its adoption by the London film circles around Screen, and the New York avant-garde, where filmmakers like Ken Jacobs (Tom Tom the Piper’s Son), Hollis Frampton (Nostalgia), Ernie Gehr (Serene Velocity), and Burch himself (Corrections Please) were also interested in deconstructing classical narrative cinema by pointing to the different practice of early cinema (or photography). They, too, challenged the notion that Renaissance perspective and Aristotelian narrative were the only precedents and necessary preconditions for cinema to develop as an art. The revival of interest in the films of the Lumière Brothers, starting in the 1970s and peaking in the 1990s, with essays by Marshall Deutelbaum (1979), Dai Vaughn (1981), Tom Gunning, and many others,17 as well as films by Malcolm Le Grice (After Lumière, 1974) and Harun Farocki (Workers Leaving the Factory, 1995) capped this historical revisionism and gave it a media-archaeological dimension, with a strongly theoretical bent towards contemporary issues in visual culture rather than merely an antiquarian revival to coincide with cinema’s centenary. Notably the opposition ‘realism’ vs. ‘illusionism’ was being deconstructed by the introduction of the term ‘attraction’, which in turn revived the debate around the apparatus, now with the digital media explicitly in mind.18 One of the key points, for instance, made by Gunning in The Aesthetics of Astonishment was that the Lumière films appeared to their first audiences more ‘magical’ than Melies, thus questioning the divide ‘documentary equals Lumière, fantasy equals Melies’–a doxa that Jean-Luc Godard had already turned on its head in La Chinoise.19 In my own contribution to the Lumière debate, I suggested that there might be a ‘missing link’, a ‘dog that did not 17 Marshall Deutelbaum, “Structural Patterning in the Lumière Films,” Wide Angle 3.1 (1979): 30-31; Dai Vaughan, “Let There Be Lumière,” Sight and Sound 50, no. 2 (Spring 1981): 126-27; Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment. Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” Art & Text 34 (1989): 31-45; Thomas Elsaesser, “Louis Lumière – the Cinema’s First Virtualist?” in Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hofmann (eds.), Cinema Futures: Cain Abel or Cable (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995), 45-62. 18 See the essays collected in Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). 19 In La Chinoise (1968), Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud) lectures his comrades on the fact that the Lumière brothers were not the first documentarists. They were (implicitly citing Henri Langlois) the last impressionists, whereas Georges Méliès did not invent fictional cinema but rather the weekly news.

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bark’: namely the Lumières’ extensive experience–as photographers and as entrepreneurs–with stereoscopy, reminding us of its vast proliferation both for private viewing and public display. Without factoring in this particular parallax way of seeing, whose illusionism is not so much optical as it is cognitive, crucial elements of the Lumière mise-en-scene, such as their often horizontal division of the screen or their many kinds of symmetries, could not be fully understood. As with other aspects of nineteenth-century visual culture, such as panoramas and dioramas, linear accounts were also missing possible links between pre-cinema and today’s 3D displays in architecture, design, as well as in popular entertainment applications.20 I shall come back to this conjuncture around early cinema as a critique of apparatus theory, but here I want to retain three main points in my argument so far. (1) As a theoretical construction, with philosophical presuppositions, the classic apparatus theory is a polemic against realism/idealism. Its critical thrust was directed against Bazin’s supposedly ‘naïve’ notions of realism in cinema and by extension wanted to critique the endemic idealism inherent in Western models of representation, putting in its place a new ‘materialism’. The upshot of this argument was that realism in cinema was nothing but a ‘reality effect’, and that this reality effect not only did not allow one to critically interrogate the iconic self-evidence that cinema provided (broadly, the Brechtian argument against ‘bourgeois realism’ and ‘illusionism’). But where Baudry went beyond the Marxism of Jean-Louis Comolli, for instance, was in showing how this realism effect also hinged on a ‘subject-effect’, understood as a form of unconscious interpellation. Here the psychoanalytic theories of subject-formation and subjectification became critical, because in some ways they modified the materialist analysis by adding a psycho-linguistic dimension in which the signifier and the signified were irrevocably separated from one another, and where a transparent window on the world became the mirror of fatal miscognition. Yet the psychoanalytic ramifications of the apparatus led in turn to a critique of Baudry’s critique as well as of the avant-garde’s critique: feminist interventions, such as those by Jacqueline Rose, Constance Penley, Mary Ann Doane, and Joan Copjec, all pointed out that this new materialism amounted to the fetishization of the basic apparatus, its technology, as well as the physical properties of the film strip, at the expense of the cultural, discursive effects (which included the construction of gender and sexual 20 Michael Wedel, “Sculpting with Light: Early Film Style, Stereoscopic Vision and the Idea of a ‘Plastic Art in Motion’,” in Enrico Biasin, Giulio Bursi, Leonardo Quaresima (eds.), Film Style (Udine: Forum, 2007), 483-498.

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identity).21 Whether they critiqued mainstream cinema or promoted the avant-garde, the structuralist-materialists and apparatus theorists had constructed a kind of ‘bachelor machine’ (Penley), a material prosthesis, whose aim it was—even in its critical deconstruction of idealism—to disavow sexual difference and thus to avoid the threat of castration.17 For feminists, the materialism claimed for the dispositif was itself a cover-up, a disavowal of an even more fundamental lack, an absence, which the invocation of the apparatus (especially in its radical form as practiced by the avant-garde, with its obsession with material traces—dust particles, scratches, sprocket holes, overexposure—on the film stock, was designed to disguise or to compensate. Against the priority of the apparatus, put forward in order to ward off the anxiety machine of sexual difference, feminist theorists used apparatus theory to re-think the psychic dimension of cinema as having as its primary function the task of ‘stabilizing’ the male subject and thus work on behalf of patriarchy.22 The lesson to retain from this brief history of apparatus theory is perhaps the following: in order to come to a more comprehensive understanding of the complex relations that bring different media together into an interdependent network, it cannot be one’s purpose to base oneself primarily on a given (audio-visual) technology and construct around it distinct dispositifs—unless, after separating them out, one also has a coherent and historically sound model for grasping their mutually interacting dynamics. It is perfectly possible and indeed desirable to have a better account of what constitutes the character and historical specificity of the ‘dispositif cinema’, ‘dispositif photography’, ‘dispositif video’, ‘dispositif television’, and ‘dispositif telephone’. However, one should remember that these dispositifs, theorized around a basic technology, do not identify or delimit a specific object of inquiry if one’s perspective is one of media archaeology—even if, as in this case, film and cinema remain the primary foci of attention. In order to track the cultural impact and consequences of a given media apparatus, one may have to have recourse to another version of my ‘dog that did not bark’ forensics and consider that certain technologies become culturally 21 Constance Penley, ‘Feminism, Film Theory, and the Bachelor Machines,’ in Robert Stam and Toby Miller (eds), Film and Theory: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 456-473 [originally 1989]. 22 See Teresa de Lauretis, Stephen Heath (eds.), The Cinematic Apparatus (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1980), especially the chapters by Jacqueline Rose, “The Cinematic Apparatus – Problems in current Theory”, 199-213) Mary Ann Doane, “Ideology and the Practice of Sound Editing”, 47-56, Teresa de Lauretis, “Through the Looking Glass”, 187-203, as well as Joan Copjec, “The Anxiety of the Influencing Machine”, October no. 23 (Winter 1982): 43-59.

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significant when, besides their performativity, their failure-prone aspects are also valorized. This can play out in different contexts: for instance, technological progress under capitalism is often described as a consequence of ‘creative destruction’. The more current version is to speak of innovation being driven by ‘disruptive’ technologies: a term that has acquired almost wholly positive connotations. Among artists, on the other hand, technological failure receives a positive evaluation when renamed ‘glitch’ aesthetics and given material connotations of roughness and resistance—as if one could thereby liberate the political unconscious of technology itself. I will return to this question of material resistance in a separate chapter when discussing ‘obsolescence’ as both a consequence of and a riposte to the digital. Tangentially, one might invoke a concept dear to Niklas Luhmann, who argues that technical or human failure (i.e., system failure) can act as an “irritant” (Störfaktor), and that such irritants act de facto as a stabilizing or energizing element in a given system.23 Applied to the cultural realm, it draws attention to the diagnostic value of dystopias, anxieties, and panics that seem to have been the inevitable byproducts and indicators of media change in any age or period. (2) In the light of this, it may make sense to think of cinema today as just such an irritant, at one level a sensor and early warning system, and at another level a stabilizing force and counterpractice amidst the expanded field of the media interaction typical of the episteme 2000. Such a seemingly contradictory position of cinema as both obsolete and in the vanguard draws attention to the different cultural speeds at which the constituent parts of the classic cinematic dispositif have evolved and developed, as their analogues or functional equivalents migrate and mutate across a range of media technologies and practices. Hence it makes sense to undertake separate studies of the ‘archaeology of the camera’, the ‘archaeology of the screen and frame’, the ‘archaeology of projection and transparency’, the ‘archaeology of motion and stillness’, the ‘archaeology of sound and color’, etc. Such studies are the historical preconditions of analyzing the kinds of synergies that can be achieved by what I have termed a Medienverbund, i.e. a tactical alliance of media practices: not a ‘transfer’ or ‘translation’ of the properties of one medium into another, be it photographic, cinematic, or video (as is claimed for the digital as universal code), nor the assumption that these are historically successive modes of production where

23 Niklas Luhmann, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990).

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handcrafted, mechanical, and electronic media replace each other in a trajectory of linear progress.24 Rather, what the idea of a Medienverbund exemplifies is the need to account for the contacts and connections between different media practices often under antagonistic power relations. It requires one to think beyond both media specificity and convergence and to generate new concepts on the strength of which fresh comparisons between distinct phenomena can be made and new genealogies generated. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin came up with the concept of Remediation (1998), Lev Manovich generated new interfaces between cinema and digital techniques in The Language of New Media (2001), Edward Branigan rethought the cinema in Projecting a Camera (2006), and Sean Cubitt defined The Cinema Effect (2005) from the perspective of the digital. None of them use the word dispositif, but their efforts (just as ours in Amsterdam, around the archaeologies of screen, projection, camera, frame) are consonant with re-situating apparatus theory, still valuable and an indispensable reference point, not least because it was the first attempt at a comprehensive theoretical-philosophical articulation of cinema. Equally crucial is the assumption that a viewing and listening dispositif is predicated on three dimensions (inter)acting together: implied is a spatial extension, involved is a temporal register, and a subjective reference point or address is also a historically variable but conceptually indispensable element. Additionally, our approach specifies that a dispositif is a dispositif only when it entails a medium (a material support, most often a combination of technologies), an image (a representation, including a sound representation), and a spectator (liable to be solicited, subjectified, addressed by interpellation, or affectively and cognitively engaged).25 Such a conception of the dispositif echoes, for instance, the definition proposed by Hans Belting. Arguing from the perspective of a post-art history, Belting advocates “a new approach to iconology” as part of his image-anthropology: “[…] W.J.T. Mitchell [uses] the terms image, text, ideology. […] I also use a triad of terms in which […] image remains but now is framed by the terms medium and body.” Belting goes on to explain that images can only be understood if one 24 Thomas Elsaesser, “Archives and Archaeologies: The Place of Non-Fiction Film in Contemporary Media,” in Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (eds.), Films that Work: Cinematic Means and Industrial Ends (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 19-34. 25 Each of these terms refers to a different theoretical paradigm: “subjectified” belongs to the psychoanalytic terminology of miscognition or disavowal; “addressed” recalls Marxist cultural studies, via interpellation and negotiation; while “affectively and cognitively engaged” comes from studies of narrative comprehension and cognitivist film theory.

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takes account of other, non-iconic determinants, and that medium needs to be understood “in the sense of the agent by which images are transmitted, while body means either the performing or the perceiving body on which images depend no less than on their respective media.”26 These attempts at re-description across the humanities underline the variable nature of what is to be understood by “image”, “medium”, and “the moving image” today. What film studies can contribute are conceptual precisions and historical clarifications. For instance, in Belting’s definition, the term “framed” seems to me a problematic metaphor in two respects: it brings back the picture frame, and thus the picture, as opposed to the image; and it is a static-geometrical term, when what is required is a term that can encompass processual and time-based phenomena that are in flux. A similar caveat applies to the term dispositif: it seems to imply a fixed assemblage rather than a dynamic, ongoing process of re-alignment and interaction. On the other hand, Belting’s definition of the body as both ‘performing’ and ‘perceiving’ is helpful in that it is also in line with major trends in film studies, redefining ‘agency’ across characters within the fiction, spectators/ viewers/users, but also objects, networks, and machines.27 Agency in cinema is no longer merely the capacity to act and interact but includes the ways of manifesting presence. (3) This brings me to the third general point: the debate about the cinematic apparatus, with its emphasis on subject position as a consequence of miscognition and disavowal, seems (negatively) predicated on a notion of cinema as ideally a source of secure knowledge about the world. When film philosophers ask “how we know what we know” in cinema—or, to quote Christian Metz’s famous words, claim that “the object of film theory is to understand how films are understood”28—are they not committing themselves too exclusively to an epistemological theory of film centered on ‘realism’, even as they denounce its realism as an ideological effect? By extension, some of the difficulties and deadlocks—not only of apparatus theory in the 1980s but also of f ilm theory at its present conjuncture (where cognitivists are ranged on one side, Deleuzians and phenomenologists on the other, united only in their rejection of psychoanalysis and 26 Hans Belting, “Image, Medium, Body. A New Approach to Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 302-19, 302. 27 Discussions around “agency” seem to point to the influence of Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 28 Christian Metz, Language and Cinema, cited in Warren Buckland, Cognitive Semiotics of Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 79.

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semiotics)—could be due in part to an insufficiently articulated debate as to the status of cinema between ‘ontology’ and ‘epistemology’. Cognitivism tends to assume a positive relationship between representation, knowledge, and truth, depending on pre-formed expectations, evidence, and ocular verification. By contrast, psycho-semiotics subscribes to such an epistemology mainly in its negative mode, critiquing films for failing to live up to this presumption of realism: the very term ‘illusionism’ requires a faith in ‘realism’ as its foil, as does the charge that film produces its ‘effects of the real’ through fetishism. Feminist theory equates scoptophilia with epistemophilia, attacking both, while in the discourse of social constructivism and cultural studies, epistemic pretensions of f ilms capable of speaking the truth are no less firmly and no less negatively implied (for instance when deconstructing Hollywood’s misrepresentations, stereotyping, etc.). A tendency towards cinephobia, in other words, underpins a radical epistemic critique of cinema, largely ignoring both the aesthetic value that ‘mere appearance’ or the ‘illusion of presence’ might have, and the possibility, put forward by Deleuze and others, that in cinema we do not so much gain knowledge about the world, as we learn about ourselves being in the world (which would either be an ‘ontological’ or an ‘ethical’ position).

Dispositif Mark 1: What was Cinema? Beyond epistemology, the problem raised is a deeper one, namely how to reach a new clarity about what is cinema/what was cinema in order to locate its place or function within the history of modernity in general—considered across a five-hundred-year span. From such a more encompassing media-archaeological perspective, it is possible to differentiate between anthropological, philosophical, and aesthetic approaches to cinema in order to trace paths and genealogies, where the relevant dispositifs are not defined solely by their basic technology. Evidently these approaches are not mutually exclusive entry points; they intersect, or rather, they articulate cinema at different levels of generality, and relate it, respectively, to society, the mind, and the work or text. Anthropological theories, for instance, comprise a wide range of views. Even André Bazin’s ideas about cinema as photographically based, and of photography as related to the bodily imprint rather than vision alone, have an anthropological dimension by relating cinema to death and how to defeat it: hence his references to mummies, the Turin shroud, plaster casts,

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and other kinds of effigies.29 An archaeological-anthropological perspective also underpins Walter Benjamin’s ideas about cinema and modernity, his influential concept of the optical unconscious and his notion that cinema ‘trains’ the senses so that we can cope with the shocks and traumata of metropolitan urban life. Likewise, a broadly anthropological perspective includes Foucault’s theories of the disciplinary and self-monitoring effects of vision machines, notably his theory of the Panopticon, which has been revived—around surveillance—as a generalized paradigm of vision in the twenty-first century, replacing both window and mirror as the central metaphors of cinema in the twentieth century30—a point to which I shall return at the end. The epistemological theories already mentioned would fall under the more generally philosophical approaches to cinema. They go back to the discovery of the magic lantern, to Christiaan Huygens and Athanasius Kircher: the first considering it a potentially useful scientific tool, the latter already fully aware that the magic lantern can foster superstition as readily as it can fight superstition. In the twentieth century, film philosophy ranges from phenomenological theories to cognitivist ones and also includes various ontologies of cinema (as attributed to Bazin, as proclaimed by Stanley Cavell, or as imputed to Gilles Deleuze), while the third general category would be aesthetic theories of cinema, whether these call themselves ‘poetics’ and are derived from Aristotelian theories of drama, or ‘formalist’ as influenced by Russian semiotics, whether they stem from ‘theatricality’ as first defined by Plato, or more specifically have to do with Romantic theories of play, of appearance and presence, and concern themselves with the status of the image in the arts or with the representation of movement and motion.31 29 Laura Mulvey, “Vesuvian topographies: The eruption of the past in Journey to Italy,” in David Forgacs, Sarah Lutton, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (eds), Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real (London: BFI Publishing, 2000), 95-111. 30 Thomas Y. Levin and Ursula Frohne (eds.), CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). 31 The publications alluded to here are André Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image, ” in Hugh Gray (ed.), What is Cinema? vol. I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 9-16; Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I. The Movement Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) and Cinema II. The Time Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); David Bordwell, Narration and the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); and Sam Weber, Theatricality as Medium (Fordham: Fordham University Press, 2004).

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In most theories of cinema proposed over the past eighty years or so, there is an overlap between epistemological and aesthetic categories, as in the different theories of realism or in the different ideological critiques, where epistemological questions and anthropological concerns are not easily kept apart. Likewise, ontological theories tend to overlap with aesthetic ones, as do phenomenological ones. But there is often also a serious disconnect, as in the non-dialogue between ‘Continental’ and ‘analytical’ schools of film philosophy. The advantage of making such distinctions at all is that they encourage another look at existing theories in the light of present concerns, notably the media change we are concerned with here. Past theories can be productively studied for how they formulate the problems, even if one does not agree with their answers. The question ‘What was cinema?’, formulated across these distinctions between anthropological, philosophical, and aesthetic ‘regimes’, would determine the agenda for our second type of revisionism, one that re-reads the history of film theory more productively as yet another crucial dimension of media archaeology, where discourses entail practices and practices rely on discourses. A recent example of such revisionist film theory in the spirit of media archaeology has been Dudley Andrew’s ‘reconstruction’ of André Bazin as a ‘new media’ critic.32 One of the undisputed founders of our discipline, Bazin has been chided as a misguided epistemologist of realism, when another look at his writings suggests: a) that he was the most interdisciplinary thinker imaginable; b) that his anthropological conception of cinema was very pertinent, even allowing for a ‘cinema after cinema’; and c) that there are quite different ways of understanding what he meant by ‘realism’. Re-reading Bazin, I could find little that indicated him to be a naïve realist and much that showed him to be a sophisticated advocate of illusionism–not only as a matter of aesthetics but also as a matter of belief and mutually negotiated rules of the game–rather than as a dogmatic idealist.33 To take another example: the emphasis on ocular perception, specularity, and voyeurism in apparatus theory and Lacanian film analysis now often stands accused of having systematically ignored the importance of the spectator’s body as a sensory organ and continuous perceptual surface as well as a key organizing principle of spatial and temporal orientation. When 32 Dudley Andrew (ed.), André Bazin’s New Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 33 Thomas Elsaesser, “A Bazinian Half-Century,” in Dudley Andrew and Hervé JoubertLaurencin (eds.), Opening Bazin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3-12.

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theorizing the film experience, apparatus theory has tended to treat the spectator-screen relationship as if it was based on a perceptual ‘illusion’ (by suggesting that objects that move on the screen are really there), which in turn assumes that vision is always transitive, i.e. a matter of ‘seeing something’ when it could just as well be ‘seeing-as’ (Wittgenstein). At the same time, psychoanalytic theory unwittingly reinforced (bourgeois) ideology’s dis-embodied, de-contextualized, de-materialised version of watching movies, while also critiquing (with its call for ‘anti-illusionism’) mainstream cinema for producing precisely such alienated forms of human experience. A different set of objections to seeing cinema as psychic, perceptual, or projective illusion have been voiced by cognitivists and analytical philosophers, who question the notion that in cinema one is dealing with either illusion/simulation or with alienation/reification. They argue that the perception, recognition, and apprehension of objects, people, or places in the moving image need involve neither deception nor suspension of disbelief.34 Apprehension and comprehension in cinema call upon the same cognitive faculties and perceptual activities as ordinary seeing and knowing: “The theory that [moving] pictures are cognitive or epistemic illusions […] has been thoroughly debunked and can be laid to rest.”35 Yet many film scholars not persuaded by the debunking efforts of cognitivists but equally dissatisfied with phenomenology have turned to Gilles Deleuze and his two cinema books (The Movement Image and The Time Image) when looking for an alternative conceptualization of the film experience as an embodied, spatio-temporal event. The literature on Deleuze on cinema has grown so exponentially that it is impossible to summarize his position regarding epistemology. But his theory of knowledge, or the relation of truth to belief in cinema, differs sharply from any form of realism based on representation or verisimilitude. Instead, Deleuze proposes a theory of cinema as a form of thought, but rejects the notion that this thought creates concepts, or is formulated in propositions expressed through language. Cinema organizes perceptions (‘percepts’) and sensations (‘affects’) in real time, and is thus the opposite of an epistemology of stable categories or fixed points of reference. The way for the epistemological approach to unify the field and overcome some of the deadlocks just discussed has been to opt for a broadly 34 Noël Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 89ff) 35 Richard Allen, “Looking at Motion Pictures”, in R. Allen/M. Smith (eds.), Film Theory and Philosophy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 78-79.

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Foucauldian approach: “the machine (its technology), its location and the place given to the spectator/hearer form in this way a three-unit structure.” In such a formulation, the dispositif is associated with power, “especially with the coercive, disciplinary or controlling power of libidinal assemblages.”36 On the other hand, the idea of a contact space or contact zone between human perceptual faculties (spectator) and mechanical elements (the apparatus) may lead one to adopt not the term dispositif but instead “interface”, understood as a boundary across which different systems meet, act on, interfere, or communicate with one another.37 Besides rethinking epistemology, ontological theories have also been revived in order to overcome what is now seen as the historically contingent nature of the technology that once was believed to be the essence of the cinematic dispositif in its classical articulation: namely, the photographic image, projection, and the fixed spectator. Acknowledging the importance (without being limited by the specificity) of the dispositif as an organizing principle, an ontological approach would place greater emphasis on ‘belief’ or ‘trust’ rather than on ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’. Such trust in the ‘image’ (as a field of forces and intensities rather than a ‘representation’ with a particular ‘reference’) is secured either as a conscious choice (the ‘contract’ the viewer has with the film) or as an interpersonal, pragmatic value (“I’ll trust the film, as long as it plays by the rules”—whatever these may be). Neither depends on ‘suture’, ‘disavowal’, ‘miscognition’ (the psychoanalytic paradigm), nor on a verifiable evidentiary relation to the profilmic (photographic indexicality) in order to explain what binds the film spectator to the world (of images). Recent work in aesthetics has challenged the ocular-centric geometry of the cinematic dispositif on several fronts as part of yet another critique of perspectival projection, with ‘infinity’ as the implied vanishing point and the ‘singular source’ or solitary observer as the necessary point of view.38 Other objections concern the fact that the cinematic ‘cone of vision’ privileges space and stasis (‘staging in depth’) over time and process; that it relies too much on the bounded frame (off-screen/on-screen) or on the centrifugal frame (in cinema) versus the centripetal (picture) frame (in painting); that it assumes as a given the upright, frontal orientation of human vision and the image, and that it tends to ‘freeze’ the individual 36 François Albera, Maria Tortajada, “Viewing and Listening Dispositives” (see Note 9). 37 See for instance Lev Manovich, “Cinema as a Cultural Interface,” http://www.manovich. net/TEXT/cinema-cultural.html. (last accessed on 4 February 2013). 38 Among the many critiques of the ‘Albertian window’ applied to cinema, see Victor Burgin, “Geometry and Abjection,” Public 1 (Winter 1988): 12-30; and Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).

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‘frame’, thus reducing the cinematic image to the still image, mechanically animated, rather than start from the moving image, temporarily stilled in the photograph. The ‘new art history’ in particular turned to cinema as a vital element of visual culture in the late 1980s.39 In the 1990s, however, overtly Marxist and/or psychoanalytic critiques of the apparatus theory began to give way to ideas about vision and the observer that revived the multi-perspectival theories of the different avant-gardes, while also acknowledging the influence of video and installation art and the general opening up of museum culture to include the moving image. In the process, the ‘archaeological’ interest in early cinema gained new traction and topical relevance: its dispositif—especially its pre-industrialized, ‘handmade’ features once considered ‘primitive’ because focused more on performance and less on narrative—could now be understood as a kind of ‘deconstruction’ of monocular perspective, as if a return to the origins of cinema would be a case of reculer pour mieux sauter, of stepping back for a new leap forward, towards cinema and the moving image in the twenty-first century.

Dispositif Mark 2: Early Cinema The turn/return to early cinema has proved fertile in many different ways. Besides documenting the enormous variety of entertainment and scientific uses of the Cinématographe in the urban environment of evolving modernity (the anthropological aspect) and identifying a different aesthetics, whether called ‘primitive mode of representation’ (Burch) or ‘the cinema of attractions’ (Gunning and Gaudreault), 40 early cinema studies also recovered an epistemological dimension that tended to be lost in the negative epistemology of the 1970s: the close alliance of chronophotography with the empirical and observational sciences. As already noted, pioneers like Jules Janssen, Étienne-Jules Marey, and even the Lumière Brothers (who from 1902 onwards devoted their best energies to experiments with color, with echographic topology, and with medical appliances for war veterans) have returned as important figures in a genealogy of new media and expanded 39 Norman Bryson, “The Gaze in the Expanded Field,” in Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 87-113. 40 See the essays by Burch, Gunning, and Gaudreault in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990) and a new contextualization of these positions in Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007).

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cinema. In France, a belatedly recognized hero has emerged in Georges Demenÿ, who dreamed up, explored, and tested many applications of the moving image for sports training, teaching lip-reading to the deaf, and more generally for educational, military, and medical uses. In Britain, the many talents of R.W. Paul is beginning to be recognized, 41 and in Germany, it was Oskar Messter who received special attention from scholars working on documentary and non-fiction film but also on more adventurous aspects of the dispositif such as sound-image synchronization, color, and 3D projection. 42 Messter holds a special place in our project, and his extensive oeuvre allowed me to speak of the S/M practices of the apparatus, meaning: the scientific and medical imaging dispositif (his work for hospitals touched upon by Lisa Cartwright), 43 the surveillance and military dispositif (linking Messter to Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema), 44 the sensory-motor-schema dispositif (showing him to be a contemporary of Henri Bergson), and the sensoring and monitoring dispositif (pioneered, besides Marey, by Albert Lorde and documented, among others, by Siegfried Zielinski). 45 In other words, by going back to early and pre-cinema and duly noting the non-entertainment uses of the cinematic apparatus, one can advance the proposition that “cinema has many histories, only some of which belong to the movies.”46 Evidently, at least in part, it is the topicality of the non- or para-entertainment uses at the turn of the twenty-first century that has once more given prominence to these earlier applications of the moving image and the cinematograph. While the historical and theoretical studies of Virilio and Friedrich Kittler helped to make the connections between war and cinema much more present in our minds, this new awareness was helped by the daily news bulletins about smart bombs during the first Iraq War, which in turn found their resonance in Harun Farocki’s work. For three decades, his films and video installations have been examining the different genealogies of what he calls “operational images” from the late nineteenth century, when photography was used for measuring the 41 See Ian Christie, sleeve notes, biography, and filmography in R.W. Paul, The Collected Films 1895-1908 (London: BFI DVD Edition, 2006). 42 Martin Loiperdinger (ed.), Oskar Messter, Erfinder und Geschäftsmann, in KINtop 3, special issue (Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1994). 43 Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 44 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989). 45 Siegfried Zielinski, Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999). 46 Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Harun Farocki – Working on the Sight-Lines (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 17.

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elevation of buildings, through gathering reconnaissance footage from spotter planes during WWII, all the way to the use of surveillance cameras in Californian prisons and the data-gathering sensors in Berlin supermarkets. Farocki’s investigations of hand, eye, and machine are exemplary in showing how the cinematic dispositif—especially in its observational, monitoring, and controlling functions—has become a pervasive presence in our everyday lives, joining art and entertainment with the industrial and bureaucratic uses of the moving image. 47 In this sense, Farocki is returning to Muybridge’s time-and-motion studies, to which his own researches into social routines, stress tests, and service-industry training exercises provide a contemporary update. 48 New media theorists, on the other hand, have benefited from another look at Marey, whose work can now be re-appreciated as part of the archaeology of data visualization and pattern recognition, which is beginning to get close consideration not just in the analysis of surveillance footage but also among film scholars and theorists of the articulations of cinematic time and the management of real-time data. 49 One of my own attempts at an epistemo-anthropological analysis is an essay on so-called ‘Rube’ films (or Uncle Josh films), arguing that earlier views of the phenomenon might have missed a crucial aspect, a double layer of reflexivity and agency. Uncle Josh films—in which a simpleton mistakes the representation on the screen for physically present objects and people and personally intervenes in the action, only to destroy the spectacle—pose several questions to the modern viewer.50 Are they intended, as is often claimed, to be didactic parables, teaching a rural or immigrant audience how not to behave in the movie theater by putting up to ridicule someone like themselves? Yet it is doubtful that such an audience or a moment of ‘infancy’ and simplicity in the history of the movies ever existed, where such an ontological confusion with regard to objects and persons might have occurred. To me, then, these films imply a meta-level of self-reference in order to explore not the epistemic conundrum of reality versus representation or truth versus fiction but the anthropological one, namely of how to ‘discipline’ an audience through comedy and laughter. Do the Rube films not teach their audience how not to 47 Harun Farocki, Auge/Maschine (video installation, 23 mn, 2000) http://www.farocki-film. de/augem1.htm. (last accessed on 4 February 2013). 48 See Harun Farocki, Reconnaître et poursuivre (Paris: Théâtre Typographique, 2002). 49 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 50 Thomas Elsaesser, “Discipline through Diegesis: The Rube Film between ‘Attractions’ and ‘Narrative Integration’,”in Strauven, Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, 205-26.

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use their bodies as spectators by allowing them to enjoy their own superior form of spectatorship, even if that superiority is achieved at the price of self-censorship and self-restraint? The audience laughs at a simpleton and village idiot, thereby flattering itself with a self-image of urban sophistication. The punishment meted out to Uncle Josh by the projectionist is both allegorized as the reverse side of cinematic pleasure (watch out, “behind” the screen lies the figure of the “master”) and internalized as self-control: in the cinema—as elsewhere in the modern world of displayed commodities and the self-display of bodies—the rule is “you may look, but don’t touch.”51 Adding a further twist, one can argue that the figure of the Rube has returned, re-appearing in our contemporary media world this time as the incarnation of the visitor/user, not in the cinema, but in the gallery space and also on the net, in the latter case learning how to be an ‘avatar’ or to behave as a ‘fan’, a ‘nerd’, or an ‘activist.’52 The same ambivalence applies to the museum, where visitors no longer know how to respond when confronted with, say, video installation art. Under the regime of ‘relational aesthetics’,53 the visitor’s role is destabilized by works that are like an enigmatic appliance or a gadget with no accompanying instruction manual: they invite participation or require a special mental act for their comprehension or completion while giving little or no overt clue about how they ‘want to be understood’. The ‘epistemological’ aspect seems like a lure or tease, an invitation to more ludic forms of engagement, but on the other hand, it implies a reflexive turn that is epistemic in intent.54 In fact, there is now general uncertainty about what role to play as spectators in the art world, just as there is in the media world of television and video games: are we ‘witnesses’ or ‘bystanders’? ‘Players’ or ‘users’? ‘Observers’ or ‘dupes’ (Rubes), inadvertently delivering ‘data’ to machine archives? My ‘return of the Rube’ would thus be a specific or ‘situated’ instance of the more general 51 See Wanda Strauven, “Re-Disciplining the Audience: Godard’s Rube-Carabinier”, in Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (eds.), Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 125-33; and Wanda Strauven, “Touch, Don’t Look”, in Alice Autelitano et al. (eds.), I cinque sensi del cinema/The Five Senses of Cinema (Udine: Forum, 2005), 283-91. 52 Thomas Elsaesser, “Archaeologies of Interactivity: Early Cinema, Narrative and Spectatorship”, in K. Kreimeier and A. Ligensa (eds.), Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture (Luton: John Libbey, 2009), 9-21. 53 The term “relational aesthetics” was made famous by Nicolas Bourriaud. See his Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 1998). 54 Among the various projects of the Imagined Futures group, see especially Jennifer Steetskamp, “Specters of Lessing: The Time-Spaces of the Moving Image Installation,” doctoral dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2012; Pepita Hesselberth, “Chronoscopy: Affective Encounters with Cinematic Temporalities,” doctoral dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2012.

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(and generally productive) problematic category of ‘agency’ which, as André Gaudreault has pointed out, should be understood to comprise both agitant and agité in early cinema.55 Yet this shift from the ‘old’ Cartesian subject-object divisions to something closer to an actor-network theory does not altogether resolve the question of the spectator’s emotional investments, so central not only to apparatus theory but also to any appreciation of the aesthetics of cinema. If scholars are now more cautious about speaking of ‘mis-cognition’ and ‘disavowal’ as the features typical of cinematic subjectivity, there are still good arguments for characterizing cinema as a dispositif for subjectification. This is not so much because of the particular spatial arrangement (projection), but thanks to cinema’s temporal dimension, marked by “delay” and ”interval” in the sense of re-inscribing duration into the cinematic experience (the time image, energy, modulation, in Deleuzian language; ‘entropy’ or ‘intermittence’ in the language of cybernetics). This also makes it possible to distinguish cinema from ‘real-time’ electronic media on the basis of ‘delay’ and ‘deferral’, i.e. on the basis of a phenomenological distinction (if we take these terms in their Derridean sense) rather than a technological one (as the difference between photographic and electronic images). We thus would have to add ‘time’ to ‘agency’ in order to build up a model of a dispositif that does not privilege a particular technology and still proves relevant to both photographic and non-photographic moving images.

Dispositif Mark 3: Installation Art and the Moving Image Temporality and time economies, in particular, raise a further dimension in our consideration of the dispositif, which conveniently leads us to reinvestigate the aesthetic theories of cinema, albeit in only one admittedly prominent manifestation: that of the ‘entry’ of cinema and the moving image onto the scene of contemporary art, where cinema now seems to have a permanent place, however ambiguous a place it may appear in practice. One of the most significant phenomena in the history of the dispositif cinema is the way the moving image has taken over and has been taken over by the museum and gallery spaces. From the mid-1990s onward, major shows in London, Los Angeles, Paris, Oxford, New York, Vienna, and other cities have affirmed the museums’ intention to ‘represent’ cinema 55 See also the preface by François Albéra in Alain Boillat, Du Bonimenteur À La Voix-Over: Voix-Attraction et Voix-Narration Au Cinéma (Lausanne: Antipodes, 2007).

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and claim it as ‘art’.56 Despite the success of such exhibitions, matters are not straightforward when the moving image enters the museum. What inevitably come into play are the different actor-agents, power relations and policy agendas, competences, egos and sensibilities, and elements of the complex puzzle that is the contemporary art world and its commercial counterpart. However easy it might be to project a film inside a gallery with just a few mobile walls and lots of dark fabric, the museum is no cinema and the cinema no museum—mainly because of the different time economies already alluded to, which oblige the viewer in the museum to ‘sample’ a film rather than make it the occasion for ‘two hours at the movies’. Time is thus one of the reasons why cinema and museum constitute two quite distinct, and in the past often mutually exclusive, dispositifs. The fact that cinema and the gallery space are, both historically and philosophically, two antagonistic visual arrangements and spatial dispositifs is usually expressed in the juxtaposition of the ‘black box’ and the ‘white cube’. Each space is culturally pre-determined, has its own historically conditioned but deeply ingrained traditions, and follows particular architectonics, ordering principles, or ‘logics’ which amount to distinct ontologies. As we saw, the classical (or ‘black box’) cinematic dispositif requires a unique layout and geometry, in the way that screen space, auditorium space, and projector are aligned in relation to one another for the ‘cinema effect’ to occur. The museum/gallery (or ‘white box’) is itself a specific dispositif. With its white walls, its preference for ‘natural’ light, and its emphasis on smooth surfaces, it organizes space in such a way that the objects visible to the spectator are brought close and maintain their distance at the same time. The placing and hanging of pictures subtly privileges the upright, forward orientation of our gaze, directed at the formation of an ‘image’ that is distinctly framed and positioned at eye level. Still paying tribute to the ‘open window’ of Renaissance perspective, the white wall into which the image space is cut allows for generous margins and empty surfaces to surround each picture, while the heavily gilded frames are a reminder of the fundamental difference between the picture, what it contains, the look it retains, and the space that surrounds it. In the museum, off-screen space (to speak in the language of cinema) is differently organized: the Renaissance 56 Some of the landmark exhibitions were “Spellbound” (Hayward Gallery, London, 1995), “Art and Cinema since 1945: Hall of Mirrors” (Moca, Los Angeles, 1996), “Notorious: Alfred Hitchcock and Contemporary Art” (Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1999), “Hitchcock et l’art: Coïncidences fatales” (Montreal/Paris, 2000/2001), “Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964-1977” (Whitney Museum, 2001), “X-Screen: Filmic Installations from the 1960s and 70s” (MuMoK, Vienna, 2004).

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easel painting is composed and contained mostly within the frame, yet often breaks the ‘fourth wall’ by looking at us (Leonardo’s Mona Lisa) or subtly engaging with the spectator.57 By contrast, classical cinema lives from the tension between off-screen and on-screen space, what the frame delimits and what it creates a passage for, and the ‘look into the camera’ is mostly barred. It corroborates André Bazin already cited distinction between the centrifugal cinema frame and the centripetal painting frame.58 The difference between these vectors helps explain why the gallery and the cinema are distinguished by the mode of attention they afford their respective viewers. The kind of presence produced by standing in front of a work of art in a museum or a gallery carries very strong indices of time and place (of a ‘now’ and a ‘here’), which in turn imply a special type of viewing subject, highly aware of itself and its surroundings and thus receptive to reflection, introspection, and auto-reflection. Walter Benjamin famously called this presence ‘aura’ and was careful to specify its conditions of possibility, along with the slippages the aura undergoes in the age of mechanically reproducible images and the commodity form. Speculating on the mode of presence typical of cinema, Benjamin speaks of the desire to touch and the simultaneous barring of this desire, generating the cycles of disavowal and fetish-formation which psychoanalytic film theory famously identified, albeit via a different route of analysis. Simplifying a little, one could say that the museum produces a particular kind of presence (a ‘me’, a ‘here’, and a ‘now’), whereas the cinema produces a split self-presence of multiple temporalities (a ‘me/not me’ in an endlessly deferred ‘here/not here’ and ‘now/not now’): Roland Barthes, in his several essays devoted to photography and cinema, highlighted some of these differences in terms of tense.59 In their distinctive logics, the dispositifs ‘cinema’ and ‘museum’ entail a further set of differential coordinates, which come into play or conflict when the moving image enters the museum: a fixed image and a mobile spectator (museum) have to be aligned with a moving image and a fixed spectator (cinema). From what has been said about the cinematic apparatus, the combination of the moving image and the mobile spectator drastically redefines if not destroys the ‘cinema effect’, while for the contemplative-reflexive 57 See Michael Fried’s argument in Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 58 André Bazin, “Painting and Cinema” [1959], What Is Cinema? vol. 1, translated by Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press 1967), 164-69. 59 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography (1981) and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1977), translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010).

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spectator of the picture gallery, the moving image is a distraction and an irritation. Painting and sculpture are about the representation of movement, not its instantiation. The encounter of cinema and museum thus obliges even art history to rethink the place and role of the viewer in front of an artwork, as well as to examine the kinds of self-enclosure or ‘exposure’ afforded to the moving image not just by the physical display (the monitor or screen) but also by the manner in which the look of the image frames the viewer’s gaze in the gallery’s surroundings.60 The new configuration of cinema/museum also affects what Belting calls ‘the body’, i.e. the respective degrees of embodiment of the ‘spectator’ and the ‘visitor’. Compared to the cinema’s originally disembodied look, the gallery visitor’s default value is embodied perception, aware as we are of our surroundings and other bodies in physical space. Also part of ‘the body’ are the different relations of size, scale, and detail in the museum and on the cinema screen. A further disruption or transgression is implied by the entry of sound and sound spaces into the museum, traditionally a site of silence and stillness (in both senses of the word). In other words, there are some fundamental antinomies between cinema and museum that require serious consideration if one is to understand the migration of the moving image into the museum.

Dispositif Mark 4: Encounter and Event Yet the salient argument to make here is that these apparent incompatibilities (and the many contradictory relations that obtain between the respective dispositifs) are precisely among the theoretically most fruitful and in practice most productive factors about the fine arts and visual culture today, not only enabling but necessitating the new kinds of encounter alluded to, as moving image and museum enter into sustained and no doubt permanent contact and alliance with each other. For is it not the case that these starkly distinct dispositifs are themselves ‘on the move’ and in flux, each in its own way undergoing internal transformation, and for reasons that at first glance do not seem to be interconnected or mutually dependent? Take as one example the upright forward orientation, the prevalence of the wall, the rectangle cut out like a window: modern art, at least since the 1950s, has subverted or ignored this arrangement with artists like Jackson 60 One may recall the famous scene in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, where Scotty watches—in the sense of ‘spying on’—‘Carlotta’/Judy looking at—in the sense of ‘contemplating’—the painting of her ‘ancestor.’

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Pollock, Carl André, Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, and many others. In very different ways, these artists have made the floor, rather than the wall, the site of display, not least because it challenges the canonical model of bodily-perceptual orientation and thus creates a new ‘moment’ of art: a challenge only very gradually taken up by cinema. More drastic but also more banal (because so often commented upon) are the changes that the cinematic apparatus has undergone: television long ago subverted it, merely by substituting the small screen for the movie theater and the phosphoric glow for projection, provoking in turn different kinds of re-assertions of the power of the projected image, whether through Cinemascope (in the 1950s) or the Dolby surround-sound design (in the 1970s). Since then, screens have become both bigger and smaller, but above all, they have become more ‘mobile’: in their proliferation as monitors on every table top, in the home and at work, in their locations (such as urban screens, electronic noticeboards, airplanes, motorcars, or public transport) but also embedded in the handheld devices we carry on our bodies such as music players or mobile phones. This means that the opposition between ‘collective reception’ in ranked and regimented seating (cinema) and ‘individual absorption’ in a state of solitary contemplation (museum) is no longer valid, at least not in any absolute way, while the most common experience in museums, notably for the blockbuster shows that international museums habitually organize, the throng of massed visitors makes the solitary study of individual works a thing of the past or of another era, while more and more let their eyes be guided by portable ‘audio tours’. The black box and the white cube are thus, strictly speaking, no longer either an oppositional or a complementary pair: we are, as it were, in the ‘grey room’. Their similarities and differences come into play at another level of generality that exceeds both types of dispositifs, generating new sets of parameters and taxonomies. What, for instance, is the status of projection, now that the moving image is mostly digital, with the notion of light meaning something quite different? In what sense can we still speak of a light cone and ‘scopic vision’ (cinema) versus diffused light and ‘ambient vision’ (museum)? A cinephile may regard projection as the defining feature of cinema and logically conclude that without projection, ‘no more cinema’. Or one might decide that the litmus test, as it were, of ‘what is cinema’ lies with light and luminosity, achieved through transparency, rather than as a video overlay or digital compositing effect. In either case, one would have to seriously revisit familiar genealogies: traditionally, a (tenuous) line of continuity could be drawn from the light-sensitive silver salts of photography to the electrons hitting the cathode ray tube, and from the

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vertical scan lines of a television set to the pixel grid of digital image—in the sense that in each case, a surface is impacted by light, leaving the particular arrangement of traces or the pattern of particles that we call an image. At the same time, a radical break is posited between photographic index and digital code. Yet arguably, at least as fundamental a break occurred in the switch from luminosity through transparency (which still photography and cinema have in common) to luminosity through refraction, opacity, and saturation. In this respect, the ‘opacity’ of the digital pixel may be closer to pigment in painting than either is to photography, leading to the many—admittedly also deceiving—painterly metaphors used to describe or advertise computer-generated image-processing software. The skillfully staged ‘slippages’ between the media of photography and painting in the work of an artist like Jeff Wall are indicative of the stakes, as fundamental categories of the image are being challenged and recast, as a consequence of the digital image, even if not necessarily caused by it.61 Contrasting the dispositif of installation art with that of cinema on the basis of these precise but diverse parameters presents several further advantages: first of all, it de-emphasizes technological determinism and allows instead for very different technologies and materials to achieve similar effects and experiences. Second, it de-centers the “performing and perceiving” subject (Belting), thus redirecting our thinking toward the relations that exist in the realm of images: between humans and things, humans and plants, humans and machines, machines and machines—all considered as agents (the reverse side and complement of cinema’s anthropomorphism, admired by avant-garde filmmakers as photogénie or celebrated in the “science is fiction” films of Jean Painlevé and others). Perhaps most crucially, however, an installation—especially one involving the moving image—has a particular relation to time and temporality in the sense that many such installations introduce a structural non-alignment between their own temporality and that of the spectator’s time economy of the gallery visit, producing (as suggested above) typical effects of ‘subjectification’: the anxiety of missing the crucial moment, the potential conflict between curiosity and boredom when confronted with a video, signaling a duration ranging anywhere from three minutes to three hours. In this non-alignment, the encounter of viewer and installation acts as both a continuation and a critique of the cinematic apparatus, not only in the way that installations can deviate from the frontal orientation and 61 See, for instance, Sven Lütticken, “The Story of Art According to Jeff Wall” in Sven Lütticken, Secret Publicity: Essays on Contemporary Art (Rotterdam: nai010 publishers, 2005), 69-82.

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Renaissance perspective already discussed but also in the manner they subvert the temporal regime of both cinema (where I know in advance that I commit a substantial portion of my time, and where narrative maps the order of succession and closure) and the art gallery (where the amount of time I choose to spend in front of a painting or sculpture is within my own decision, unstructured, and not in any way pre-given by the work). The (video) installation, by contrast, suspends me: I wait for the unique moment of rupture, I attach myself to or fantasize para-narrative elements; I experience a configuration of time-space, which puts me in a different relation to self-perception and body-awareness—no longer the kairos or chronos of linear narrative but an un-pulsed time of ‘too much’ and ‘not enough’. Elements that appear to my eyes as contiguous in space may have to be read as successive in time, or vice versa: their succession has to be retroactively reconstructed as spatially distinct. In any case, there is no longer a ‘norm’ by which to measure the deviations, the extremes, or the excesses, while any sense of the work’s overall shape and extension necessarily escapes me, forcing a radical reconsideration of the relation between fragment and totality so crucial to Western aesthetics but also to cinema (‘montage’/editing), and challenging any notion of spatial capture or closure, even as the black box mimics the darkened movie theater. Yet in some ways, this anxiety of the ‘too much/not enough’ of installation art, turned into an aesthetic effect, is reminiscent of one of the panic discourses in early cinema, when movie theaters switched from short programs to full-length features, with doctors warning about eyestrain, physiological damage, and nervous disorders that might result from watching a continuous action on screen for more than a few minutes.

The Dispositif as Interface? The detour via the museum and installation art has, hopefully, offered some further scope for clarifying the situation cinema finds itself in, as one among several media dedicated to the moving image and identified with the effects of cinema. While the media archaeological perspective makes the distinctive features of each medium the very condition of their interrelatedness, the emphasis has shifted to parameters of temporality, duration, process, interface, contact, mobility, event, and encounter. Traditional definitions of the dispositif are entangled in ‘technology’ as determining factor and remain locked spatially into the (Euclidian) ‘geometry of representation’. Furthermore, such a dispositif keeps the viewing subject in a Foucauldian

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disciplinary libidinal double bind, even if the ‘subject effect’ of fetishism and disavowal is giving way to the ‘subject effect’ of power, knowledge, discourse. If besides being defined by ‘image’, medium’, and ‘body’ (Belting), cinema today should also be regarded as an ‘event and encounter, taking place’ (my definition, intended to both supersede and contain the idea of films as ‘works’ and ‘texts’), terms are needed that can establish a viable conjunction between the variables space/place, agency/subject, and time/ duration—the ‘here-me-now’ for short, as the set of variables (also known as ‘shifters’) that demarcates a medium’s effects, while remaining flexible enough to accommodate different technological configurations. In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich puts forward the term ‘interface’ to designate this conceptual space, i.e. the different contact zones, spatial relations, or visual surfaces that cinema audiences have in common with computer users and their interaction with the software, but also for the kinds of encounters between object, space, duration, and beholder that I have sketched as ‘taking place’ in the museum. Manovich sees cinema as an important set of references for the new media environment, what he calls ‘cinema as cultural interface’: despite frequent pronouncements that cinema is dead, it is actually on its own way to becoming a general purpose cultural interface, a set of techniques and tools which can be used to interact with any cultural data. […] ‘Cinema’ [here] includes mobile camera, representation of space, editing techniques, narrative conventions, activity of a spectator—in short, different elements of cinematic perception, language and reception. Their presence is not limited to the twentieth-century institution of fiction films, they can already be found in panoramas, magic lantern slides, theatre and other nineteenth-century cultural forms.62

Manovich’s eminently pragmatic approach tries to give some transhistorical validity to ‘interface’, linking it explicitly to media-archaeological concerns with pre-cinematic devices and displays. Yet where dispositif seemed overly restrictive, ‘interface’ looks unduly capacious. If, like myself, one travels in the opposite direction and comes to contemporary media practice from the study of cinema, one of the pressing questions is: under what circumstances or conditions (cultural-historical, technological-industrial, or 62 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 86. See also http:// www.manovich.net/TEXT/cinema-cultural.html. (last accessed on 4 February 2013).

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aesthetic-formal) is it conceivable that the moving image no longer requires as its main support the particular form of time/space/agency we know as ‘narrative’—perhaps the most culturally durable conjunction of these variables so far developed—while still managing to establish a coherent ‘world’, which is to say, turn an ‘event’ (a singular time/space occurrence) into an ‘encounter’ (addressing a spectator in his/her here-and-now)? Is a time/space continuum possible that is differently organized yet still accommodates the ‘body’ and gives the impression of ‘virtual presence’? What forms of the index (material link, pointer, meta-data) or iconicity (mimesis, resemblance) are available for combinations of sounds and images to credibly mark a ‘here’ and ‘now’, while also relating them to a ‘me’? In other words, whatever supersedes either dispositif or interface should capture this ‘here-now-me’ as the coordinates that ground and stabilize the cinematic experience—even as these allow for the radical disorientation and destabilizations that typify the art works of modernity. Whether I watch a Hollywood blockbuster on my iPod or see a mere five minutes of Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho in a gallery, both can be called a ‘cinematic’ encounter and event, not because of questions of LCD screen vs. projection, digital vs. photographic image, black box vs. white cube, film vs. video, optical vs. haptic, fragment vs. totality; rather, because in each case, I can specify that the relation of a ‘here’, a ‘now’, and a ‘me’ constituted a consistent spatio-temporal world whose ‘rules’ I understand and whose effects I experience as ‘presence’, under conditions of assent that I can call ‘belief’ (which, of course, includes the ‘suspension of disbelief’ as well as the ‘as-if’ belief of the fictional contract). What is also clear, however, is that with such an emphasis on experience, event, encounter, I am no longer in the realm of epistemological questions to put to cinema. Rather, I am on the road to ‘(re-)ontologizing’ cinema: conceiving it not as a way of knowing the world or seeking to attribute to it a specific meaning (or indeed any meaning as such) but instead, living cinema as a particular way of being-in-the-world and participating in its unfolding, its becoming present: with all the affects, cognitive dissonances, or bodily perceptual states that this might entail. If this sounds unexpectedly Deleuzian, I feel bound to point out that such an idea of cinema actually rests as much on media-archaeological foundations as it does on philosophy, and that it has its own genealogy and pedigree in early and pre-cinematic practice. Of course, in one sense, I am re-ontologizing the cinematic dispositif; I would still have to specify how moving images and sounds are generated, stored, archived, reproduced, socially mediated, technically produced, and commercially circulated before I can abstract from these conditions in order to focus on the kinds of

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energy (if we see affects, perceptions, cognitive processes as forms of energy) that are being distributed—dispersed and gathered—through cinema. However, instead of importuning Deleuze, suppose one were to go back once more to the laterna magica of Athanasius Kircher as the agreed ancestor of cinematic projection. Yet instead of tracing its mode of representation via Renaissance perspective to the rigid geometry of the cinematic apparatus, where do we end up if we were to explore an alternate route? What if, from the laterna magica, one were to move to the uses made of it by Étienne-Gaspard Robert (or Robertson)? What if his phantasmagoria was recognized as the most popular but also conceptually most challenging precursor of cinema? We might then find ourselves in a position to argue that a direct line runs from phantasmagoria to Pepper’s Ghost and other spectral productions of presence in the nineteenth century to certain genres of cinema, mainly those featuring special effects, with horror and fantasy, but not only: the lineage of phantasmagoria also initiates a form of cinema that does not project itself as a window on the world nor requires fixed boundaries of space like a frame. Rather, it functions as an ambient form of spectacle and event, where no clear spatial divisions between inside and outside pertain, and where there are strong indices of presence, while its temporality reaches into past and future (calling up the dead, soothsaying, and predicting events yet to come), while the senses are anchored in physical sensations and the body is situated in a ‘here and now’. As such, phantasmagoria would be the dispositif that not only has given rise to one of the most fruitful-fateful philosophical notions of German Idealism—G.W. Hegel’s ‘night of the world’ as the birth of the subject63—but also closely approximates the genealogical ancestor of what I described as installation art above, one that does not depend on the frame or even on the upright forward orientation; one that furthermore takes ‘sound’ into account; but also the one whose epistemological effects are, as it were, grounded in an aesthetics of appearance as presence rather than the other way round. However, the modification I am proposing has not one but two nodes in the nineteenth century: besides that of the phantasmagoria, as it comes down to us via Robertson’s adaptation of the magic lantern, the same 63 G.W. Hegel: “This is the night, the inner of nature that exists here—pure self—in phantasmagorical presentations it is night on all sides; here a bloody head suddenly surges forward, there another white form abruptly appears, before vanishing again. One catches sight of this night when looking into the eye of man-into a night that turns dreadful; it is the night of the world that presents itself here.” (Jenaer Realphilosophie, 1805-6). It is a passage often cited by Slavoj Žižek, notably in The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso 1999), 67.

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cinematic dispositif also includes the work of Marey, notably insofar as he pioneered the non-human—dare I say ‘spectral’—visualization of data, both photographing and graphing statistical (mathematical, numeric), optical (visible to the machine eye but too fast or too slow for the human eye) as well as dynamic phenomena (emanating from organisms and sentient beings). This is why Marey remains a key reference point for the project of a media archaeology of cinema. Although his efforts, experiments, and ambitions would normally be called ‘epistemological’ (aimed at producing new knowledge about the world), considered from the standpoint of making all emanations of life manifest, Marey’s thinking also introduces a new taxonomy of things, of what exists and what does not, of what is visible and what is not, and of what is actual and what is virtual—linking him, together with Bergson, to Gilles Deleuze and to an ontological theory of cinema.

Vanishing Points: Infinity versus Ubiquity My proposition has been that, in order to understand what the episteme 1900 and the episteme 2000 have in common, we need to overcome the division between photographic and post-photographic cinema and see it not as a break but as an occasion for revising our previous notion of ‘what is cinema’. If for some thirty or forty years, the answer to ‘what is cinema’ has involved some version of the ‘cinematic apparatus’, then the task inter alia is to redefine this central concept without abandoning it. This is what my essay has attempted to do: first I reviewed the canonical definition, as it has been specified around the particular geometry of representation that Jean-Louis Baudry was the first to identify with the parable of Plato’s cave, with Renaissance perspective, and with the Freudian psychic apparatus. Following references to the various critiques of this formation, I proposed and discussed several other possible articulations of this dispositif whose properties were more institutional than technological, more time-based than geometrical, more anthropological than ideological, and more ontological than epistemological. Starting out from early cinema, making a detour via installation art and the museum, and touching briefly on digital media and their interfaces, I end up by returning to pre-cinema: the double and possibly improbable pedigree of Robertson’s phantasmagoria joined to Marey’s chronophotography. The trajectory has provided me with a set of parameters and priorities that in my opinion need to inform our definition of cinema for the twenty-first century, for which notions of space, time, and agency (the ‘here-now-me’) as well as of ‘belief’, ‘appearance’, and ‘presence’

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play as great a role as the semiotics of absence and presence, the dynamics of voyeurism and disavowal, or the notion of ‘vision-knowledge-power’ (voir, savoir, pouvoir). This ‘perspective correction’64 has led me to posit a further proposition, or rather to formulate a challenge, namely that we may have to supplement our traditional epistemological interest in cinema (around ‘realism’, the subject-object split, questions of ideology, illusionism, power) with a tentatively ontological view (as well as a renewed aesthetic investigation) of cinema—here called, perhaps somewhat imprecisely, ‘cinema as event and encounter, taking place’. Another way of highlighting the difference of emphasis would be to suggest that whereas our Renaissance ocular-centric orientation has infinity as its vanishing point (the all-seeing God of the Dollar Bill, or of Bishop Berkeley’s esse est percipi: to be is to be seen) and the singular source as its point of view, the orientation I am trying to identify has as its salient (spatial) feature ubiquity rather than infinity. Ubiquity can be defined as the felt presence of pure space whose temporality is neither chronos nor kairos but an ‘indefinite’, reversible time, and whose ocular counterpart would not be surveillance as sight, knowledge, or power, but surveillance as the unlocalizable experience of sight without an eye and as the human-machine equivalent of Nicolas de Cusa’s God: ‘to be at the centre of the world and yet at every point of its circumference’— i.e. the paradox of an un-locatable situatedness. Such ubiquity, in other words, produces its own forms of embodiment and agency in response to unrepresentability and to the unlocalizable sense of presence. That way lies paranoia as the new normal of the control society, but ubiquity also lends imagined vision and sight to non-sentient objects, to machines, organisms, or ‘things’, as these enter the realm of the visible in seemingly contradictory forms: as effigies (imprints, moulds, installations, photographs) and as apparitions (ghosts, revenants, zombies, and other post-mortem creatures). Together, the effigy (as index) and the apparition (as presence) constitute elements of a new modality of evidence and authenticity, sometimes called ‘the virtual’ but which may come to be seen as constitutive for all cinema. The conclusion I would draw, then, is that such an idea of cinema means accepting not only the groundless ground of cinematic ‘representation’ in the way that Foucault, for instance, deconstructed the Renaissance painterly dispositif in Velásquez’ Las Meninas. It would require a further step of ‘renegotiating’ belief, appearance, and presence in the full knowledge that 64 I borrow the phrase ‘perspective correction’ from Rod Stoneman, “Perspective Correction: Early Film to the Avant-Garde”, Afterimage 8/9 (Spring 1981): 50-63.

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such a ‘belief in cinema’ inherits and accommodates both the hopes and the skepticism of the epistemological view rather than denying, disavowing, or pretending to transcend it. A cinema grounded in ‘belief’ and ‘presence’ is contradictory and counterintuitive, but it would see time, space, and agency as the (necessary) relational terms for any form of cinema, whose impure and mixed, mechanical and spiritual, material and mental, semiotic and mimetic ‘nature’ alienates us from our bodies and senses, takes us away from the ‘here-and-now’—in the very act of constituting possibly their most historically potent and in all likelihood most permanent manifestations.

II The Challenge of Sound

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Going ‘Live’ Body and Voice in Some Early German Sound Films

A System of Double Address While writing a book on Weimar cinema, I came across a number of early sound films, which seemed to me to strikingly confirm a more general thesis regarding silent German cinema of the early 1920s.1 The thesis claimed that many of the so-called ‘expressionist films’ become more comprehensible if one assumed that they were intended to be read by their contemporary audiences as both ‘serious’ and ‘tongue-in-cheek’. They could be said to be staging a kind of double address towards their public. At once naive and calculating, cynical and subversive, films like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Nosferatu, The Golem, and The Student of Prague are very sophisticated at the level of style, and—contrary to the nostalgic, historically remote aura with which they generally surround themselves—they are rightly famous for their extremely bold experiments in film technique and special effects. From the point of view of media history and cultural politics, such a system of double address gives a clue to the special social pressures that cinema was exposed to in Germany after the war: it needed to legitimate itself as the Seventh Art among middle-class audiences while not wishing to lose touch either with a mass public or with the advanced audio-visual technologies that so fascinated this public. The films, I argued, wanted to reach two kinds of audiences: a sophisticated international (high-culture) audience, which frequented the cinema in the expectation of experiencing art and being in touch with the avant-garde, and a national audience that preferred popular films with stars, spectacle, special effects, and catchy titles. With this move, I also wanted to challenge the division usually made in the study of German cinema between ‘Expressionism’ and ‘Realism’ (Die Neue Sachlichkeit). Likewise, I felt the time had come to re-align the distinctions between the Gothic-Romantic heritage of the ‘Haunted Screen’ and the traditions of popular music and variety, usually summarized as Viennese operetta kitsch, which—a fact often forgotten—had its admirers

1

Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After (London/New York: Routledge, 2000).

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even among intellectuals.2 My aim was to show that similar strategies of narrational mise-en-abyme and the suspension of referentiality were also present in key examples of both art cinema and popular mainstream cinema, irrespective of genres. Fritz Lang’s Dr Mabuse, Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry, and Reinhold Schünzel’s Hallo Caesar are all remarkable for the degree to which they reference cinema itself, providing a kind of ironic meta-commentary and pursuing related strategies of self-consciously manipulating and mirroring their fictional world. I called this system of double address ‘transparent duplicity’, and I related it to several different aspects of Weimar culture in the 1920s and early 1930s.3 Since I focused on narration, point of view, visuality, and the look, I did not give that much attention to sound, which is why in this chapter, I want to consider some of the early German sound films in the light of my broader concerns with image and diegesis, representation and referentiality during a period of filmmaking marked by technological and political change. Scholars have always been aware of the fact that the sound films of the early 1930s all over Europe consistently utilize so-called anti-illusionist devices to draw attention to the new technology of sound. This ‘experimental’ era was said to have come to a close a few years after the introduction of sound, once synchronization had been ‘mastered’. Since 1936, the new system, i.e. the classical paradigm of (Hollywood-style) continuity editing, was deemed to have been fully implemented: the soundtrack subordinated itself to the image, either being synched with what we see, or (in the case of music) becoming the proverbial ‘unheard melody’. While this was the rule in the talkies made by Ufa, Terra, or Tobis 4 German cinema also knew a transitional or ‘experimental’ period, with respect to sound which lasted until 1933. One thinks of films like Pabst’s The Threepenny Opera and Kameradschaft, Slatan Dudow/Bert Brecht/Hans Eisler’s Kuhle Wampe, or Lang’s M and The Testament of Dr Mabuse as prominent examples of montage experiments. Their strikingly anti-realistic sound bridges and unsettling sound-image counterpoints draw attention to the ‘intrusive’ but also autonomous function of sound. Elsewhere in Europe, one could cite René Clair’s Sous le toits de Paris and Alfred Hitchcock’s 2 Rudolf Arnheim was known for his detestation of operetta films: ‘Tauberton und Studio,’ Die Weltbühne 7 (11 February 1930), 246-248. 3 Peter Sloterdijk has diagnosed the cultural symptoms of ‘cynical reason’ in Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (Frankfurt/M: Surhrkamp, 1983), two volumes. 4 The notion of unheard melody is borrowed from Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

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Blackmail as influential early examples of this practice.5 In this respect, Orson Welles’s famous sound bridges in Citizen Kane actually look back to the early 1930s rather than forward to the 1940s and 50s. The film’s lack of success at the time of its original release in 1941 shows how much such a foregrounding treatment of sound had fallen out of favor in the industry—and not only in Hollywood, if one thinks of the illusionist use of sound effects, voice-over commentary, and music in the documentary and feature films of the late 1930s and 1940s in Germany. Yet what I discovered was that Lang’s typical mise-en-abyme or Pabst’s ‘Brechtian’ alienation effects found their equivalents also among the popular movie genres, mostly in the musicals and comedies that greatly helped the sound film win general acceptability and popularity. Typical of a certain vein of self-referentiality in German films of the 1930s are the comedies directed by Rolf Thiele (Die Drei von der Tankstelle), Ludwig Berger (Ich bei Tag und Du bei Nacht), Paul Martin (Ein blonder Traum and Glückskinder), or the films directed by Hanns Schwarz, Hans Steinhoff, and Geza von Bolvary, the latter three directors who were to be loyal servants of the Nazi regime and are thus unlikely candidates for avantgarde or ‘Brechtian’ techniques. My main examples, however, are from a relatively forgotten German film of 1931, Das Lied einer Nacht (Tell me Tonight).

Das Lied einer Nacht: Modernism versus Modernization Das Lied einer Nacht is a multi-language UFA production directed by Anatol Litvak and starring the then well-known Polish tenor Jan Kiepura in the role of the world-famous Enrico Ferraro, an obvious allusion to Enrico Caruso. Tired of his fame and the endless tours it entails, Ferraro switches trains in Vienna and travels to Zern in Switzerland instead, desiring nothing more than to be incognito, an ordinary man among ordinary people. A chance acquaintance with a confidence man allows him to also switch identities. They do a deal, and Ferraro ends up being his own secretary, while the impostor is feted by the town’s mayor as the great star, constantly urged to give a concert, not least to promote the city of Zern as a tourist resort. The mayor’s daughter falls in love with the famous singer but discovers her mistake just in time, while the real Enrico only barely escapes arrest as an 5 See Jean-Paul Goergen on René Clair, ‘Lebenswahrheit im Musikfilm,’ in Malte Hagener and Jan Hans (eds.), Als die Filme singen lernten (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1999), 72-85 and Charles Barr, ‘Hitchcock’s two versionen of Blackmail,’ in Sight and Sound January 1989.

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internationally notorious bigamist and confidence trickster, wanted by the police after a tip-off. He rescues himself thanks to an impromtu performance of an aria in the courtroom, while his double is led away in handcuffs. The story is thus a standard operetta plot in the genre of the pastoral, where a king decides to travel incognito in order for the shepherd’s daughter to fall in love with him. The defamiliarizing element is that these moments of fairy-tale romance are transposed into the modernity of motorcars, express trains, health spas, and recording stars: a move which in turn is the basis for the film’s self-reference, where it can generously help itself to the clichés while remaining assured of the audience’s collusion, having been invited in on the joke. The auto-reflexive gestus, usually considered a sign of the literary avant-garde and artistic modernism, here shows itself at home among popular stereotypes and frankly commercial intentions. Although this feature of the products of mass culture is not new nor has it remained unremarked, it nevertheless helps to resituate the media-technological aspects of ‘vulgar’ or ‘vernacular’ modernism. Insofar as impulses of allusion and irony have often signalled a major change from one dominant medium to another, these strategies are also part of ‘modernization’. Because such pleasurable playfulness prepares a media technology for the marketplace and for mass consumption, such technological-industrial modernization has, at least in the first half of the twentieth century, often been in a notable tension with avant-garde and high-art modernism. To understand this relation between modernism and modernization around technical media, we need to look closely at the textual-intertextual relations, for the efficiency of the overall ‘commercial’ strategy depends to some extent on the professional skills and—dare I say—even the formal subtlety of the aesthetic means thereby deployed. As an example, one could take the opening scene of Das Lied einer Nacht. The film starts with ‘Heute Nacht oder nie’—the hit song that launches the film—being announced in front of two giant microphones to an invisible radio audience before we hear it coming from different domestic radio-sets. Each scene is distinguished from the next by a special mise-enscène of the act of listening: at first in the consulting room of a dentist, then in the bourgeois salon of an elderly gentleman living alone, and finally in the open-plan office full of female typists of a modern firm. To indicate that the film viewer enjoys an advantage over the radio listener, the mise-en-scène underlines the (sometimes comic) consequences of the inevitable separation of eye and ear when listening to the radio. Thus, both the announcer and the singer are merely the shadows of their own vocal presence. This opening sequence ends with one of the secretaries absentmindedly typing the title

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of the song on her typewriter, as if she were taking dictation. This montage overture is so separate from the subsequent plot that at first glance it seems to have little to do with the rest of the film. Nevertheless it is tightly woven into the ideological and media-technological fabric of the film. As Brian Currid suggests, the grammar of this sequence corresponds to the standard f ilmic syntax of representing the technology of radio. The synchronous relation between the place of emission and the places of reception are here depicted diachronically through superimpositions: from the recording studio to the transmitter, and from there to the domestic aerial, and finally inside several living rooms and offices. […] The sequence shows how radio and above all popular music can penetrate different domestic spheres and orchestrate diverse scenes of everyday life. The shots of this sequence, where the camera seems to be led by the song, appears like a travel experience through the spaces of radio: in its journey from the studio to the office the song transforms the more or less private worlds of the listeners’ experience into public displays of commodity fetishism.6

However, this opening scene can be read in several ways. Certainly, it is above all a way of celebrating radio, both as a technology and an institution, showing us how it penetrates all sites and aspects of social life, from work to leisure, from the domestic to the public. Mechanized sound knows no boundaries and no classes; it does not even differentiate between human and animal. We can also regard the scene as a metaphor for the infectiousness and popularity of hit songs—or as they are known in German, Schlager (pop songs). The hit ‘Heute Nacht oder Nie’ is sung by Feraro, and we see how it carries people along and holds everyone in thrall. The fact that in the first shot, we see two microphones in close-up filling the screen while the announcer and then the singer-star himself are only perceptible as shadows furthermore points to a process. By showing the character become a shadow before even this shadow fades into the ether, the scene de-materializes the body in favor of the voice. The technology of sound reproduction manifests itself as an exchange: at stake is the place of the human vocal organ within the sound reproduction systems and the value—here defined erotically as well as economically—of his/her body, which already gives the plot an allegorical dimension of meaning. Note also 6 Brian Currid, ‘Das Lied einer Nacht. Filmschlager als Organe der Erfahrung,’ in Hagener and Hans (eds.), Als die Filme singen lernten (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1999), 55-56.

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a slippage of names: while Jan Kiepura, the star in the film and of the film, has a fictitious name, Ferraro, the composer of the theme song is named by his ‘real’ name: Mischa Spolianski, one of the top musicians of the Weimar musical and cabaret scene. The combination of real and fictitious names in one diegetic (sound) space draws attention to an issue in authorship and enunciative authority, which the film subsequently amply thematizes in its play of imitation, simulation, and authenticity around Kiepura’s star image and stage presence. I think the opening scene also lends itself to yet another interpretation: it gives us the story of a particular kind of ‘failure’. We can see how the disembodied sound is looking for an image to ‘land on’, to ‘stick to’. Failing to do so in the representational space or the diegesis, it achieves ‘fixing’ only in the form of a graphic sign—the song title in capital letters on the typewriter of one of the girls in the office typing pool. The film stages this failure via a number of possible but incongruous sound-image synchronizations and comic ‘mis-matches’ of voice and body—this time not that of the singer and song but of the song and the listener. These comic double-takes extend from the simple visual pun, where the anticipated close up of the tenor’s face turns out instead to be the open mouth of a patient at the dentist’s office, to a kind of ‘inner speech’ in-joke, making the dog in front of the radiogram immediately recognizable as the literalization of the famous trademark of the Deutsche Gramophone and of HMV (His Master’s Voice). It also includes the aural pun of the businessman listening with rapt concentration to the song on the radio while a burglar can comfortably rob him of his valuables, even dropping something without being heard or disturbed. The scene of the typing pool, finally, literalizes the seriality of the song as a popular hit and of repetition as its typical mode of reception, bringing the quest of the song to finally ‘register’ to its happy ending. Here, mobility and the spatio-temporal indeterminacy of sound, compared to the fixity of the image, are used as a comic resource, teaching the spectator to be on guard and distrust any matching or synchronization of sound and image. This inculcation of distrust is portrayed not as a critical stance (in the sense of Brechtian distanciation), but as a pleasurable viewing position: it flatters our cynicism and suspicious tendencies, taking us in, by a conspiratorial wink and nudge. The strategy of complicity makes evident one of the connections that the opening scene has in relation to the rest of the film, because it is this ‘I know that you know that I know’ gesture that becomes the basis of the plot intrigue for this story of confidence-men and impostors, of stars travelling incognito, keeping doubles and understudies, of mistaken identities and duplicitous discoveries in the strip-tease game of love.

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Horror Vacui or Ontological Vertigo? The ghosting of the singer in the opening scene is repeated, but also reversed, in a much more direct and yet no less multi-layered scene in which the young woman is serenaded by her lover. She is in her bedroom on the first floor, while outside in the garden, Enrico Ferraro—still impersonated by the charming confidence man—sings ‘Heute Nacht oder nie’. He only mimes or lip synchs the song, for directly across from him, protected by the shadow of the wall, stands the real Enrico who lends his double a voice. Note how the film here borrows the romantic-tragic premise of Cyrano de Bergerac and turns it into a comic-burlesque device. The device, however, is mirrored: the young woman, too, practices deception as a necessary condition of getting at the truth by turning the coatstand into her own simulacrum in order then to tiptoe downstairs, hoping to see her suitor for real. It is only then that she discovers how she has been duped, at the same time as the two men realize that they have been duped. It is an uncanny moment of ghosting, which repeats but also reverses the ghosting of the singer in the opening scene. One could argue that Das Lied einer Nacht, too, is an example of what I called ‘transparent duplicity’—yet this time not in the sense I define it above, as a function of culturally mediated dual audience-address and the respective positions of knowledge these imply, but rather as the staging of two technologically different but economically compatible dispositifs of recording and reproduction. Before exploring this in more detail, it may be useful to point out that this scene also relativizes another argument often made about German cinema of the early 1930s, according to which sound-image counterpoints have been read as metaphors for the political instability of the late Weimar years. This is said to apply above all to the early sound films of Fritz Lang, notably M and The Testament of Dr Mabuse.7 In the latter, one might point to the scene where Kent and Kitty, the main protagonists, decide to confront the master criminal in his inner sanctum. It has often been seen as Lang’s prescient comment on the rising power of radio as an instrument of mass-propaganda under Goebbels, and the ubiquity of totalitarian power when backed up by advanced technologies. What strikes one in Lang’s mise-en-scene is the uncanny undeadness of this representation of mechanized sound: not only do the gun-shot ‘wounds’ leave holes in the cardboard cut-out and the loudspeaker without being able to destroy the voice, becoming the seemingly ineradicable trace of vampiric presence. The 7

See, for instance, Tony Kaes, M (London: BFI Classics, 2000).

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scene becomes truly nightmarish when the two prisoners notice a ticking sound without being able to locate its source. They tear up the floorboards, they peel off the wallpaper and they chip away at a bricked-up door: all to no avail. They are trapped as much by the terrible sound of the time bomb as they are by the locked doors and non-existent windows.8 In effect, the film deconstructs its own point of reference by folding inward the position of the spectator, an act of suspended enunciation that also—in the mode of comedy—applies to Das Lied einer Nacht. The transparent duplicity of the scene of the nightly serenade lies more in our sudden awareness of the constitutive instability of image and voice in relation to each other, as a kind of ontological vertigo brought about by the coming of sound. On the one hand, Das Lied einer Nacht mirrors the theme of the confidence man and the recording star across the topos of the relation between master and slave, several times inverted. On the other hand, the master-slave dialectic at the plot level is itself used as a metaphor to instantiate the unstable and reversible hierarchy between sound and image. It reminds us of the fact that there was nothing ‘natural’ about sound film when it first appeared, and that a certain learning process may have been necessary to initiate audiences not only into the institutionalization of sound cinema but to accustom them to the regime of the classical narrative, with its peculiar hierarchy that treats sound as the subservient element in the sound-image relationship. Thus the scenes from Das Lied einer Nacht just discussed allow us to identify three closely related parameters relevant for this historical dynamic, which extends the diegetic ontological question to the aesthetictechnological (and institutional) dispositif on which it relies. First of all, what seems to have been at stake was the issue of genre: while sound-image discrepancy can be accommodated in comedy and musical, it is more difficult to naturalize within the dramatic genres, where one tends to think of sound pictures seeking a perfect match between sound and image. Secondly, this match connects a sound to a located and localizable source in visual space: a relation modelled in analogy with the human voice, emanating from a body as its source. Thirdly, it is necessary to establish this relation in order to align agency and narrative drive with a central protagonist.

8 This scene from Lang’s The Testament of Dr Mabuse might have inspired Francis Ford Coppola in the famous closing scene of The Conversation, when Gene Hackman systematically and futilely demolishes his room in order to find the surveillance and bugging device he knows must be there and whose position we gradually realize we ourselves occupy.

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The reason this convergence of body and voice is so strongly connected to our notions of agency are probably best defined negatively as a sort of aural horror vacui. It is from psychoanalysis that we learn how severely the split between body and voice is experienced as a source of almost primordial anxiety, reaching far back into human psychogenesis. No wonder, therefore, that classical cinema splits body from voice only in order to eventually unite them again, thereby gratifying the audience with a kind of sonorous bodily plenitude associated with the early stages of development and the mother-child dyad.9 Analogous to the cinematic apparatus, the acoustic mirror is said to work as a psychic dispositif, placing the subject in the technologically engineered but ideologically assured ‘primary identification’ of miscognition as the first condition of his/her subjectivity, under the law of desire.

Radio and Cinema Besides the self-reflexive ‘vernacular’ modernism and the ontological confusion between image and sound, another issue is involved in the ‘transparent duplicity’ of early sound films. The emphasis put on radio in Das Lied einer Nacht reminds us that an audience in the late 1920s would have been well acquainted with very different representations of sound in cinema, and that most of this sound would have been disembodied sound, whether conveyed through an orchestra, a piano player, or other sources located in the audience space and not in the screen space. Similarly, the radio or gramophone in the home often makes its appearance in these early sound films as a way of staging a disjunction between body and sound. There is, for instance, a scene in Einbrecher (Burglars), a film directed by Hanns Schwarz with Lilian Harvey and Willy Fritsch, in which Harvey is doing her morning exercises, and again, it is a comic multiple ‘matching’ of sound (music, voice, sound effects) and body language that draws our attention to the distinctness of body and voice while also letting us in on the anthropomorphic-mimetic impulse that classical cinema will seek to repress. Einbrecher foregrounds the ‘mickey-mousing’ of the music 9 Mary Ann Doane, ‘Body and Voice’, in Yale French Studies no. 60 (1983), and Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). On the issue of body and voice in the sound film in general, see also Michel Chion, Audio-Vision (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) and James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

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and the human body, making Harvey’s gestures at once mechanical and animated, while confusingly-comically synchronizing the voice of the radio-announcer with that of the man-servant making his entry at the door. It was not so much with regards to the human voice in the ‘talkies’ but around the sound effects and pure sonic events of early sound pictures that the issue of realism-illusionism was debated most fiercely. One might think of the analogy with the first Lumière films, where the moment of astonishment was not so much the fact that human beings moved, inflected with intentionality and direction, but that viewers could see the leaves move or smoke curl from a bale of hay. For the first time, in the all-singing, all-talking pictures such as Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer or The Singing Fool, all kinds of noises are suddenly present: what smoke and the leaves were for early cinema were the random noise and sound effects for the movies. In other words, it was the accidental and even excessive or unlocatable sound that was seen as the mark of the indexical trace and of the historical-material residue that so enchanted Kracauer and Benjamin and that more properly might deserve the Brechtian epithet of the defamiliarized representation. Treating the sound-image combinations in early sound films such as Das Lied einer Nacht across the paradigm of illusionist plenitude and its ruptures thus runs the danger of applying a conception dating from a later period. It might make one miss the particular logic that manifests itself in these practices, which are perhaps better grasped if one places oneself in the perspective of late silent film. There, it was not so much a question of illusionism versus anti-illusionism but of the different kinds of inscription that sound might achieve in the image. How, for instance, was the narrative dealing with the tension between represented sound (the practice of silent cinema, which is full of sound cues in the image) and recorded sound (where sound no longer needs a visual equivalent)?10 Applied to the opening of Das Lied einer Nacht, the problem poses itself in yet another form, namely as the enactment of a questionable inscription rather than a matter of representing sound: in this case, it is not the sound that is looking to inscribe itself in the image but the image that wants to locate itself within the new sound space, or rather, that needs to enter into and combine with the traditional sound space of radio. The image is looking for an ‘anchor’ and ‘embodiment’, and in the move from technology to animal and from human to machine, what we are witnessing is its comic failure to do so in a permanent fashion. Or rather, the answer the film gives to 10 See Michael Wedel, Der deutsche Musikfilm. Munich: text + kritik, 2007, on sound systems.

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the problem of inscription versus performance is that with the coming of sound, the image is no longer that secure, except when supplemented. This supplement is the graphic technology of the typewriter, that quintessential instrument of inscription and trace but also of transcription and encoding rather than of ‘performance’ or ‘representation’. This, of course, chimes with what we know about early sound recording: it was the uninterrupted and un-editable soundtrack to which the image had to bend, had to be cut and edited. It was recorded sound that determined the closure of a scene, as indeed it does here, where the song is performed in its entirety while the image tries to accommodate itself to the song’s extension and presence. ‘Performance’, inscription, and narrative diegetization could be seen as the three distinct steps by which these early sound films—popular and successful mainly thanks to these musicals and comedies—tried to come to terms with the peculiar materiality of sound. Sophistication in the plot intrigues registers as an instability in the sound-image relation, which together characterize this first period and constitute the norm—before these relations were more rigidly modelled around the body, suppressing the traces of the mechanical in the act of inscription in favor of an illusion of an originary plenitude of body and voice. It is therefore in the transitional period that we can observe the unaccommodated residue or supplement of such transformations. Before this residue is suppressed in classical film, the body, as in Das Lied einer Nacht, appears as an appendage, a mere by-product, at once too fallible and in excess when compared to the technical processes that the new recording and reproducing media have placed center stage. That this process can have both comic and uncanny, horror-like effects is proven by the examples so far given. In the 1930s, the comic moment often prevails, and its ambivalences are narrativized accordingly, as in the scene from Das Lied einer Nacht where Magda Schneider eventually stands face to face with Jan Kiepuras while her ‘body’ is still listening at the upstairs window and Kiepura’s ‘voice’ still emanates from the open mouth of the fake Ferraro. In an earlier scene, the superfluity of the body and the voice within the new dispositif are demonstrated in an even more drastic manner. The mayor of Zern is paying a visit to his illustrious guest, trying to persuade him to perform at a public concert. Meanwhile, unaware that his double is entertaining the local dignitary, the real Ferraro can be heard rehearsing upstairs which in turn attracts the attention of the mayor’s daughter, who wants to know where the voice comes from. Not so much as missing a beat, the fake Ferraro explains the puzzle by saying that his secretary must be playing one of his records upstairs. The young woman promptly goes

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upstairs and asks the ‘secretary’, i.e. the real Ferraro to once more play the record. Baffled at first, but picking up the cue, he goes next door, where he starts to sing, but quickly starts to imitate the sound of a gramophone needle stuck in an imaginary groove, in order to escape the dilemma of having to own up to the deception. Here Jan Kiepura’s body becomes the servant of his voice, while the voice is servant to his gramophone record: His Master’s Voice indeed. Thematizing the gramophone record while simultaneously devaluing it in the context of a piece of deception refers us to the historical context of the ‘introduction’ of sound in cinema. It is easily forgotten that the emerging talking picture confronted an already constituted media world on the side of the sound thanks to radio and the quickly expanding gramophone industry. But also on the side of the image, with a highly developed culture of ‘silent cinema’ which by the mid-1920s had successfully repressed the knowledge that right from the start (and throughout the preceding decade), the moving image had been accompanied by—and presented with—sound. From the largely negative estimation given to the talking picture in film-aesthetic and film-critical circles, we can conclude that not only were massive ideological interests at stake in resisting sound but that the promoters of the ‘image’ very soon realized that they were in some sense the losers. It is also known that in the film industry, a battle began between two kinds of professionals, the sound engineers from the radio and gramophone industry and the cinematographers from the movie business. There, however, it was the image makers who won the day, ‘subduing’ the unruliness of sound, certainly until the 1950s, when composers like Bernard Hermann gave back to sound and music a life of their own.11 It would be worthwhile investigating more closely which types of stories permit most readily the sound to ‘enter’ into the image or to make a space for the image ‘inside’ the sound.12 In the case of Das Lied einer Nacht, it is the romantic or musical comedy, or as already mentioned, the return to the genre of the pastoral: a prince perambulates incognito to seduce beautiful shepherdess daughter. But this ‘prince’ is in a double disguise, for behind 11 By the 1980s, this ‘emancipation’ of sound enabled a Walter Murch or John Williams to reverse the relation between sound and image altogether by developing a concept of sound design. Their way to prioritize sound over image inspired directors like Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and Seven Spielberg to radically rethink the image track. See Gian-Luca Sergi, The Dolby era: Film sound in contemporary Hollywood (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 12 See Rick Altman, ‘The Silence of the Silents,’ in The Musical Quarterly vol. 80, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 648-718.

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the conventional operetta story in which Enrico Ferraro gets to marry the mayor’s daughter, another ‘marriage’ is being concluded. It is that of sound (after maintaining its independence) finally wedding the image, and of the gramophone industry consummating its alliance with the film industry. But this mating dance of technologies and industries also raises the question of how the sound picture inserted itself into the marketplace and seduce a public of already constituted media consumers? Das Lied einer Nacht was above all a star vehicle for Jan Kiepura—his second film as a singer-star (the first one was Die singende Stadt, made in 1931 and directed by Carmine Gallone). More were to follow, often with ‘Lied’ in the title, such as Ein Lied für Dich (1933, directed by Joe May). The formula required a plot (i.e. a narration/diegetization) which split the signifier ‘Jan Kiepura’ into two: into the actor-performer and the gramophone star. The conventionally pastoral theme is updated to include luxury trains, gas stations, and open-top automobiles, all of which can unproblematically be aligned with the tourist signifier ‘Switzerland’. The actual ‘modernizing’ twist, however, is that the singer’s body is separated from his voice without reviving any originary anxiety, instead kindling consumerist desires. This is achieved by the mirroring of the split, with the body impersonated by a confidence man on the run from the police while the voice is ‘impersonated’ by a gramophone recording. The purpose is, as indicated, less to secure the happy ending for the couple and instead to unite body and voice in the new (synthetic) identity of the performer and star, as Kiepura proves his ‘real’ identity at a courtroom hearing by singing ‘live’ to the jury, which is to say, the recording is once more synchronized with his own body rather than lip-synched and playbacked by the con man. This double turn ironically comments on another practice in the early years of sound, when the film industry did indeed borrow a voice in order to lend it to a star. One of the earliest German sound films featured the very popular Harry Liedtke who, despite his name, had no singing voice, which was lent to him by the famous tenor Richard Tauber, Germany’s Pavarotti at the time. However, the playback in Ich küsse Ihre Hand Madam was not hidden but was actually used to advertise the double attraction of Liedtke and Tauber: two for the price of one, as it were.

Going Live as Staying Alive Das Lied einer Nacht cleverly utilizes the aura of ‘presence’ produced by the recorded voice of a singer and actor for its comedy of errors in order to

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build up Jan Kiepura the recording star for the new medium of the sound film. The mise-en-abyme of the two levels ‘sound’ and ‘image’ here have a precise objective, for they displace attention from the potentially deconstructive play of signifiers—their transparent duplicity—and towards the pleasurable investment in the new technical processes around the new star identity. Our perception shifts from person to product, and the rapt attention of the diegetic audiences—at the trial, for instance, or an earlier opera performance—shifts towards the poster image and the community of fans. Anticipating some of the strategies of another film ‘about’ the early sound film era, namely Singin’ in the Rain, the film Das Lied einer Nacht contains a number of such mirroring effects which let film and the surrounding media comment on each other. The brand name ‘Jan Kiepura’ and the title Das Lied einer Nacht endorse each other by each becoming the other’s advertisement. The film, which was to have originally been called ‘Heute Nacht oder Nie’ (after the title song) features Kiepura’s gramophone record (if only by their mimetic equivalent), while in the extra-filmic world of reception, the records promote the new genre of the sound film. Insofar as this Ufa production participates in the kind of general but transparent duplicity typical for Germany in the late 1920s, it nonetheless accurately thematizes a major technological transition in a medium of representation. This is not strictly speaking the change from silent cinema to sound film but the shift from the imaginary body of sound experienced via radio and gramophone to the even more complex body of sound represented by the modern film star. Technologically mediated reflexivity, packaged as lifestyle modernity in Einbrecher, Das Lied einer Nacht and many others, proves to be a source of aesthetic fascination. It ends up boosting the commodity-character of the media experience itself, as it fetishises the technical effects in the figure of the human performer, making her or him a ‘star’. Lilian Harvey and Jan Kiepura are finally (when all the impostures have been uncovered) only authentically themselves if they managed to become identical with their media functions. This they accomplish as idealized or perfect bodies who appear to get the better of technology by submitting to technology, if necessary being humiliated by it, in the mode of screwball comedy or slapstick. These parallels between a popular film like Das Lied einer Nacht and a film d’auteur like The Testament of Dr Mabuse illuminate a common historical situation while also helping to highlight differences. For although it is not my intention to claim for the latter an auteurist-modernist reflexivity and condemn the former for its crass commodification and blatant consumerism, the sombre self-reflexivity of The Testament of Dr Mabuse

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nonetheless sustains a radical mise-en-abyme of representation itself. By constantly undercutting and relativizing the signifiers of hierarchy and identity, of the human and the non-human/mechanical, of the beneficial and the malevolent, it makes sure that at no point do the two coincide: there is no ‘marriage’. Das Lied einer Nacht, on the other hand, eventually does compact these layers in the inevitable happy ending. The formation of the couple is the perfect metaphor for the picture-postcard reconciliation typical of the emergent alliance between audio-visual entertainment and mass tourism, whose excessive symmetries and perfect harmonies can, of course, be also read as an all-knowing irony. What conclusions can we draw? Firstly, it seems evident that the fetishization and commodification of the disembodied voice, now authenticated through cinema, does not heal the breach but institutionalizes it for the benefit of the various industries and their synergies (convergence) in the marketplace in the form of irony, satire, or cynical complicity. The so-called transitional period (1927-1932) is usually thought to have given way to the classical period, for which it had to be pacified, disciplined even, in order to make pleasurable and profitable the repression of heterogeneity and the elision of media materiality. But we could also, from our present perspective, see this transitional period as the truly classical period, indeed the ‘norm’, because of its separation of the elements, its pervasive self-reflexivity, its allegorical staging of its own conditions of possibility. Going ‘live’: two very distinct models of representation seem to be involved in the coming of sound: on the one hand, that of graphic inscription, with its mnemotechnic func­tion (recording and storing, memory and history, access and transcription); on the other hand, the illusionist representation, the ‘capture’ of the fleeting moment, of the transitoriness and ineffability of sensory (sound) experience—was deemed to work against commodification while nonetheless benefiting from the technologies of inscription. What Das Lied einer Nacht as an example of both vernacular modernism and technological modernization makes evident is that both modes are in the end cultural allegories of what it means to be ‘going live’. The contrasting set of terms first applied to cinema—Vita-‘graph’, Bio-‘scope’, etc. testify to this dialogue around the media-specific definitions of ‘life’ and ‘live’. The early sound musicals and comedies, so my argument goes, stage these alternatives as a ‘flirt’, a ritual of seduction, as if they were trying to delay the ‘marriage’ between fixed meaning and the fleeting senses, or at least to defer their consummation. With this, a film like Das Lied einer Nacht escapes perhaps the death of forgetting and cheats the near-death of the archive: by ‘going live’, it manages in a very special sense to ‘stay alive’.

4. The Optical Wave Walter Ruttmann in 1929 Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener 1 The Film Industry and Avant-garde The meeting of the European cinematic avant-garde in the Swiss city of La Sarraz in September 1929 is now considered a milestone for the aesthetic development of film, as well as the very first film festival.2 In the eyes of the participants, among them Hans Richter and Béla Balázs, Alberto Cavalcanti and Sergej Eisenstein, Ivor Montagu and Léon Moussinac, it seemed as if a new transnational, non-commercial, and artistic movement–the first truly international avant-garde in the domain of cinema–was coming into existence. Among the points for discussion was drafting the statutes for an “International League of Independent Film”, which was to be initiated by the conference members. The objectives of this cooperative included subsidies for the production and distribution of f ilms that combined medium-specific modes of expression with the “unadulterated treatment of reality”.3 The five-day schedule of activities at the small castle in the Frenchspeaking part of Switzerland was diverse: speeches were made, issues discussed, task force meetings were held, an international association of film clubs was set up, and, of course, films were also screened. 4 One idle 1 This chapter was jointly written for a collection of media-archaeological essays edited by Stefan Andriopoulos and Bernhard J. Dotzler. Das Jahr 1929: Beiträge zur Archäologie der Medien (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002) set out to explore the cross-media connections and inter-media relations of the late 1920s by focusing on the events, innovations, and inventions of a single year: 1929. Our thanks to the translator, Alexander Holt. 2 Hervé Dumont, director of the Cinémathèque Suisse, has even claimed that the meeting was „probably the most importat film event ever to have taken place on Swiss soil“. See Dumont: Geschichte des Schweizer Films. Lausanne: Cinémathèque Suisse 1987, 80. 3 Six months later, the „Deutsche Liga für unabhängigen Film (Mitglied der Internationalen Filmliga Genf)“ is founded, whose members, apart from Hans Richter and Walter Ruttmann, included Paul Hindemith, Herbert Ihering, Mies van der Rohe and Asta Nielsen. As in other countries in Europe the aim is to create a modern international film culture, capable of giving audiences acces to high-quality films. 4 A reconstruction of the festival’s activities can be found in Helma Schleif (ed.): Stationen der Moderne im Film II. Texte, Manifeste, Pamphlete. Berlin: Freunde der deutschen Kinemathek 1989, 200–219. A more humorous and subjective description is given in Sergej Eisenstein’s

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morning, a minor cinematic prank was staged in the form of a film scenario that involved the fair maiden “independent film” being rescued from the claws of the dragon “film industry”.5 It has since become a mythic “lost masterpiece”. One of the most important themes of the conference was sound film, which Walter Ruttmann addressed in a seminal presentation.6 Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov had published their famous manifesto “The Future of Sound Film”7 the year before, even though the Soviet film industry was still a long way from overcoming the technical and industrial obstacles posed by sound film’s inauguration. Ruttmann and the Russians thus ranked among the filmmakers who, in the fall of 1929, were interested in productively employing sound and refused to reject it per se, as so many of their artistically inclined colleagues had done. At about the same time in September 1929, while the cinematic avantgarde convened in an old castle in the Alps, a delegation of European film industry representatives met with US movie producers at the Carlton Hotel in London to negotiate patents, licenses, as well as the sales and distributions of sound films on the world market. The European group was composed of delegates from Tobis-Klangfilm–a cartel comprising patent owners for sound film recording and playback, film production companies, and the electrical industry (Siemens & Halske, AEG)–as well as financiers from Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands. The German-Dutch Küchenmeister group, a fund operating with what would now be called risk capital, was the actual mastermind behind this meeting, vigorously

(posthumously published) memoir: YO – Ich selbst. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer 1988, 400–407. For additional bibliographical information see Thomas Tode: »Auswahlbibliografie zu La Sarraz«. Filmblatt, Nr. 11, Fall 1999, 31–33. 5 The fact that this film, to which contributed so many great names of the European avantgarde of the 1920s must be considered lost, merely adds to the myth of La Sarraz. Judging from the various plot summaries – as well as the extant photos from the shoot – the project looks more like a holiday distraction to while away the time rather than a serious work with high aesthetic ambitions. 6 The text of Ruttmann’s lecture has not survived. Presumably he advanced similar arguments to the ones he had already formulated in his numerous debate contributions elsewhere. See for instance the essays published only a short time previously »Prinzipielles zum Tonfilm 1 & 2«. Reichsfilmblatt 35, 1.9.1928 and Film und Volk, Heft 2/II, Dezember 1928/Januar 1929 (reprinted in Jeanpaul Goergen, ed. Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Berlin/West: Freunde der deutschen Kinemathek 1989, 83, 84). 7 In German in Sergej Eisenstein: Das dynamische Quadrat. Schriften zum Film. Köln: Röderberg 1988, 154–156.

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promoting the European changeover to sound film via skillful financial strategizing and planning.8 The positions thus appeared clearly allocated in the fall of 1929: whereas in the eyes of contemporary observers the cinematic avant-garde advocated internationally innovative approaches to cinematic art and culture, the industry-led implementation of sound film in 1929 was largely met with apprehension by commentators in the arts pages. According to the critics, film had barely outgrown the fairgrounds and the attractions of the amusement tent, had hardly begun to evolve into a mature art form, when sound film, with its enormous capital investments, began to threaten film’s newly won internationalism and its function as an expression of modernity. At this point in time, the fronts were clearly drawn: here art and internationalism, there commerce and national language borders; on one side creativity and innovation, on the other capital, kitsch, and canned theater from the conveyor belt.9 And yet Ruttmann, in his presentation on sound f ilm at La Sarraz, referred to the valuable experience he had acquired when working on two productions, each of which he considered important steps in testing the new medium, even though they were by no means independent ventures but rather sponsored by industry. In 1928, with considerable financial backing by Tobis and at the behest of the German National Broadcasting Corporation, Ruttmann shot a promotional film for the latter, Deutscher Rundfunk / Tönende Welle, and in 1929 his Melodie der Welt was released, a promotional travelogue commissioned by the Hamburg America Line (Hapag). Also, between September 1928 and the summer of 1930, Ruttmann made several polemical and programmatic interventions in the ongoing sound film debates. In the process, he developed a whole series of viewpoints that practically and theoretically specified an ambitious set of objectives, which—besides championing the “new functionalist” version of modernity—also outlined a concept of multimedia that deserved the label ‘avant-garde’. By the fall of 1929, the implementation of sound film could no longer be deferred: the US output consisted almost entirely of sound films in 1929, while the large European film industries (at this time Germany, France, 8 See Karel Dibbets: Sprekende films. De komst van de geluidsfilm in Nederland, 1928–1933. Amsterdam: Cramwinckel 1993, as well as Harald Jossé: Die Entstehung des Tonfilms. Beitrag zu einer faktenorientierten Mediengeschichtsschreibung. Freiburg: Alber 1984. 9 See Jürgen Kasten, Abgefilmtes Theater oder avantgardistisches Erzählkino? Eine stil-, produktions-, und rezeptionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Münster: MAkS, 1990).

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and to a limited extent England) were neither inclined nor in a position to reverse the development. Too much capital had already been invested into constructing new production facilities and converting cinemas for sound. The Bavarian f ilm company Emelka completed its f irst sound film studio in Geiselgasteig in July 1929. In September, UFA presented its so-called Tonkreuz studio in Potsdam-Babelsberg to the press, where in November principal photography began for Der blaue Engel. A cursory glance at the year’s premieres equally emphasizes this watershed moment in the summer of 1929. Whereas such “accomplished” silent films as Die Büchse der Pandora (G.W. Pabst, premiere: 9 February), Asphalt (Joe May, 11 March), or Die Frau, nach der man sich sehnt (Kurt Bernhardt, 29 April) still comprised the spring’s main attractions, sound film premieres predominated in Germany after the summer: Das Land ohne Frauen (Carmine Gallone, 30 September), Atlantic (E.A. Dupont, 28 October), and, of course, The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 26 November). Although a mere eight premieres from the German output in 1929 were sound films (against 175 silent films), one must remember that, due to lengthy planning and preparation, these films were already in the works in 1928. In 1929, however, the production for 1930 was already being planned and here the situation appeared quite different: 101 sound films against 45 silent films.10 In this respect, the discussions in La Sarraz—over whether sound film now implied artistic advance or regression—was a rearguard action, overlooking the realities of cinema as an economic factor. Ruttmann belonged to those who recognized that the contest between silent and sound film was based on a false dichotomy, too much premised on personal artistic assumptions as points of departure or on a technologically obtuse medium specificity. The main battlefield had already shifted elsewhere: to the fight over the audience and access to screens on the one hand, and on the other, to the narrowing gap between (non-fiction) film as a source of information or (short) film as an advertising and propaganda medium.

International Cooperation against National Profiling Europe’s defeat in the First World War had granted US cinema worldwide supremacy in the domain of film production and exhibition, since the pivotal European industries (France and Italy) had sustained heavy setbacks due to the war, and the European market was splintered in 1919, with many 10 Figures are taken from Alexander Jason: Handbuch der Filmwirtschaft 1935/36. Berlin 1936.

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of the cross-border alliances no longer functioning. Unfettered by domestic competition or national borders, Hollywood was able to satisfy the demands of audiences in most European countries. In Germany, however, protectionist policies, a strong electrical industry, as well as inflation and other (unintended) consequences of the war favored the emergence of a national film industry. Only over the course of the 1920s did a slow, incremental opening occur towards other countries and a rapprochement with France in the film sector take place.11 In 1924, Erich Pommer, the executive producer of UFA, concluded an agreement with the French distribution company Etablissement Aubert over the bilateral sales and distribution of German and French films. A first step was thus taken to repair German-French relations, which had been poisoned as a result of the war, and the ground was laid for further deals with other territories. In a succession of international conferences as well as bilateral and multilateral accords, representatives of the largest film-producing European nations (i.e. Germany, France, and England) attempted to create better opportunities for distribution and exhibition.12 The goal was to establish a European domestic market capable of taking on its American counterpart in size and strength. At the same time, working relations developed on a personal and professional basis through international co-productions, resulting in contacts which in several cases were maintained until well into the 1930s. Such an internationalization–some would say, “Americanization”–was also typical of other parts of mass culture: the mid-1920s saw a homogenization of taste and a leveling of regional and national peculiarities, reflected in the Europe-wide enthusiasm for Charlie Chaplin, jazz bands, black-face “negro-balls”, tango fever, and the sudden appearance of showgirls and iconic stars like Josephine Baker. This urban modernity in entertainment culture went hand in hand with a modernization in the technical sense, from private motor cars, express trains, transatlantic flights, trams, radios, gramophones, and public loudspeakers to neon signs, street advertising, sports rallies, department stores, and escalators. While the artistic avantgarde tended to disdain a portion of these phenomena, it also succumbed to the fascination with precisely this darker, sensuous (or more sensational) side of urban modernity. Examples of this include the Paris Surrealists’ 11 Regarding German-French film relations, which quickly move from outright boycott to a cautious rapprochement, see Jürgen Kasten, »Boche-Filme. Zur Rezeption deutscher Filme in Frankreich 1918–1924«. In: Sybille Sturm, Arthur Wohlgemuth (ed.): Hallo? Berlin? Ici Paris! Deutsch-französische Filmbeziehungen. München: edition text + kritik 1996, 33–50. 12 See the essays in Andrew Higson, Richard Maltby (eds.): »Film Europe« and »Film America«. Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange, 1920–1939. Exeter: University of Exeter Press 1999.

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enthusiasm for Eugène Sue’s Les mystères de Paris and the Fantomas detective series or the Berlin Expressionists’ interest in serial killers, deviant sexuality, and other scenes out of the metropolitan subculture. While the avant-garde regularly opposed the institutions of bourgeois art such as salons or museums and made fun of the conventions of art critics who subscribed to contemplative, immersive art appreciation, their stance visà-vis the emerging mass culture was much more ambivalent, with the film and entertainment industries generally still considered the enemy. Ruttmann was all too aware of this opposition, and he attempted to resolve it dialectically. In an issue of the journal Filmtechnik from 25 May 1929, he published his thoughts on a possible counter-initiative under the title “Der isolierte Künstler” (“The Isolation of the Artist”): One possibility would be to reconcile and balance film art and commerce by way of an external power factor: through a patron or the state. But nowadays patrons only exist in fairy tales or for the promotion of a diva, and the state—at least in our capitalistic countries—appears entirely uninterested in this problem for the moment. Only the initiative of the arts remains. But who represents the arts for film? In France, and perhaps also in the Netherlands and elsewhere, there exists the possibility of consolidation, the united front of those who want art and consider it a common good. One calls this the “avant-garde”, one acknowledges its existence, and to a certain degree one takes it into account because it provides proof that a demand for art exists. […] However, this success, which has been achieved elsewhere, is […] not easily imitated in Germany. […] What remains for us is the hope of a personality strong enough to risk making compromises without degrading himself; of a personality elastic enough to infiltrate into enemy headquarters, in order to win the enemy over.13

As Ruttmann plainly perceived, the avant-garde in Germany could not single-handedly create and maintain its audience. In 1928, he had still envisioned the possibility of a “state cinema”, that is, a broadly based political support program for cinema. But by 1929 he no longer retained this hope and instead believed one had to make a pact with the devil, i.e., the mainstream industry represented by the commercial studios. German avant-garde filmmakers did not manage to realize productions either via the International League of Independent Film or through private 13 Filmtechnik, 25.Mai 1929, cited in Goergen 1989, 86.

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patronage (as was the case for Man Ray, Luis Buñuel, and Marcel Duchamp in France).14 Their support was either politically motivated, as with the films of the Soviet-German production company Prometheus (with Piel Jutzi and Slatan Dudow as the main directors),15 which was financed by Willi Münzenberg’s IAH (Worker’s International Relief Fund), or films owed their existence to fiscal agreements and the exploitation of legal loopholes. Thus Ruttmann’s Berlin, die Sinfonie der Grossstadt was a Fox-Europe production, originally made as a quota film in order to circumvent the import restrictions for US films.16 With this maneuver, one could say that Ruttmann’s strategy of swindling his way “into the enemy headquarters” had already paid off. One must differentiate here between the film industry, which in Germany was generally identified with UFA—under the control of the nationalconservative media magnate Alfred Hugenberg, who had taken over after the failure of the Parufamet Agreement that followed the financial crisis of 1927—and the electrical industry, which took an interest in technological innovation to boost its profits. Instances of the latter could be identified in the contributions of Siemens & Halske and AEG, which invested large sums of money in the development of sound technology and the general refitting of cinemas over the course of sound film’s implementation. The advertising industry likewise emerged as a space where experimental filmmakers had a better chance of landing lucrative commissions than in the heart of the film industry, such as UFA. A key figure in the field of innovative advertising was Julius Pinschewer, for whom Ruttmann made some of his best-remembered work between 1922 and 1929. Besides Ruttmann, Pinschewer also commissioned and produced promotional films from the likes of Lotte Reiniger, Hans Fischerkoesen, Guido Seeber, as well as Gerda and Hedwig Otto: by and large all artists identified with the avant-garde, but who made their living with commercials.17 The Philips Corporation in the Netherlands acted similarly as patron and sponsor, surrounding itself with experimental 14 Charles de Noailles may serve as an example who, among others, financed and produced Man Ray’s Les mystères de Château de Dé and Luis Buñuel / Salvador Dali’s L’âge d’or. See Jean-Michel Bouhours, Nathalie Schoeller, eds. L’Âge d’or, Correspondance Luis Buñuel – Charles de Noailles. Lettres et documents (1929-1976). Paris: Les éditions du Centre Pompidou 1993. 15 For film production by and for the German Left, see Bruce Murray: Film and the German Left in the Weimar Republic. From Caligari to Kuhle Wampe. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press 1990. 16 A second film by Ruttmann for Fox-Europa, entitled »Sport« was apparently in discussion, but was never made. See Goergen 1989, 25. 17 For a history of advertising films in Germany, see Günter Agde. Flimmernde Versprechen. Geschichte des deutschen Werbefilms im Kino seit 1897. Berlin: Das neue Berlin 1998; regarding

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artists and benefitting from their avant-garde credentials.18 The same is true of the Bata shoe company in Zlin, also an important patron of the Czech film avant-garde in the 1930s.19 Among the best researched and documented initiatives for an alternative avant-garde film distribution was the Dutch Film League, which in 1931 briefly owned its own cinema in Amsterdam, De Uitkijk, and subsequently ran a cinema also in Rotterdam. The League even intervened in the production sector in an attempt to copy the vertical integration of the film industry.20 The principle was simple: the board (based in Amsterdam) selected films that were then screened in various locations (at one time, the Film League maintained branches in up to ten Dutch cities). By paying an annual fee, members of the League were able to attend individual showings. Moreover, being a members’ association, the League circumvented censorship, which is why workers’ associations and trade union clubs were popular venues for the screening of politically controversial films throughout Europe. In the Netherlands, the revenues from subscription permitted a degree of financial stability. In all other respects, the Film League was a company that, like any commercial cinema, had to finance itself and balance its books, as it received no government subsidies. What distinguished the screenings and programs were the introductions before and discussions after the screening, situating the films in their aesthetic, political, and historical contexts. The League also published a journal and often invited filmmakers to present their work, building up an international network of personal contacts. It had, for instance, correspondents in Berlin and Paris who provided news and information on current releases. These personal contacts formed the basis of what the meeting at La Sarraz tried to accomplish, namely to formalize the networks through a syndicate of independent film clubs. Yet the arrival of the sound film as well as polarizing political developments at the end of the 1920s meant that the chances of such a syndicate coming into being had worsened considerably.

Pinschewer in particular, see André Amsler: »Wer dem Werbefilm verfällt, ist verloren für die Welt«. Das Werk von Julius Pinschewer 1883-1961. Zürich: Chronos 1997. 18 See the chapter »Philips Radio« in Dibbets, Sprekende films, 226–242. 19 See Peter Szcepanik, “Modernism, Industry, Film: A Network of Media in the Baťa Corporation and the Town of Zlín in the 1930s”, in Vinzenz Hediger, Patrick Vonderau, eds. Films that Work. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009, 349-376. 20 See the detailed study by Céline Linssen, Hans Schoots, Tom Gunning: Het gaat om de f ilm! Een nieuwe geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Filmliga, 1927–1933. Amsterdam: Bas Lubberhuizen / Filmmuseum 1999.

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Already in 1930, the year after the meeting in La Sarraz, one can speak of the failure of the avant-garde and the triumph of the industry. At the followup meeting to La Sarraz, which took place in Brussels, the one-year-old alliance of film artists and enthusiasts fell apart, while the so-called “soundfilm peace treaty” was successfully concluded in Paris, where European and US representatives of the holders of rights and patents, divided the world into spheres of interest (or territories), in an unmistakably colonial gesture. A few selected European markets were specifically kept open for the competitive battle between US and European sound systems, while the rest of the territories were partitioned and allocated on the basis of exclusivity. The meeting of film industry representatives in London, meant to decide the future of cinema as an economic institution, took place in an atmosphere of crisis, as the Europeans and the Americans each threatened to block the other by means of increasingly complicated patent infringement suits.21 Against this background, the 1929 meeting in La Sarraz had still struck a positive note regarding the future, believing that, with the apparent disarray of the industry, the initiative for an international quality cinema still lay with the avant-garde, while the industry would wear itself out in protracted disputes. Only in retrospect does it become evident that the situation was precisely the other way around. In his report on La Sarraz, Mannus Franken, the Dutch correspondent for the Film League, concluded that “the first stone has been laid for the international cooperation between all the associations that represented the interests of independent film”.22 His article, drafted immediately after the September 1929 meeting, however, also hints at the tensions that were to intensify the following year: Hans Richter and Béla Balász quarreled over “absolute films” (the first stirrings of the realism debate), the sound-film question was on the agenda (which would play such an important role in the theoretical writings of Balász and Arnheim), and Eisenstein clashed with the Italian and Spanish delegates, as the followers of Marinetti and the Falangistas were headed towards the fascist camp. That the allies of 1929 had become sworn enemies by 1930 is indicative of (European) society as a whole, which underwent an exceedingly rapid polarization with the onset of the world financial crisis. Not only did a wide rift run right through the avant-garde in 1930 but the hardened fronts 21 More about this debate can be found in Jossé, Entstehung des Tonfilms, 271–280. 22 M. H. K. Franken: »Het congres van den onafhankelijken f ilm in La Sarraz«. Filmliga, Nr. 9/10, vol 2. 115, cited after the reprint: Filmliga, 1927–1931. Nijmegen: Socialistiese Uitgeverij 1982, 439.

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between cinema as art and cinema as industry, seemingly still distinct in 1929, softened incrementally in the following years. Thus a clear majority of Nazi documentarians, for instance, working for the industry even before they worked for the Party, came from the avant-garde movements of the 1920s: “Not only Svend Noldan and Walter Ruttmann, but also Hans Cürlis (Arbeitsdienst, 1933), Arnold Fanck (Atlantikwall, 1944), Carl Junghans (Jahre der Entscheidung, 1939) and others attest to a tight artistic and work-biographic continuity between the realistic and documentary approaches of New Objectivity and the National Socialist propaganda film.”23 These various fault lines ensure that the years 1929-1933 form a period that must rank among the most contradictory epochs of European film in general. As indicated, the upheavals were connected to the radical changes brought about by sound-film, but the political circumstances also led to a situation where economic, technological, and demographic aspects were so closely intertwined that cinema epitomized a particularly multilayered conception of modernity. Literary modernism, the political avant-garde, the mass media of press and radio, along with the technological modernization of domestic life supply the multiple overlapping frames of reference that also resituated both the production and reception context of film. The overlap is one of the reasons why cinema—whether commercial or avant-garde—can be fitted only with difficulty into a strict progressive/reactionary schema, since one cannot simply pit the modernism of the artistic avant-garde against the lifestyle modernity of the metropolitan masses, itself fused with various forms of modernization (in technology, the domestic sphere or the role of women). As the patronage of the cinematic avant-garde by large corporations throughout Europe indicates, their push for modernization was not always incompatible with the modernist experiment. Even Nazi Germany after 1933 presented itself as a young and modern nation, playing an aggressive role in modern industry and business competition with other European countries, and especially with the United States. Similarly, the technical advances that occurred during the late 1920s had not left the German film industry untouched, with UFA taking the lead in modernization. Trying to stay competitive internationally also slowed UFA’s slide into becoming a mere instrument for implementing right-wing nationalist propaganda. Between 1927/28 and 1929/30, the UFA company structure twice underwent an exhaustive reorganization, broadly in line with the international (i.e., Hollywood-inspired) management system 23 Klaus Kreimeier: »Dokumentarfilm 1892-1992«. In: Wolfgang Jacobsen, Anton Kaes, HansHelmut Prinzler (eds.), Geschichte des deutschen Films. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993, 400.

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introduced in Berlin by Ludwig Klitzsch, who had been appointed by the new proprietor, Alfred Hugenberg. Klitzsch transformed UFA from a film production company into a multimedia conglomerate that produced books as well as records, star postcards, and musical scores. Film was no longer UFA’s only product but was rather the motor intended to jumpstart and promote the sale of other products ranging from celebrities and film stories to blockbusters and hit songs, wholly in line with today’s merchandising efforts and spin-off marketing of global Hollywood.24 With the rapid transition to sound and the production of popular comedies and catchy musicals, the once stricken company fully recovered financially over the span of a few years, not least thanks to these new marketing strategies. At the same time, competition intensified for independent film producers, who were fighting over a reduced market share, but it also became more difficult to secure independent screening locations, which adversely impacted especially the avant-garde film sector. One could therefore argue that the avant-garde’s gradual relinquishing of its precarious independence was the result not so much of the aesthetics of sound film per se but because sound film served as the main economic factor that ushered in new management structures reaching all branches of the film industry, presenting special challenges but also a few opportunities for the avant-garde. For instance, the avant-garde, specialized in short films, gained several perhaps unexpected sponsors that were keen to advertise their products, services, and values: heavy industry, state institutions, consumer brands, and political parties.25 That this turn of the avant-garde towards more or less overt forms of commercial or political sponsorship is not an isolated German or right-wing phenomenon is clear by a glance at neighboring countries: in Russia, the Netherlands, France, and especially Great Britain, avant-garde filmmakers found their greatest artistic tasks, ideological conflicts, and sources of income first and foremost as commissioned filmmakers or in the service of the government and political parties. The names Vertov, Eisenstein, Ivens, Storck, Painlevé, Clair, and later Grierson, Lye, and Jennings are representative of this trend. Among their German counterparts were Hans Richter, Georg Pal, Lotte Reiniger, and Walter Ruttmann. 24 For an account of the intricate links between radio, gramophone industry and other stakeholders involved in the introduction of sound, see Wolfgang Mühl-Benninghaus: Das Ringen um den Tonfilm. Strategien der Elektro- und der Filmindustrie in den 20er und 30er Jahren. Düsseldorf: Droste 1999, 251–285. 25 See the writings of Michael Cowan, notably Walter Ruttmann and the Multiplied Image. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014.

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In Germany, a country relatively late in developing such patronage, an additional opportunity arose for the avant-garde: German programming policy provided for several shorts and newsreels to precede the main feature, which required UFA to set up an in-house cultural film department (Kulturfimabteilung). Its task was not only to supply these shorts as program fillers but also to act as a kind of “research and development” unit, notably for special effects, new camera techniques, and the implementation of new developments in camera design, lighting, etc. It is here that a substantial portion of the avant-garde effectively took up residence or even received their start. Since its inception in 1918, this department had, under the guidance of Nicholas Kaufmann, promoted technological and aesthetic innovation—such as the photomicrograph, slow motion, color film, and the military training exercise in Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (1924)—and had thereby offered a testing ground from which UFA could draw ideas and collaborators: “…the cultural film division is […] ahead of its time: it is the experimental base of the UFA.”26 Ruttmann had not only predicted this development but had programmatically demanded it: When compared with other industries and branches of production, the most surprising aspect of the film industry is the complete lack of a laboratory. […] And yet precisely the laboratory would be film’s breeding ground, upon which it could develop […] and secure itself. […] It should not, in the f irst instance, be the duty of this laboratory to study the improvement and enhancement of the filmic apparatuses, for instance. […] Rather, a workshop for experimentation and research would have to be established, in which the potential possibilities of film as a means of expression […] would be examined from all sides.27

A key paradox, if one wishes to understand Ruttmann’s life and work, is the superimposition within the concept of the “laboratory” of modernism, modernization, and modernity as understood by the leading industrial nations of the interwar period: social experiments in state and government forms, and thought experiments in the manner of engineers that expanded into the domains of the body, medicine, living environments, but also into artistic production and aesthetic media. Ruttmann was less interested 26 Michael Töteberg: »Wie werde ich stark. Die Kulturfilm-Abteilung«. In: Hans-Michael Bock; Michael Töteberg (eds.): Das Ufa-Buch. Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins 1992, 67. 27 Walter Ruttmann: »Technik und Film«. In: Leo Kestenberg (ed.): Kunst und Technik, Berlin 1930, 327. Cited in Goergen 1989, 87-88.

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in the political parameters of such projects than he was in film’s role in the process of lending a timely mode of expression and an independent existence to the materials being formed—icons of modernity such as ships, big cities, steel mills, household utensils, and radio stations. Simply to penalize him with the blanket accusation of apolitical formalism would be to rehearse once more the sticking points of the Expressionism debate.28 The concept of modernization, which for Ruttmann went hand in hand with artistic modernism, particularly in the realm of photography and graphic design, rises above this debate. Ruttmann’s idea of an avant-garde was much more closely aligned with popular culture—with its interest in the latest fashion, urban entertainment culture, and new technologies—than with bourgeois art appreciation and its tendency towards preserving tradition. Ruttmann’s ‘will to form’ was also a ‘will to civilization’ in the sense of social and technological progress, as he understood it. This understanding included a positive appreciation of promotion, propaganda, and advertising–terms that in the 1920s were used almost interchangeably. In late Weimar and early Nazi cinema–especially in the area of the non-fiction film–propaganda constituted an integral element of what today would be called an emergent, typically modern consumer and media society. In this regard, mainstream star and genre cinema, too, understood itself as part of popular culture as inaugurated by Hollywood and still practiced today: movies seized on diverse popular trends, featured urban forms of entertainment like varieté and dance music, and, with the help of show values like spectacle, celebrity, and glamor, generated that surplus value (of libido and vitality) that found its expression in the consumption of the goods and services of the leisure sector. Cinema thus possessed a modernizing function that, at first glance, appeared to run counter to the militarization of Nazi society: as an entertainment industry, it contributed to the propagation of an American-style consumer society and to the mediatization of public life throughout the 1930s and even into the first years of the war.29 This type of ‘lifestyle modernism’ manifests itself in fashionable household appliances and “Strength through Joy” tourism and includes the celebration of nature (hiking, sailing, winter sports). An integral part of this 28 See the Expressionism-Debate (Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch et al.), documented in Hans-Jürgen Schmitt (ed.): Die Expressionismusdebatte. Materialien zu einer marxistischen Realismuskonzeption. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973. 29 Examples illustrating this point with reference to the German musical can be found in Malte Hagener, Jan Hans (eds.): Als die Filme singen lernten. Innovation und Tradition im Musikfilm, 1928–1938. München: edition text + kritik 1999.

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new mobility were the transatlantic voyages of the Hamburg America Line, for which promotional shorts—usually comedy sketches or parodies—were produced until the mid-1930s. Among the best known of these films is Ruttmann’s Melodie der Welt.30 The frame of reference for much of this activity at the interface of avant-garde and modernity was international, bringing together Western Europe and the Soviet Union: was it not precisely in these years between the introduction of sound film and the intensifying polarization of the political regimes that hopes were highest for a truly European film alliance? Never before had such an animated exchange of films and ideas taken place, never before was there so much practical cooperation between cinema-related organizations: Mezhraproms invited celebrated independent film directors such as Ivens, Ruttmann, and Piscator to film in the Soviet Union. In Paris, independent films were shown in the cinémas d’art et essai (Studio d’Ursulines, Studio 28). In Amsterdam and other large Dutch cities, films were screened by the Dutch Film League, by the London Film Society, by the Berlin Society of New Film (Gesellschaft Neuer Film) and by Germany’s People’s Union movement (Volksverband­bewegung), as well as films by other similar initiatives from various European countries. The Englishlanguage journal Close Up was published in Switzerland, and in Amsterdam (1927-1931) and Rotterdam (1931-1935) the Film League’s journal naturally featured articles in German and French. Lazare Wechsler (himself a Polish immigrant) and his company Praesens-Film produced films with Eisenstein and Ruttmann in Zurich, Berlin, and Paris. In June and July of 1929, Dziga Vertov toured through Germany, stopping off in Frankfurt, among other cities, for a screening of his films at the film club of Das Neue Frankfurt, organized by Ernst May, Mart Stam, and Ella Bergmann-Michel. Following his two premieres of the year and the meeting in La Sarraz, Ruttmann also did not end 1929 in Berlin but went to Paris in November in order to contribute to Abel Gance’s Fin du Monde as an assistant and consultant. According to reports, he met there with James Joyce, who was only willing to entrust a film adaptation of his Ulysses to either Eisenstein or Ruttmann.31 Internationally renowned, having reached the peak of his fame, Ruttmann moved comfortably within the circles of the international 30 The synthesis of industry and lifestyle in Nazi cinema can be also studied around the promotional materials produced to propagate the Volkswagen and the Autobahn project, which included feature f ilms, newsreels, picture books, magazine articles, as Hartmut Bitomsky demonstrates by way of archive footage in Reichsautobahn (1985) and Der VW-Komplex (1989). 31 See Goergen, Ruttmann, 38.

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avant-garde. In 1929, internationalism and technological progress, modern art and modern life were still very much in the air. Klaus Kreimeier gives a fitting summary of this historical moment around 1928 and 1929, just before the world economic crisis hit Europe: Technological fascination and openness toward all the facets of modern sobriety, an obsessive interest in topicality and the present moment, accompanied by scientific reasoning and a pragmatic understanding of art that emphasized education and self-improvement, along with a willingness to take social responsibility, and readiness for political engagement. […] A boundless optimism was the common ferment; belief in the steady progress of the historical process was the categorical imperative.32

Ruttmann was doubtless a leading f igure among the innovators and experimenters of what one could call the “cultural techniques of modern life”, though not a politically engaged artist (in the sense of Brecht or Eisenstein), nor a political figure with artistic ambitions (like Speer or Goebbels somewhat later), nor was he a film director with a patrician worldview, in the manner of Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, or G.W. Pabst. Typical for him is that he collaborated with directors like Lang and Abel Gance, whose ideological affiliation it was difficult to determine, but also with politically unambiguous directors such as Sergej Eisenstein and Leni Riefenstahl. The paradox may be more apparent than real but may not be resolved by invoking the formalist charge that Ruttmann fetishized the medium and remained indifferent to ideologies. Ruttmann was an indisputable exponent of the New Sobriety; he fits the character type of “cool conduct” (Helmut Lethen) and is the outstanding representative of the “crosssectional aesthetic of contrasts and coincidences“ (Klaus Kreimeier). A better explanation of his stance is that he wanted to stick with the idea of a “laboratory” and of “research and development” even after the various “experimental workshops” dedicated to cinema had already committed themselves to national-totalitarian ideologies. On the other hand, when Ruttmann called for a “personality strong enough to risk all compromises without degrading himself [and …] elastic enough to swindle himself into enemy headquarters”, he was probably writing his own job description.

32 Kreimeier, »Dokumentarfilm 1892-1992«, 394-5.

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Painting with Time: Ruttmann and the Physiognomy of the Curve In the light of such programmatic self-evaluations within the framework of the late 1920s, the traditional perception of Ruttmann presents a rather one-sided if not distorted image of his position at the fulcrum and the crossroads of cinematic modernism. Too often he is lumped together with those who were engaged on the political left at the beginning of the Weimar Republic, only to more or less naively or cynically switch fronts and curry favor with the Nazis or even capitulate with relish. David Thomson, for instance, writes: “Within twenty years, Ruttmann managed to advance from his position as pioneer of the absolute, abstract film to the leading propagandist […] of the Nazi-German army. Ruttmann’s much-praised ‘purity’ was always already sterile, formalistic, and merely waiting to be enlisted by a totalitarian message.”33 Another standard reference source, Ephraim Katz’s International Film Encyclopedia, delivers a milder verdict, while also regretting that “Ruttmann put his talent in the service of the Nazi propaganda machine in the thirties.”34 Both authors stick to the legend that Ruttmann was fatally wounded on the eastern front during the filming of one of his propaganda films, almost as if this were just punishment for his artistic treason. German film history remembers Ruttmann as a pioneer and trailblazer for the abstract film and the Querschnittfilm (“cross-sectional film”), and until recently, the rest of his work had remained largely unknown and inaccessible,35 apart from the series of Opus films (i-iv, 1919-1925) and the archetype of the city film Berlin, die Sinfonie der Grossstadt (1927). Within the body of his entire oeuvre, however, these films only comprise a fraction of his output over thirty years of artistic activity. Even the apparent volte-face, which led to his assisting Leni Riefenstahl on Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) (1934) and the propaganda films Deutsche Waffenschmiede and Deutsche Panzer (both 1940), did not proceed as seamlessly as the drawing of a straight line from “expressionism to fascism” would suggest.36 Behind it lies not only an unusually intelligent and complex personality but also film-political and film-historical changes whose impact can perhaps be better grasped from a present-day perspective. The years 33 David Thomson: A Biographical Dictionary of Film. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994, 659. 34 Ephraim Katz: The International Film Encyclopaedia. London: Macmillan, 1982, S. 1006. 35 See Michael Cowan, Walter Ruttmann and the Multiplied Image. 36 This is also the subtitle of a series of essays on Ruttmann by Hans Jürgen Brandt: »Walter Ruttmann: Vom Expressionismus zum Faschismus«. Filmfaust, Nr. 49-51, 1985/86.

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1929 and 1930 are particularly decisive in this regard: the controversy around sound film on the one hand and the significance of abstract film on the other prove especially illuminating. To return to his artistic body of work as a whole: Ruttmann was certainly no universal genius, and neither was he an all-rounder but more a jack-ofmany-trades. He was at home in various media and trends, movements and genres, always with profound—if seemingly eclectic—professional expertise. He was a painter who experimented successively with impressionist, expressionist, cubist, and futurist formal elements.37 He designed posters and composed music and created radio plays and advertising graphics. In the realm of film, he was well acquainted with short advertising films (the forerunners of today’s commercials). He assisted other directors on relatively commercial projects with animation sequences or put his knowledge at their disposal (Fritz Lang, Paul Wegener, Lotte Reiniger, Abel Gance); shot documentary, industry, and propaganda films; and was well-versed in both abstract (animation) and representational (live action) films. Nevertheless, Ruttmann was by no means a dilettante. Rather, his oeuvre displays a coherence that suggests a number of particular inclinations and thematic obsessions. With regard to his sense for form, he had an unmistakable signature and gave himself severe – but only in his style. Ruttmann began his career as a proponent of a rigorous “modernist” conception of the new art of cinematography. He was already arguing against the so-called Autorenfilm (with its strong literary pedigree) before the end of the First World War. For instance, he compared the films of the director-actor Paul Wegener with a “good sausage—stuffed with the most exquisite delicacies—but nonetheless a piece of intestine.”38 He made the case that an “artwork can only come into being when it is born of the possibilities and exigencies of the material itself.”39 As a consequence, [t]he laws of cinematography are most closely related to those of painting and dance. Its means of expression are: forms, surfaces, light and darkness, with all of the inherent atmospheric content, but especially the movement of these optical phenomena, and the time-based transformations of one form into another. [Film] is a visual art whose uniqueness

37 See the illustrations in Jeanpaul Goergen (ed.): Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Berlin/West: Freunde der deutschen Kinemathek 1989. 38 Walter Ruttmann: »Kunst und Kino«, 1917, cited in Goergen 1989, 73. 39 Ibid. 73.

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and aesthetic roots is not a matter of the final result, but reveals itself by the becoming and coming-into-being of one disclosure after another. 40

Such a conception of cinematic form—metaphorically aligned with music, motion, dance, and disclosure—identifies Ruttmann’s work as ‘compositions’ that create ‘abstract’ film. Entitled Opus i-iv, his first films speak of rhythm: for instance, he writes “the action reaches a crescendo through a cumulative rhythm, generated by the succession of individual frames, and the progression of shots that vary in length, duration, darkness and brightening … and by a thousand other, closely-related possibilities when alternating light and shadow, stillness and movement.”41 Ruttmann became world-famous with a film that bears the word “symphony” in the title, whose basic idea is the “consistent performance of film’s musical-rhythmic challenge”, given that film is “the rhythmic organization of time through optical means”. 42 In the early 1920s, abstraction was still perceived as a political weapon, since it eschewed the tainted practices of representational realism and thus signaled its opposition to the commercial film industry. The critique of formalism as apolitical had not yet been voiced, so that the Dutch Film League could celebrate Ruttmann’s formal experiments and Eisenstein’s revolutionary hymns at a joint screening, claiming parallels and a correlation between the two filmmakers. 43 In Berlin, by contrast, the left severely criticized the City Symphony film, attacking its cross-sectional sociology (instead of denouncing class society) and its surface aesthetics (instead of looking at the underlying reality). 44 Ruttmann himself repeatedly emphasized that, in his films, he was neither concerned with formalism nor with abstraction for their own sake. He had already formulated one of his most important aesthetic credos in 1920—that of the “physiognomy of the curve”. However, he also clearly stated that a level of abstraction was necessary in order to depict the abstract

40 Ibid. 73. 41 Ibid. 73. 42 Walter Ruttmann: »Berlin? – Berlin!«. Der Filmspiegel, Nr. 5, Mai 1927, cited in Goergen 1989, 79. 43 Tom Gunning speaks in this context of an “equivalence of music and f ilm”, in Linssen, Schoots, Gunning: Het gaat om de film!, 1999, 227. 44 See Siegfried Kracauer »Wir schaffens« Frankfurter Zeitung vom 17.11.1927, reprinted in: S.K.: Von Caligari zu Hitler. Eine psychologische Geschichte des deutschen Films. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 1979, 404–405.

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nature of technologically mediated experience and the mechanical conception of time that rules and regulates urban life: The specific temporal character [of modern intellectual life] is mainly elicited through the “tempo” of our age. The telegraph, express trains, stenography, photography, high-speed presses and so forth are not to be judged as cultural achievements in and of themselves; they entail an exponentially increased speed of transmission of mental results (geistige Resultate). […] But since this overwhelming […] superabundance does not allow for a direct, non-associative, intuitive handling of the mental findings, and an understanding by means of analogy is inadequate, there arises the necessity of an entirely novel mindset. And this new mindset emerges from the fact that, as a consequence of the increased speed at which individual bits of data are cranked out, attention must shift from the individual data or content to the capture of the overall development by which the separate points form a curve and can be perceived as a phenomenon taking place in [real] time. It is the time-based physiognomy of the curve caught in a continual process of becoming, and not the rigid contiguity of the isolated points that must be the object of our efforts. 45

Thus “painting with time” shapes the segments and moments into a “curve”, which, as opposed to the graphical line, not only connects points but is present simultaneously in multiple dimensions as it swells, expands, grows, and disappears. Alfred Kerr provided a friendly parody of this method in his review of the first Opus film: One thinks of expressionist images. But these are unmoving. Chagall’s luminous paradises remain rigid. The flashing Futurism of the most current Parisians fossilizes lifelessly—within the frame. But here things flit, paddle, burn, rise, thrust, bulge, glide, stride, wilt, flow, swell, dam; unfold, arch, widen, dwindle, roll up, narrow, sharpen, spread, slant, lift, fill up, empty out, distend, duck, flower and crumble. 46

Virginia Woolf had seen something similar in Cabinet des Dr Caligari, though she had taken it more seriously: “a shadow shaped like a tadpole suddenly appeared at one corner of the screen. It swelled to an immense size, quivered, bulged, and sank back again into nonentity. For a moment it 45 Walter Ruttmann. »Malerei mit Zeit« (1919/20), cited in Goergen 1989, S. 74. 46 Alfred Kerr’s review of Lichtspiel Opus 1, Berliner Tageblatt, cited in Goergen 1989, 99.

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seemed to embody some monstrous diseased imagination of the lunatic’s brain. For a moment it seemed as if thought could be conveyed by shape more effectively than by words. The monstrous quivering tadpole seemed to be fear itself, and not the statement ‘I am afraid’.”47 When treating Ruttmann’s work, one speaks primarily of counterpoint, montage, and rhythmic arrangement, although he was simultaneously concerned with something else, namely with the machinic principle as such (derived from the montage films of the French avant-garde and the Russians), the conjoining of parts, a supplementary principle to that of the “curve”. 48 Ruttmann, on editing Berlin, die Sinfonie der Grossstadt: While editing, I became aware of how diff icult it was to realize the symphonic curve I had envisioned. Many of the most beautiful shots had to be eliminated since I did not wish to form a picture book, but rather something like the framework of a complicated machine that can only come to life when each tiny particle interlocks with another with the most exacting precision. […] After each attempted edit, I saw what was missing, there an image for a soft crescendo, here an andante, a tinny clang or a whistling tone, and then I decided anew what had to be recorded and which motifs needed to be sought out. 49

To the graphical component belongs the rhythm, to the rhythm the music, to the music the sculptural volume, and to the volume the temporal dimension of the curve. This being the case, it also becomes clear why he had to speak out against the “absolute film” in February of 1928: to protect his positions and films from the wrong kind of appropriation, as it were: Does one really mean well for film when one all too avidly presses for its artistic purification? Does one truly understand cinema when one wishes upon it the fate of absolute music, for instance? Should it migrate 47 Virginia Woolf: »The Cinema« (1926). Collected Essays. London: Hogarth Press, 1966, 270-71. 48 Rudolf Kurz captured it well in his review of Melodie der Welt: There is no chaos or arbitrary disorder, the edited images somehow belong together, and there is a clear dramatic arc in their sequence. Either discovering or creating obscurely sensed relationships between these images that are not tangible, but only felt: such is the art of Walter Ruttmann. The principles are similar to those of the top Russian montage films, but more restrained, limited in their effects by the objectivity of the material. Yet this juxtaposition of image that either echo each other or demonstrate stark contrasts gives a feeling of flow to the action that holds the spectator and retains his interest.” Licht-Bild-Bühne, Nr. 61, 13.3.1929, cited in Goergen 1989, 127. 49 Walter Ruttmann: »Wie ich meinen Berlin-Film drehte«. Licht-Bild-Bühne, Nr. 241, 8.10.1927, cited in Goergen 1989, 80.

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into poorly attended concert halls, monastically distill itself for a small community of highbrow aesthetes who guard over the “purity” of its structure? […] Film is—God be thanked!—not only an artistic but also, and above all, a human-social affair! It is the strongest fighter for […] the spirit that today makes jazz ‘more important’ than a sonata, a poster ‘more important’ than a painting. […] Art is no longer abstraction—it is a statement!50

This passage reiterates the self-defense Ruttmann had already voiced when undertaking the commission for the Berlin film, having argued that the abstract film be seen as neither esoteric nor as a departure from material reality or human-social engagement: It is probably surprising that I am the one promoting film’s popularity and accessibility since I, with my contentless ‘absolute’ films, created works that […] are only enjoyed by a fraction of the public. [… But] precisely this highly consistent emphasis on the rhythmic and dynamic regularities of film, as they once occurred in my ‘absolute’ moving pictures, is already being adopted and integrated into the general filmic composition as a self-evident prerequisite. […] Today the European arm of the Fox Film Corporation presents me with the task of demonstrating the viability of my cinematic views by means of a great, purely ‘material’ film.51

Evidently, ever since the mid-1920s, a tension between abstraction and materiality, between elite art and universality, between the “laboratory” and “social-human commentary” consistently run through Ruttmann’s public statements. In a different key, we re-encounter the tension between modernism and modernization that, in Ruttmann’s case, does not surface at the level of form and content but rather manifests itself as a conflict between art and society, between the author and his audience, and thus reflects the respective balance of power between production and exhibition in the film industry. For this reason alone he had to welcome the sound film, since he saw how it generated a new connection between diverse audience segments and how the collaborative and competitive networks between different media industries had expanded film’s productive forces and its possibilities for social use.

50 Walter Ruttmann: »Die absolute Mode«. In: Film-Kurier, 3.2.1928, cited in Goergen 1989, 82. 51 Walter Ruttmann: »Mein neuer Film«. In: Film-B.Z., 9.7.1926, cited in Goergen 1989, 78.

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“Sound film is the topic of the day”—the pivotal years: 1929-30 “Sound film is the topic of the day. Sound film inflames the passions, stimulates discussion, and only briefly had to endure dismissive and excited viewpoints.”52 How to place Ruttmann within the context of the sound film revolution and the European cinematic avant-garde? And how do these two contexts, in turn, position themselves within the conflict zones of social policy, political propaganda, industrial advertising, and trademark branding? By 1929, Ruttmann had become a household name and his self-image was of someone for whom finally—after ten long years of experimentation and relative outsider status—every possibility, and therefore “the world”, stands open. He had made a living from promotional film commissions since 1922. But in 1929, with the emergence of sound film, he parted ways with advertising. As a farewell gesture, he took his idea of the laboratory and applied it to the advertising film (perhaps Julius Pinschewer had provided him with a working environment that came close to his idea), expressing the hope that, through the acquisition of new sponsors, this would “supply film with new resources and new impulses”.53

By the beginning of 1929, Ruttmann was—along with the Soviet triumvirate of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Vertov—probably the most famous avantgarde director in Europe. The Dutch Film League invited him to Amsterdam for its first season, and Joris Ivens visited him in Berlin to observe him at work. In January of 1929, Ruttmann wrote in Film und Volk: At the moment, I am busy with the production of my first sound film for Tri-Ergon. […] My film covers the German broadcasting service and takes place at all of its transmitter stations in order to lead from there through the most beautiful regions of the German Reich acoustically and visually. The imageless broadcasting service and the soundless film are two antitheses that, when played off against each other, approach the concept of the sound film.54 52 Walter Ruttmann: »Prinzipielles zum Tonfilm«. In: Reichsfilmblatt, 1.9.1928, cited in Goergen 1989, 83. 53 Walter Ruttmann: »Moderne Werbung im Film«. In: Film-Kurier, 10.8.1929, cited in Agde, Flimmernde Versprechen, 33. 54 Walter Ruttmann: »Prinzipielles zum Tonfilm II«, cited in Goergen 1989, 83-84.

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A concept of multimedia synergies across attracting opposites is laid out here that, on the one hand, outlines a propaganda apparatus of general mobilization that uses the modern medium of broadcasting in order to create the nation as an imagined community. On the other hand, Ruttmann is aware of the energizing potential inherent in the competing complementariness of cinema and radio—a feature typical of the early sound films, as examined in more detail in the previous chapter. Ruttmann’s conception of sound film is consistently multimedia-based and decidedly contrapuntal. He sees sound film as a continuation of the combinatory strategies and procedures that originally led him from painting, architecture, and music to film, but he also sees it as a radical break with silent film and not as its “enhancement”: Sound film does not have the task, for instance, of loosening the tongue of silent film. From the outset, it must be clear that its laws have almost nothing to do with those of the soundless film. There exists here an entirely new situation. The photographed movement of images is coupled with photographed sound. […] Counterpoint, optical-acoustical counterpoint must be the foundation of all sound-film composition. The battle between image and sound, their occasional fusion, which then part in order to act against each other, all over again.55

He argues even more clearly in favor of a dialogical relationship between image and sound, in which the principles of ellipsis, omission, and inference obtain, as opposed to those of redundancy or mimesis: The image cannot be strengthened by collateral sound. That would certainly constitute a weakening, like a lazy excuse that one tries to prop up with two different arguments. The principle of counterpoint that shapes sound film, however, would consciously play the two forms of expression off of each other—image and sound in a conceptual bond. For instance: you hear an explosion—and see: a woman’s horrified face. You see: a boxing match—and hear: the clamoring crowd. You hear: a plaintive violin—and see: one hand tenderly stroking another.56

He remains true to himself as well as to the basic principles of modernism when he insists on the immanent, medium-specific, avant-gardist 55 Walter Ruttmann. In: Reichsfilmblatt, Sept 1928. 56 Illustrierter Film Kurier, Nr. 1115 Melodie der Welt, cited in Goergen 1989, 84.

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conception of material and expands it to sound film, although the latter comes into existence precisely through the combination of multiple technologies and media: Sound film’s effectiveness is solely dependent on a systematic manipulation that is appropriate to its material. It is thus similar to the demand that chimneystacks not be made of wood, that lounge chairs not be made of brick, or that Corinthian capitals not be built from cast iron.57

This demand to do justice to the material leads to one of Ruttmann’s most interesting works, the “audio drama” Weekend, which was undertaken in February of 1930 at the behest of the German National Broadcasting Company. However, this “film without images” also shows prototypically the aporias that mark Ruttmann’s subsequent career, or rather, that lend this career its ostensible indetermination, its fractures, and its peculiar change of fronts.

1929 Melodie der Welt Ruttmann had already taken his f irst steps into the realm of sound film with the three-act film Deutscher Rundfunk / Tönende Welle in 1928, produced for the Tri-Ergon-Musik AG on behalf of the German National Broadcasting Company. On 31 August 1928, the world premiere of the abridged version caused a sensation at the opening of the International Radio Exhibition in Berlin. Subsequent premieres in different cities met with great success. This film, which today is presumed lost, essentially comprises a series of cityscapes extending from Königsberg to Cologne, from Schaffhausen to Hamburg, in which technology and tradition continually confront one another: in Leipzig, for instance, we see, alongside the Monument to the Battle of Nations (Völkerschlacht-Denkmal), the main train station and a rotary press; in Munich, the Kreuzeck gondola and the Schuhplattler folk dance; in Cologne, the cathedral and a suspension railroad; in Berlin, the newly built Broadcasting House (Haus des Rundfunks) along with an amusement park and the Potsdamer Platz. The Rhine Falls at Schaffhausen were greeted as an “exceptional acoustical and optical sensation”, of which critics commented that “sound lends the image a deeper

57 Filmtechnik, 27.4.1929, cited in Goergen 1989, 85.

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corporeal vividness and a heightened vitality.”58 Critics generally praised Ruttmann’s use of sound and montage, which do not make concessions to the sponsors who commissioned and funded the film: “Whenever Walter Ruttmann as director, ignoring the interests of radio and propaganda, puts himself in the service of a documentary presentation of current events and contemporary phenomena, […] we glimpse the path to the sound newsreel film (Wochenschau).”59 The field trips throughout Germany were carried out by a film crew from Tri-Ergon, without the director. As the footage arrived in Berlin from all parts of the country, Ruttmann assembled the film according to the principles of cross-sectional montage (Querschnitt). The reason for this particular division of labor was presumably the narrow timeframe available, since there were no more than six weeks between the start of filming on 16 July and the film’s completion at the end of August. In addition, Ruttmann may have been less interested in the individual takes than in the combination of various single shots, the montage, so that he did not consider his presence on location to be essential. The same principle and practice served him in his subsequent film. Melodie der Welt was a film put together by Ruttmann out of silent material from a round-the-world film expedition aboard the steamship “Resolute” (shot under the direction of Dr. Heinrich Mutzenbecher of the Hapag) as well as culled from equally soundless newsreel footage. That this film was advertised as “the first full-length sound film” is paradoxical given that the sound was created and recorded practically entirely in the studio. As director and editor, Ruttmann attempted to get the optimal result from these less-than-perfect production circumstances. In this instance, he developed his conception of the sparing implementation of natural sound (O-Ton), not least because he had little natural sound at his disposal. But this constraint created its own minimalist aesthetics. In Melodie der Welt, according to Rudolf Kurtz, who reviewed the f irst version, “the sound character of the film manifests itself primarily by being restricted to the photographic illustration of the musical accompaniment.”60 Another reviewer was surprised to note that: “[d]uring the first act, we had already forgotten that we were promised the first great German talkie and sound

58 Anon.: »Deutscher Rundfunk«. In: Lichtbild-Bühne, Nr. 211, 1.9.1928, reprinted in Goergen, Ruttmann, 125. 59 Hans Sahl, Berliner Börsen-Courier, Nr. 411, 2.9.1928. 60 Rudolf Kurtz: »Die Melodie der Welt«. Lichtbild-Bühne, 13.3.1929.

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film. Instead, we saw a film that moved us most effectively with the intense silences of its unique montage.”61 Thus, in a certain sense, Melodie der Welt is a sound film illustrated with images, just as Weekend is a sound film without images. The French were the first to make Melodie into a historically important film because it applied the Russian films’ montage principles to sound. It was René Clair who–after Sous les tois de Paris (1930) had become a success in France following its triumphant detour through Germany—returned the praise to Germany and declared Ruttmann’s film (along with Walt Disney’s sound experiments) “true sources of sound film inspiration” that had “taught [him] what sound can be for the image.”62 In this regard, it would be interesting to see to what extent the audacious sound montages of Fritz Lang in M or Pabst in his early sound films drew on Ruttmann (by way of René Clair) as a role model.63 If, at first glance, the subject matter of Melodie der Welt appears to stand alone in the history of early sound film, from a different perspective, it falls within one of the most popular genres of the period: the exotic expedition film.64 In the official brochure for the film, the claim is made that one will find in the film “the summary, the idea served by a shipping route that spans the globe. When the sword rests, research and economy join hands. Man blossoms under the warming rays of peace. Is not the root of discord often merely the misunderstanding of the other? Ignorance breeds hatred, understanding breeds love.”65 Despite this affirmation of international understanding, beneath the idea of subjugating the entire world first to the camera-eye and then to Ruttmann’s montage is hidden a particularly colonial gesture, when all occurrences, things, and people are subordinated to one and the same principle. In a universalist turn, Ruttmann first transforms the city into a symphony, then the entire world into a melody, as if the concept of the symphony were to be the sole organizational 61 H. P.: »Die Melodie der Welt«. Vossische Zeitung, Nr. 65, 13.3.1929 62 René Clair: »Dank an die deutsche Presse«. Lichtbild-Bühne, Nr. 112, 12.5.1931, reprinted in Malte Hagener (ed.): Als die Bilder singen lernten. Materialien zum 11. Internationalen Filmhistorischen Kongreß. Hamburg: CineGraph 1998, 17. 63 Noël Carroll claims that the early sound films of Lang and Pabst utilize both Eisenstein’s counterpoint montage and Bazin’s realist continuity principle: »Lang and Pabst: Paradigms for Early Sound Practice«. In: Elisabeth Weiss, John Belton (Hgs.): Film Sound. Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press 1985, 265–276. 64 See the essays assembled in Jörg Schöning (Red.): Triviale Tropen. Exotische Reise- und Abenteuerfilme aus Deutschland, 1919–1939. München: edition text + kritik 1997. 65 Heinrich Mutzenbecher: Melodie der Welt. Ein Präludium zum ersten deutschen Tonfilm. Hamburg: Hapag [1929], 2.

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criterion that can give film its due as a medium: “Film, which is comprised of the most heterogeneous artistic and technological elements, will only ever be truly filmic when it unifies, like a great symphonic composition, all of the contrapuntal, optical, and acoustic laws in its score.”66 This essentialist handling of the medium, typical for the avant-garde, strove to join the disparate parts into a homogenous whole, to subject the entire world to an organizational principle. Such a totalizing gesture in the name of unification already raises the question of appropriation, and with it some of the issues that have since come to the fore around found footage films. For can we not say that Melodie der Welt is not only the first sound film but also the first found footage film?67 Something else is at stake as well. Klaus Kreimeier has put forward the thesis that “the modern discourse on media authenticity arose from the interaction between the advanced technologies of the optical industry with the fetishized notion of precision as developed by the natural sciences.”68 Ruttmann’s engineering-inspired precision editing together with the technological developments he wished to promote—quite literally in the patent applications that he files and figuratively in his idea of a “laboratory”—can be seen to precisely embody the discourse of authenticity referenced by Kreimeier. The same modernist attitude that can be found in Ezra Pound or Bert Brecht—that a combination of dexterity and skills acquired through training and a trade, when assisted by the most advanced technologies is capable of revealing the true nature of things—permeates Ruttmann’s entire work. Subjecting the world to a single formal principle, executed with craft and precision in order to arrive at an authentic essence is, in the case of Melodie der Welt, one of its most striking features. Hence the persistent critique of formalism already mentioned: “[Ruttmann] only sees formal connections, [he] is only capable of seeing formal connections. […] In this way, at any rate, the internal vacuity of the film is compensated by the external system in its execution.”69 However, if instead of chastizing Ruttmann for his empty formalism one were to regard him as the prototype of the engineer, the gap between (artistic) modernism and (technical) modernization narrows once more, 66 Walter Ruttmann: »Auch Eisen kann Filmstar sein« (“even iron can be a film star, 1937), cited in Goergen 1989, 93. 67 Thomas Elsaesser, “Ethics of Appropriation – the Found Footage Film between Archive and Internet”, Found Footage, issue 1, October 2015, 30-37 68 Klaus Kreimeier: »Mechanik, Waffen und Haudegen überall. Expeditionsfilme: das bewaffnete Auge des Ethnografen«. In: Schöning, Triviale Tropen, 48. 69 Huldermann: »Melodie der Welt«. Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 14.3.1929.

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since the engineer mediates between the abstract sciences, such as mathematics and their practical applications. One could even say that the engineer is charged with giving material form to immaterial thoughts but is also capable of turning raw materiality into a construct that dematerializes this very material base by making it function in another dimension. Ruttmann’s transformation of a teeming humanity—observed all over the world in their actions, rituals, domestic pursuits, their work and play, their grief and joy—into a full-length feature, splicing some 16,000 meters of disparate expedition material into the 1,500-meter film that is Melodie der Welt, is only one side of his engineering activity. The other side is that Ruttmann has always seen in material objects—be they factories or cities, people or places, bodies or sounds—their potential for abstract relations and thus for new combinations. The engineer in Ruttmann also validates his perceived affinity and affiliation with the Russian avant-garde: his stance and personality are in line with especially Constructivism’s celebration of the artist as engineer who arranges materials objectively and who produces his artwork as precisely and as technically proficient as he would any other manufactured object. The engineering analogy casts a different light also on the question of independence in the film sector. Considered from the perspective of the production circumstances, Melodie der Welt was a commissioned film not unlike Willy Zielke’s Das Stahltier (commissioned by the German State Railways) or Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens (for the NSDAP). Yet so was Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (commissioned by Canadian fur traders) and Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon (the UK Empire Marketing Board). The dichotomy between the avant-garde and the industry is thus misleading—what modern artists opposed was the film industry’s conservative handling of the medium. In the case of Melodie der Welt, the Hamburg American Line wanted to ensure that their trips were advertised, just as Tobis Film wanted to promote the usage of sound. Together the companies produced the film, to their mutual advantage. Neither commissioning party expected to generate profit from the film when shown in the cinemas. Rather, they sought to generate buzz and bring sound film as well as world tourism to general attention and into the discussion. It was a matter of manifestly linking a new medium to technological modernization in transportation. By doing so, the equipment manufacturers, that is to say the hardware industry, had to turn the new medium against the commercial film producers, finding their support instead more readily among the artistic avant-garde.

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If, for the most part, only Ruttmann’s abstract Opus films and his Berlin: Symphony of a Big City remain in the history books, while the rest of his work is often treated under the sign of a politically unconscionable opportunism, this is also due to the manner in which the avant-garde movements have been historicized and canonized, often adhering to a rigid, politically inclined left-right divide. However, the unifying factor among the ‘isms’ of the first third of the twentieth century was their anti-institutional endeavor, their impetus to challenge the bourgeois artistic impulse as such. Independence among these filmmakers thus referred much more to their independence from the artistic norms of their time than it implied financial independence from commission, contract, or sponsorship.

The Film Author and the Commission: Ruttmann and the Industry “Walter Ruttmann’s Tönende Welle,” Hanns Horkheimer wrote in the Berliner Tagesblatt in 1928, “was shot as a commissioned film for the German Radio Exhibition. If only all independent features displayed such intellectual liberty!” In the West German discussion on documentary film following the Second World War, in which above all the directors Alexander Kluge, Christian Rischert, Klaus Wildenhahn, Jean-Marie Straub, and (through posthumous publications) Hans Richter took part, the commissioned film was by definition the filmmakers’ fall from grace. Kluge in particular, with his dictum of the “Babylonian captivity”, inaugurated a sharp dichotomy between the objectivity of the documentary and the bondage of the commissioned film. A contemporaneous citation like Horkheimer’s gives voice to an altogether different position. Between this citation and the post-war discussion lies the historical trauma of the National Socialist culture and propaganda film, but this is precisely why it is important to consider more closely the constellation of the industry (or studio) film, the advertising film, and the cross-sectional film as a forerunner of the sound newsreel around the year 1929. Shortly after his visit to the Dutch Film League, Ruttmann published an article in which he addressed the relationship between such organizations and the commercial film economy: Two grotesque adversaries! The mighty industry—insofar as it is, to date, even aware of this rivalry’s existence—smiles. And strangely: the other party smiles as well. Who will have the last laugh? Industry, of course. For

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it will ultimately be industry that swallows its opponent, digests it, and nourishes itself from it. But the swallowed party will also be satisfied, for at bottom that is precisely what it wanted. It wanted to compel being swallowed and, above all, this digestion. It will certainly achieve this.

One could see this proclamation not only as a comment on the relationship between European avant-garde film clubs and the film industry but also as a more programmatic statement. It is a clever, albeit cynical evaluation of the position of filmmakers in relation to the general conditions of production. In an uncannily prophetic manner, Ruttmann describes here his own fate, for even he, who at the time of this publication was still relatively independently busying himself with experiments, apparently let himself be swallowed by the industry. This digestion admittedly took on a form quite different from what he had perhaps imagined at the time: after all, starting in 1933, the film industry itself faced some altogether stronger forces, so that Ruttmann’s willing acceptance of his role as bait for the industry could only have raised a pitiful smile. However, even this state of affairs was more complicated. As was already apparent in the already mentioned remarks about the “elastic” authorial personality capable of “swindling itself into the adversary’s headquarters”, Ruttmann displayed a thoroughly dialectical understanding of the mutual metabolism of devouring and being devoured, of host and parasite, which artists of the communist left—under different political auspices—also attempted to practice by getting involved with party mandates. One could argue more generally that, with the introduction of sound film, filmmakers only had the choice of the lesser evil. There was no getting around the commissioned film. Either the commission came from the industry or it came from politics, but in both cases it was fundamentally a question of the promotional message or the propaganda film. Regarding corporations, business, and the manufacturing industry, it could be that a benevolent chairman of the board or a patron might pass along a commission to the filmmaker on a personal basis. This is the case with Willy Zielke, for instance, and the film he produced for the State Railways, Das Stahltier. In the case of Ruttmann’s film Deutscher Rundfunk, Guido Bagier from the Tri-Ergon-Musik AG—in other words a man associated with the film industry—established contact with the actual commissioner, the German National Broadcasting Company. If the commission came from the political realm, it was generally from an organization or a party with which the director was ideologically sympathetic, as with Joris Ivens, Henri Storck, or Hans Richter. The situation

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becomes substantially more difficult when the commission comes from the state or government, as was the case with the Russian directors following Stalin’s seizure of power, the Americans under Roosevelt’s New Deal (Pare Lorentz, Robert Flaherty), the British and Canadians under the first Labour government (John Grierson), or the Germans after 1933. And yet in 1929, these developments were still unforeseeable: Hans Scheugl and Ernst Schmidt Jr. recapitulate that the concept of the “Dokumentarfilm” was first used in 1929. Not that films made before 1929 did not approach our contemporary understanding of the documentary, but they were differently classified at the time: as culture films (Kulturfilme) or industrial films, as newsreels or scientific films. Presumably, Ruttmann never thought of the documentary as a film genre in the present-day sense. Instead, he saw himself in the service of “progress”, enlightenment, and social well-being—aims to which he leant his artist-as-engineer genius in matters of film montage, technology, and design. Even though this remains speculation, one can safely assume that he considered promotional as well as commissioned films—the entirety of his work after the Opus series all the way to his collaboration on Triumph of the Will and right through to the warmongering armament films—to be experiments on behalf of the progress of cinema as an art. It is for that reason that he had to “swindle” himself into the laboratories, be it those of the industry, advertising, or the avant-garde. He believed that he could take on any adversary, however “grotesque”.

Ruttmann Believes It This is why, after all that has been said, it is too simple to agree with Ruttmann when in the company of Paul Falkenberg he once called himself a “whore”: the artist as prostitute—succumbing to every commission as long as the money was right. On the contrary, in one of his most bizarre remarks, he shows that he was precisely not concerned with the money. Falkenberg tells of an encounter between his wife and Ruttmann shortly after the latter had just finished the manuscript for the framing narrative to Leni Riefenstahl’s party conference film: Then she said, “Walter, what’s the big idea?” – And he said, “Would you rather that I do it for the money or should I believe in it?” – “I would naturally prefer that you do it for the money.” – And he said, “I believe it.” And then she stood up and said: “Goodbye!”

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This “I believe it” (“Ich glaubs”) provides more food for thought than the punch line discloses. That he did not wish to admit he was doing it for the money and by contrast adhered to belief is precisely what is worth considering. Whether at that point he believed in Nazi ideology, in the “applied” film, or in his own artistic talent—who can say with certainty? Particularly when one considers how willingly he later dropped his collaboration on Triumph of the Will. Three paths effectively present themselves: the first would have been to stick with the media-montage concept adopted for Weekend, which would not have taken him back to making films but to musique concrete—becoming the precursor of John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Maurizio Kagel.70 The second path would have led to the educational cultural and documentary (feature) film, in which the “human-social” themes were beginning to predominate. It would have been the continuation of his earlier films such as Gesolei (1926) and is even more in evidence in the series Feind im Blut (1931), where Ruttmann was only partially able to realize his ideas, and the same impulse is arguably present in his Ein Film gegen die Volkskrankheit Krebs (1941). It would have paralleled the career of such notable documentary filmmakers as Humphrey Jennings, or it might have made him the figurehead of a (publicly and privately sponsored) documentary school such as the one that established itself around Grierson. The third path—the one actually taken—led either to a lukewarm commitment to Nazism or to “inner isolation” (Falkenberg), that is to say, at least in a figurative sense, back to the “attic in Munich” (Ruttmann). After the failed detours in France, Italy, and with Riefenstahl (all of which still await more precise historical research), Ruttmann returns to making formally very sophisticated but also quite didactic films, commissioned mainly by the industry and on occasion, by the UFA Kulturfilm unit. In these films, alongside a dandyish cynicism and perhaps even a touch of “existential despair” (Falkenberg), it is hard to overlook the steady dose of irony and even black humor. At any rate, Falkenberg is certain that his friend must have seen his fate laid out quite clearly at the time he made Weekend. Falkenberg sees in the male voice’s repeatedly failed attempts to establish a telephone connection the self-portrait of the director, not least because it is indeed Ruttmann’s own voice. But that is precisely where we can reassure Ruttmann and Falkenberg and even announce some good news: the connection has been (re)established. Not only is Ruttmann a presence on the Internet, with a majority 70 Weekend was made retroactively into musique concrete avant la lettre.

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of “hits” under the name Ruttmann relating to Weekend and its now highly popular remixes. His Opus films, as well as his advertising films also do well on YouTube, where they have found a home, while DVD editions of his feature-length films confirm his status as an undisputed auteur. In a sense, our contemporary “sampling” culture has an instinctive affinity with Ruttmann’s work, where he had already grasped the fundamental problem of the digital age, namely how to deal with the “world archive”—the taxonomies and classifications, the storing and organizing not only of images but also of texts and sounds—beyond the narrative feature film but also beyond the debates around the documentary. This is why it is probably a good moment to conduct the media archaeology of Ruttmann’s physiognomy of the curve, his symphony of the metropolis, and his melody of the world.

III Archaeologies of Interactivity

5.

Archaeologies of Interactivity The “Rube” as Symptom of Media Change

Attention – Problem or Solution? Some of the most persistent debates among scholars arising from twentyfirst century crises of cinema have centered on spectatorship and narrative, figured as a deficit of attention and the decay of storytelling. Filmmaking, according to this argument, is threatened by the impatient, hyperactive spectator and trapped by the contradiction between ‘game logic’ and ‘narrative logic’. Of course, these symptoms of decline can be turned around and advertised as signs of continuity, transformation, and renewal: as to the active-interactive spectator, his or her heightened involvement in the story or immersion in the spectacle has been the goal of the popular arts for centuries. In what follows, I shall take a different line of defence: from the onset, narrative cinema has incorporated forms of active spectatorship, since the audience rarely if ever experiences a film as wholly external to itself and its world. Cinema offers modes of engagement with the world, of which it has become a part—based as it is on an ontological principle of interaction between cinema, spectator, and the world. To substantiate this claim, I shall argue that it is possible to map a certain configuration of variables around spectatorship and narrative and to trace their presence in such a configuration throughout the history of cinema, thus hoping to provide a possible ‘archaeology’ for both the impatient viewer and the interactive user. It means shifting the ground and focus of traditional film theories while extending the various conceptual frameworks deployed by the studies of spectatorship in cultural studies. Such a shift is best implemented by a ‘return’ to early cinema: reviewing—and, if necessary, revising—our interpretations of cinema’s initial modes of engagement and immersion. If successful, it should permit a fresh approach to the issue whether there is a future for cinema after narrative, thereby also illuminating another perennial question: why and how did cinema turn to narrative in the first place? An obvious starting point for such an archaeology would be to re-examine the evidence we have of how spectators construed or experienced cinema around 1900—how they made sense of the different kinds of movement and of the new kinds of surface agitation within the fabric of the everyday. Did

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the apparitions on the screen take them out of their lives into the ‘kingdom of shadows’, or were they inclined to integrate or embed the moving image into the urban experience as its natural extension and site of heightened sensation? Such studies have been undertaken under the headings of modernity and visuality, of shock and protective shield, conceptually held together by the idea of a ‘cinema of attractions’, typical for an intense and immersive but also intermittent and impatient spectatorial habitus. Fast forward to the present: can one locate a similarly contradictory dynamic (or ‘dialectic’) in contemporary modes of spectatorship, and how might one describe their polarities? In other words, what are the dynamics of attention and interaction commensurate with our contemporary media environment, and what kinds of bodily presence and sensory agency do they entail or stage? Besides the shift of thinking from the continued involvement or immersion of the spectator to cinema’s incorporation of the spectator, a second shift is required: it opens up the somatic as well as the perceptual field and takes us away from cinema as a physical site of optical projection, though hopefully only in order to bring us back to cinema as a space of mental, affective, and sensory extension. As to attention, it is perhaps best defined as the selective perception of a particular stimulus (sustained by means of concentration and the exclusion of interfering sense data).1 In our contemporary knowledge society and information economy, it has arguably risen to the status of a universal currency while also becoming society’s scarcest resource. As such, attention emerges paradoxically as both a problem (for child psychologists, cultural critics, and advertisers) and a solution (for audiences and spectators), in that the audio-visual media constantly solicit our attention and spare no effort or expense to retain it. Attention is the problem for educators, under the name of attention deficit disorder, and for cultural critics who lament the general amnesia in our culture, blaming television or video games. But attention is the solution when considered as a response to the dilemmas of overload and overexposure because as a form of selectivity, as an ability to shift or switch, it allows for a mode of perception—and by extension, spectatorship—that refuses to be absorbed or drawn in, that resists contemplation, staying on the surface 1 See also: ‘Everyone knows what attention is,’ William James in Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1890). ‘It is the taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. … It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.’ Quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention (14 September 2008).

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and remaining alert. It is the reed rather than the rooted tree that weathers the storm, and it is the cork, bobbing on the water, that survives a flood. What if the attention economy demanded that choices be made between being the reed or the cork rather than between active and passive spectatorship or between ‘identification’, ‘distraction’, and ‘distanciation’? In which case, the much-maligned figure of the television zapper, along with the equally despised first-person shooter of the video game, might yet become the unlikely heroes of such ‘flexible’ modes of perception: witting or unwitting vanguard figures, parrying the double binds of interactivity, as bodies engage with images and as images require new motor skills and hand-eye coordination in order to be ‘grasped’. Victim and survivor, the zapper wields the remote control as much to ward off the ever-increasing army of programs, as to select favorites and choose among them. But the zapper is also the canny user, the disabused and uncommitted skeptic who surveys all and brushes or grazes the media world with the lightest of touches before deciding who or what to engage with, and for how long. Similarly, the first-person shooter—armed with joystick, console, or mouse—learns to be both defensive and aggressive, anticipate the ambush and prepare the proactive, pre-emptive move—all in order to maintain a foothold on his terrain and stay the course. It may seem that these two figures—the zapper and the gamer—are typical phenomena of the last 30 odd years, products of television and the Internet and thus symptomatic of precisely those crises of cinema just mentioned, especially the decay of narrative and the corresponding decadence of spectatorship. Yet one can also recognize in this configuration a much older cultural trope highlighting ephemerality, chance, and the fugitive moment, first diagnosed by Charles Baudelaire around the emergence of photography, with its confusing and hyper-stimulating l’émeute du detail (‘riot of detail’). That a photograph of a city street scene should once have been experienced as too replete with detail to be looked at without anxiety may strike us as odd, but it shows that the relation of ‘noise’ to ‘information’ in a given medium is a cultural variable. Baudelaire’s heroic-ironic countermove to such crises of perception was to embody them in figures such as the suburban ragpicker, with an even more emblematic phenomenon being the ‘man of the crowd’, taken from the story by Edgar Allen Poe. The significance of this tale largely comes to us thanks to Walter Benjamin interpreting Baudelaire who translated Poe. The man of the crowd’s modernity is manifest in his anonymity as much as in his ‘state of heightened sensitivity’: He finds himself in “one of those happy moods—which are so precisely the converse of ennui-moods—of the keenest appetency, when

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the film from the mental vision departs … and the intellect, electrified, surpasses greatly its everyday condition.”2 Such clarity of sensory introspection acts like a shield or mirror, for as one reads the story, it becomes clear that Poe’s protagonist is glued to his window for much of the time as if to a screen, watching the crowd over a whole day and night cycle and switching focus but also varying speed. It is as if Poe’s narrative ‘anticipates’ or emulates some typically ‘cinematic’ techniques of montage and editing as well as ‘televisual’ ones, of fast-forward and action-replay, and thus the protagonist becomes not only the well-known flâneur of the metropolis in Benjamin’s interpretation but the alter ego of the zapping attention-flâneur of media- immersion or the hip-hop musician and rapper—all figures of the city dancing to a beat that has become steadily more strident since the advent of modernity and the metropolis. In other words, the trope of the ‘fugitive moment’, the ‘sensory overload’, the ‘heightened sensitivity’, and selective surface attention is not something new, but links the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth and early twenty-first century as periods of rapid change and transition. It reminds us of Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer’s theories of the culture of distraction, which Benjamin contrasts to the reception mode of ‘auratic’ works of art, and Kracauer to the reading mode of the realist novel. If Versenkung (‘sinking into a text’) is the gathered, focused concentration that leads to immersion, then distraction is the mode of perception engendered by the technical media and in particular cinema. Distraction as a cultural mode does not preclude the kind of selective attention that, for instance, a gamer brings to a video game, although as I shall want to argue, such intensely engrossed forms of attention, bordering on autism, can be both a consequence of and a response to the stimuli-rich environments we expose ourselves to. Benjamin keeps intact the essential tensions just outlined between distraction and focused immersion, which I argued are typical for the modes of attention and bodily participation associated with emerging media technologies across the centuries. When applied to cinema, they refer to a practice that is only partially determined by narrative, because Benjamin, like much of the avant-garde, did not assume narrative to be the necessary destiny of cinema nor the result of a process of maturity and mastery of its techniques. Similarly, scholars of early cinema see the turn to narrative as a compromise formation and even a reactive rearguard action, 2 Edgar Allen Poe, ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1850), available online at http://xroads.virginia. edu/~HYPER/POE/manofcro.html (2 October 2008).

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in order to attract a better-paying middle-class clientele. Partly countering the embourgeoisement of cinema, Benjamin favored the montage cinema of Eisenstein and the Soviets, yet—I want to argue—not exclusively for the political reasons of an aesthetics appropriate to the Socialist revolution. The mode of ‘distracted viewing’ and the ‘montage of attraction’ advocated in Benjamin’s ‘Artwork’ essay3 means both more and less than an artistic experiment and a revolutionary practice. They can be understood as a complex counterstance to another kind of revolution. For with the emergence and rapid dissemination of mechanically reproduced sounds and images at the turn of the twentieth century, there began a data flow previously unknown in human history. Time could now be stored without the intervention of any kind of symbolic notation such as a musical score or a chronometer. But the recording and transmission of sights and sounds, thanks to the cinematograph and the phonograph, also meant the proliferation of acoustic and optical data in quantities, and with a degree of physiological presence as well as signal precision (‘fidelity’) hitherto unimaginable. The impact can be measured negatively: widely resented as a threat to the established arts and their institutions, cinema also occasioned medical warning about eye strain and attention deficit besides the betterknown moral panics about sexuality, drink, and other depravities. But mechanical reproduction also gave rise to what has been called ‘haunted media’: extremely popular para- and pataphysical experiments that accompanied the discovery of electricity, electro-acoustics, and especially electromagnetic fields and radio waves. Jeffrey Sconce (who coined the term) has documented some of the rich folklore and fantasy literature accompanying the introduction into everyday life of the telephone, the telegraph, and the wireless. 4 Friedrich Kittler has shown how: all data-flows prior to the phono- and cinematograph had to be cut up, symbolized and pass through the ‘gate’ of the signifier: alphabet, grammatology, writing … [so that the technical media] launched a twopronged attack on … the book [and its monopoly] on the storage of serial data. The gramophone [for instance] empties out worlds by bypassing

3 Walter Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, in Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 10th ed., 1977), 7-44; English translation: ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ in Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), 211-244. 4 For a history of electricity in popular culture, see Jeff Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence From Telegraphy To Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

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their imaginary aspect (signifieds) for their real aspects (the physiology of the voice).5

Against this background, Benjamin’s theories and Eisenstein’s practice can hopefully be seen as the complex response that they are: both mimetic of the riot of detail unleashed by audio-visual technology and anti-mimetic in that they try to recapture for these undifferentiated, borderless and horizonless magnitudes of data flow the regulatory powers of language and grammar, genre and convention. The effort answers to Benjamin’s wider concerns, namely whether cinema could play a progressive role by imposing a mode of distraction as well as immersion, which exposes the contradictions between Erfahrung and Erlebnis (two kinds of ‘experience’: integrated and continuous vs. shock-like and intermittent), thereby becoming, in Benjamin’s words, modernity’s optical unconscious.6 Or did cinema—with its turn to narrative and melodrama and corresponding forms of spectatorship—function therapeutically, forever, yet in vain, trying to heal the breach? Benjamin argues against narrative because he regards its ‘linearized’ focalization of attention and temporal succession of actions primarily as a way to facilitate the social reproduction of the laboring body, under the tyrannical dominance of the eye, while repressing this body’s other faculties and senses.7 Instead, filmmakers should use the ‘dynamite of the millisecond’ to blast open this artificial continuum of narrative, to inoculate the spectator against the very hierarchy that vision imposes on the sensible world. Forty years on, the same questions would be debated around ‘interpellation’ and ‘subject-positioning’. In both Benjamin’s view and in screen theory, cinema appears as an apparatus of integration and stabilization, disciplining the spectator via pleasure rather than coercion—but only Benjamin, emphasizing the somatic, traumatizing aspect of cinema’s mode of perception, is fully alert to the monitoring and, above all, self-monitoring type of reflexivity inherent in cinema, thus anticipating Michel Foucault’s surveillance paradigm. Benjamin, more readily than screen theory, is the theorist to take along when undertaking an archaeology of the zapper and the gamer, who trains not only the eyes (vision) but also fingers and 5 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 246. 6 Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, edited by Peter Demetz, translated by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978). 7 The term ‘linearized’ was introduced into film studies by Noël Burch, ‘Passion, pursuite: la linearization,’ Communications 38 (1983): 30-50.

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hands (touch), making them ready for new steering, monitoring, and selfmonitoring tasks. One of the singular achievements of New Film History and early cinema studies is surely the systematic deconstruction of the notion that narrative was either natural or pre-ordained. Cinema adopted narrative formats only gradually, and for complex social (attracting a middle-class audience), economic (charging higher admission), and ideological-institutional (shifting power from exhibitors to producers) reasons rather than for technical or aesthetic ones alone, and these narratives did indeed have a containing, controlling, and ‘disciplining’ function. 8 As a ‘large cultural form’ (i.e., present in very different media and across the arts), narrative is not only a widely disseminated mode of address and intersubjectivity (i.e., ‘narration’, ‘narrator’, ‘point of view’, ‘tense’); as an almost universal cultural framework for ‘meaning-making’, it is also a very efficient principle of data storage and symbolic data processing. In such a view, narrative cinema represents a historically specif ic solution to a problem: that of how to manage (audio-) visual data in the first century of technical media. The ‘realism’ of narrative fiction, as one encounters it in the nineteenth-century novel and as it was partly taken over in twentieth-century mainstream cinema, represents an optimized form of information transmission: the very high density of data storage (in the photographic image) is ‘scaled down’ (or compressed) by linear narratives with individualized agents, while the reduction is in turn compensated by the universality and ease of access, represented by stories with a beginning, middle, and ending (no special skills or mediators are required), taken from the cultural repertoire of European literature and (rarely) also other cultures. Having proved itself remarkably well-suited for processing the data produced by human perception and the brain, one might say, it made sense to also utilize narrative’s formal resources as a way of coping with contingency and ‘meaninglessness’ in the data generated by the new technical media. But this sorting and coding of sensory data in order to make them fit for human comprehension and consumption came at a cost. Narrative radically reduces the quantity and complexity of visual and aural signals, and ‘matching’ the (‘raw’) data with the (already culturally coded) story material meant imposing hierarchies as well as producing a ‘surplus’ (of possible meaning) and repressing it—precisely what Benjamin meant by the ‘optical unconscious’. Or, to paraphrase Kittler, narrative would be 8 Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

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the cultural ‘gate’ of the signifier, filtering out ‘noise’ which nonetheless remains as a retroactively retrievable residue. As a compromise formation and the outcome of several kinds of struggle, the hegemonic, universalizing claims of narrative cinema have always been contested or resisted (e.g. by the avant-garde, European auteur-cinema) as well as historicized and polemically polarized (by early cinema studies) when played off against the cinema of attractions, assumed to be not only typical for films up to 1907 but an autonomous, alternative mode, present throughout the history of cinema and currently once more in the ascendant.9

The Rube Films: Towards a Theory of Embedded Attention Returning to spectatorship, then, I want to propose as emblematic for this ‘early cinema’ not the rowdy masses in smoke-filled rooms nor young couples enjoying brief moments of unchaste behavior but the phenomenon that Tom Gunning, Stephen Bottomore, and Yuri Tsivian have discussed under the heading of ‘the (in)credulous spectator’10 when alluding to the so-called ‘train effect’, that is, the widely reported and forever repeated stories of people fleeing in panic from the onrushing train upon the screen or women pulling up their skirts so as not to get wet when watching films with titles like Rough Sea At Dover (1895) or Panoramic View of Niagara Falls In Winter (1899). Were these reports ‘for real’, or were they simply ways of advertising the sensationalist effects of the cinematograph, exaggerating its potential for embodied perception? Did the make-believe of fright and anxiety give extra cover to erotic foreplay and licentiousness? What exactly was going on? My suggestion is to accept all of the above but to take them as indices of a particular form of reflexivity in the mode of ‘interactivity’. It seems to me that spectatorship right from the start was: a) reflexive in relation to consciousness (‘I am watching a film’), b) reflexive in relation to the spatio-temporal dimension (‘I am here but transported elsewhere’), and c) reflexive in relation to embodiment and situatedness (‘I am watching 9 See e.g. Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). 10 See Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator,’ Art & Text 34 (1989): 31-45; Stephen Bottomore, ‘The Coming of the Cinema,’ History Today 46, no. 3 (1996): 14-20; Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema In Russia and Its Cultural Reception, translated by Alan Bodger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 134-155.

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with my eyes, but my other senses are also present, as is my capacity for taking action’). Proof for these assertions of reflexivity is a re-reading of one particular type of film practice associated with early cinema and repeatedly revived in subsequent decades. While it involves aspects that we have come to associate with the ‘cinema of attractions’ such as reflexivity and self-reference, display and performativity, I think that its implications for both narrative and for the modernizing functions of cinema exceed the brief that the cinema of attractions gives itself. The (in)credulous spectator is most fully embodied in that often-ridiculed figure of the country bumpkin who makes a sporadic appearance throughout film history, so much so that one can speak of a genre, usually referred to as the ‘Rube film’. The Rube is almost as old as cinema itself: it emerged at the turn of the century, first in Great Britain and the USA, but similar films were also produced in other countries.11 They often presented a ‘film within a film’, that is, they showed a member of the cinema audience who does not seem to know that film images are representations to be looked at rather than objects to be touched and handled or that the screen is not a door through which to enter a space. The ‘Rube’ or simpleton spectator usually leaves his box to climb up onto the stage and either attempt to grasp the images on the screen or pretend to join the characters on the screen in order to interfere with an ongoing action or look behind the image to discover what is hidden or kept out of sight. The best-known example of this genre is Uncle Josh At the Moving Picture Show, made by Edwin S. Porter for the Edison Company in 1902, but characteristically enough, it is a remake of a British prototype, Robert Paul’s The Countryman’s First Sight of the Animated Pictures (1901). Part of the Edison catalogue entry reads as follows: Here we present a side-splitter. Uncle Josh occupies a box at a vaudeville theatre, and a moving picture show is going on. First there appears upon the screen a dancer. Uncle Josh jumps to the stage and endeavors to make love to her, but she flits away, and immediately there appears upon the screen the picture of an express train running at sixty miles an hour. Uncle Josh here becomes panic stricken and fearing to be struck by the train, makes a dash for his box. He is no sooner seated than a country couple appears upon the screen at a well. Before they pump the pail full of water they indulge in a love-making scene. Uncle Josh evidently thinks 11 For an extensive discussion of Rube films in American cinema, see Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 25-30.

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he recognizes his own daughter, and jumping again upon the stage he removes his coat and prepares to chastise the lover, and grabbing the moving picture screen he hauls it down, and to his great surprise finds a Kinetoscope operator in the rear. The operator is made furious by Uncle Josh interrupting his show, and grappling with him they roll over and over upon the stage in an exciting encounter.12

Insofar as Uncle Josh At the Moving Picture Show was a remake of Robert Paul’s film, the differences are equally telling. Porter, for instance, substituted for the ‘films within a film’ his own company’s films, including Edison’s Parisian Dance (copyrighted 15 January 1897) and Black Diamond Express, thus taking reflexivity from the realm of illusionism and trickery into self-reflexivity, which is what product placement and self-promotion in this instance disguise themselves as. These ‘Uncle Josh’ or Rube films pose a question. Are they intended, as is often claimed, to be didactic parables, teaching a rural or immigrant audience how not to behave in the cinema by putting up to ridicule someone like themselves?13 Yet—as with the ‘train effect’—was there ever such an audience or such a moment of ‘infancy’ and simplicity in the history of the movies where this ontological confusion with regards to objects and persons might have existed? If the ‘train effect’ and Uncle Josh belong to the folklore and urban mythology that early cinema generated about itself, then the second level of self-reference, citing the first, would be that they promote a form of spectatorship where the spectator watches, reacts to, and interacts with a motion picture while remaining seated and still, retaining all affect and agency within him/herself. A further question poses itself: do these films construct their meta-level of self-reference in order to ‘discipline’ their audience—not by showing 12 Edison catalogue, 1902, quoted from http://www.us.imdb.com/title/tt0000414/plotsummary (1 October 2008). 13 See Isabelle Morissette, ‘Reflexivity In Spectatorship: The Didactic Nature of Early Silent Films’, Offscreen (31 July 2002), http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/reflexivity.html (2 October 2008). ‘The spectator [in the film] is a country bumpkin and, in this case, someone that more sophisticated city people would laugh at for his display of naiveté. It functions on two levels even for contemporary audiences. Initially, the countryman seems to play the role of an entertainer, providing emphasis to the action happening on the screen, by imitating the woman dancing on the movie screen that the bumpkin sees. But the countryman’s happy moment is suddenly interrupted by the arrival of a train, a very popular cinematic theme at the end of the 19th century, made famous by the fact that the historically significant Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (Lumière Brothers) had a surprise effect on its audience similar to the reaction of the countryman’s experiences.’

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them how not to behave—i.e. by way of a negative example, shaming and proscribing—but rather by a more subtle process of internalized control? Do the Rube films not discipline their audience by allowing them to enjoy their own superior form of spectatorship, even if that superiority is achieved at the price of self-censorship and self-restraint? The audience laughs at a simpleton or village idiot who is kept at a distance and ridiculed, and thereby it can flatter itself with a self-image of urban sophistication. The punishment meted out to Uncle Josh by the projectionist is both allegorized as the reverse side of cinematic pleasure (watch out: ‘behind’ the screen, there is the figure of the ‘master’) and internalized as self-control (watch out: in the cinema—as elsewhere in the modern world of urban display and self-display—the rule is ‘you may look, but you may not touch’).14 This makes possible an additional dimension of the genre in which cinema colludes with or encourages the civilization process as conceived by Norbert Elias (or Pierre Bourdieu), 15 according to whom the shift of bodily orientation from touch (a proximity sense) to sight (a sense that regulates distance and proximity) constitutes a quantum leap in cultural evolution. What, however, typifies cinema’s particular ‘modernity’ would be that it re-enacts but also exacerbates this quantum leap by ‘performing’ the kind of cognitive-sensory double-bind that is usually associated with the commodity fetishism inculcated by the shop window display. It also says ‘look, but don’t touch’ but resolves the conflict when inviting the gazer or gawker to enter the shop—a gesture that relieves the eye and promises control through the plenitude of touch and caress (‘the eye handing over to the hand’, you might say) with the act of purchase (resulting in ‘possession’). In cinema, by contrast, the same scene of desire and discipline is staged as a kind of ‘traumatic drama’ of touch and sight, with both senses at once overstimulated and censored, seduced and chastised, obsessively and systematically tied to the kinds of delay (suspense) and deferral (anticipation) we associate with the workings of narrative.16 The theorist of this promise of proximity enshrined in cinema and also elegiac allegorist of its traumatic deferral is once more Benjamin. One 14 For an inverse reading of the relation between looking and touching, see Wanda Strauven, ‘Touch, Don’t Look,’ in Alice Autelitano et al. (eds), I cinque sensi del cinema/The Five Senses of Cinema (Udine: Forum, 2005), 283-291. 15 Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 16 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘ Haptic Vision and Consumerism: a Moment from Fritz Lang’s Siegfried (1924),” in James Walters and Tom Brown (eds.), Film Moments: Criticism, History, Theory (London: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2010), 70-74.

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recalls the famous passage from his ‘Artwork’ essay in which he outlines the cultural-political significance of tactile proximity and haptic perception as it takes shape around the moving image and its contact with the masses: The desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of everyday reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.17

What is hinted at here through the act of substitution—likeness—and mechanical duplication (reproduction) is the ontological gap that opens up in the trade-off between the sense of proximity and the one of distanceand-proximity and also the irreversible nature of the deferral that pushes haptic perception into the realm of the optical unconscious and visuality into the realm of the phantasmagoric, i.e. ambient and unframed, fusing perception and hallucination (where the distinction between possession of … and possession by … begins to blur).18 The Rube, such is my argument, is second cousin to the zapper or the first-person shooter, each at first glance appearing to be naively ‘trapped’ in the superabundance of data he [sic] encounters in the realm of the sound-image.19 Yet on reflection, he also ‘performs’ this entrapment, either for the benefit of another viewer/spectator or as the reflexively doubled self-discipline in which he is both attacking and defending, ‘getting lost’ on the surface in order not to get caught, pushing buttons in order not to get pulled into the spiral of the ‘Maelstrom’—another Poe reference, this one dear to Marshall McLuhan as an allegory of mankind extending itself via its media and at the same time encircling itself. The Rube film, then, in my extended definition, would refer to a genre or practice of self-reflexive or auto-referential cinema that inserts the body (of the 17 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ quote on p. 223. 18 Margaret Cohen, “Walter Benjamin’s Phantasmagoria” New German Critique 48 (1989): 87-107; Thomas Waynants, “Phantasmagoria” (http://www.visual-media.be/visualmedia-index.html) and Tom Gunning, “Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusions and Wonder: Towards a Cultural Optics of the Cinematic Apparatus” in Andre Gaudreault, Catherine Russell, and Pierre Veronneau (eds.), The Cinema, A New Technology for the 20th Century (Lausanne: Editions Payot, 2004), 31-44. 19 See Wanda Strauven, ‘Re-Disciplining the Audience: Godard’s Rube-Carabinier,’ in Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (eds), Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 125-133. Strauven suggests that the early Rube films actually created the image of the credulous early cinemagoers and thus may have been responsible for this myth.

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protagonist/spectator) as both blockage and enabler at the interface of active and passive, manipulator and manipulated. The Rube film returns us to some fundamentals of cinema’s mode of spectatorship concerning the questions of attention and agency, fixed site and mobile view, temporal delay and instant reaction, while also bringing into play the philosophical conundrum of how an image relates to a body and a body to an image. It represents one of several counter-metaphors to both ‘cinema as window on the world’ and ‘cinema as mirror to the self’, each of which have held sway for about half of the last 50 years of film studies.20

The (Extra-)Diegetic Spaces of Early Cinema We can return to the question of narrative, poised between being an intuitively graspable sorting and ordering principle of ‘raw’ data and acting as a ‘defensive shield’ or ‘protective film’ to manage this data’s overload. By replicating the autobiographical mental schema we all carry in our heads (since one tends to regard one’s life as a linear trajectory, inflected by goals and moving in an irreversibly forward direction), narrative in cinema does double duty: it acknowledges contingency, excess, and overload but also articulates time, space, and agency in such a way as to assure the consistency of self as ongoing process rather than fixed identity. A term for this time, space, and agency configuration of narrative in both cinema and literature is ‘diegesis’, first used by Étienne Souriau and subsequently made famous in literary studies by Gérard Genette.21 Souriau’s definition seems very simple: ‘everything which concerns the film, insofar as it represents something’ but also ‘the reality of the fiction’. More commonly, diegesis refers to the time-space continuum represented but also merely implied or supposed by the film: in other words, the ‘world’ of the film. Even more commonly, diegesis is invoked negatively: when one refers to something as ‘extra-diegetic’, one usually means a space deemed to be present but represented neither on screen nor implied as off screen (e.g., a piece of music heard but whose origins are not locatable in the narrative, or 20 Both window and mirror were already ‘put in crisis’ at the threshold to sound, for instance in the famous ‘missing mirror’ scene from the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, where ‘Pinky, dressed as Firefly, pretends to be Firefly’s reflection in a missing mirror, matching his every move—including ones that begin out of sight.’ 21 Étienne Souriau, ‘La structure de l’univers filmique et le vocabulaire de la filmologie,’ Revue Internationale de Filmologie 2, nos. 7-8 (1951): 231-240; Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, translated by Jane E. Lewin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980 [1972]).

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another absent-present sound-source, such as a voiceover commentary).22 The point about early cinema, in relation to narrative, performance, commentary, and spectatorship—and in contrast to ‘classical cinema’—is that it did not practice this clear distinction between diegetic and extra-diegetic given the multiple kinds of possible interrelationships between screen space and audience space (e.g. pianola music or orchestra performing in the auditorium, the presence of a lecturer, frontal staging, actors directly addressing the audience). Therefore, a film’s diegesis was far less stable and predetermined, being more like a score that needed an event to realize itself, each ‘film performance’ dynamically constituted by the interplay between what occurred on screen and in the auditorium.23 I have elsewhere argued that the changing relations between screen space and auditorium space constitute one of early cinema’s most crucial variables and a key determinant of cinema’s adoption of narrative, which suggests that only when considered together, in their mutual interdependence, can we begin to understand how spectatorship functioned in this unique, but uniquely overlapping, diegetic space.24 And just as the shifting parameters of screen space and audience space help define the ‘diegetic’ space of early cinema, so the relations of diegetic, extra-diegetic, and ‘imagined’ sound are often highlighted in the early sound era. One thinks of the many levels of self-reference, allegory, and mise-en-abyme in the famous scene of The Jazz Singer, when Jakie (Al Jolson) sings about bluebirds to his Mama and is suddenly stopped in his vocal chords by a thunderous ‘Silence’ emanating from an intertitle—transcribing the emphatic word from his incensed Cantor-father just entering the room. In my argument, it is the Rube—sometimes within the film, sometimes from outside—who personifies spectatorship at this delicate but also turbulent juncture, where diegetic and extra-diegetic worlds, the imaginary space of the action and the physical space of the audience are not yet rigorously separated nor ‘disciplined’ by a newly empowered eye at the expense of hand and touch. If film scholars now tend to speak of ‘haptic vision’, a ‘tactile cinema’, or ‘the skin of the film’—a perceptual-sensory configuration that, after 22 In some cases what appears to be extra-diegetic will reveal itself as ‘diegetic’ after all, as in films by Orson Welles (voice-over commentary) and Fritz Lang (music). 23 An attempt to re-think ‘diegesis’ in relation to both early cinema and television can be found in Noël Burch, ‘Narrative/Diegesis – Thresholds, Limits,’ Screen 23, no. 2 (July/August 1982): 16-33. 24 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Once More Narrative,’ in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI, 1990), 153-155.

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Annette Michelson, Antonia Lant, Vivian Sobchack, Laura U. Marks, Angela della Vacche, and many others, seems set to become the new paradigm of spectatorship for Anglo-American film studies—it might be worth looking for the ghost of a ‘Rube’ haunting any smooth transition or clean break from the ocular-centric theories of classical cinema to a body-based aesthetic of ‘early’ and ‘late’ cinema. The Rube’s ambiguous and disruptive mode of reflexivity stands guard, as it were, when we begin to rewrite all of film history and spectatorship around the body as total perceptual surface. That the highlighting of texture and touch opens up genealogies that bypass the photographic mode (based on luminosity through transparency) is evident: haptic vision can help reinstate video as the true predecessor of the digital image (whose luminosity is achieved through refraction, opacity, and saturation) and thus avoid the deadlock and blockages currently surrounding accounts of cinema that insist on projection and transparency as that which must define cinema, or declare ‘indexicality’ to be the main dividing line between photographic and post-photographic (also now often called ‘post-film’) cinema. However, in the rush to leave behind the ocular-centric paradigm, the Rube reminds us that one of the enduring appeals of cinema since its beginnings was the separation of eye from body, allowing the eye to travel, transgress, explore, and penetrate spaces otherwise too far away or too close, too small or too big, too dangerous or too socially out of bounds.

The Return of the Rube These reflections prompt a thesis that would need to be examined in more detail elsewhere: versions of the ‘Rube double-take’ on attention, interaction, and bodily presence tend to turn up whenever there is a transference of, or struggle over, symbolic power between one medium or media technology and another. One instance I have tried to explore is the high-stakes rivalry, which began in the 1990s and has intensified ever since, between cinema, its dispositif (epistemological rather than technical), and gallery or installation art.25 This ‘installation art after cinema’ inhabits the institutional (‘art-world’) space of the museum but confronts the museum’s specific 25 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Ingmar Bergman in the Museum? Threshold, Limits, Conditions of Possibility,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Culture (online), Vol. 1 (2009). www.aestheticsandculture. net/index.php/jac/article/download/…/2611. Other useful reviews and analyses of the challenges posed by the moving image in the museum space can be found in Sabine Breitwieser (ed.), White Cube/Black Box (Vienna: EA-Generali Foundation, 1996) and Erika Balsom, Exhibiting Cinema In Contemporary Art (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013).

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diegetic arrangement (its time of contemplation and open duration, its physical space of mobility and perambulation, its aural space of silence and the sacred, its liminal spaces and thresholds) with ‘the cinematic’, bringing both into crisis (in recurring debates around the ‘white cube’ and the ‘black box’), each simultaneously trying to renew itself through the other. The manner, however, in which the cinematic has found entry into the museum, both in form and content, often resembles more the diegetic overlap and mutual interference reminiscent of early cinema than it revives or reinstates the ‘classical’ dispositif of cinema. Work from the 1960s and 1970s by Andy Warhol, Anthony McCall, Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, and Malcolm Le Grice certainly qualify in this respect, while more recent installations by Dan Graham, Bill Viola, Stan Douglas, Pierre Huyghe, Pipilotti Rist and Douglas Gordon, Tacita Dean seem to suggest that installation art’s ‘turn’ to cinema invariably also implies a return of the Rube. With their timedelay mirror mazes, cunning shifts of perspective, and play with size and scale, their pieces invite the spectator to get caught up in cognitive loops and bodily double takes, putting the visitor in situations that demand or promise to reward his participation while also deflating, deriding, and even punishing it. Classical narrative’s transition to—or perhaps more accurately: Hollywood’s testing and toying with—interactive narrative and game logic has produced its share of Rubes, usually coded in stories that either double a conventional diegetic world with a parallel universe of surveillance that at crucial points tilts the more familiar one out of kilter, or introduces an alternative world in the form of time travel, underscoring how both worlds are inextricably interdependent of each other. A good example of the former is Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002), in which Tom Cruise becomes the ‘Rube’ (not knowing whether to interfere in the film that turns out to be his own life, and communicating Rube-like with his presumably dead but hologrammed son), while Richard Kelly’s cult film Donnie Darko (2001) could be a case of the latter, with the eponymous hero unsure in which time loop he needs to be, but certain that he has to interfere in order to ‘rescue’ the world. A film that combines both the surveillance paradigm and the necessity of time travel is Tony Scott’s Déjà Vu (2006), where Denzel Washington plays an AFT agent who has to investigate a domestic terrorist attack in New Orleans and in the process is enlisted in a top-secret government laboratory, which has developed a short-span time machine. By travelling back a few crucial days, the agent is able to rescue from a murder the woman he has fallen in love with but whom he first discovers when she is already

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dead. In the process, he dies in the past so that she can live in the future. A complex play of different kinds of agency in situations where media simulations have real world consequences, Déjà Vu is, in a media archaeological perspective, Edwin Porter’s Uncle Josh meets Jean Cocteau’s Orphee in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.26

Towards a New Reflexivity It would be too rash a conclusion to assume that early cinema and art installations, contemporary Hollywood cult films or science-fiction thrillers and the interactive narratives of video games share enough pertinent traits to make their comparison crucially illuminating for film theory. Nonetheless, my suggestion is that across the two lines of inquiry—reassessing the diegetic space of early cinema and re-activating the (in)credulous spectator embodied in the ‘Rube’ phenomenon (also originating in early cinema)—one arrives at a better understanding of how the audiovisual media themselves think and figure media change and the transfers of cultural capital. The “Rube as symptom” thus complements analyses ‘from within’, such as Jay David Bolter’s/Richard Grusin’s ‘remediation’, or analyses from without, such as Lev Manovich’s ‘archaeology of the screen’27 where the cinema becomes the digital media’s ‘cultural interface’. At the same time, the persistence of the ‘Rube’ and its many different incarnations throughout the history of cinema at crucial turning points suggests that attention, interaction, and situatedness invoked through bodily self-presence, ‘performed failure’, and cognitive or ontological ‘category mistakes’ (as one also finds them in ‘mind-game’ films) are vital clues to the cultural acceptance of ‘disruptive’ media technologies. Once read from a mediaarchaeological perspective that is as attentive to technological glitches as it is to technological performativity, these features suggest a different mode of critique. Rather than responding with modernist forms of reflexivity 26 The question of contemporary digital “Rubes” was discussed in my Yale graduate classes in 2010. Michael Anderson subsequently published a detailed analysis of Déjà Vu under the title ‘Resurrecting the Rube: Diegesis Formation and Contemporary Trauma in Tony Scott’s Déjà Vu (2006)’ on his weblog Tativille (http://tativille.blogspot.nl/2010/11/resurrecting-rube-diegesisformation.html) 27 See Jay David Bolter and Richard Gruisin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000) and Lev Manovich, ‘An Archaeology of a Computer Screen,’ Kunstforum International (1995), available online at http://www.manovich.net/TEXT/digital_nature.html (2 October 2008).

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(such as mise en abyme, mirroring, doubling, or alienation/distantiation), the Rube might turn out to be a pertinent figure or trope for analyzing both ‘interactive narrative’ and ‘spectatorship’ in the new century, not just in and for cinema but for other ‘scripted spaces of the moving image’ such as video installations and interactive games as well, while not having one’s analysis blocked at the level of their seeming incompatibility. Just like Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, became the patron saint of the ‘active reader’ from Laurence Sterne to Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust to Thomas Pynchon, so the Rube of early cinema, tearing down the screen while trying to rescue the world, might yet preside over the ‘interactive spectator’, from early cinema to present-day video games, via Fritz Lang and Jean-Luc Godard, Buster Keaton and Steven Spielberg.

6. Constructive Instability or: The Life of Things as Cinema’s Afterlife? Here-Me-Now This chapter is concerned with the changing function of narrative, that is, with the question of what happens when one of the central cultural forms we have for shaping human sensory data as well as information about the ‘real world’ finds itself in a condition of overstretch or is being challenged by different technologies of storage and retrieval. Why overstretch? First, the position of narrative—understood as more than simply ‘story-telling’—has changed due to an incremental surge in the amount of information, whose traditional transmission has been in narrative or para-narrative forms. What kinds of asymmetries occur when much perceptual, sensory, and cognitive data is being produced, i.e. recorded and stored by machines in cooperation with humans? While this has been the case for much of the twentieth century, its challenges are only being fully acknowledged since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Photography, cinema, television, and the Internet are all hybrids in this respect: they gather and store sense data that is useless without the human interface but exceeds in quantity what humans can make sense of but also what narrative can contain, i.e. articulate, ‘linearize’, or ‘authorize’. Second, the same potential overstretch affects the kinds of spectatorship, of participation, of witnessing that are entailed by the display of and access to this data, especially in an environment that is common, public, and collective (like the cinema) but also ‘dynamic’, discrete, and ‘interactive’ (like the Internet), which, in other words, allows for feedback loops, for change in real time, and is thus potentially both endless and shapeless. Narratives are ways of organizing not only space and time, most commonly in a linear, causal, or consecutive fashion: they also, through the linguistic and stylistic resources of ‘narration’, provide for a coherent point of reception or mode of address: what is often referred to as a ‘subject-position’ or ‘reader-address’. Narratives, in other words, are about time, subject, and space or the conjunction of ‘here-me-now’. My argument starts from the notion that linear temporality is only one axis on which to construct such a sequence and for making connections of continuity, contiguity, causality, and of plotting a trajectory and providing closure. It follows that if time is only one of the axes on which to string

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data and access it, then stories with a beginning, middle, and end are only one such cultural form. In the era of simultaneity, ubiquity, and placeless places, other cultural forms are conceivable and do indeed exist. Computer games are often cited as the competitor of the hegemony of narratives, and so-called scripted spaces1 or spatial narratives increasingly gain attention even outside gamer communities. Henry Jenkins, for instance, thinks of both narratives and games as ‘spatial stories’. He argues that “spatial stories can evoke pre-existing narrative associations; they may embed narrative information within their mise-en-scene, or provide resources for emergent narratives”, yet they do not have to take the form of classical narratives.2 A perhaps surprising but for that reason symptomatic competitor is the online video platform YouTube, which provides other possibilities to present and access data about ‘here’, ‘me’, ‘now’. Assuming, for the sake of argument, we (mis)take YouTube for a reservoir of spatial stories or scripted narratives, what does YouTube offer the casual user, once s/he engages with the site’s dynamic architecture, sets up a few ground rules, and then lets him/herself be taken to different sites, spaces, and places? An online video platform is not directed by the logic of an individual character’s aims, obstacles, helpers, and opponents (to cite the story formula of Vladimir Propp and many other narratologists) but by the workings of contiguity, combinatory, and chance. So the main question is: what happens when neither the causal chain of action and reaction nor the temporal succession of locales determines the direction or trajectory of the journey and, instead, we are propelled by key words or tags, tag clouds or clusters, embedded links, users’ comments, and, of course, our own ‘free’ associations? There is a long tradition of generating such chains and concatenations in literature, going back to some of the very first narratives we call novels, such as Cervantes’ Don Quixote (the patron saint of the active reader, who is now found in the company of the ‘Rube’ of early cinema to embody the interactive spectator), or from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, all the way to films like Luis Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty and Tod Solondz’ Palindromes.

1 The term ‘scripted spaces’ was coined by Norman Klein, possibly in connection with an exhibition in Rotterdam, February 2000: http://www.wdw.nl/event/scripted-spaces/ 2 Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (eds.), First Person (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 121.

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Constructive Instability As a site for exploring the shaggy-dog type of scripted spaces, YouTube still stands in some of the major traditions of narrative (the novel, cinema). Close to cinema in its use of visual segments extracted from different (narrative, performative) media, YouTube also gives the illusion—like the realist novel, but also like YouTube’s owners, Google—of a totality, a full universe, with the difference that a novel suggests a world (among many), while Google suggests the world: if you cannot find it on Google or YouTube, many people now seem to believe that it either doesn’t exist or is not worth knowing or having. Most of us are well aware of the dangers of relying on such a monopoly of information, but we also know—from our frequent if shamefaced use of, say, Wikipedia—how seductive it is to take as reliable fact what has been written, rewritten, amended, deleted, and once more rewritten by many hands in a single Wiki entry. Yet we accept the convenience that such ready-to-use knowledge affords, and we align ourselves with the implied consequences of a potentially momentous development: the so-called post-human condition, which “configures human beings so that they can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines”.3 In the post-human, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, between cybernetic mechanisms and biological organisms, between robots running on programs and humans pursuing goals or quests. In the words of N. Katherine Hayles, a prominent representative of the post-human view: “What [… is] happening, is the development of distributed cognitive environments in which humans and computers interact in hundreds of ways daily, often unobtrusively.”4 The idea of distributed intelligence and information-rich environments providing us with important data has almost become a commonplace. Yet even if one rejects the full implications of such a post-human position,5 3 Niran Abas, “The Posthuman View On Virtual Bodies,” C-Theory (25 May 1999) http://www. ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=266 4 ‘Computers aren’t just in boxes anymore; they are moved out into the world to become distributed throughout the environment. My colleague Marcus Novak has called this phenomenon “eversion”, in contrast to the “immersion” of the much more limited and localized virtual reality environments. N. Katherine Hayles in conversation with Albert Borgman on Humans and Machines. http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/borghayl.html (last accessed: 14 June 2015) 5 According to many of the recent studies of evolutionary biology (signed by such notable figures as Francisco Varela, Thomas Metzinger, Antonio Damasio, and Daniel Dennett), the smooth transition model of the human/machine interface is too large an assumption to make.

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one is well-advised to reflect on the changing definitions of ‘culture’ and ‘nature’. Not only are humans (culture) now largely responsible for what happens on and to the planet (nature), both nature and culture stand under the sign of techné. This techné needs itself to be refigured around the notion of ‘art’ and ‘artifice’: practices that are best situated between ‘design’, ‘engineering’, and ‘programming’. An interesting prospect arises that may even hold out a promise: as ‘life’ becomes more ‘artificial’ by being both engineered and programmable, the possibility arises that ‘art’ (or culture as we normally understand it) has to become more life-like (by emulating processes of reproduction, replication, random generation, mutation, chance, and contingency) in order to remain ‘art’, that is, ‘human’, in the sense of ‘un-adapted’ and sensitive to ‘failure’ (which in this context would be another word for finitude–that is, the certainty of death, or closure). Similarly in the sphere of knowledge production and knowledge dissemination, if the principles of ‘art’ and ‘life’ collapse, coalesce, or converge around replication and repetition, are organized by self-regulation and feedback and shaped by aggregation and clustering, what kind of art or knowledge arises from Internet culture? In order to test this question, I conducted an experiment: accepting the post-human ‘human-machine symbiosis’ as fact, I aligned myself with the logic of the auto-generated web links and their embedded information. At the same time, I imagined myself a Web 2.0 flaneur while also falling back on an old-fashioned avant-garde technique popular among the Surrealists: automatic writing. One specific version of this technique—Cadavres exquis (Exquisite corpses)—involves a daisy chain of participants continuing a drawing or a piece of writing without knowing more than a fragment of the previous contribution, making it a combination of ‘Chinese whispers’ and ‘six degrees of separation’. To give some indication of the results of the experiment, I shall introduce the concept of constructive instability. What interests me about the term, derived from engineering,6 is the idea that ‘instability’ and even ‘failure’ must have a place in the narratives of adaptive, dynamic, or emergent situations. For one obvious point to make about self-regulatory systems is that they involve risk and imponderability. As, among others, the ‘Internet guru’ Jaron Lanier in his attack on Wikipedia as ‘digital Maoism’ has pointed out, there 6 Originally a term used in military aviation to designate fighter bombers that relied so heavily on computer software that they were too unstable to be flown by humans, a feature which increased their operational speed and efficiency. The term became popular under George W Bush and Condoleezza Rice to indicate a policy of deliberate destabilization of the Middle East to bring about “regime change” and “democracy”. See Walid Charara, “Constructive Instability,” Le Monde diplomatique 7 July 2005 (https://mondediplo.com/2005/07/07instability).

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is real concern about the kind of agency and extent of control individuals and collectives are handing over when ‘intelligent systems’ run so much of everyday life, in the area of medicine, the government, or on the financial markets and in the conduct of modern warfare. Information systems such as we have them are considerably more fallible than is usually realized, as can be seen from electricity power-station failures or the knock-on effects that come from a local disturbance in the international air-traffic systems. Of course, one could argue that these are not self-regulatory phenomena but hierarchized and top-down, while the Internet was conceived and built precisely in order to minimize the domino effects typical of linear forms of communication or command-and-control. It is indeed due to the general success of this package distribution system that we feel so overconfident in the workings of all complex systems and circuits. A spectacular example are the financial markets, where the more advanced trading instruments such as futures and derivatives are inherently unstable; just how dangerous has been proven by the ‘crashes’, ‘meltdowns’, and ‘credit crunches’ in recent times. One working assumption of my experiment, in other words, was that the principle of instability and volatility and, indeed, fallibility must be regarded as systemic in the human-machine symbiosis: not as a design fault to be eliminated but specially engineered as a calculated risk and maybe even as a design advantage.7

Performed Failure: Narratives of Collapse I now want to report where the idea of constructive instability or performed failure took me in a more circumscribed field of application, namely film and media studies and the ‘future’ of narrative. I understand the term ‘constructive instability’ first in its most literal form, namely as the property of an artefact, constructed and built for the purpose of drawing maximal use from the processes engendered when it collapses or self-destructs. My focus of attention for this new field of force centered on constructive instability as a systemically precarious equilibrium on the Internet was YouTube— exemplary for the social networking and user-generated content websites where the monopoly of information (as controlled by Google) is constantly modified and amplified by the users’ own sense of what is important, useful,

7 Some of these ideas have been taken up and developed further by Jussi Parikka, notably in Digital Contagions (Berne and Brussels: Peter Lang, 2007).

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amusing, or of what simply exists: modified by a thoroughly pragmatic understanding of what is ‘true’ and what is ‘real’. Utilizing what I understand to be the underlying algorithmic structure and feedback dynamics of these ‘open socials’ or ‘social graphs’, i.e., the combination of search terms—the tag clouds—with the cluster mechanisms and sort algorithms of the YouTube site, I began to follow the semantic trail of the terms collapse, instability, and chain reaction to see where it would take me, eventually deciding to make my starting point a two-minute British advertisement. In 2003, it had ‘made history’ not only because its fame and success proved the power of the Internet as a ‘window of attention’ for advertisers but also because its production cost—it cost around six million dollars to produce—puts it squarely in the league of Hollywood blockbusters. It also demonstrated the ambivalence of the idea of collapse when understood as a bipolar principle of destruction and creation, with moments in between: of transition, of balance, of interlinked concatenations, or—to use a term familiar to urbanists and sociologists, ecologists and climatologists—of tipping points.8

The Honda Cog The advertisement is for the Honda Accord car and is generally known as the Honda Cog. Besides an enormous amount of Internet traffic, it generated serious coverage in the press. It had a substantial cross-over effect into the traditional media as well and became, in fact, an ‘urban legend’. Looking at the original advertisement more closely, it is clear that the setting connotes a gallery space: white walls, wooden parquet floor, no windows, controlled light sources. It also alludes in a playful but unmistakeable fashion to the work of several canonical artists of the twentieth century, notably in the f ield of sculpture and installation: Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder, Jean Tinguely, Carl André. The ‘floor’, as opposed to the wall, has become the main display area: combining pop-art resistance to easel painting with the ecological conceptualism of land art. It also seems very fitting that a Japanese car maker should have commissioned this ad, 8 Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (New York: Little Brown, 2000). See also Ian Bremmer, The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005) about “how to turn authoritarian regimes into stable, open democracies.” Ian Bremmer, whose Eurasia Group advises on political risk, sums up the challenge in a simple graphic that is this year’s tipping point.

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for it was Japan that first showed Europe and the US how to make cars with robots, how to reduce costs by just-in-time delivery. It was Japanese auto firms that pioneered several of the principles we now lump together under the term ‘post-Fordism’ but which, on this analysis, could just as well be called ‘Toyota-ism’ (or ‘Honda-ism’). What we see, then, is the ironic miseen-scene of a meta-mechanic assembly line which says “look: no hands! Pure magic” or (as the Honda slogan has it) “the power of dreams” (alluding to the oneiric life of objects so beloved by the surrealists). The director, Antoine Bardou-Jacquet, is a well-known creative artist of high-concept ads and music videos. The links on YouTube around the Honda Cog quickly lead to an extract from a ‘making of’ video, which give some glimpses into the immense effort that went into the production of such an effortless-seeming and yet inevitable concatenation of collapsing moments and obedient parts. The ‘making of’ video—which, by a nice coincidence, has as its motto Soichiro Honda’s famous slogan—Success is 99% Failure—ends up celebrating in the language of cinema our fascination with the engineering marvels that are contemporary automobiles, but it also mimics the generic features of a nature documentary, about the patience it takes to train animals (here: car parts) in order for them to perform for humans. Back to the Honda Cog: besides the allusions to Japan and post-Fordism, there is the voice at the end, intoning the tag line: “Isn’t it nice when things just work?”. I associated it immediately with Sean Connery and James Bond, and so did the users of YouTube. Very soon I discovered tags that led from the Honda Accord to the Aston Martin DB 5, Bond’s famous car; the link immediately connected the ‘life’ of the parts of the Honda Accord to the Aston Martin gadgets, and especially those fabulous demonstrations given at the modifications workshop in the belly of the MI5 headquarters by the immortal engineer-inventor Q, played by Desmond Llewelyn, notably in Goldfinger (1964). Another link brought me to a French mash-up of this scene, which gives it a quite different sub-text and cultural atmosphere: references are now to Christopher Lambert, Bob Marley, the Rastafarians, Californian beach culture and air lift suspension, Rizzla cigarette paper, rolled joints, all played out against intense homophobic/homo-erotic banter between Q and Bond.9 The gruff boffin-engineer from MI5—who “never jokes about his work” but visibly delights in his playful as well as lethal modif ications—is 9 My special thanks to Fabrice Ziolkowski for providing the translation and cultural commentary on the clip.

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immediately associated with one obvious father also of the Honda Cog, namely, Rube Goldberg (1883-1970). The name stands for a kind of machine that does simple or humble tasks (like sneezing into a handkerchief) in an especially complicated, ingenious or roundabout way, utilizing common principles of traction and transmission but in a manner that makes them meta-mechanic (reminiscent of both Marcel Duchamp and Charles Chaplin). Apart from the voice, it is the words that hold another key to the ad’s cultural layers. For besides Bond and automotive gadgets, “Isn’t it nice when things just work?” cannot but evoke—for a British listener, at least—one of the most famous party-political campaigns ever. “Labour isn’t working” was the 1979 slogan that brought Margaret Thatcher to power and made advertising chic and hip, thanks to Charles Saatchi (head of the company that devised the poster and for whom Antoine Bardou-Jacquet has also worked), who in turn made ‘Young British Artists’ chic and hip and to this day is one of the most influential collectors of modern and contemporary art: precisely the sort of art the Honda Cog gently mocks as well as generously celebrates.

Der Lauf der Dinge However, the words of the Honda Cog not only nod and wink at the knowing cognoscenti but also anticipate possible legal problems (which did indeed arise) by acknowledging (not so obliquely) where the makers had ‘appropriated’ the idea for the ad from: not a London gallery nor a billboard but from the Kassel documenta of 1987. There, one of the most popular art pieces was a half-hour 16 mm film entitled Der Lauf der Dinge, generally translated as The Way Things Go but better rendered as the “the Life of Things”. Its authors are two Swiss artists, Peter Fischli & David Weis who have been working together since the early 1970s. This videotape was their international breakthrough. The rough, para-industrial set-up, the processes put in motion, as well as the materials used inevitably recall many of the key elements of modern sculpture, conceptual art, and other avant-garde practices, notably but not only from the post-WWII period: the concern for balance and suspension (Suprematism and Constructivism); assemblage art (from the late 1940s); kinetic art (from the 1950s and 60s); trash objects, garbage, and recycled materials (from New Realism and Pop); ready-mades and small wasted energies made useful (Marcel Duchamp); and, finally, the energies inherent

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in apparently inert matter from the work of Carl André, not forgetting the macho-engineering skills of Richard Serra and the action paintings—here duly automated and pre-programmed—of Jackson Pollock. The connections between the Honda Cog and Der Lauf der Dinge (just as the ironic allusions to their respective predecessors in art, cinema, and popular culture) are of, course, the very stuff of cultural history in both its modernist and post-modernist variants. The echoes and allusions can be accommodated within the traditional parameters just this side of plagiarism: of ‘homage’, ‘remediation’, ‘pastiche’, and ‘appropriation’. The saturation with puns and arcane references to inter-media phenomena is furthermore the trademark of the smart ad, as pioneered and made global by, among others, Saatchi & Saatchi in Britain since the 1970s and 1980s. It is seen by many as part of the problem of the cultural collapse of distinctions rather than as part of the (democratizing) solution or rescue of high culture, even though this type of advertising has been widely adopted not only for cars and other commodities but is now a staple promotional tool also for museums and other traditional temples of high culture. Yet the point to make in the present context is that the majority of these cultural references, genealogies, and associations were suggested to me not by critical essays but by the YouTube tags and user comments themselves. This is a different, much ‘flatter’ mode of linkage and hierarchy in which the pop-cultural, topical, taste-driven, or art-historical knowledge base of the users and uploaders is cross-hatched with a good deal of contingency and chance, while nonetheless seeming to form part of a discernable design, a ‘narrative’. As narrative, it is a totality-in-the-making, however amorphous or blob-like it may appear in its early stages of formation. If I were to draw some preliminary conclusions from my experiment so far, I would highlight the following points. First, the Honda Cog, while serendipitous in its media effects–no-one anticipated quite what an internet phenomenon it would be–is very traditional in the ideology of its creation: in the ‘making of’ video, one recognizes all the clichés of commercial filmmaking (money and labor invested equals aesthetic value and authenticity) as well as of auteurism (the artist’s vision is paramount, he is a driven and relentless perfectionist: success–the perfect take–finally rewards his perseverance).10 10 „In 2003, he directed the internationally acclaimed and multi-award-winning Honda ‘Cog’ commercial for London’s Weiden & Kennedy. It is a two-minute commercial showing Honda parts bumping into each other in a chain reaction. It took months of meticulous planning and trial and error, with a four day shoot at the end. It was shot in two takes and was all done for

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Second, and as a counter-argument, one can also observe a new frame of reference at work: that of the test or test run11 as a new paradigm, situated between Deleuze’s ‘control society’ and the concern with the post-human. In the Honda Cog, it manifests itself in the take, the re-take, here amplified and exaggerated to become its own parody: it took 605 takes to “get it right”, eloquently illustrating the “99% failure” rule. Likewise, the lab conditions, the stress tests of man and machine are frequently mentioned, humbly put in the service of perfection, excellence, and self-improvement, which is to say, in the service of that ever-elusive, dogged-by-failure perfomativity. As if to respond to this challenge, there is now a ‘making of’ video also for Der Lauf der Dinge, especially compiled by Fischli & Weiss for their major Tate Modern retrospective that opened in October 2006. It, too, concentrates on the endless trials and the recalcitrance and resistance of the materials, emphasizing performativity now in the mode ‘performance of failure’ as a goal in itself rather than any emphatically asserted ‘artist’s vision’ (as with the Honda Cog). A third point, worth highlighting because it brings the Honda Cog and Der Lauf der Dinge not only in line with each other but aligns them with major issues in film studies and film theory, is that both are the work of bona fide filmmakers. I already highlighted this in my comments on the Honda Cog and its proximity to the Hollywood blockbuster, but it is worth pointing out that Der Lauf der Dinge only exists as a film/videotape: it is not the filmic record of a performance of machinic self-destruction, such as Tingeley staged them in New York in the 1960s, or the Fluxus Happenings of Wolf Vorstell and the Vienna Actionists, but an event staged specifically for the camera. The mise-en-scene in each case is that of an auteur-director who decides exactly where to place the camera, when to move it, and how to frame and reframe each action and its (con-)sequence. A half-century of film theory comes alive in these mini-films with maxi-budgets, around the ‘long take’ and ‘montage’ and the implication of opting for ‘staging in depth’ or ‘cutting in the camera’. While some ‘invisible edits’ are discernable, long take classic continuity editing is the preferred choice in both pieces. Finally, in both works one notes a studied anachronism, a retrospective temporal deferral at work. This has two aspects: one concerns their real. It was a victory for patience and passion! It first caused a stir running throughout the entire commercial break during the Grand Prix and went on to win a Gold Lion at Cannes, Best commercial and Gold at BTAA and a Gold Pencil at D&AD to name but a few.“ Entry for Antoine Bardou-Jacquet http://graphic-arts-student.blogspot.nl/ 11 For more on the new regime of the test as a paradigm of the control society, see Avital Ronell, The Test Drive (Bloomington: University of Illinois Press, 2005).

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respective artistic technique, the other their (meta-)physics. Regarding technique, the Honda Cog team are proud to certify in the ‘making of’ video that they engineered this extraordinary concatenation ‘for real’ and not with the aid of digital effects, which in the aesthetic they are committed to would have amounted to ‘cheating’. And yet, by 2003, digital effects had already become the norm in advertising, so that their decision is a deliberate self-restriction and creative constraint such as one knows it from minimalism, concept art, or—as I have argued elsewhere—European auteur cinema since the 1990s. The other studied anachronism concerns the physics used in both works and the way they figure causality. Neither Roadrunner gravity-defying antics here nor the oneiric dream logic of a Salvador Dali or Hans Richter film sequence. Causality in these films operates at the familiar middle level and within human proportions. Rooted in Newtonian physics, the makers celebrate a visible, tangible world, fast disappearing into invisibility at both ends of the scale (at the macro-astronomic as well as at the microsub-atomic level) but also insisting on a linear causality vanishing in the media in which one now encounters their work: the Internet and YouTube are, precisely, non-linear and rhizomatic. The ‘old physics’ on display are in the case of the Honda Cog highly stylized and deliberately tweaked for humorous effect, while in Der Lauf der Dinge the concatenation of build-ups and disasters has also a more sombre, cosmic dimension.

Around the World in Eighty Clicks Fischli & Weiss have as their motto: Am schönsten ist das Gleichgewicht, kurz bevor’s zusammenbricht (balance is most precious, just before it crashes). While clearly applying to their work as a whole,12 this aesthetics of the tipping point also encapsulates the main challenge that my experiment with tagging and user-generated links on YouTube poses. For at this juncture in my test, the question arose: where would this semantic knot or node around ‘constructive instability’ and the performativity of failure take me, once I had chosen the Honda Cog and Der Lauf der Dinge as my epicenters, once ‘collapse’, ‘concatenation’, and ‘chain reactions’ became my search criteria, and once YouTube’s tag clouds defined 12 As demonstrated, for instance, by their series Equilibres – Quiet Afternoon (1984), on show in the Fischli & Weiss “Flowers & Questions” retrospective at the Tate Modern in London Oct 2006 to Jan 2007).

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my self- imposed constraints? One answer was: nowhere at all; a second one: all around the world; and a third answer would be: into the problems of narratology. Nowhere at all: following the YouTube tags puts one on the cusp of an abyss: of hundreds if not thousands of similar or even the same videos, commented on and cross-referenced to yet more of the same and the similar. In Foucault’s epistemic terms, the Internet is ‘pre-modern’ in its regime of representation: resemblance rules. The more you move, the more you come to a standstill. All over the world: searching the Honda Cog and The Way Things Go on the Internet and YouTube started off several other chain reactions, which opened up wholly unexpected avenues in a wonderful efflorescence of rhizomatic profusion, beckoning in all directions and sending one on a most wonderful journey of discovery. Not all of these journeys or forking paths can be retraced here, so for convenience’s sake, I have sorted and bundled some of them into clusters that formed around instability and concatenation but allowing the clusters to become small ‘cluster bombs’, ignited and radiating outwards from the Honda Cog and Der Lauf der Dinge.13In this respect my YouTube journey itself retraced and reproduced en-abime the key structural dynamics I discovered as underlying both my chosen examples: the Rube Goldberg machine.

Cluster and Forking Path “Rube Goldberg” That the tags from Fischli & Weiss should quickly bring one to Rube Goldberg was to be expected. But little did I suspect that ‘out there’, the idea of building such elaborate mechanical contraptions serving a very simple purpose has an enormous following. With the camcorder always at the ready, geniuses of little more than eight or ten years of age try out how to fill a cup of coke from a bottle catapulted by a mousetrap snapping tight or show us how to use the vibrations of the ringer-setting on their mobile phone to set off a chain reaction that switches on the radio. A different kind of task preoccupies a New York artist by the name of Tim Fort, who spends his time devising Rube Goldberg hybrids, which turn out to be little allegories of the cinema itself. His homage to the beginnings of 13 A button on the YouTube Screen now allows one to ‘explode’ such clusters around the selected video and see the tag clouds scatter. My thanks to Pepita Hesselberth for drawing my attention to this feature.

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cinema (chronophotography, galloping horses, Fred Ott’s Sneeze), once more evoke the celluloid strip and its transport by and through machine devices, unseen by the spectator but here made visible in their mechanic simplicity. Fort himself calls his works ”kinetic art movement devices, using an extended repertoire of impulse transmission techniques and the magic of montage”, and this originary idea of cinema as pure mechanical movement hovers, like a fantasmagoric ghost, over many of the Internet’s Rube Goldberg meta-mechanical contraptions: so much so that their clustered presence on YouTube makes of the site something like cinema’s reverential funeral parlor.

Cluster and Forking Path “Pythagoras Switch” From the Rube Goldberg connection, it was but ‘one degree of separation’ that led—‘laterally’ but also by the simple addition of an adjective in one of the user comments—in an apparently quite different direction. The unlikely combination ‘Japanese Rube Goldberg’ landed me among a cluster of videos from a Tokyo-based educational television programme, collectively known as “pitagora suicchi”. This is the Japanese pronunciation of “Pythagoras Switch” and is aimed at children. It shows simple but ingenious combinations of everyday objects aligned in such a way as to allow one or several small balls (or colored marbles) to travel in a circuitous but steady downward motion. Subjecting the ball to the laws of gravity (Newtonian, for sure), the objects create intricate obstacles which interrupt but cannot finally stop the ball’s trajectory. The journeys always end with a tiny flourish, a point of recursiveness, and self-referentiality. Signalled by the moment when the ball falls into a receptacle or hits a mini-gong, the flip confirms the identity of the show and plays a maddeningly addictive jingle. A Pythagoras Switch is a minimalist exercise in creating closure out of indeterminacy, miraculously conjoining the pleasures of free play with the strict rules of physics. Why is it called Pythagoras Switch? The makers merely hint at “the Eureka experience” that children are supposed to have, thanks to a sort of category switch: “‘Pythagoras Switch’ wants to help kids have that moment of A-HA! We want to raise thinking about thinking, to flip that epiphany switch in every child.” Granted that these short performances do indeed flip a switch, I nevertheless tend to think of the name ‘Pythagoras’ as a misnomer and even a parapraxis, a failed performance: not only is “Eureka, [I have found (it)]” usually attributed to Archimedes and not Pythagoras, it

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should be called the Archimedean Switch also for another reason. After all, the principle of pitagora suicchi resembles the famous fulcrum associated with Archimedes’ name: the single point of equipoise that he said could lift the universe from its hinges. But the fact that it is called Pythagoras leads one in yet other, no less intriguing directions: to geometry and to Euclidean solids, as well as to the so-called Pseudo-Pythagoreans, the first important Gnostics of the ancient world, who survived right into the Middle Ages and beyond and whose main analysis of the universe was in terms of the magic of numbers and the mysteries of mathematics. Pythagoras would have been a fitting grandfather of the power of algorithms and thus the appropriate patron saint not so much for the Pythagoras Switch and instead for the sort and cluster algorithms of YouTube that made me discover pitagora suicchi in the first place, right next to Rube Goldberg.

Cluster and Forking Path ”Domino Day” and Celebrity TV If the Pythagoras Switch is minimalist and haiku-like in its elegant economy and delicate epiphanies, a close cousin, by contrast, is all on the side of excess, the incremental, and of the nearly ‘getting out of hand’: I am referring to that other major Japanese pastime having to do with knock-on effects, namely ‘Domino toppling’. Here, too, Japanese television is in the forefront, since it appears to stage regular domino telethons. One of these televised Japanese shows on YouTube features a high-tech contraption where the steel ball’s trajectory is only one phase, releasing other mechanical agents and setting off further reactions, including small explosions in the manner of Fischli & Weiss but also gravity-defying underwater action in goldfish bowls. The show is commented on by experts, who fire up and encourage the performing parts as if they are players in a competitive sports event. Once again, it is worth noting the aesthetic that oscillates between the cinematic and the televisual: while the Pythagoras Switch programme prefers long takes with a camera that pans and reframes rather than cuts, the Japanese Rube Goldberg contest and the Domino telethon, by contrast, favor the typical action replays of televised sports events, but with their spoken commentary they are also reminiscent of the benshi tradition of silent cinema, and they even re-invent the action overlap from the very first Edwin Porter films.

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Between Epiphany and Entropy The domino toppling contests also brought home another lesson of globalization: ‘don’t follow the flag, follow the tag’. Just as commodities, trade, and labor no longer ‘respect’ the boundaries of the nation-state, so the tags ‘chain reaction’ or ‘domino telethon’ easily cross borders and even continents. So it is fitting to interrupt this ‘Tour of the YouTube World’ with an image, and one of totalitarian domination. While multitudes (whether of dominoes or of young atheletes) forming a recognizable likeness highlight the coercive, normative power of such software as operates the Internet at the level of the algorithms, of the codes and protocols—mostly hidden from view and in any case incomprehensible to the ordinary user—the idea of an ‘image’ reminds us of the fact that in the man-machine symbiosis, two very different kinds of system are expected to communicate with each other. For this ‘image’ is nothing but the filter, membrane, or user-friendly face—the ‘interface’—between stupid but infinitely patient (and performative) machines running on programmes relayed to gates and switches (electric-electronic dominoes, one might say) and intelligent but increasingly impatient (as well as accident-prone) humans, requiring visual representations that give a sense of recognition and self-presence, relayed through words, sound, and, above all, images. The concept of the interface at this juncture raises more issues than can be tackled here, but it allows me to return to the question I started with, namely the place of narrative as interface between data and user. As the logic of the time-space continuum (the diegesis) is transformed into clusters of multiply interrelated and virally proliferating semantic links (the ‘fabula’ or ‘story’), it seems that narrational authority, the (uneven) distribution of information, and the order or sequence in which it is accessed (the ‘syuzhet or ‘plot’) passes from ‘narrator’ to ‘narratee’, from storyteller to user. Yet since the user depends on the ‘machine’ to generate the access points by way of sort algorithms and tag clouds (whose internal logic generally escapes him/her), a new authority interposes itself, one that is both stupid like chance and all-knowing like God.14 How can one describe the effects of this encounter?

14 “What’s the different between God and Google? God—as revealed through Jesus Christ—is the finite infinite, and Google—as experienced by its users—is the infinite finite.“ There are a number of memes about “What do Google and God have in Common” on the Internet, but a worthy effort to list possible comparisons can be found on Janet Denison’s blog: http://www. janetdenison.com/blog/165-what-do-god-and-google-have-in-common

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Fischli & Weiss see the encounter in both ethical and aesthetic categories. That they are aware of the problem of who or what is in control and of who or what has agency and responsibility is shown by their remarks on Der Lauf der Dinge. By fully implicating “the things” themselves, they comment meta-critically on the dilemma that agency poses for the human-machine symbiosis.15 In the context of narrative, Fischli & Weiss suggest that the ‘worlds’ that open up as a consequence of following the semantic trail of the Honda Cog and Der Lauf der Dinge both have a creator-narrator (multiple, anonymous, but nonetheless singular-in-plurality) and do not have one (to the extent that they are self-generated). By bringing together various individuals and their activities, skills, and obsessions in very different locations, they can be called ‘scripted spaces’ (since their coming to my attention is at least in part ‘scripted’ or ‘programmed’), but they are neither directly comparable to the classic novel nor do they resemble a video game or a virtual world like Second Life. Yet what one encounters is nonetheless a story-world of sorts, rich in human interest, detail, and characters, full of humor and wisdom: in the genre of what one could call the digital picaresque. YouTube is a user-generated content site with a high degree of automation where nonetheless a certain structured contingency obtains, as suggested by the semantically quite coherent clusters that I was able to extract via the tags attached to the videos. My ‘Travels with YouTube’ (besides becoming itself a Rube Goldberg machine) also led to a series of forking path narratives, where the multiplicity of strands made up for some weak plotting and meandering storylines, which together nonetheless make out of exquisite corpses a lively clutch of shaggy dog stories reminiscent of Manuscript Found in Saragossa, Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths, or Buñuel’s The Milky Way.16 This leads to the paradox alluded to above: the structured contingency is, on the one hand, strongly informed and shaped by mathematics via the site’s programming architecture and design, based on its search and sort algorithms. On the other hand, the chaos of human 15 “GOOD and EVIL are often very close, for example when the candle on the swing sets fire to the detonating fuse. Because they are nice and childish, the candle and the swing tend towards the good, whereas the detonating fuse is evil because you don’t need it for harmless things. On the other hand, every object in our installation is good if it functions, because it then liberates its successor, gives it the chance of development“ (Fischli & Weiss, n.d.). 16 The link between interactive storytelling and Buñuel has been made before, most systematically by Marsha Kinder, “Hotspots, Avatars and Narrative Fields Forever: Buñuel’s Legacy for New Digital Media and Interactive Database Narrative,” Film Quarterly 55, no. 4 (Summer 2002): 2-15.

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creativity, eccentricity, and self-importance prevails. My clusters around ‘collapse’ were only small islands of sense carved out of a sea of boiling magma, made up of human self-presentation and self-performance, the trials and errors of the collective ‘me’, which is YouTube. But who is to say that this performative persistence to be, to be present and to be perceived does not mimic certain forms of narrative self-reference, while creating a cast of believable characters and even generating a particular mode of narrative address? Narrative self-reference: The rhizomatic branching or viral contagion propagating in all directions, while non-hierarchical and ‘flat’ or ‘lateral’ in its linkage, nonetheless seems to produce a surprisingly high degree of selfreflexivity and auto-referentiality, no doubt due to the effects of ‘positive feedback’: the demonstrations of chain reaction, mechanical concatenation, Pythagoras switches, and falling dominoes are performative also in the sense that they either enact their own conditions of possibility or remediate a previous stage of their own mediality, as nostalgic or ironic pastiche and repetition. For instance, via the Pythagoras switch another meta-dimension emerged, which brought one of the core mechanisms of YouTube into view. One of the creators of the Pythagoras switch series is the video artist Sato Masahiko, one of whose installations, called ‘Bubble Sort’, I was linked to. The piece, which shows a line of people waiting, re-arranging themselves in fast-forward motion according to size, completely baffled me, until its tags led to several other videos also having to do with sorting. Masahiko’s video, it transpires, visualizes a popular sorting algorithm, called indeed ‘bubblesort’, explained on YouTube by tens of videos, all manually ‘remediating’ or graphically ‘interfacing’ the different sorting algorithms (insertion sort, selection sort, shell sorts, etc.): apparently a favorite pastime for first-year computer science students.17 The cast of characters, as we saw, included some well-known names, such as ‘Rube Goldberg’, ‘Pythagoras’, ‘James Bond’; others become known because they ‘sign’ their work: Antoine Bourdou-Jacques, Fischli & Weiss, Tim Fort, Sato Masahiko; many more merely present themselves to the camera in low-res home-made videos. Thanks to all of them, however, the YouTube ways of showing and telling (i.e. of mimesis and diegesis) are ludic and reflexive, educational and participatory, empowering and humbling. They mark an unusually soft dividing line between creative 17 Different types of sorting: insertion sort, selection sort, and shell sorts, but bubble sort is the simplest, if the least efficient—electronic spread-sheets, the computer’s first ‘killer application’ (VisiCalc) and the mythical ‘birth’ of Apple computers.

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design and hard-core engineering, storytelling and role playing, singularity and repetition. To put this in the terms of another discourse, more germane to the posthuman: it is to find oneself in the presence of strange organisms pulsing, moving, and mutating depending on the tags one enters or encounters as YouTube sorts, filters, and aggregates the choices I am not even aware of making. That they cluster themselves semantically (instead of letting a more Gestaltist organization—an ‘image’—determine their shape) is partly a concession to the ‘human interface’ but partly also because of special heuristic value: it is where the cultural noise of verbal language encounters the information of the mathematical program, providing the constructive instability of performed failure, and throwing the grit of human creativity and dirt of human unpredictability into the machinery of perfect humanmachine adaptation. Mode of address. The traditional asymmetry of the single point of origin (the author, the narrator) addressing a potentially infinite number of readers or viewer was already deconstructed by Roland Barthes’ ‘writerly text’ and many other narratologists since. So the multiple authorship of the YouTube tales, when joining up with the selectivity and serendipity of the user, make YouTube a very ‘writerly’ experience. But the mode of address that I am trying to focus on is also different from the ‘writerly’ in that it creates an empty space of enunciation, to be filled by the anonymous but also plural “me”. On the one hand, a site like YouTube is inherently addictive, as one video drags one along to another and another and another. Yet after an hour or so, one realizes how precariously balanced and delicately poised one is between the joy of discovering the unexpected, the marvellous, and occasionally even the miraculous, and the rapid descent into an equally palpable anxiety, staring into the void of an unimaginable number of videos, with their proliferation of images, their banality, or obscenity in sounds and commentary. Right next to the euphoria and the epiphany, then, is the heat-death of meaning, the ennui of repetition and of endless distraction. The relentless progress of entropy begins to suck out and drain away all life. ‘Epiphany’ and ‘entropy’, one might say, are what define the enunciative position or ‘subject-effect’ of YouTube, encapsulated in the recursiveness of its own tagline “broadcast yourself”, which, being circular, accurately describes its specific ‘mode of address’ as an infinite loop. YouTube’s picaresque narratives are held together not by a coherent diegesis nor by a coherent ‘subject-position’ (whether articulated by a psychoanalytic, cognitivist, or pragmatic theory of spectatorship) but by a perpetual oscillation between the ‘fullness’ of reference and recognition and

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the ‘emptiness’ of repetition and redundancy, the singularity of an encounter, and the plurality of the uncountable in which the singular occurs. There may be a better name for this oscillation, but in the meantime it puts me on notice that my experiment would be incomplete and even misleading if I did not emphasize this oscillation between epiphany and entropy and instead gave the impression that it was either possible or responsible to gather my clusters like floral bouquets, or cherry-pick the gems like the Honda Cog or Der Lauf der Dinge while ignoring or even disavowing the rest. Like the high-wire acrobat sensing at all times the trembling tightrope underneath her feet, the pleasure (or ‘plaisir’) of YouTube as narrative in its referential expanse (the ‘whole world’), its downside (or jouissance) is the crash and the void. Epiphany and entropy remind us that the post-human always comes up against our mortality and finitude. Held against the open horizon of our ‘stupid God’, the Web 2.0 feedback loops with their unimaginable and yet palpable magnitudes suspend us between infinity and indefiniteness, a state only made bearable and liveable, and therefore human, thanks to constructive instability and the performativity of failure, for as Fischli & Weiss so wisely remind us: am schönsten ist das Gleichgewicht …

IV Digital Cinema

7.

Digital Cinema Delivery, Event, Time

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.1 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 1 See for instance, Kevin Robbins, “The Virtual Unconscious in Postphotography,” in Tim Druckrey (ed.), Electronic Culture (New York: Aperture, 1996), 154-163.

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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’,2 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. Instead, the answer must lie in a more conjunctural history of the technical media, one that respects uneven developments and discontinuities, while reminding oneself that one is constructing an archaeology3 in which concerns pressing on the present formulate the questions one puts to the past, as a way of coping with the future. Any technology that materially affects the indexical status of (moving) images—and digitization would seem to be such a technology—thus puts into crisis deeply held beliefs about representation and visualization, and many of the discourses—critical, scientific, or aesthetic—based on or formulated in the name of the indexical in our culture have been re-examined. It is in this last respect, I would argue, that the digital has come to function less as a technology than as a ‘cultural metaphor’ of crisis and transition.

Digital Delivery and Film Production An example of a conjunctural approach to the history and thus the future of cinema would be to look at an apparently odd phenomenon, namely that much of the digital revolution around cinema has at its heart a familiar commodity, the narrative feature film, mainly identified with Hollywood. It is still the one ‘killer application’ for many of the new developments, whether directly (on pay television, VOD, home video, the cinema multiplexes) or indirectly (for video games, theme park rides, and transmedia applications). For this remarkably stable product, digitization is a contradictory factor, at once an ingenious technical process of translation, generation, and storage 2 Bill Joy, “Why the Future doesn’t need us” Wired 8 (2004) http://archive.wired.com/wired/ archive/8.04/joy_pr.html 3 See also Erkki Huhtamo, “Time Machines in the Gallery: An Archaeological Approach in Media Art,” in Mary Anne Moser (ed.), Immersed in Technology: Art and Visual Environments (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 232-268.

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and the totem notion around which a notoriously conservative industry is in the process of reorganizing. And this usually means reinventing itself in order to do much the same as it has always done. If there is change, it is above all in the form of new distribution and circulation opportunities, where digital cinema is basically a new delivery system, adding ‘value’ to the product as it percolates through the entertainment industries, but where digital trans­mission seems so far to have had relatively little effect on the product itself: we are still dealing with the big picture, the blockbuster movie (and its ‘moons and satellites’). 4 The blockbuster movie is among other things, as we know, a marketing concept generating attention and high recognition value and involving shorter exploitation spans by implemen­ting in the audiovisual market a principle perhaps better known from publishing and the music business: the ‘bestseller’ and the promotion of a ‘top ten’ or ‘popularity chart’.5 You can think of such a marketing principle what you will, but it is not only crucial for the secondary markets (recognition value is what television buys from the film industry, because it in turn is what advertisers are buying time for on television). In the primary market, on the other hand, the bestseller or blockbuster, because of the size of its budget, also acts as a starter engine, pulling along other productions as well as often generating the funds to finance changes in the infrastructure of the industry, such as updating equipment and investment in the plant. It can also provide training sites for new skills, talent, and services as well as occasioning other kinds of spin-offs. The principle or model would be that of the ‘prototype’ as it features in other industries, such as the car industry, which develops and tests its prototypes in-house, or in the aircraft or armament industries, where fighter planes and advanced weapon systems often function as prototypes for civilian applications but which are tested by the military.6 Finally, the blockbuster as prototype helps set standards also on the service side, for 4 Despite mature technical solutions, there is still little prospect of films being beamed into theaters. Piracy is one concern, but a clash of interests among the parties involved is at least as strong a factor. 5 See the importance of the opening weekend of a film and the popularity of revenue charts produced by Box Office Mojo. 6 “The cinema of the future will be a simulated roller coaster ride. Go see Star Tours at Disneyland. That is the prototype. The cinema auditorium of the future will be a modified flight simulator. […] That’s why you’re seeing alliances between the motion picture and aircraft industries.” Conrad Schoeffter, “Scanning the Horizon: A Film is a Film is a Film,” in T Elsaesser and K. Hoffmann (eds.), Cinema Futures: Cain Abel of Cable – The Screen Arts in the Digital Age (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), 105-118.

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the exhibition sector: for instance, it may demand the installation of better sound and projection equipment in cinemas. In each case, digitization is ‘somewhere’, but it is not what regulates or disrupts the system, whose logic is commercial, entrepreneurial, or capitalist-industrial. Thus, despite the fact that the narrative feature film is still at the center of the system, we must be careful not to underestimate either the multiple types of input that are invested in this single, apparently unified commodity which is the Hollywood movie, nor can we ignore the mesh of connections tying such a smoothly coherent feature of the media-scape into its economic and technological surroundings. Perhaps the most appropriate way to put it is to remember that when we speak of cinema today, we speak of cinema after television and after the video game, after the theme park and after the DVD. What does this mean in practice? From the point of view of production, filmmaking has always been a combination of different businesses, requiring a multitude of skills, techniques, and technologies to work together in order to realize the finished product. The difference that digitization has brought to this division of labor is to shift the balance between pre-production and post-production towards the latter. Even so, most mainstream films continue to be a composite of live action in real settings; live action in studio settings; live action in painted sets; live action and animation combined; mechanical special effects, robotics, and animatronics combined with digital visual effects; and all of the above combined with digital sound effects. In this respect, digital cinema is not new in itself but a possibly more efficient and maybe in the long run even cheaper way of continuing the longstanding practice of illusionism in cinema while adding another element to the mixed-media, multi-media hybrid that is commercial filmmaking. In the light of this, and given the central importance of the narrative, star-cast feature film for the economic system that is the international film industry, it is fair to assume that traditional ways of making films will, for the foreseeable future, continue. We know that the revolution announced by Francis Ford Coppola in the late 1970s, which he hoped to implement with his Zoetrope Studio and all-digital filmmaking, has so far not materialized. Another guru of digital cinema, the inventor and owner of ‘Industrial Light & Magic’ George Lucas, voiced as recently as February 1997 a certain skepticism,7 and this not after a commercial failure, as Coppola’s One from the Heart (1982) proved to be, but flushed with success after the 7 See Kevin Kelly and Paula Parisi, “Beyond Star Wars, what’s next for George Lucas,” in Wired, February 1997, 164.

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tremendously lucrative re-launch of the first part of his Star Wars trilogy and his digital empire, working to full capacity, evidently also having ‘the Force’ on its side. It would appear that cinema in the age of the digital will basically remain the same. Yes, it will remain the same, and it will be utterly different, it is already utterly different. For, as suggested above, the digital is not only a new technique of post-production work and a new delivery system or storage medium, it is the new horizon of thinking about cinema, which also means that it gives a vantage point from beyond the horizon so that we can, as it were, try and look back to where we actually are, and how we arrived there. The digital can thus function as a time machine, a conceptual boundary as well as its threshold. Therefore, if one extrapolates from the present, but with this borderlimit in mind, one comes to something like the following considerations. Faced with the increase in special effects but also the use of digital visuals in all kinds of other fields, one can speculate whether this ‘norm’ that we have so far referred to, namely the Hollywood-type feature film, will one day be seen as what Lev Manovich has called merely the ‘default value’ of the cinematic system.8 According to him, it is now possible to conceive of so many ways of generating moving or animated images, all of which fulfill the perceptual criteria of photographic presence (Manovich calls it ‘perfect photographic credibility’), that the most common use today—the live action film—will seem but one variant among others, a historically and culturally specific type with no further claim to dominance either in the marketplace or conceptually. In fact, the ‘photographic’ mode may come to be seen as a leftover from the nineteenth century, part of a curious obsession with ‘footprints’.9 At the present time, then, we would be witnessing a transition from what one could call the optical (or the photographic) to the digital (the post-photographic) mode of image production. Manovich goes even further in reversing the traditional hierarchy, arguing that we need to see the digital not as a post-photographic but a graphic mode, one of whose many possibilities is the photographic effect and, by extension, the live action cinematic effect. Considered as a graphic mode, the digital presents itself with a long history that not only predates 8 “[Real-live action films with actors] may become merely the default values of the system cinema, in the future, all kinds of other options are possible, so that both narrative and live action may seem to be options rather than constitutive features of the cinema.” Lev Manovich, Digital Cinema www.manovich.net/index.php/projects/what-is-digital-cinema 9 Ibid.

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cinema and accompanies its history throughout but that also makes crucial reference to a history that, in the modern period, has often been seen in contrast and opposition to cinema, namely the history of painting. This has two implications: firstly, the rise of photographic cinema appeared to marginalize graphic cinema, relegating animation to a minor genre, to this day confined either to avant-garde forms such as abstract cinema and video or more frequently associated with cartoons, which is to say, with cinema (and television) made for children. The reversal of priorities makes animation the general, higher-order category for cinema, of which live action, photographic-effect filmmaking is a specialized subsection within the overall possibilities of the graphic mode, especially when 3D graphics, simulated environments, and other kinds of virtual reality spaces are added. The second point is that, as a graphic mode, digital cinema joins painting also in another respect: it requires a new kind of individual input, indeed manual application of craft and skill, which is to say, it marks the return of the ‘artist’ as source and origin of the image. In this respect, the digital image should be regarded as an expressive rather than reproductive medium, with both the software and the ‘effects’ it produces bearing the imprint and signature of the creator.10 This is reminiscent of the way George Lucas describes digital filmmaking as ‘the process of a painter or sculptor. You work on it for a bit, then you stand back and look at it and add some more onto it, then stand back and look at it and add some more. You basically end up layering the whole thing.’11 Lucas and Manovich’s drastic perspective corrections are very welcome. Declaring the photographic a graphic mode elegantly disposes of the semiotic conundrum of the ‘indexical’, and the analogy with sculpture introduces important new aspects of ‘embodiment’ into our speculations about the future of cinema. At the same time, their new archaeologies of digital cinema are not unique: they echo other ‘alternative’ histories of cinema and the audiovisual media, propounded even before digitization entered into the debate. The classic narrative film, for instance, has in recent years often been seen as an ‘intermediary’, an ‘intermezzo’, a ‘mere episode’ in a historical account centered elsewhere; for instance, in the ‘cinema of attractions’; in ‘simultaneity’, in ‘interactivity’. In each case, the center 10 For an interesting account of this ‘expressive’ mode in contemporary television, see John T. Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995). 11 Kelly and Parisi, 163.

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chosen depended on whether the vanishing point was the post-classical cinema of ‘roller coaster rides’,12 video in the form of television as both the storage medium of record as well as the mass-medium of choice,13 or the internet as the real-time multi-directional communication and interaction mode.14 Today’s media historians need to keep these different entry and exit points in mind while not forgetting what has been argued so far: that economically, the feature film is still a key element; that socially and politically, television is still a very powerful medium; and that our culture is evidently more than a little reluctant to leave the episteme of the trace and the imprint, that is to say, give up the concept of record and evidence, of truth and authenticity.

Cinema: The Art and Act of Record? The graphic mode argument disposes perhaps too neatly of the problem of the indexical—and, by extension, issues of representation—by treating the digital either as a matter of terminology and definition, or considering it mainly as a new ‘poetics’ of cinematic technique and practice. What is not addressed are the consequences that follow from the breakdown of belief in ‘evidence’ or ‘truth’ habitually invested in photographic images. A second example of a conjunctural history of cinema would therefore be to ask how we can best understand this cultural crisis of ocular verification arising in the change from the photographic to the post-photographic in cinema. The analogue audiovisual media of this century possess a certain cultural prestige. Although not as great as that enjoyed by print, the value given to the moving image in the public sphere has steadily grown: paradoxically, one might say, given that its use for propaganda and persuasion has also made it more suspect. By contrast, the cultural value of an expressive mode such as painting has also grown but in quite different domains, in the art world, for instance, or at the museum. The sound and image media derive this new self-confidence to a large extent from television, a medium that calls upon and consumes vast quantities of ‘historical footage’. No subject is too remote, too personal, 12 See Schoeffter, “Scanning the Horizon”. 13 Siegfried Zielinski predicted even the decay and decadence of television: Siegfried Zielinski, “Fin de siècle of Television,” in Elsaesser and Hoffmann (eds.), Cinema Futures, 73-83. 14 See, among several other sources, William J. Mitchell, City of Bits (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).

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too secret, or too shameful for there not to have been photographs taken, voices recorded, and films made. Equally remarkable, an extraordinary quantity of this material has survived in public archives and commercial picture libraries; in film, radio, and television studios; in private possession, photo albums, family collections; in local and regional museums. Nothing has happened in the twentieth century without a camera recording it, or so it seems. Brought back to life, it can speak for itself, give itself away, or accuse itself: an illusion, of course, and possibly a dangerously naive one. But this does not diminish the fact that photographs and films, both fictional and factual, have left us with the most extraordinary ‘art of record’ for the last 150 years, a most extensive ‘archive’ of what, for instance, cities or buildings looked like, how people dressed or gestured, how they lived indoors and out, how they saw themselves and were seen by others or wanted to be seen. This quantity of evidence derives its truth claim from the idea of material traces, the dominant model in our culture for identifying ‘pastness’ in such f ields as history or archaeology: an event has left a material residue that the historian verif ies to be ‘authentic’ and then proceeds to interpret as a ‘document’. The photographic as imprint, mechanically and thus objectively recording an event of which it is the trace, would seem to fit rather well into this general matrix of historical knowledge. Yet especially in the moving image, the indexicality of the trace is so bound up with the iconicity of the likeness that it has, in some ways, confused the categories. At one extreme, it has led to a ‘naturalization’ of the audio-visual illusion, crediting the moving image with the status of proof, and at the other end it has led to skeptical caution, with most professional historians reluctant to grant to cinematographic records much value as evidence whatsoever. What if we were to turn the argument around by claiming that the status of authenticity and proof of a photograph or moving image does not reside in its indexical relation at all but is a function of the institutions in charge of its verif ication and dissemination? For instance, most photographs we find on the front pages of our newspapers are either stills taken from video or photographs transmitted digitally: in both cases, they have been manipulated in all kinds of ways before they are printed. But since we still accept our daily paper as a medium of record (tabloids perhaps excepted), its digital mode of reproduction is secondary compared to the contract we expect the newspaper to honor with its readers, a contract of veracity and accuracy extending from the text in a newspaper to its pictures and vice versa.

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In which case, it would seem that any threat to the ‘authentic’, to the truth status of the moving image, too, does not come from digitization per se but might well come from, say, deregulation. If television, for instance, is no longer trusted as a public medium of record, it may be because, in the commercial environment it finds itself in, when competing for ratings, it no longer enjoys the same political or social legitimation as an institution that ‘polices’ or self-regulates the veracity of its messages and representations. By the same token, in East European countries we may see the inverse: the media were distrusted because the state controlling them lacked legitimacy, so that it is the commercial press and the newly privatized audiovisual media that are now endowed with the reputation of providing reliable evidence. The question of truth arising from the photographic and postphotographic would thus not divide along the lines of the trace and the indexical at all but rather flow from a complex set of discursive conventions, political changes, and institutional claims that safeguard (or suspend) what we might call the ‘trust’ or ‘good faith’ we are prepared to invest in a given regime of representation. Yet something else supports the impression or illusion of ‘truth’ emanating from the moving image almost as decisively as the contract of trust we have with the institution. Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, speaks of the way a photograph involves the viewer in a peculiar kind of presence and absence, what he named the sense of ‘having been there’. This sense, as he analyzes it, is also a tense, joining a perfectum with a present in a conjunction of a place and a time. And with its ‘thereness’ it also embeds a deictic mark, that is, a speaking position and the trace of a subject in discourse: a photograph addresses us by the very act of placing us before it in relation to our existence in time and language. The moving image, by extension, derives its reality effect similarly not only from its iconic features but also from the tense structure within which it holds the viewer, a ‘here and now’ which is, however, always already a ‘there and then’. To this temporality thus correspond distinct spaces, so that the audiovisual experience always involves several space-times, related to each other and yet distinct from each other, a then/here space, and a now/there space, which, by at once doubling and displacing the viewer’s own now/here space-time, make possible the subject effects of audiovisual experience as an affective engagement. We might say that vision is only part of what makes the moving image ‘real’ to a viewer, so that the question one needs to ask is not so much whether the digitized image severs the link between the material trace of the real in the photograph and its power to resemble the real but how digitization might affect the time-space relations for the viewer and thereby the ‘tense’

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of the image. Transmission and circulation add another dimension: that of place and location.15

Television and the Media Event There are several ways of approaching this issue, which will eventually lead us to a consideration of the time-space coordinates in video games and interactive narratives. One necessary intermediary step is to look at television and to briefly outline the conjunctural argument that would put the digital ‘in perspective’ for the televisual image, which in the form of video has also broken with the indexicality of the photographic image—without, however, provoking a similar crisis. Put more directly, how would one go about defining the ‘ontology’ of television and the video image? Television, rather than being examined around essentialist assumptions derived from its ‘apparatus’ (e.g. the cathode ray tube or the video camera) is mostly understood according to the ideology of its institutional structures by studying the uses people make of programmes in their everyday lives or how the television set figures in the ‘gender politics’ of the living room.16 However, there have been two classic attempts to outline an ontology specific to television and video, one by Jane Feuer focusing on ‘liveness’ in television, and one by Fredric Jameson defining the ontology of video around the concept of ‘empty time’ and ‘boredom’.17 Both thus involve temporality and space, and they are my lead for identifying two typical ‘tenses’ of television’s mode of address. One seems to mark television’s limits: I have called it the ‘stand-by’ mode of schedule-busting, when television interrupts itself, as it were, to bring into the domestic sphere wars, revolutions (e.g. the Arab Spring), assassinations, genocide, and natural or human disasters such as hurricanes

15 One of the more unexpected and apparently unconnected consequences of the malleability of digital images and the crisis of indexicality is the increase in popularity of researching, photographing, and visiting the locations of famous movies. Prominent examples include Hitchcock’s films (the Golden Gate Bridge from Vertigo, the Indiana Prairie Stop from North by Northwest), but there are a number of internet sites responding to the desire for such retroactive authentification: http://www.pelfusion.com/the-famous-movies-moments/, http://onthesetofnewyork.com/ greatestfilmscenes.html, http://mentalfloss.com/article/57051/9-famous-movie-locations-thenand-now, http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/a/adamsrib.html#.VdecK0UWXEc. 16 See the studies by Dave Morley, Family Television (London: Comedia, 1987) and Ien Ang, Living Room Wars (London: Routledge, 1994). 17 See Jane Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television – Ontology as Ideology,” in E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Regarding Television (Los Angeles: American Film Institute, 1983) 12-22.

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or 9-11.18 The other mode is the segmented flow, the ‘stand-for’ mode of schedule programming: the day-to-day business of consensus-building and agenda-setting on television, by a process of attrition and negotiation, as witnessed by the inexhaustible ‘talk’ of news interviews, chat shows, and soap operas.19 The latter, with its ‘therapeutic’ discourse as the dominant form of personal interaction and the resolution of conflict, is what one might call the simulation of the social and to this extent a ‘virtual’ mode without it being based on digital technology. The former mode, on the other hand, actualizes (or rehearses?) the red alert of critical emergency and catastrophe (and thus connotes the return of political, ideological contradiction, albeit disavowed). Neither, I would argue, has any privileged relation to the real, and instead engages us on the time axis. While the stand-for strategies generate the imagined communities typical of television (from the fan community all the way to ‘the nation’), the stand-by mode breaks through this staging of national self-identity and social role-play towards the universally human(itarian). But it is always also a self-staging of televisual technology and power, as the whole hardware infrastructure of satellite hook-ups, equipment-laden camera crews, frontline reporters in Land Rovers, and telephone links via laptops becomes visible and audible, making time palpable and distance opaque: together, they signify the proper ‘materiality’ of media disasters. Yet this self-staging of technology and manpower also demonstrates its ability to bring us the signal, to assure us that it won’t fail, fade, or break down; it also invokes this very specter of failure.20 With it, the viewer enters a world that is at once unreal and hyperreal, grounded in a space-and-time location and yet also a simulation: the world of the media event.21 The stand-by mode may seem to be the exception, but on reflection it is clearly the more ‘fundamental’ of the two: the very fact that by definition it has the power to override the schedule indicates its primacy. Perhaps one way to put is to say that it, too, is one of television’s ‘virtual’ modes, 18 Thomas Elsaesser, “TV through the Looking Glass,” in N. Browne (ed.), American Television (Langhorne: Harwood, 1993), 97-120. 19 The concept of segmented flow was introduced by John Ellis, Visible Fictions (London: Routledge, 1983). 20 “Television’s greatest prowess is its ability to be there—both on the scene and in the home (hence the most catastrophic of technical catastrophes is the loss of signal).” Mary Ann Doane, “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” in Patricia Mellencamp, Logics of Television (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 238. 21 For an extensive discussion of media events, see Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).

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permanently threatening to become actualized behind the regular programs. Among the channels with a global reach, CNN International is the one most often—and most literally—on stand-by mode. The network can in some sense claim to be television’s model for how to put media events into circulation, and it has made an art out of managing both sides of this mode, the moments of boredom when nothing happens, as well as those of high tension, when anything can happen (hence the term stand-by: waiting and being ready when the story ‘breaks’). Intriguingly, CNN often gives its longerrunning ‘event stories’ titles that are or could be borrowed from cinema (as does the US military to its operations and initiatives, e.g. Star Wars or Desert Storm): for instance, ‘The Siege of Baghdad’ (in a clear allusion to ‘The Thief of Baghdad’ which was also used, incidentally, as a nickname for Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait) or ‘The Waco Stand-Off’ (played at first according to the Spaghetti Western-Clint Eastwood scenario of ‘The Three Way Mexican Stand-Off’). While television on these occasions seems to be attempting to ‘narrate’ disaster and catastrophe, it is dramatizing a fundamental contradiction constitutive of television. 22 On the one hand, television sees itself as a medium of record, but on the other, event for television is a pure time category, but a time category in the state of both scarcity and loss: time is always running out on television, even though it has so much of it to fill. Especially ‘news’ is a commodity always on the verge of attrition and dissipation. It is a transaction that has a meter ticking to oblivion, as it were, from the moment it is ‘aired’ or ‘broken’. The media event could thus be seen as the drama of television itself: trying to turn information into narrative (which is to say, turning something that is fleeting and constantly perishing into something that ‘keeps’: a narrative, a story). The media event becomes the embodiment of televisual time in its purest form, modulated into its different aggregate states. The stand-by mode (catastrophe), while apparently situated at the margins of television, would thus be the default value of television, while the stand-for mode (consensus), usually seen as what makes television a national institution (and justifies the license fee), becomes the fragile in-between state, always threatened by the other mode’s sudden and necessarily unexpected i(nte)rruption, turning its simulation of the social into ‘moving wallpaper’ (Kate Adie). This ontology produces some powerful subject effects, and once again, these are characterized by a peculiar conjunction of space and time. I am 22 Doane in Mellencamp, 227-28.

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referring to the classic ‘media event’ situation encapsulated in the question ‘Where were you, when President Kennedy was shot?’. In each case, the question ‘where were you…’ also implies ‘… when television brought it, showed it, and replayed it all day/all week?’23 A conjunction of temporalities and spaces (which are discussed in previous chapters as the here-me-now) would be the ground on which identification takes hold rather than a specular relation to a sight, image, or view. Time-shifting would constitute the mode of ‘subjectivation’ typical of a ‘media event’.

Cinema as Social Event and Site What is it that cinema can set against this; how does it compensate for its rival medium’s recursiveness, this sense of ‘being there’, in order to have been there, or the peculiar eyewitness-as-viewer effect of the typical media event, sustained by the double temporality of ‘live’ and ‘replay’, ‘real-time’ and its repetition? We might begin by differentiating between cinema as ritual and cinema as spectacle, as social event, site, and audiovisual experience. Evidently, a certain event-character is cinema’s ‘external’ organizing principle: going to the movies is to entertain a set of expectations, with which we are all familiar, but which vary crucially from culture to culture: a break for drinks and a smoke in the middle of the film is different from the popcorn consumed during the screening. In some cinemas, the audience talks through the film and behaves as if in front of the television set; in others, there is more hushed seriousness than in a church on Sunday. The contemporary film experience is socially and culturally multi-coded—for some, it ranks alongside shopping or eating out, and for others, it is comparable to an exhibition or gallery opening. In each case, the occasion is to some extent also doubled by self-reference, implying an element of seeing and being seen—not only the cinematic spectacle itself but added to it the recursive effect of ‘ritual’ and community, being there and being seen to be there. But the cinema experience has an event scenario as its organizing principle also in a different sense. One could propose a definition of cinema in the television age—i.e., after television—which, however, merely highlights a general feature of cinema since its beginnings, namely that a film requires 23 Thomas Elsaesser, “One Train May be Hiding Another: Private history, memory and national identity,” in Screening the Past, 16 April 1999 (http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/ screeningthepast/reruns/rr0499/terr6b.htm).

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a performance for its completion and an event for its actualization. The combination of performance and event has over the past hundred years taken very diverse forms.24 For instance, if the performance character of silent cinema required an orchestra in the pit, the event character in the 1930s and 1940s was defined around the family audience; in the 1970s and 1980s, the event modelled itself on the leisure habits of its predominantly youthful, male audience, while in the 1990s it is said to have catered increasingly again to a family audience, its performance character now requiring Dolby and digital sound. The success of cinema as social and performance event is for the exhibitor a critical factor economically, since his income from concessions and amenities can often exceed that from admissions. Another index that cinema has had an event scenario built into its commercial exploitation almost from the very beginning is the fact that, since the 1910s, spectators have been charged according to a time advantage and a location advantage: the principle of ‘first run’ or ‘première exclusivité’ or ‘West-End release’ by which cinemas and admission prices are classified mean that, in effect, audiences pay a premium for seeing a film during its initial release period, when it has the attention of the press and the general public. Its commodity value resides in its temporality, here expressed as the time advantage: we are prepared to pay extra for a film while it is still an ‘event’. The emergence of the pre-recorded video cassette and its proliferation at a cost barely above the admission price of a cinema ticket may have shortened the period in which the cinema film is an ‘event’, but it has, of course, given films a substantial secondary market in which its event character can and does reverberate as pre-publicity.25 The ‘event-driven’ nature of cinema today also reflects the changing function of public spaces in the wake of ‘urban renewal’ schemes for inner cities, where crowds no longer gather for political action or to go to work. Since the ubiquity of television and the motor car, a whole range of other activities compete for the population’s free time. But these domestic appliances also mean that those who now populate the streets of city centres do so almost wholly for the purposes of shopping, leisure, and entertainment: activities connected again with seeing and being seen, in which ‘going to the movies’ is both part of a continuum of spectatorship ranging from 24 For more detailed information about the history of exhibition practice, see Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema I: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Scribner, 1991) and Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). 25 Edgar Reitz has always pleaded for the event status of cinema. See Kraft Wetzel (ed.), Neue Medien gegen Filmkultur? (Berlin: Volker Spiess, 1987), 140.

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window-shopping, meeting friends at a cafe, or eating out, but also marks a liminal space, at once a physical focus and social site, defined in relation to its opposite: home. As Edgar Reitz has put it: ‘cinema is a sort of consensus about going out, it gives a name and an address to the desire of leaving the house for an evening’.26 A further effect of the blockbuster as the main attraction of theatrical release is that it makes ‘cinema’, too, partake in the meta-genre ‘mediaevent’ as sketched above. We come across cinema everywhere, but in a peculiar temporal modulation. A new film, more likely than not, first hits us in the form of movie trailers, posters, billboards, behind-the-scenes features on television, and star interviews. In fact, in this respect the blockbuster’s carefully orchestrated marketing campaign involves a build-up and an intensification, followed by a media blitz whose nearest analogy is the weather. It is much like a hurricane gathering force in the mid-Atlantic, as it were, showing the first signs of turbulence in toy shops or on MTV before moving inland to the capital for its big release, and then finally sweeping the rest of the country’s screens before gently subsiding on online platforms. The event movie par excellence, such a blockbuster is characterized by the fact that it takes place in a kind of countdown time and that it occupies all manner of urban, mental, and media spaces. On the other hand, it also ‘devastates’ the cinema landscape for the more modest films, usually of domestic or European origin. The effect of the onslaught and its peculiar event logic is also reflected in cinema architecture and cinema siting, notably symbolized in the move from urban multiplexes to suburban cineplexes. These new structures, attached to or integral parts of shopping malls, leisure parks, and amusement arcades, suitable for daytime family outings as well as evening entertainment, have begun to transform the physical identity of cinema, doing away, for instance, with the unsightly, undignified, and often extremely unappealing back-alley rear exits through which the traditional inner-city cinema used to dismiss its audiences at the end of the show, as if to express graphically its contempt, after having relieved them of their money. The new cinemas, by becoming absorbed into a different dimension (be it the theme-park atmosphere of the cineplex or the art-house ambience modelled on museums, or the lobby areas of other high-profile, high-tech public or corporate buildings), are part of an urbanism in which they figure as ‘cathedrals of another faith’, to use a memorable phrase coined by the architect Hans Hollein for the kind of prestige buildings that today make up a metropolitan skyline. If this 26 ‘Gespräch mit Edgar Reitz’, Telepolis no. 2 (June 1997): 71.

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seems a little too metaphoric and hyperbolic, it is worth remembering that contemporary cinema’s most ‘architectural’ features are in fact the films themselves: in their action-, sci-fi, and adventure genres especially, their spectacles represent megastructures of image volume and sound space. Here also lies the chance for non-Hollywood films: a more attractive physical environment, thanks to multi-screen luxury theaters, with sound and projection equipment that does justice to the new technologies of the image, is like an event waiting to happen. It provides the physical conditions for even ‘small’ films to partake in what John Ellis calls the ‘sacred’ quality of the event. For him, it is the possibility of ‘epiphanies’ that justify cinema’s main claim to be different from television: A cinema is a special space, one to which we are permitted a limited access. It is not our space, it is a controlled public space which we enter according to set rules—the payment of money, arrival at an appointed hour—and agree to behave according to still further established rules. These rules certainly vary according to the particular culture in which the screening is taking place, but in Europe our established convention is that we sit, we do not talk, and we attend to the spectacle. We submit—and, having submitted, we can enter into a different modality of exist­ence, into a realm of fantasy. This process is essentially a sacred one. […] Collective submission to rules and rituals allows the individual a degree of epiphany. […] Television, on the other hand, occupies a different space entirely, one that has no sacred dimension to speak of. We have television of right in our society. It is a social necessity in the same way that indoor plumbing is a social necessity.27

Compared to the old stand-alone cinemas, but especially the shoebox cinemas of the 1970s, contemporary cineplexes offer not only a difference of kind and level in the amenities but a different encoding of space itself. The old cinema space is all about ‘drawing boundaries’, inviting the audience by a palatial foyer but at the rear, separating the cinema from the street. By contrast, the new ones are about integration, making the cinema space merge with a café, a bar, or a restaurant space: areflection of a different policy not only of services inside the cinema but of how contemporary public spaces relate, communicate, and connect with each other and what experiences are being offered across these spaces. In contrast to Ellis’ sacred space, 27 John Ellis, “Cinema and Television: Laios and Oedipus,” in Elsaesser and Hoffmann (eds.), Cinema Futures, 134.

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which is essentially a homogeneous and threshold space, the auditorium can also be a participatory space linked to other participatory spaces, in which case the function of the screen space may become quite different: one recalls the phenomenon of cult films like the Rocky Horror Picture Show or the Blues Brothers, where the narrative action has become secondary (and with it the temporality of suspense or other narrational devices). The fans’ familiarity not only favors participation but turns the film into a cue sheet for a performance. One might call the film—in anticipation of what I shall discuss below—a map to be navigated, an environment to be entered rather than a window to be viewed or a text to be read.

The Digital Media as Event This example of interactive non-digital cinema finally brings me once more to ‘digital cinema’, understood as the use of digital technology to construct either virtual environments or to tell stories interactively. As argued more fully in the subsequent chapter, we tend to encounter a series of paradoxes: for instance, one widely held view is that there is no such thing as an interactive narrative, and yet the term no longer feels like a contradiction. The reasons may partly be terminological: what commonly passes for interactivity in narratives is strictly speaking hyper-selectivity. The aim is to programme an architecture of multiple choices presented from a pre-arranged menu and leading to different paths, which among themselves have certain nodal points. When these are carefully or cunningly devised, they can give the illusion of freedom of response: ‘creating a better kind of mousetrap’, as it has been called.28 Yet even if the menu could be extended indefinitely (and with it, the options arising from the nodal points correspondingly multiplied), another perhaps even graver difficulty would arise. This difficulty has to do with a story’s ‘point of view’: who tells what to whom or, put differently, who controls the relation between information and inference for the viewer in the process of narration and organizes the levels and perspectives of narration. Digital cinema per se does not make films interactive, for the latter would require that the viewer could intervene actively in the progress of the narrative or take over the function of the narrator.29 28 Isabelle Reynaud, “Multi-Media Interactive,” lecture given in Amsterdam, 7 June 1996. 29 For a more detailed discussion, see Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991).

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While the ideology of a self-selected narrative and open-ended storyline suggests freedom and choice, this is precisely what interactive cinema strives to conceal. The user colludes to being a ‘player’, whose freedom can be summed up as: ‘you can go wherever you like, as long as I was there before you’, which is, of course, precisely also the strategy of the ‘conventional’ storyteller (or narrational agency) whose skill lies in the ability to suggest an open future at every point of the narrative while having, of course, planned or ‘programmed’ the progress and the resolution in advance. This casts doubt also on an argument sometimes advanced in favor of the absence of a narrator, of point of view, of a central perspective: might it not ‘free’ the narrative image from its ‘bourgeois-patriarchal’ symbolic which film theory in the 1970s always protested against? Reviving Roland Barthes’ term of the ‘writerly text’, theorists such as George Landow and others have argued that Barthes and Derrida’s literary theories ‘anticipate’ hypertext and interactivity and thus provide these practices with philosophical foundations. But this would be attributing an excessive literalness to a theory of excess and indeterminacy!30 The issue can also be phrased as one between ‘narration’ and ‘navigation’: there is a category shift between random access in media that offers some resistance in the form of an irreversible temporal flow, like a narrative film, and those that do not, like a book. If a medium does not offer this resistance—such as, for instance, an ordinary electronic database—what exactly does random access represent or add in respect of this dialectic of freedom and constraint? To what extent does navigating rely on a ‘map’, and what would a map in the case of such a narrative look like? No longer would a story be the exploration of a world thanks to narrative. The DVD or interactive video game is more like the exploration of (several) narratives thanks to a ‘world’. The setting or set, the fiction, the collection of information functions then as background to a new kind of (serial) activity: a sampling or sorting of information, making connections in the form of montage, or more likely, following the connections laid by others. In other words, with an interactive story or a computer game we may be invited to ‘enter a world’, but rather than begin to explore it, we explore its narrative architecture: its paths and its detours, its branching and its multiple choices. We enter a territory in order to explore its map, rather than use a map to explore a territory. What we have as our mode of transport—to move, surf, connect—is the mouse, a tracking device. Shooting an enemy, ascending a tower, or descending into 30 See Andy Cameron, “Dissimulations – The Illusion of Interactivity”, Millennium Film Journal no. 28 (Spring 1995): 33-47 http://mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ28/Dissimulations.html.

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a dungeon are actions translated into micro-motions, which in turn initiate a movement at one remove, while the locations we thus reach conceal their own motion vehicles: the hyperlinks and hot spots transporting us elsewhere. It is the point at which narrative becomes, in Manovich’s words, ‘tele-action’, and we are in what would seem to be related but nonetheless distinct paradigms (of action rather than representation).31 The digital is in this case the more convenient or efficient means to this end, though not the end itself. The end has to do with the spatialization of time: providing mobility, conveyance, ‘transport’, action. The ‘motion picture’ narrative seen on the monitor screen has become even more than before a ‘static vehicle’. Alternatively, the space-time coordinates of interactive cinema have to be constructed in order to convey an impression of movement while allowing for the ‘illusion’ of freedom and choice to arise. Grahame Weinbren seems to have pondered these questions harder than most, partly by commenting on his own interactive cinema. Once again, the issues arise irrespective of digitization, and Weinbren conceived and developed his interactive films prior to the advent of digital images, since he initially used analogue laser discs connected to a computer software program.32 His work is an intriguing example of interactive/multiple-choice cinema, and in its terms, extremely successful: with The Erl King and Sonata, he has made film installations that create a sort of multiple perspectivism by first of all telling the story from different vantage points or ‘narrators’ (à la Rashomon or the films of Alain Resnais), all of which are accessible to the viewer in the form of hyper-selectivity. But he also allows the viewer-as-user to ‘enter’ into and explore ‘pockets’ of the narrative world, which are not exactly parallel universes yet have a high degree of autonomy, while nonetheless belonging thematically or in their visual or aural motifs to the underlying story world. What adds to the suspense, however, is that while one is ‘inside’ these pockets, the story ‘elsewhere’ is nonetheless progress­ing in linear fashion towards its predetermined conclusion. The viewer/user is therefore structurally split between his desire to explore the pockets and his anxiety not to lose the thread of the narrative, which seems a rather intriguing compromise between (the ‘laws’ of) narrative and (the possibilities of) interactivity, making one ‘police’ the other, so to speak, while creating a number of unusual and unusually powerful subject effects. 31 Lev Manovich, “To Lie and to Act,” in Elsaesser and Hoffmann (eds.), Cinema Futures, 189-199. 32 Graham Weinbren, “Interactive Cinema,” New Observations no. 70, New York 1989, and “In the Ocean of Streams of Story,” Millennium Film Journal no. 28 (Spring 1995): 15-30 http://www. mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ28/GWOCEAN.HTML.

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Weinbren’s interactive cinema are installation pieces: not so much a prototype as a meta-type and senso-theoretical object. In the nature of such work, his interactive cinema may not have a mass-media future. Intriguingly enough, again, the obstacles in the way of interactive cinema are perhaps not primarily technological nor in the order of a logical impossibility. What they highlight are the misunderstandings as to the social character of the cinema experience, that is, the event status of cinema and the temporalities it implies. What is satisfying about Weinbren’s pieces is that they are precisely neither ‘games’ nor ‘postmodern’ narratives but, instead, feel ‘readerly’ in the way they give a strong sense of an underlying, continuous time-management, in other words, suggest the presence of a super-narrator, a storyteller. Granted that normally only games should be called ‘interactive’, these examples highlight differences between a narrative scenario (where the user/viewer confronts a narrator as his Other) and a ‘game’ scenario (where the user/player confronts another player as antagonist and the designer as the super narrator). Important, again, is the time/space dimension. Games may seem to have a different way of representing time, but one can relate it to narrative devices: video games/interactive programs usually create artificial time constraints that force decisions, choices. This means that the identificatory potential of film-narrative time (made up of suspense, surprise, the uneven distribution of knowledge, and how to maintain it from one plot situation to the next) is replaced by the temporality of the countdown, by levels of difficulty (usually measured in the time it takes to complete tasks), or of branching points and the containment of hyperselectivity or ‘branching explosion’. We seem to have come full circle, for this dilemma not only corresponds to the basic situation of hyper-selectivity, it may actually ‘rehearse’ it and thus give us a broader framework for understanding the social function of the digital media. In our consumer society, choice could be regarded as much as a burden and an obligation as a right. Even more crucially, perhaps, the intensity and frequency with which ‘interaction’ with the human-machine interface is now required at the workplace as well as in situations of leisure, necessitates new skills of cognition, vision and embodied sensory coordination.

The Digital as Cultural Metaphor The digital thus above all allows us to rethink cinema and television across the categories of space, time, and subjectivity–what in the previous chapter

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I have called the new configuration of “here-me-now”. Random access does not break with linear narrative per se but only with single-strand narrative: a change which in itself is neither revolutionary–think of the nested narratives of German Expressionism or the multi-strand narratives of Luis Buñuel–nor a sufficient condition for interactivity. Similarly, computerbased stories do not eliminate the need for narration: automated story generation will simply pose new challenges to ‘narrators’ when deciding on the temporalities of information flow and distributing the contiguity of alternative options. Time warps, virtual worlds, parallel universes, just as much as multiple personalities, magical transformations, and fantastical identities and disguises are nothing but more or less pleasingly metaphoric embodiments of contiguity, raising the same questions of identification, participation, and suspense as single-strand narratives: in short, the subject effects of fictional experience. It is in respect to these subject effects that the argument over the fundamental difference or likely convergence between narratives and games may have to be rethought. For instance, in some so-called interactive narratives, the games principle of accumulating points is fictionalized into serial repetition of actions, with the higher score of points giving access to other story levels, thus simulating greater narrative complexity. Similarly, rewards and punishments can be narrativized into feedback loops, while magic worlds are needed to motivate the randomized appearance or disappearance of protagonists and antagonists. What is perhaps most useful about the games metaphor challenging narrative theory is that it points to the fact that the default value of any intersubjective interaction in both games and narratives is a contract rather than a difference in their respective ontologies. What I mean by this is that digital media bring us back to cinema as a matter of trust, belief, and the suspension of disbelief rather than truth and reference: the televisual and audiovisual event may spell the end of the face-to-face, but as our only hope of a face-to-face, it promises to eliminate the ‘noise’ of failed communication, fostering the illusion of being the medium of immediacy. Instead of playing the analogue off against the digital, with the analogue retroactively appearing as more real or more authentic, our skepticism vis-a-vis the digital must include the analogue, with both modes requiring a contract based on trust or on the ‘felicity conditions’ of successful communication: here again, the digital can stand as a metaphor for a different way of generating thought rather than a different way of generating images. I therefore want to conclude with another order of convergence altogether: that of a cultural shift, the

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consequences of which seem to be to leave everything the same while simultaneously altering everything. The digital in this view is not a new medium but rather—for the here and now, for the time being, for film and television—f irst and foremost a new medium for knowing (more) about all media.

8. Digital Cinema and the Apparatus Archaeologies, Epistemologies, Ontologies Can Film History Go Digital? The specter stalking film history is that of its own obsolescence. However, it is not at all obvious that digitization is the reason why the new media present such a challenge, historically as well as theoretically, to cinema studies. Is film history vulnerable because it has operated with notions of origins and teleology that even on their own terms are untenable in the light of what we know, for instance, about early cinema? This chapter takes this question as its working hypothesis. I want to start by identifying typical attitudes among film scholars since the 1990s when it comes to responding to the new media or digital media. In 1995, Jean Douchet, a respected critic in the tradition of André Bazin, thought that the loss of the indexical link with the real in the digital image presented a major threat to mankind’s pictorial patrimony as well as to a cinéphile universe, of which he felt himself to be the guardian: The shift towards virtual reality is a shift from one type of thinking to another, a shift in purpose, which modifies, disturbs, perhaps even perverts man’s relation to what is real. All good films, we used to say in the 1960s, when the cover of Cahiers du cinéma was still yellow, are documentaries, … and filmmakers deserved to be called `great’ precisely because of their near obsessive focus on capturing reality and respecting it, respectfully embarking on the way of knowledge. [Today, on the other hand], cinema has given up the purpose and the thinking behind individual shots, in favour of images–rootless, textureless images–designed to violently impress by constantly inflating their spectacular qualities.1

At the limit, digital media for Douchet was a revival of the old futurist and fascist obsession with speed and kinetics, the most superficial kind of activism, kinetic avant-gardism, and sensationalism, making digital effects a childish toy, a grimace disfiguring the face of the seventh art.

1 Jean Douchet, lecture given in Paris on 20 March 1995 at a symposium called ‘Le Cinéma: vers son deuxième siècle’.

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On the other side of the silicone divide stood those for whom, with the promise of ‘virtual reality’, Bazin’s prediction of an age-old dream was finally fulfilling itself, that of man creating his own immortal double. According to this argument, all previous audio-visual media, and especially cinema, are but poor cousins and incomplete sketches of such an aspiration. Thanks to virtual reality, it would become possible to `break through’ the screen: ‘no more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality, there is no more cinema.”2

It’s Business as Usual Some held the view that it was business as usual, and their argument might go as follows: The film industry has been delivering the same basic product, the full-length feature film, for nearly a hundred years as the core of the cinematic spectacle and of the institution cinema. There have been technological innovations all along, but they have always been absorbed and accommodated, possibly reconfiguring the economics of production. They have left intact the context of reception and the manner of programming. There still is, among film scholars, a sizeable and respected group who would concur with such downgrading if the importance of the digital revolution for feature filmmaking. They maintain that the formal system that has underpinned Hollywood and other mainstream commercial cinema practices for the past hundred years—based as it is on the three or five-act model of Western drama which is itself more than two-and-a-half thousand years old, namely ‘classical narrative’—is alive and well in the digital age. Against all comers and all odds, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, for instance, never tire to point out how the classical model has adapted itself to different media and technologies, adjusting to the introduction of sound as well as to other technical innovations, be it color, widescreen, animation, or electronic imaging techniques by what they call the principle of ‘functional equivalence’.3 2 André Bazin, “Neorealism and Pure Cinema: The Bicycle Thief,” in André Bazin, What Is Cinema? Vol. 2 (London/Los Angeles/Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 60. The link between the aesthetics of neorealism and immersive virtual reality is also made implicitly in the opening section (“The Logic of Transparent Immediacy”) of Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 21-31. 3 Cf. one of the recent editions of Film Art with the bullet-time effect from The Matrix on the cover, and Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in the New Hollywood. Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

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Another section of the film-studies community, notably those familiar with early cinema, have gone further, but they have also changed direction by refusing to make ‘classical narrative’ the gold standard. When you know the trick and animation work of Georges Méliès, Segundo de Chomon, Emile Cohl, or the experiments of Oskar Messter with 3-D projection and synchronized sound (all before 1910), there is little that can be called fundamentally new about the effects achieved by digital images or the spectacle attractions generated by contemporary multimedia. One could even argue that our present state of the art of visual magic and virtual imaging is a throwback to the beginnings of cinema and before. To spectators at the turn of the twentieth century, the Lumières, too, were magicians.4 This would be the stance of Tom Gunning and his ‘cinema of attractions’.5 Finally, scholars of the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s have argued that you can fold film history around the 1950s and see how the two ends overlap, i.e. the 20s with the 80s. This is Lev Manovich’s position, who argues that Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera very much converges with the work now done by digital artists experimenting with new kinds of graphics: his film-within-a-film is not unlike certain CGI techniques, his split screen and superimpositions similar to video overlay and morphing, and his form of montage close to today’s compositing.6 The futurist and constructivist ideas of how both art and everyday reality would be transformed with the help of new technologies of sight and sound, of bodily prosthetics and precision engineering, seem to be coming true in the computer age.

As Usual, It’s Business A slightly longer view, not necessarily confined to our field, would hold that both the technologically determinist and the formalist-modernist case are misconceived: what gives the digital image its uncertain status is that the search for a ‘killer application’ has not yet produced a decisive 4 In the Lumière Brothers’ 50-second films, the spectacle of curling smoke, moving clouds, or leaves shaking in the breeze was more enchanting and did more to amaze them than Méliès’ conjuring tricks, many of which were already familiar from magic theater, circus, and vaudeville. See also Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment. Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator,’ in Art & Text no. 34 (1989): 31-45. 5 Tom Gunning ‘The Cinema of Attractions’, in T. Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 56-62. 6 Lev Manovich, ‘Prologue: Vertov’s Dataset,’ in Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press 2001), XIV-XXIV.

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winner. Digital storage and delivery may have exponentially increased the production and circulation of images both in quantity and accessibility, but digitization has yet to transform the way people use these images. Except for computer games, admittedly a very lucrative market where digital imaging has opened up innovative and challenging possibilities above all for 3-D graphics, the vast majority of digital images produced today still serve traditional aims: besides live-action feature films, they have taken over the home. The digital cameras for domestic use are instantly recognizable and thus profitable products in the mass market, but they serve very traditional ends. By contrast, when in the 1980s the video recorder and the remote control were introduced, they not only powered a new consumer industry and changed people’s entertainment habits, they also transformed the television industry (programming, advertising needed to take note of zapping) along with the film industry (creating the secondary market for video rentals and purchase). In the 1990s, the economic-technological basis for a vast industrial and infrastructural expansion turned out to be not the digital image but the mobile phone. With its universal popularity, its wildfire penetration of everyday life, its mythology of mobility, ubiquity, and interactive instantaneousness, it is probably the more likely candidate for also redefining the use and function of images in our culture. The DVD actually encouraged a form of cinephilia and collector’s mania that everyone thought was passé in the 1970s. In the meantime, the iPod, a music-based device, transformed our way of interacting digitally with the environment, more so than Game Boys, data gloves, or VR helmets, and this development has continued with the smartphone, which is permanently online, allowing us to download not just music and audio information but also images of any kind, both still and moving. The technology of telephony and wireless internet access is moulding the socio-cultural dimension of new ‘killer’ applications, one that has made the DVD as obsolete as the videotape and the CD. Lowering the unit price and increasing the availability of previously scarce commodities are the chief parameters that allow new ‘hardware’ to win over the sort of users who encourage the development of demand-driven mass-market products. According to this ‘as usual, it’s business’ perspective, only consumer acceptance can impose a medium, not a technology, however superior it may be: witness the victory of the (technically) inferior VHS standard over the BETA system or Apple’s astonishing comeback from personal computer limbo thanks to the iPod. But if we take the longer view, we may have to be even more skeptical regarding the digital image. In 1999, still before the high-tech bubble burst,

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The Economist ran a sobering survey of the IT revolution. While it was true that in the 1990s the computer and modern telephony had brought a massive fall in the cost of communication and thus had increased the flow of information through the economy, it has yet to be proven whether the ‘new economy’ will be remembered as a revolution in the same way as the invention of the steam engine had been a revolution that via the railways created the modern city and mass-market consumer society. Or in the same way as the invention of electricity, which via the assembly line, artificial lighting, the extension of the working day, and the invention of leisure and entertainment brought about not only new and more efficient ways of making things but led to the creation of new things altogether. Cinema, as we know, is very much a consequence of both these revolutions, that of urbanization and electrification. According to The Economist, besides the cost of information, it is the cost of energy that is the real variable in a major, epochal social transformation, which is why the weekly suggested that the development of new fuel cells may well be a bigger breakthrough on a global scale than either the computer or the mobile phone. This is a prediction that seems hard to believe from our present vantage point, not to mention for those of us interested in film and digital media. But as we also know, genetic engineering and nanotechnology are just waiting in the wings to be crowned the true transforming technologies of the twenty-first century.7

The Digital: Technological Standard or Epistemological Rupture? Where, in these different stances towards the digital, does one locate oneself as a film historian? What about the optico-chemical image’s unique value as a record with its evidentiary as well as its enunciative status of authenticity? Take film archivists, the guardians of this heritage. Admittedly, they are finally agreed that celluloid (or its polymer successor) is still a more durable and reliable material support of audiovisual data than digital storage media. Yet when it comes to restoration and preservation, they now rely on digital intermediaries, only then to reintroduce the digital artefacts such as grain or soft focus, the natural ‘special effects’ typical of celluloid. Others such as Lev Manovich argue that the photographic mode (so heavily fetishized in our culture) is merely one of the graphic mode’s

7 ‘A Survey of Innovation in Industry,’ Special Supplement, The Economist, 20 February 1999, 5-8.

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possible articulations.8 Already before him, at the height of the semiological turn and well before digitization, it was Umberto Eco who deconstructed the so-called indexical level of the photographic image into a dozen or so iconic and symbolic codes.9 The Czech media historian Vilem Flusser also pointed out, around 1970, that in any photograph, the distribution of the grain already prefigures both the dots of the video image and the numerical grid of the digital image.10 Other scholars and filmmakers have likewise drawn analogies between the mechanized loom of Jacquard in the eighteenth century, the Hollerith punched cards that ensured the success of IBM in the late nineteenth century, and the television image of the De Forest cathode ray tube in the early twentieth century.11 All this is to say that, with regard to the indexical nature of the photographic image and its place in our cultural episteme, one may be well advised to regard digitization less as a technical standard (important though this is, of course) and more as a zero-degree that allows one to reflect upon one’s present understanding of both film history and cinema theory. And as a zero degree, it is necessarily an imaginary or impossible place from which one speaks. From this impossible place, digitization can serve as a heuristic device, helping me as a historian to displace myself in relation to a number of habitual ways of thinking. For instance, it allows me to suspend judgment on the usual range of options. I need not decide whether digitization is technically speaking a moment of progress but aesthetically speaking a step backward; whether it is economically speaking a risky business bubble and politically speaking the tool of a new totalitarianism of ubiquitous surveillance and relentless data mining. But neither do I need to mourn the death of cinema.

Cinema: An Invention that Has No Origins Instead, we can look at digital multi-media through the lens of early cinema and judge early cinema from a media-archaeological perspective rather than a chronological or genealogical one. One can even go a step further 8 Manovich, The Language of New Media, 309 ff. 9 Umberto Eco, ‘Zu einer Semiotik des visuellen Codes,’ in Umberto Eco, Einführung in die Semiotik (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1972), 195-292, esp. 214-230. 10 Some of Flusser’s key essays have been published posthumously as Ins Universum der technischen Bilder (München: European Photography, 2000). 11 Harun Farocki’s Wie man sieht/As you see (Germany 1986, 16mm, col., 72 min.) explores this ‘archaeology’ which links Jacquard, Hollerith, the television image, and the computer.

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and displace the cinematic apparatus (as we know it from the theories of Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, or Stephen Heath)12 by adding to it the four S/M practices or perversions. These are, to recapitulate, the scientific and medical cinematic apparatus (on which there are some excellent books, notably by Lisa Cartwright),13 the surveillance and military apparatus (theorized by Paul Virilio and Friedrich Kittler, among others),14 the sensory-motor-schema apparatus (of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy),15 and the sensoring and monitoring apparatus (celebrated by Kevin Kelly), which speaks of feedback loops, pull technologies, searchability, and augmented reality.16 By going back to early and pre-cinema and by duly noting the non-entertainment uses of the cinematic apparatus, I refer once more to the proposition that cinema has many histories, only some of which belong to the movies. If one goes back to the genealogies of cinema printed in the textbooks of the 1990s, one can observe the kind of self-evidence that today seems startling for its blind spots. There, the history of photography, the history of projection, and the ‘discovery’ of persistence of vision are listed as the triple pillars that sustain the temple of the Seventh Art. But as we know, an archaeology is the opposite of genealogy: the latter tries to trace back a continuous line of descent from the present to the past, while the former respects the discontinuity and the pars-pro-toto of the fragment, which alone gives the present access to a past. A media archaeologist would therefore notice above all what is missing or has been suppressed. What about the telephone as an indispensable element of what we would now understand by cinema in the multi-media environment? Radio waves? Einstein’s wave and particle theories of light? Electro-magnetic fields? The history of aviation? Do we not need Babbage’s difference engine ranged parallel to his friend Henry Fox Talbot’s Calotypes, combined with Ada Lovelace’s first attempts at programming?17

12 See the essays by these authors in Phil Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press 1986). 13 Lisa Cartwritght, Screening the Body. Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 14 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, Translated by Patrick Camiller. (London/New York: Verso, 1989); Friedrich Kittler: Grammophon, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoff. Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 15 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Cinema 2: The Time-Image, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 16 Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy (New York: Penguin, 1999). 17 Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997).

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Or take the so-called ‘delay of cinema’. If we were to travel back in time and place ourselves at the end of the nineteenth century, we could see the cinematograph in 1895 as both a sleepy latecomer and a perilously premature birth. A latecomer because the technology of moving images had been known for almost 50 years and also in that the Lumières’ invention was in some respects no more than a mechanized slide show whose special effects for a brief time were inferior to any twin or triple-turret magic lantern worked by a singer-lecturer assisting the skilled lanternistoperator, which could supply sound and image, verbal commentary and color, abstractly moving designs, and representations from life. But cinema was also premature or, some would say, an irrelevant detour altogether because the late nineteenth century may have been poised on the brink of a quite different imaging technology, which the popularity of cinema in some ways ‘delayed’. There is even a sense in which cinema was not only a bastard but an unwanted child altogether. According to television scholars, both Edison’s peep show and Lumière’s public projection was not what the nineteenth century had been waiting for. What it was imagining for its techno-topic future was domestic television, and preferably two-way television (Edison’s Telephonoscope). The Victorians not only ‘dreamt’ of television: they were as hungry for mobility, instantaneity, for simultaneity and interactivity as we are today, and they also had a good idea of what it would mean to be connected to an internet: after all, they had developed the telegraph system!18 Few of us now recall that many of the so-called pioneers–among them Pierre Jules César Janssen, Ottomar Anschütz, Eadweard Muybridge, and even the Lumière Brothers–were either not at all or not primarily interested in the entertainment uses and storytelling possibilities of the cinematograph, thinking of it in the first instance as a scientific instrument. Were they blind to the economic potential of entertainment and its social role in the late nineteenth century, or had they something in mind that only the emergence of an entirely different set of needs and uses nearly a hundred years later could bring to light? Whenever historians have begun to think in these terms, their findings produce at times dramatic shifts in our conception of early cinema but also of cinema in general. So much so that today, near-forgotten figures such as Étienne-Jules Marey or his assistant Georges Demenÿ look more interesting than the Lumière Brothers

18 Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet (London: Berkley Trade, 1999).

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(as in the books of Manoni, Martha Braun, and Mary Ann Doane),19 and to those historians interested in German cinema, Oskar Messter seems as emblematic of an archaeology of multi-media as Thomas Alva Edison used to be for the history of cinema and the origins of the film industry.20 Never very well known outside Germany, Messter’s Alabastra three-dimensional projections of 1900, his synchronized sound pictures from 1902, his medical films from 1904, or his airborne surveillance cameras from 1914 nonetheless strike one as more fantastic than Jules Verne’s novels but just as prescient and much more practical. Messter’s indefatigable search for applications of the moving image parallel to its entertainment uses testifies to such a pragmatic understanding of the different potentials of the cinematic apparatus that he stands at the intersection of several histories, many of which we are only now beginning to recognize as being histories: precisely those configurations and applications of the basic apparatus I just listed as its S/M practices.21 Yet it is worth recalling that much of what we are now beginning to consider as belonging to early cinema was not initially intended or indeed suited to performance in a movie theater: scientific films, medical films, training films, for instance. The pioneer of nervous diseases, Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, had very sophisticated photographic equipment, and his successors used the moving image alongside still photography to document the symptoms of his patients.22 Many prominent surgeons were also among the early users of the cinematograph. On the other hand, even such classics of early cinema programming as the tourist view, the actualities, and many other types of films or genres initially relied on techniques of vision and on a habitus of observation that had to be ‘adjusted’ in order to fit into the movie theater. Think of the landscape view, or the 19 Laurent Mannoni, Le grand art de la lumière et de l’ombre. Archéologie du cinéma (Paris: Nathan, 1995); Marta Braun, Picturing Time. The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Mary Anne Doane: The Emergence of Cinematic Time. Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). 20 On Messter’s diverse activities, see Martin Loiperdinger (eds.), Oskar Messter – Ein Filmpionier der Kaiserzeit (Frankfurt am Main/Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1994). 21 Especially “Surveillance and the Military” has received special attention in recent years (see references in footnote 14). It is also the practical impact of satellite technology, space exploration, and airborne or terrestrial surveillance that have alerted us to a continuous, if submerged, alternative history of cinema, which is gradually being recovered. See Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel (eds.), CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). 22 Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).

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painted panorama: prior to the cinema, they relied on the mobile observer, optimizing his varying point of view; think of the stereoscope (so important in Jonathan Crary’s techniques of the observer)23 or the so-called ‘Claude glass’ and the camera lucida, both recently revived by David Hockney as precursors of the digital camera.24 Think of the phantasmagorias or fog pictures: they and a multitude of other devices were bein used for everyday or specialized purposes, and besides serving public spectacles they were also handled in private or, like the Mutoscope, by a solitary spectator. Yet cinema borrowed from all these genres and practices, adapting them and significantly transforming their cultural meaning. In the process, both the mode of presentation and the audiences had to be ‘disciplined’—‘disciplined through pleasure’ one might call it—in order to become suitable for collective, public reception.25 What this suggests is that the different ways in which the moving image in its multi-medial electronic form is today ‘breaking the frame’ and exceeding, if not altogether exiting the movie theater (giant display screens in airport lounges or railway stations; monitors in all walks of life, from gallery spaces to museum video art, from installation pieces to football stadiums, from tiny mobile screens to IMAX theaters), we may be ‘returning’ to early cinema practice, remembering Lumière’s giant screen for the 1900 Paris world exhibition, Pathé’s Baby projector for living room use, or W.K. Dickson’s experiments with 68-mm film stock to capture the grandeur of Niagara Falls. On the other hand, we may be on the threshold of another powerful surge of ‘disciplining’ and normatively prioritizing one particular standard of the multi-media image over others. What can be said is that the instability of the current configuration is by no means unique in the history of the moving image. In fact, we seem to have been here before, even if less dramatically, for instance, when the drive-in cinema was competing with the television screen, converting the automobile into a living room, or trying to combine the erotic intimacy of home with a giant outdoor screen, not to mention the better-remembered 3-D and Vistavision experiments.

23 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). 24 On the use of optical toys and precision instruments in painters’ studios, see David Hockney, Secret Knowledge (London: Phaidon, 2001). 25 See Thomas Elsaesser, “Discipline through diegesis: The Rube film between ‘attraction’ and ‘integration’,” in Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 205-224.

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Film in the Expanded Field I hope I have been able to suggest that in film history, even before one gets to digitization, the case for a wider agenda as well as a different range of issues is a compelling one. That it has not been an insight exclusively owed to the new media is proven by a century of avant-garde cinema, and what has been variously described and celebrated by historians such as Gene Youngblood as expanded cinema.26 It was practiced among many others: by Peter Weibel and Valie Export in Vienna, and by Standish Lawder, Anthony McCall, and Ken Jacobs in New York.27 But even here we must beware, as an anecdote once told to me by Vivian Sobchack might illustrate. One day, when she was still teaching at Santa Cruz, she was driving on a San Francisco freeway behind a van with the words ‘Pullman’s Underground Film’ written on the back. Being a film scholar with wide-ranging interests, she became curious, since in all her years of teaching the American avant-garde, she had never come across a filmmaker or a collective by that name. As she accelerated and levelled with the van in order to see whether she recognized anyone inside, she read, neatly stencilled across the driver’s door: ‘Pullman’s Underground Film: The Bay Area’s Specialists in Electronic Sewer Inspection’.28 Perhaps only in the city or the region that is home to the Pacific Film Archive could the industrial users of the cinematic apparatus salute the artistic film community with such a handsome tribute. But as the cases of the so-called pioneers just cited show, the non-entertainment and nonart uses of the cinematic apparatus at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century did not disappear with the arrival of narrative cinema or the feature film around 1907: they merely went underground. But this underground was in many instances contiguous with the above ground, and in several cases it was the very condition of possibility for the developments of the entertainment uses, making cinema as we know it no more than the visible tip of the proverbial iceberg—certainly when one recalls once more how many of the technical innovations in the fields of photography, cinema, and the new media were financed and first tested for warfare and military objectives. To name just a few of the best known: the powerful searchlights

26 Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1970). 27 See exhibition catalogue, Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, Matthias Michalka (ed.), X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions of the 1960s and 1970s (Cologne: Walther König, 2001). 28 Vivian Sobchack, personal communication, June 1998.

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of WWI, the 16mm portable camera, radar, the Ampex (audio and video) recording tape, the television camera, the computer, the internet. As so often in the history of inventions, some of the most influential or momentous ones were the byproducts of other discoveries or turned out quite differently from what their makers intended with them: technological ‘progress’ rarely takes the form of a Eureka experience, and nothing seems more the result of bricolage than cinema. Consider the film projector—to this day, film technology’s equivalent of the platypus. Apart from being a mechanized magic lantern, it still shows quite clearly that what allowed this magic lantern to be mechanized were the treadle sewing machine, the perforated Morse telegraph tape, and the Gatling machine gun. After they had disappeared in their respective areas of applications, their mechanisms had miraculously been preserved in the film projector. Let me try and sum up what these brief forays into media archaeology might tell us about the electronic multi-media as part of the history of cinema. By positing the digital not only as a technology of signal conversion and data transmission but as a moment of cultural rupture, I first wanted to disarticulate the cinematic apparatus in its historical dimension and to re-articulate it across its many entertainment and non-entertainment practices. These practices in their diversity, but also our ‘digital’ perspective on them, suggest that cinema may well have ceased to be important because of this particular cinematic apparatus of camera, projector, screen, and auditorium, and instead, it has become digital culture’s internal reference point. If we follow Friedrich Kittler and take seriously the multi-media, multi-modal dimensions of our sound, image, and text machines, we need to speak of discourse networks rather than an apparatus, with its suggestion of fixity, ocular alignment, and rigid geometries of space.29 If we follow Gilles Deleuze, we should forget about narrative, subjectivity, and interpellation (i.e., the psychic dispositif ) and instead start from the raw physiological given of movement, flow, folds, energies, and intensities as they animate matter, memory, and brain. For both, cinema constitutes something like our epoch’s symbolic form, the way Erwin Panofsky talked about perspective as the Enlightenment’s symbolic form, the way Michel Foucault described the Order of Things during the classical age by pointing to Velásquez’ ingenious perversion of perspective in his Las Meninas painting, or the way Martin Heidegger spoke about the Age of the World Picture: “the basic dynamic

29 Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990).

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of modernity is the conquest of the world as image. The word image here means: the enframing of man’s imagined production of the world”.30 If Manovich sees cinema as the digital domain’s preferred interface as well as montage, superimposition, compositing, multi-tasking, mapping, morphing, and layering as our Heideggerian being-in-the-world, both Kittler and Deleuze imply that cinema has become in some fundamental sense a reality in its own right: there is no outside to its inside and no fixed point of view from which to either verify or falsify ‘the moving image’. The camera is in our head even before it is in our hand or its images on the screen. For Kittler, this is an epistemic problem: how do we know what we know in the discourse network of our age? It is a question of our modes of seeing no longer being our ways of knowing, our form of agency becoming mere performativity and our bodies the material residues, the ‘wetware’ of information processing. For Deleuze, on the other hand, cinema stands for the promise of a new ontology: a mode of immanence without [the need for] transcendence. To ground the groundless that is film, we may expand the survey of metaphors from the previous chapter. Film theory, after WWII, has seen film in terms of: reality as God had intended to reveal it (Bazin), a natural language without a language system (Metz), the very logic of our subjectivity (Baudry, Heath via Lacan-Althusser), the tragic destiny of gendered identity (Mulvey), the nature of human consciousness (Michelson), the unsymbolizable real (Žižek), the figural (Lyotard), the body and the senses (touch and skin), the death drive, affect, attraction, time, the brain (Deleuze), the percepual modelling of our hard-wired cognitivist schemata (Bordwell), and so on. The digital as rupture thus leaves us with a paradox: just as it installs cinema as the contemporary episteme of ‘mind’, ‘body’ and ‘thought’, it does away with cinema as a unique technology of imaging (based on the ‘ontology’ of photography). Its vantage point or vanishing point, so to speak, is a cinematic apparatus no longer grounded in the eye, in vision, or in visuality. The digital inaugurates a cinema for the blind or of the blind (‘ein Blindenkino’), as Franz Kafka is supposed to have imagined it. And if we take my last S/M practice: of sensors and monitors, and think of the electronic traces and digital footprints we leave behind every time we go online or move through the circuits of computerized transaction, transport, and exchange that now make up our lives, then the ‘cinematic’ interface the corresponds to it is at the threshold of the visible or altogether beyond it. 30 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in The Question of Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Levitt. (New York: Harper and Row Pub., 1977), 127.

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Here I pick up, as promised, the argument from the previous chapter, that the visible itself would become, as it already is for the computer, a mere interface for our convenience, a sort of prosthetics of our data doubles, since the digital machine needs neither time, motion, image, light, or object. A specter is indeed haunting film history: that of the disappearance of the cinema as a machine of the visible.31 And here the digital may indeed come to our rescue: by not itself belonging to the order of the visible, the digital can close the gap between the visible and the invisible of the world and thus be the ‘ground’ on which cinema can indeed be re-invented, as it has been so many times. In this respect at least, it is neither business as usual nor is it, as usual, business. At most, it is our business, and we have to make it so, to see cinema anew, as part of another archaeology of knowledge, and as theoretical object: in short, as a philosophical perpetuum mobile, as an intellectual automaton and a source of self-renewing energy.

31 Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘Machines of the Visible,’ in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (eds.), The Cinematic Apparatus (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1980), 121-142.

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 Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is set in Paris’ Montparnasse railway station: not a bad in-joke when you think that the film is a boy’s fantasy about the origins of cinema, now in 3D. And although Scorsese purports to tell the story of Georges Méliès as the inventor of cinema, it is the Lumière Brothers’ Arrival of a Train that prominently features at a key point in the narrative, when Méliès the magician acquires vital filmmaking equipment and know-how from the Lumières. There is another in-joke inside the in-joke: the boy has a terrifying nightmare of a train roaring into Montparnasse station and nearly running him over, a scene that is repeated ‘for real’ towards the end when Hugo is rescued by his tormentor, the station officer, thus preparing the happy ending. Yet for the cinephile, there is an in-joke within the in-joke within the in-joke. The train seen roaring twice into the station is not just any old train, and not even an old train from the 1920s. It is the digitally enhanced proleptic train from Jean Renoir’s 1938 La Bête Humaine, complete with Jean Gabin’s begoggled sooty face leaning out of the locomotive: Scorsese’s mise-en-abyme of film history in reverse is giving us this train wreck as in-joke in 3D, considered as a temporal anamorph rather than an optical effect. Not only does it neatly balance the director’s homage to (French) film culture and cinephilia with a somewhat more ambiguous appropriation of Méliès’ genius as the ‘precursor’ of Hollywood’s 3D revival (making Scorsese, the well-respected champion of film preservation, also the legitimate heir to Méliès’ ‘lost’ legacy). It also hints at a change of paradigm in the way we might come to look at 3D itself: not as a special effect in the field of cinematic vision but a different kind of ‘mental image’ (or ‘crystal image’, to use Gilles Deleuze’ terminology),1 fitting for an age and a time when cinema (and television) history is likely to become the only history our culture has an affective 1 See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by Tomlinson and Habberjam, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

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‘memory’ of, and when time has become a function of space. What train of thought might have led to this supposition?

Digital 3D: Case Already Closed? One of the most remarked-upon phenomena of mainstream cinema in the new century was the publicity effort orchestrated by the film industry to launch digital 3D cinema as a new ‘attraction’. For instance, the 2009-2010 film seasons is remembered as the years of the ‘return of 3D’, the culmination being the opening of James Cameron’s Avatar on 18 December 2009: a film that made instant history as the biggest and fastest box office success ever, having earned close to three billion dollars worldwide within less than six weeks of its theatrical release. Since then, mainstay industry directors like Robert Zemeckis (Beowulf, 2007), Steven Spielberg, and Peter Jackson (The Adventures of Tintin, 2011); entire studios like Pixar (Toy Story 3, 2010), Disney (Up, 2009) and Dreamworks (Shrek Forever After, 2010); acknowledged auteurs—besides Scorsese—such as Tim Burton (Alice in Wonderland, 2010), Michael Gondry (The Green Hornet, 2011), and not forgetting European greats Wim Wenders (Pina, 2011) and Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams, 2011) have all embraced the new technology. Despite such high-calibre interest and endorsement, another prestigious and reputable consensus holds that the wave has already peaked, that the revival is spluttering, and that the operation has not been a success, either economically or aesthetically. The respected film critic Roger Ebert railed against 3D from the start, regarding it an aberration, a travesty, and an abomination: “3D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension. Hollywood’s current crazy stampede toward it is suicidal. It adds nothing essential to the movie-going experience. For some, it is an annoying distraction. For others, it creates nausea and headaches. It is driven largely to sell expensive projection equipment and add a $5 to $7.50 surcharge on already expensive movie tickets. Its image is noticeably darker than standard 2D. It is unsuitable for grown-up films of any seriousness. It limits the freedom of directors to make films as they choose.”2 While Ebert now considers the “case closed” against 3D, with support from no less an authority than Walter Murch,3 there is more than a hint of Schadenfreude in 2 Roger Ebert, “Why I Hate 3D (And You Should Too),” Newsweek, 10 May 2010. 3 Roger Ebert, “Why 3D doesn’t work and never will. Case closed,” Chicago Sun-Times, 23 January 2011. http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/01/post_4.html

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Kristin Thompson’s articles on her and David Bordwell’s blog “Observations on Film Art”, quoting an industry wag: “it’s as if the characters are actually reaching out of the screen … and robbing your wallet”. 4 In two consecutive entries, she cites statistics that purport to document the precipitous fall of 3D at the box office.5 Bordwell and Thompson were not alone in considering the big buzz and the big bucks around Avatar a one-off.6 The British critic Mark Kermode sarcastically titled his put-down “Come in Number 3D, your time is up.”7 These and many similar assessments confirm one of the dominant narratives of why there was a return to 3D in the first place. As in the 1950s with the advent of television, Hollywood once more panicked in the face of increased competition from the Internet and a dramatic drop in DVD sales. To combat the threat of piracy as well as to upgrade the event-character of going to a movie theater for a night out rather than watch a film as streaming video on your home entertainment center via Netflix or the iPad on the go, Hollywood had to come up with a new gimmick, a special effect, a new attraction. The new gimmick in fact turned out to be an old gimmick that had already been short-lived the first time around, but because Hollywood does not have a memory—or is out of fresh ideas—it was tried again and failed again. Such would be the canonical story that can be backed up with a brief reminder of the rise and fall (also called the “Golden Age”) of 3D from 1952 to roughly 1954, i.e. also no more than two years. It began with Bwana Devil (1952) and House of Wax (1953) and ended with Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954).8 In honor of Jane Russell, one should also add The 4 Quoted in Kristin Thompson, “Has 3D Already Failed? The Sequel, Part One: RealDlighted,” davidbordwell.net/blog/2011/01/20/has-3d-already-failed-the-sequel-part-one-realdlighted/; from figure reproduced on first page; hereafter abbreviated “H.” 5 “If the more modest goal is the one many Hollywood studios are aiming at, then no, 3D hasn’t failed. But as for 3D being the one technology that will “save” the movies from competition from games, iTunes, and TV, I remain skeptical.” Kristin Thompson, “Has 3D Already Failed” http://www. davidbordwell.net/blog/2011/01/20/has-3d-already-failed-the-sequel-part-one-realdlighted/ 6 Daniel Engber, “Is 3D dead in the water? A box off ice analysis” http://www.slate.com/ id/2264927/pagenum/all/#p2 7 BBC video, Wednesday 23 December 2009 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/markkermode/​ 2009/12/come_in_number_3d_your_time_is.html 8 Dual strip projection meant that, effectively, two prints of a 3D movie were supplied to the theaters: a left eye print and a right eye one. The distributors figured: two prints, twice the rental. The exhibitors soon discovered, though, that customers wouldn’t pay twice as much to see a 3D movie, especially because sometimes —and this led directly to the second big problem—you sometimes got sore eyes after half an hour watching a 3D picture! This was because some projectionists were more than a little casual when it came to 3D presentation. If

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French Line (1954), which is a reminder that 3D as a special effect in the 1950s mostly concentrated on thrusting big, round or pointy things at the audience—be it arrows, swords, boulders, or bosoms. Hampered by competing and incompatible technical systems, (anaglyph and polarized 3D) cumbersome glasses, restricted angle of vision, and suspected headaches, 3D movies were indeed a passing fad for Hollywood. The actual reasons for its failure in the 1950s are both simpler and more complex than this narrative suggests, but as claimed by Thompson also for the current wave, by the end of 1954, 2D versions often significantly outearned the 3D version, not least because theaters were reluctant to convert to 3D projection. In other words, the theaters bet against it and thus produced a self-fulfilling prophecy. One casualty, for instance, was Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954), shot and advertised in 3D but mainly released in 2D.9 Meanwhile, in the movie sub-culture underground, 3D films continued to be made, with The Stewardesses (Allan Silliphant, 1969) the most profitable 3D film before Avatar relative to cost of production, suggesting unexpected parallels to another hugely successful (and paradigm-changing) film from 1969, Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper), which, partly thanks to its music track, brought teenagers back into the movie theaters. The coincidence is less fortuitous than it seems: popular music and 3D will, as we shall see, have their postponed rendezvous after all.

one projector is slightly out of focus or out of rack, the result is eye strain for the audience [see the accompanying article by Gary de Wan], as their eyes try in vain to correct the discrepancy. Occasionally, damaged frames would be removed and the ends of the film simply spliced together instead of being replaced with the appropriate length of blank film, thus rendering the remainder of the film from that splice onwards out of sync with the other. More eye strain! And while the exhibitors’ f inancial grievance was eventually resolved, some patrons eventually began to avoid a 3D presentation of a movie if they could see it flat somewhere else because they didn’t like having to wear the cardboard glasses. In fact, many theaters were booking single prints of 3D movies. anyway (which were still marked ‘left’ or ‘right’) because they didn’t think 3D was worth all the effort and installation expense. (http://widescreenmovies.org/WSM11/3D.htm) 9 The system used was the Natural Vision 3D camera rig, which meant the film would be shown as dual strip polarized 3D. There were, in fact, a few screenings of Dial M for Murder in 3D, but the few exhibitors equipped with 3D were not encouraged by audience response, and Warner quickly withdrew 3D versions. Self deprecatingly, Hitchcock is reported to have said of 3D, “It’s a nine-day wonder, and I came in on the ninth day.”

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The Counternarratives I want to suspend the narrative of Ebert, Kermode, Thompson, and other Cassandras of 3D to consider a few alternatives. My storyline rests on four apparently counterintuitive claims around 3D: 1. D3D’s short-term goals are internal to the industry, while its long-term transformative effects will be felt on small screens, game consoles, and mobile screens, although it may, for a while, leave television in something of a limbo. Furthermore, the short-term industry strategy, pursued with the introduction of D3D, once accomplished, makes it almost irrelevant whether 3D motion pictures on the big screen are a passing fad, a minority interest, or a major game-changer. 2. 3D has come back as a complement to our sound spaces and aural systems of representation. We should not simply think of it as an improved, more ‘realistic’ system of visual representation. 3. From a historical perspective, it can be argued, 3D actually preceded 2D in mechanical imaging, and in the form of stereoscopic slides conquered fields as familiarly diverse but interdependent as entertainment and the military, prior to the advent of cinema, which appropriated part of the stereo-aesthetics and simultaneously suppressed the knowledge of its popularity. 4. From an aesthetic perspective, D3D aspires to become, in the films themselves, an invisible rather than visible special effect. That is, much of the effort of directors, designers, and draftspersons working in 3D goes towards ‘naturalizing’ this type of technologically produced spatial vision, making it increasingly indiscernible. My general thesis, drawn from these four narratives, is that 3D is only one element re-setting our ideas of what is an image, and in the process is changing our sense of spatial and temporal orientation and thus our embodied relation to data-rich simulated environments. By way of conclusion, I want to speculate on what such turns and returns indicate about the history of cinema—and possibly our need to enlarge the cast of its ‘actors’.

The Tail Wags the Dog In the first of my alternative narratives, as it concerns contemporary Hollywood, D3D is not (only) a defensive damage limitation exercise; we are not in the 1950s, where the film industry might have lost the family audience to

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television. Since the 1990s, Hollywood has increasingly been present in all media and all markets, offline in physical space, online in virtual environments, on the domestic market, and globally.10 Introducing an expensive new technology for just the big screen would mean that Hollywood is in competition with itself, which makes no sense. The danger is less the Web per se but the Web’s “business model”, where so much content is either free or priced too low to return a profit to its originators, because “content” on the web is a means to an end and not an end in itself. Hollywood’s answer lies in franchise movies, merchandizing, and themed entertainment rather than 3D. Even piracy and copyright protection are issues that require legal measures and internationally enforceable agreements rather than technical gimmicks or artificial access barriers such as encryption.11 One of the key problems for the industry has been internal, namely how to convince exhibitors to take on the cost of converting to digital projection.12 Here, 3D as an added attraction was aimed only indirectly at the public and more directly at the exhibitors: the extra admission fee was meant to help recoup the investment in digital projection.13 Once installed and amortized via a season of successful 3D films, it does not matter if 3D is a big screen mainstay or a niche product, if it is only suitable for sci-fi, fantasy, and animation blockbusters, or also for regular drama, 10 Tino Balio, “‘A Major Presence in All the World Markets’: The Globalization of Hollywood in the 1990s,” in Steve Neale and Murray Smith, eds. Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (London: Routledge, 1998) 58-73. 11 See the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and worldwide protests against its adoption. Don Melvin, “Activists Present Avti-ACTA petition to EU,” Associated Press, 28 February 2011 (http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5goN98YMyvwPqQiW31gBs8U-xn vIg?docId=7afd9eef4f6b44acbb43b1029820bc87) 12 “Exhibitors have a low-cost, proven, low-tech approach … and see no urgent need to go digital. […] On the face of it, studios have most to gain: making and distributing fragile prints cost them about $1bn a year in the US alone. On the other hand, updating US cinemas could cost $5 bn. Logic suggests … that studios should come up with the funds. Yet part of the problem is the eternal argument between studios and theatre owners […] over the fair distribution of screen spoils.” Christopher Parkes, “Science fiction the old-fashioned way”, Financial Times, 18/19 May 2002, 7. 13 I do not wish to oversimplify a protracted process that began in earnest when seven Hollywood majors obtained anti-trust permission and in March 2002 founded the Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) to develop industry-wide specifications for digital formats. One of the key factors in the conversion to digital exhibition was the institution of the so-called Digital Cinema Package (DCP), which includes a Virtual Print Fee (VPF) guaranteeing exhibitors a reimbursement or subsidy from the distributors, in recognition of the fact that they are the major beneficiaries of the switch to ‘digital prints’, i.e. films stored and distributed as files on portable hard drives. David Bordwell has given a factually detailed narrative of the pros and cons of conversion: http:// www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2011/12/01/pandoras-digital-box-in-the-multiplex/

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thrillers, documentaries and romantic comedies.14 Another issue has been the digital projection systems which the majors are trying to foist upon all the exhibitors, whether they run multiplexes or arthouses, whether they show 3D or 2D films. A further round in the seemingly never-ending power struggle within the different branches of the industry, this argument is about the power to set binding standards—that is, only incidentally about 3D and only nominally about anti-piracy measures.15 Already by the end of 2010, industry commentators reported that the strategy of using 3D as a way of forcing theaters to adopt and fund digital projection had by and large succeeded, thanks to the films of the 2009/2010 season including Up, Coraline, Avatar, Alice in Wonderland, along with Toy Story 3, Shrek, Ice Age, and other Disney-Pixar animation films.16 Unlike analogue 3D, digital 3D equipment can switch between 3D films and 2D films, although some technical hitches remain when watching 2D digital films on 3D-enabled projection equipment. However, my claim goes further: 3D is hyped on the big screen also for the same reason that all films are hyped on the big screen: the theatrical release of a film is the marquee and billboard that allows a movie property to accrue cultural capital and enter all the subsidiary markets that eventually decide whether it is a commercial success. In some cases, the theatrical release of a film only accounts for 35% of its overall revenue across its life span and its different media outlets, and over the past ten years up to 70% of even

14 In another sense, it is vital whether 3D is suitable for other dramatic genres, once the function of the big screen as promotional attention window for the different small screens is factored in. For more on this, see below. 15 A useful account of earlier rounds of struggles can be found in Richard W. Haines, The Moviegoing Experience, 1968-2001 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2003). The asymmetrical cost-benefit relation between production, distribution, and exhibition (with distributors anxious to control exhibition outlets by prescribing leasing arrangements of costly 4K equipment) is especially resented in Europe, where art house cinemas depend on projecting films on different formats and with open standard equipment. 16 “There has been a considerable increase in the number of screens with 3D projection systems, from 4,400 in May 2010 to 8,770 in early December. That’s out of roughly 38,000. This growth presumably came in response to the huge success of Avatar and Alice in Wonderland. Anne Thompson’s “Year-End Box Office Wrap 2010″ quotes Don Harris, Paramount’s executive vice-president of distribution: “There are more screens, so a theater can now handle anywhere from two to three 3D films at one time.” By year’s end, there were roughly 13,000 3D-equipped screens outside the North American market. The number of 3D films per year has grown from two in 2008 to 11 in 2009 to 22 in 2010 to an announced 30+ for this year (2011).” Engber (see above),

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the theatrical gross of a film has come from overseas markets.17 In other words, while a US theatrical release is now, economically speaking, merely the appendage to the Hollywood entertainment machine, without theatrical release a film does not exist, which makes big screen movie exhibition a striking example of the tail wagging the dog, or, in another terminology, an instance of the logic of the supplement.18 No less paradoxical is the relationship between the first release of a film and the chain of subsidiary markets. As the window of attention has been getting tighter, with the opening weekend becoming the make-or-break event domestically as well as internationally, promotional budgets have also followed the logic of the supplement, accounting for more and more of the production cost. Yet this extreme focus on the time and location advantage of the first release imposes itself not merely because of piracy: it is another of Hollywood’s answers to the business models of the internet, where mail-order and subscription services like Netflix or Redbox represent as much of a threat to Hollywood’s economic survival as illegal downloads.19 Therefore, if the film business intends to introduce 3D imaging as a new ‘industry standard’ across the board (which is what my overall argument implies), then fictional stories showcasing its attractions still require the big screen and a theatrical release to introduce them, irrespective of whether these attractions are destined for quite other formats. Given the potential scope for 3D images on mobile devices, for instance, not just for feature films but for other forms of entertainment and types of information, including 17 Gloria Goodale, “Hollywood’s foreign booty: New ‘Pirates’ film earned over $250 million abroad,” Christian Science Monitor, 23 May 2011 http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2011/0523/ Hollywood-s-foreign-booty-New-Pirates-film-earned-over-250-million-abroad 18 The supplement, according to Jacques Derrida’s formulation in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” both adds to and completes an entity already assumed to be whole, and as such, underscores the absence within a sense of full presence or wholeness. The big screen has become, in economic terms, the supplement of the cinematic institution as a whole, yet without this supplement, the rest would disintegrate around its absence. 19 “Netflix […] was becoming so powerful that studios worried they were following their music counterparts down an iTunes path. ‘One buyer is your biggest nightmare,’ Mr. Guber said. ‘They can hear the rattle of your begging cup a mile away.’ The New York Times, 25 February 2012. With the collapse of the DVD market, Netflix, iTunes, and the iPad tablet are perceived as ‘disruptive’ services and technologies. Throughout 2010 and 2011, analysts tried to assess the ‘threat’ (to Hollywood and cable outlets), while Netflix argued the ‘benefits’ the company provided for the studios. See “Netflix a Fast-Growing Rival to Hollywood”, New York Times, 24 November 2010 (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/25/business/25netflix.html) and “Company defends itself to Hollywood”, Los Angeles Times, 5 April 2011 “http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/ entertainmentnewsbuzz/2011/04/netflix-fast-growth-contines-in-first-quarter-as-companydefends-itself-to-hollywood.html

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above all games but also every manner of GPS-supported location service such as maps (Google Earth and street view in 3D), holiday snaps (Microsoft 3D aggregator Photosynth), as well as shopping, tourism, and home videos, it is safe to assume that 3D is indeed aimed at a significantly greater market than multiplexes. On devices like smartphones or game consoles, the technical difficulties of credible 3D are less daunting, since its spatial effects can now be produced without the disadvantages still encumbering 3D films in theaters such as glasses, headaches, and limited angles of vision. Hence another paradox: a film’s 3D supplement, felt as redundant by a movie buff like Ebert or Kermode, may nonetheless be “functional” in and for an entirely different viewing situation and user context. Placed between an IMAX dome screen and an iPhone touch screen, the return of 3D leaves television in something of a limbo. On the one hand, TV is an important transmitter of cinema content: even if 3D films prove to occupy no more than the niche of animation films and children’s features, TV will have to be able to show such premium content. On the other hand, as both broadcast and cable TV reinvent themselves in order to respond to the internet, many kinds of tie-ins with tourism, talent shows, reality TV, and cross-over programming with online shopping are becoming ever more prominent, and sure enough, 3D-ready sets are developed and showcased by global manufacturers such as Toshiba, Hitachi, Samsung, and LG.20 In the past, the staple software for introducing (and inducing the purchase of) new technological hardware in the home such as color TV, stereo sound, or flat LED screens has always been—besides movies—sports, big national or international events (coronations, royal weddings, Olympic Games), or domestic pursuits, such as shared parental pleasures in front of the TV and the more solitary pleasures of porn. So far, there is not enough indication whether demand on any of these fronts will tempt consumers into replacing their HD-TV sets for 3D-enabled ones just yet. Thus, the 2012 London Olympics were touted to be the “tipping point”.21 ‘Serious’ games, more integration of TV with the Internet, and the guarantee of glasses-free TV will probably also be needed before 3D gains a defined place in the domestic setting, probably at a point in time when 3D on VR headsets and

20 The Internet is full of speculation, tips, and consumer advice on 3D television. See http:// www.consumerreports.org/cro/electronics-computers/tvs-services/hdtv/3d-tvs/overview/ index.htm or http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2365010,00.asp 21 Molly McHugh, “The 2012 London Olympics is 3D TVs’ big opportunity” (15 February 2012) http://news.yahoo.com/2012-london-olympics-3d-tvs-big-opportunity-011206230.html

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game consoles has become as unremarkable and common as touch screens (which 3D could be said to complement) are today.

Playing Catch-up to the Revolution in Sound? To come to my second counternarrative: if I am right in assuming that 3D is a supplement to sound and hearing even more than to vision and seeing, then an altogether different dimension emerges. Much of the objection to 3D on the part of critics and even filmmakers comes from the assumption that 3D is primarily an enhancement of vision, taking us in the direction of greater and greater realism: realism being one of the enduring if questionable teleologies said to drive the history of cinema and its chief technological innovations (silent to sound, black-and-white to color, 2D to 3D). The study of early cinema has shown that this is erroneous history even without considering 3D, which in any case already existed around 1902, when the Lumières (and not Méliès!) showed 3D films at the Paris World Exhibition projected onto a giant screen. Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former head of production at Paramount and Disney and then CEO of DreamWorks Animation, seems to share a similarly selective understanding of film history. Once called “The Jerry Falwell of 3D”22 because of his missionary zeal—but sometimes looking more like he served as the model for Shre, one of his studio’s more successful (now 3D) franchises—Katzenberg is, along with Steven Spielberg and James Cameron, one of the chief promoters of 3D in Hollywood. Katzenberg speaks of 3D as “the third revolution in cinema” (after silent to sound, black-and-white to color).23 The surprising aspect of his “revolution” is not that he presents too streamlined a version of film history but that he very much sees 3D as taking “vision” out of what he calls its “vinyl phase”.24 While he seems to have conveniently forgotten Hollywood’s 3D phase in the 1950s, his telling metaphor of “vinyl” (and thus analogy with sound) leads to two further observations. For the past 30 years or so, Hollywood 22 See Patrick Goldstein and James Rainey, “Jeffrey Katzenberg: The Jerry Falwell of 3-D?” Los Angeles Times, 15 September 2008, latimesblogs.latimes.com/the_big_picture/2008/09/jeffreykatzenb.html. Also at http://digitalcinemablog.blogspot.com/2009/04/jeffrey-katzenberg-jerryfalwell-of-3D.html 23 Quoted in Bruce Handy, “Jeffrey Katzenberg on 3-D: Depth Becomes Him,” Vanity Fair, 23 March 2009, http://www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2009/03/jeffrey-katzenberg-on-3d​ -depth-becomes-him 24 Ibid.

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picture making has revolutionized itself in many ways, most clearly through digital production methods and a corresponding shift to outsourced postproduction. Yet very few of its industrial and business innovations have actually been noted by the average viewer, because so much in our moviegoing experience has remained the same throughout. However, what has changed substantially and is often credited with having revived the film industry in the 1980s is movie sound. “Surround sound” was itself influenced and inflected by the Walkman experience of the 1980s, making what used to be known as “personal stereo” become a collective, shared experience: a new kind of public intimacy conveyed through the sound space we share with others in the dark.25 Dolby, multi-channel directional sound has given cinema a new spatial depth and dimension, which four key films from the mid to late 1970s (Nashville, Jaws, Star Wars, and Apocalypse Now) pioneered very successfully—each in its own way—in order to redefine the movie experience. Is Katzenberg, then, merely stating the unexpected but retrospectively obvious fact: that 3D images are the belated catch-up, finally drawing level with three-dimensional sound? If so, it has to do with the generally changing relation in our culture between “sound” and “image”: more and more, it is sound and noise that define public and private space, inner and outer worlds, norm and deviancy. At least since Dolby noise reduction systems were introduced, sound has been experienced as three-dimensional, ‘filling’ the space the way that water fills a glass, but also emanating from inside our heads, seemingly empowering us, giving us agency, even as we listen passively. In cinema, the traditional hierarchy of image to sound has been reversed in favor of sound now leading the image or, at the very least, giving objects a particular kind of solidity and materiality. It prompted film theorist Christian Metz to speak of “aural objects”,26 a notion used to good effect in another 2012 Oscar winner, The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011), a “silent” film, where the main protagonist who refuses to believe in the “talkies’ has a nightmare in which everyday objects such as a water glass or chair suddenly take on a sinister aural life in his otherwise soundless world. The return of 3D would then be part of a broader culture of technologically induced synaesthesia or sensory substitution, where sound becomes “a modality of seeing”, making vision 25 The history of sound in cinema has in recent decades become a fertile research area, thanks to the work of Rick Altman, Doug Gomery, James Lastra, Michel Chion, Claudia Gorbman, Kaja Silverman, and many others. For sound and the ‘New Hollywood’, see Gianluca Sergi, The Dolby Era: Film Sound in Contemporary Hollywood (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 26 Christian Metz, “Aural Objects,” Yale French Studies no. 60, Cinema/Sound (1980): 24-32.

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an appendage to hearing, with monocular sight increasingly submerged in the sea of stereo sound.27 But there is a further aspect to sound that is crucial in the shift to 3D: if we think how quickly—and for the record companies, how profitably—the archives of recorded sound were digitally remastered with the arrival of the CD and how readily consumers accepted and adapted to it, then one can understand why the holy grail for the owners of Hollywood film libraries is the prospect of digitally remastering our film heritage in 3D: technically possible and while still expensive, it was (until recently) the openly stated goal of someone like James Cameron, not least because he owns several of the necessary patents for doing so.28 It might even give a boost to the collapsing DVD sales, bypassing theatrical release, while tempting consumers to implement 3D as the new default value on both television and laptop screens, making them willing to replace the old hardware if both new and familiar software becomes available. To promote 3D on the big screen today would then be a way of investing in 3D on the small screen tomorrow.

The Many Histories of 3D—and a Different Genealogy for Cinema To substantiate my main thesis, namely that 3D has made its re-appearance as only one part of an emerging set of new default values about how to locate ourselves in simultaneous spaces, multiple temporalities, and data-rich, simulated environments, and thus how to live in and with “images”, I need to recapitulate some of the manifold and continuous but often submerged histories of stereoscopy and 3D. For a film historian, the “return of 3D” prompts first of all a brief reflection on the very idea of “return”. In view of an alternative genealogy of cinema, made possible or desirable by any number of phenomena only provisionally subsumed under the transition from analogue (film-based) cinema to digital (post-film) cinema, the return of 3D might be better described as either never having been away or as the “return of the repressed”. Once one traces 3D back not only to the 1950s (or 1920s, or the Lumière Brothers 27 See, for instance, http://www.seeingwithsound.com/ for new ways of using sound to assist the visually impaired. Sensory substitution has become a major topic in neuroscience: A. Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004). 28 See ‘Titanic to Be Relaunched in 3D but James Cameron Warns “Don’t Expect Another Avatar,”’ 16 March 2010, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1258336/Titanic-3DJames-Camerons-Avatar-followup-2012.html

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around 1900)29 but takes the longer view and recalls the extensive practice of stereoscopic images in the nineteenth century,30 one is quickly led back to the phantasmagorias of the late eighteenth century: the panoramas, dioramas, and other spatial projection methods which for centuries have existed in parallel to the history of monocular perspective.31 Rather than speak of a “return” of 3D, it is best to once more invoke the logic of the supplement, with 3D remaining invisible or un(re)marked because of particular historical or ideological pressures, but always already inherent in both still and moving pictures. Assuming for a moment that one conceives of cinema not in terms of animated photographs in motion (i.e. as a pictorial art form capable of rendering on a two-dimensional surface the illusion of three dimensional depth and turning intermittent succession into the illusion of movement), cinema’s telos can plausibly be reconstructed as the elimination of any kind of frame or limit to the perceptual field, indeed as driven by the tendency to self-abolish its apparatic scaffolding and peculiar geometry of representation. Already present in one of André Bazin’s ironic ruminations in the 1950s (“no more cinema!”), this is the perspective put forward by Akira Lippit: Because the discussions of 3D cinema have often veered toward the history and theory of optics (nineteenth-century explorations of stereopsis, techniques of 3D rendering in film), its relation to genres of excess (horror, soft-porn, exploitation) and its function as a precursor of new media (virtual reality, interactive media), the persistence of 3D cinema as a recurring but wishful dream has been elided. […] The impulse toward stereoscopic cinema is sustained by a fundamental cinematic desire to eliminate the last vestige of the apparatus from the field of representation, the film screen. In this light, stereoscopic cinema can be seen not only as a technological extension of flat cinema, a surplus dimension, but as

29 For the most exhaustive history of 3D cinema to date, see Ray Zone, Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3D Film, 1838-1952 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007). 30 Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer is still the best-known study of the impact of stereoscopy on nineteenth-century theories of vision, optical toys and image practices not conforming to the accounts that assume a direct line of descent from Renaissance perspective to the principles of the cinematograph; see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). 31 Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997).

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the dimension of its unconscious. 3D cinema represents the desire to externalize the unconscious of cinema.32

Even as one might wish to nuance the bold strokes of this lightning sketch of an alternative teleology to the usual one of realism/illusionism, Lippit’s point is well taken, and the question arises: why did the framed view come to dominate imaging and picture making from the late fifteenth century to the late nineteenth century, when other systems were both technically feasible and popular? There have always been avant-garde movements or artists who contested the monopoly of the monocular paradigm. In the modern period, the better-known challenges to perspectival representation came from painting. They roughly coincided with the period during which photography and then cinema emerged into prominence. J.M.W. Turner comes to mind, who in the 1840s started to paint what was impossible to capture through photography: pictures that had no fixed horizon or that required a mobile point of view, like the celebrated Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway (1844), painted after Turner had put his head out of the window of a railway carriage for full nine minutes, or the equally famous The Slave Ship (1840) that forces the viewer to position him or herself in fatal proximity with the dying and shackled slaves, thrown overboard to drown, so that the vessel’s owner could collect extra insurance money.33 32 Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Three Phantasies of Cinema – Reproduction Mimesis Annihilation,” Paragraph, vol. 22 (3): 213-227. Lippit begins his essay with a flourish: “Among the great expectations of cinema, unfulfilled to the extent it was anticipated, remains the unrealized dream of a viable three-dimensionality. The technical advances that characterized the evolution of cinema during the twentieth century seemed to destine cinema toward a fantastic state of total representation, a phenomenography of life. To accomplish this, cinema needed to surpass, at some moment, the limitations of the basic apparatus—screen and projection—and provide a synthetic experience of the world, not just its reproduction. Cinema would have to move, at the very least, from the confines of two-dimensional representation to the plenitude of threedimensional space. Stereoscopy came to serve as a focal point for this projection, promising the transformation of flat cinema into a voluminous supercinema, and ultimately a form of anti-cinema. The drive to complete cinema, to perfect its mimetic capacities, suggested the eventual elimination of cinema as such. At the end of the twentieth century […] the medium continues to be haunted by its failure to overcome itself.” (213) 33 “The work of Goethe, Schopenhauer, Ruskin, and Turner and many others are all indications that by 1840 the process of perception itself had become, in various ways, a primary object of vision. For it was this very process that the functioning of the camera obscura kept invisible. Nowhere else is the breakdown of the perceptual model of the camera obscura more decisively evident than in the late work of Turner. Seemingly out of nowhere, his painting of the late 1830s and 1840s signals the irrevocable loss of a fixed source of light, the dissolution of a cone of light rays, and the collapse of the distance separating an observer from the site for optical experience. Instead of the immediate and unitary apprehension of an image, our experience

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The other challenge to perspective was, of course, that of Cubism and Futurism, cutting up the homogeneous space of Renaissance painting into segments representing temporal succession and the observer’s spatial displacement. Notwithstanding the proximity of Eadweard Muybridge’s chronophotography to Cubism—if we think of Marcel Duchamp’s seminal Nude Descending A Staircase (1912)—the popularity of photographic practice in the culture at large and the advantages of apparatus-free monocular view over stereoscopic vision in moving image-making led to a mode of representation in cinema that generally favored two-dimensional images projected onto a flat screen and surrounded by a frame, offering the illusion of spatial depth in much the same way that the central perspective organized pictorial space: around a single vanishing point, recession in depth, shading, and graded color schemes, and the corresponding scaling of size and distance of objects, space, and human figures. However, for cinema to take this option was neither as natural nor as inevitable as it might appear in retrospect. More careful film historical research has shown that during the first ten to fifteen years of motion picture history, there is ample evidence to suggest that filmmakers could and did draw on quite a wide range of techniques and traditions in the organization of pictorial space, resulting in styles of mise-en-scene and modes of spatiality that, if viewed from the normativity of Renaissance perspective, seem deviant at best and inept at worst. And so they were often judged, until the combined efforts of a generation of early cinema scholars were able to prove that there is a historical logic to the Lumière Brothers’ exaggerated diagonals in Arrival of a Train (projected, as mentioned, in a stereo version at the Paris World Exhibition in 1902), to Edwin S. Porter’s cowboy shooting straight into the camera in The Great Train Robbery (1903), itself a typical stereo effect.34 We have learnt again to read D.W. of a Turner painting is lodged amidst an inescapable temporality. … The sfumato of Leonardo, which had generated during the previous three centuries a counter-practice to the dominance of geometrical optics, is suddenly and overwhelmingly triumphant in Turner. But the substantiality he gives to the void between objects and his challenges to the integrity and identity of forms now coincides with a new physics: the science of fields and thermodynamics.” Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 138. On J.M.W. Turner, see also John Gage, Turner: Rain, Steam and Speed (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1972) and Gerald Finley, Angel in the Sun, Turner’s Vision of History (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999). 34 For a general overview of the relation between stereoscopy and early cinema, see Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema (New York: Scribner, 1990). In 1915, Edwin S. Porter and William E. Waddell managed to screen 3D moving pictures to an audience at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, New York.

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Griffith’s highly idiosyncratic staging in A Corner in Wheat (1909), or when he emphasized the frame edges while leaving the center empty (Musketeers of Pig Alley, 1912), just as scholars have come to prize the tromp l’oeil effects of Ferdinand Zecca’s The Ingenious Soubrette (1903), G.A. Smith’s Grandma’s Reading Glasses (1900), Franz Hofer’s silhouette cut-outs in Weihnachtsglocken (1914), or the impossible spaces of James Williamson’s The Big Swallow (1901), previously regarded as incoherent, idiosyncratic, or primitive.35 But these non-standard cinematic spaces are themselves embedded in the long battle of stereoscopic vision versus monocular vision, which is also part of the status contest over prestige and discursive power between popular culture and high culture among the arts in the nineteenth century. Film historians, but especially film theorists of the cinematic apparatus, have tended to forget just how widespread, diverse, and popular stereo slides were from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards.36 It comes as a surprise to learn in what huge numbers they were produced, distributed, and consumed: adopted in schools or enjoyed in the home with portable stereo viewers, used for business as visiting cards as well as in public thanks—at least in Europe—to the widely installed Kaiserpanoramas, i.e. circular viewing galleries, where up to 24 people could watch the same slide show simultaneously.37 We owe to Walter Benjamin one of the best-known and most eloquent descriptions of the Berlin ‘Tiergarten’ Kaiserpanorama, mentioned both in One Way Street and his Berlin Childhood around 1900: “The travel images you found at the imperial panorama had the great charm that it did not much matter by which one you started the tour. The screen, with places to sit down on in front of it, was actually round, and each image thus travelled through all the stations from which you could look at the pale colours, through a 35 On Franz Hofer, see Michael Wedel, “ Melodrama and Narrative Space: Franz Hofer,” in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 123-131. An extensive discussion of The Big Swallow can be found in Jennifer M. Barker, The tactile eye: touch and the cinematic experience (Berkeley: University of Calfornia Press, 2009), 158-160. See also Ch 2.4 in this volume. 36 The most successful US company for mass-manufacturing of stereo slides was Underwood & Underwood, in the 1890s the largest publisher of stereo views in the world, producing up to 10 million views a year, while the Keystone View Company of Meadville, Pennsylvania was one of the largest distributors, especially to schools. 37 Dieter Lorenz, Das Kaiserpanorama. Ein Unternehmen des August Fuhrmann (Munich: Munich City Museum, 2010). See also Carolin Duttlinger, ‘‘‘Die Ruhe des Blickes’’: Brod, Kafka, Benjamin and the Kaiserpanorama,’ in Christian Emden and David Midgley (eds.), Science, Technology and the German Cultural Imagination (Oxford: Lang, 2005), 231-55.

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double window, far away.” Oddly enough, Benjamin here fails to mention that the images were stereoscopic views. However, one of the sections of One Way Street is entitled “stereoscope”, where he uses the term figuratively in order to describe moments of spatio-temporal displacement in the modern city. It is an indication that the practice was sufficiently remembered and embedded in the culture for the device itself to serve as a telling metaphor. What is remarkable, then, is how and why this knowledge of stereoscopy came to be repressed in the early twentieth century with the proliferation of cinema, thereby giving a major boost to the painterly paradigm of generating the illusion of a 3D space out of a 2D surface. No doubt, the drive to make cinema respectable and to adjust its spatial coordinates to the bourgeois theater and its compositional codes to salon painting may have been contributing factors.38 The plebeian aspect of 3D also goes some way towards explaining why the anti-bourgeois, anti-avant-gardes—notably Dada and Surrealism—kept 3D imaging and its effects alive and even built on them, when one thinks of Marcel Duchamp’s roto-relief disks, and his palindrome of a film anemic cinema, not to mention the Small Glass, also known as “To Be Looked at (from the other side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour”, a witty deconstruction of monocular vision by a stereoscopic ocular ensemble, to which Duchamp adds a temporal dimension.39 Similarly, several of the practitioners of the so-called “absolute film”, notably Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, and Walter Ruttmann as well as Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Hans Richter were fully aware of the visual-conceptual possibilities offered by simulating by graphic means the impression of seeing in depth. 40 Their efforts can be counted as part of the general revision of the Renaissance paradigm in the 1920s and their refusal to subject cinema entirely to its rules and ideology. Fast-forwarding to the 1960s and 70s—whether to Andy Warhol’s Outer and Inner Space; Dan Graham’s Time Delay Rooms; Michael Snow’s Two Sides to Every Story; or to Ken Jacobs, with his revival of stereoscopic slides in strobe animation experiments such as Capitalism: Slavery, discovering 38 How complex a process of mutual give and take this struggle turned out to be can be seen in Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 39 On Marcel Duchamp and stereoscopic vision, see Rhonda Roland Shearer et al., “Duchamp’s Revolutionary Alternative in the context of competing optical experiments,” Tout-fait vol. 1, 3 (December 2000) http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_3/Multimedia/Shearer/Shearer10.html 40 On Hans Richter, see Malcolm Turvey, “Dada between Heaven and Hell: Abstraction and Universal Language in the Rhythm Films of Hans Richter,” October 105 (Summer 2003): 13-36.

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depth in decaying color photographs (Razzle-Dazzle), his found-footage film Disorient Express (1996), or the reworking of his famous Tom Tom the Piper’s Son (1969) into Anaglyph Tom (2008)—each artist and work were tapping into genealogies of unorthodox spatial dispositifs in the realm of still and moving images, either manipulating depth cues or simulating multi-dimensionality or sometimes both. 41 Jacobs is especially remarkable for his many do-it-yourself ways of achieving the illusion of spatial depth, using stroboscopic effects, flicker, and the so-called Pulfrich technique, which involves placing lighter and darker lenses successively in front of the eye. A technique invented after he had lost the use of one eye during World War I, Carl Pulfrich realized that delaying the flow of light to one eye via a tinted filter would produce a similar result as a stereoscopic view. Pulfrich, like Duchamp—and at about the same time—made use of delay, i.e. a temporal disparity, adding to images the fourth dimension of time, which the mind reconstituted into spatial terms as if it was a parallax horizontal disparity. 42 By reviving these and other hand-made and apparently obsolete techniques, Jacobs has shown that such devices of time-space dis- and re-orientation of the viewer were far from exhausted, either aesthetically or politically, allowing one even to trace a line of descent from J.M.W. Turner to Ken Jacobs, from Rain, Steam and Speed to Disorient Express or better still, from The Slave Ship to Capitalism: Slavery. 43 Generally, however, the North American film avant-garde exploring 3D had, under the sway of Duchamp’s enigmatic minimalism, been more influenced by sculpture and performance than by painting. Taking one’s cue, 41 On Ken Jacobs’ different cinematic, paracinematic, and spatio-temporal dispositifs, see Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur (eds.), Optic Antics: The Cinema Of Ken Jacobs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 42 For a detailed explanation of the Pulfrich effect, see http://pulfrich.siuc.edu/ 43 Commenting on Let There Be Whistleblowers (18 min.), Jacobs explains: “The original film, Sarnia Tunnel, 1903, is in the Library of Congress. In 1996 I used it to create the Nervous System performance work, Loco Motion, (25 min). Steve Reich’s music brought about an entirely different development.” As to Ontic Antics Starring Laurel And Hardy; Bye Molly (88 min.), it was “the 1929 Laurel and Hardy short Berth Marks, filmed twice, with and without sound [that] is our glorious take-off point. In some ways Ontic Antics now goes beyond what had been possible in live performance, especially the new (purely-digital) 3D coda. The foot-stool that becomes a live puppy, however, is no computer effect but comes from rapid juxtaposition of opposing left-right frames, just as in the live performance.- For the last 15 minutes, Ontic Antics can be visually enhanced by the use of a gray Pulfrich filter in front of one of the viewer’s eyes. An inch of plastic absorbing some of the light, it can deepen apparent depth and change direction of movement.” http://www.expcinema.com/site/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&page=shop. product_details&flypage=shop.flypage&product_id=363

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for instance, from Anthony McCall’s now canonical projector-installation Line Describing a Cone, one can open up another genealogy altogether, also for cinema in its contemporary mainstream 3D manifestations. 44 For McCall’s take on the cinematic apparatus from 1973—then understood as a materialist demystification of the illusionist device but now more admired for its poetic, mysterious, sculptural qualities of time and embodiment—refers us back to Athanasius Kircher’s camera obscura via Étienne Robertson’s Phantasmagorias and Pepper’s Ghost as another of the many devices intended to give spatial volume and body to projected light. 45 Such an alternative genealogy, tracing lines of descent of monocular cinema’s illegitimate brother, born of the same father, the camera obscura, but blood-related to the gypsy beauty from the fairground and the itinerant magic lanternist, highlights the main point of my third counterintuitive narrative: that 3D preceded 2D in mechanical imaging but that 2D won the battle of the standards largely because of photography’s superior software and cultural status. In which case, the current turn to 3D would not only be the compulsive return of something repressed in the very identity of cinema but may also herald the break of the firm hold that photography has had on the ontology of cinema: a precondition, almost, for a better understanding of “what is an image” and “what is cinema” in the digital age. It suggests that 3D is important less for being cinema’s inevitable make-or-break future destiny than for giving us a better understanding of its past history.

What is an Image Today? The detour by way of the history of spatial vision across an alternative genealogy of cinema (one that includes its digital future because it is already part of its past) allows the fourth of my counter-narratives to come into view. Claiming that 3D today should be regarded as part of and a symptom of decisive change in our perceptual and sensory default values also includes a 44 Branden Wayne Joseph, Jonathan Walley, and Christopher Eamon (eds.), Anthony McCall: The solid light films and related works (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005). 45 Here I signal the exceptional research of Tom Gunning on the history of the phantasmagoria in two magisterial essays: “Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusions and Wonder: Towards a Cultural Optics of the Cinematic Apparatus,” in Andre Gaudreault, Catherine Russell, and Pierre Veronneau (eds.), The Cinema, A New Technology for the 20th Century (Lausanne: Editions Payot, 2004), 31-44; and “The Long and the Short of it: Centuries of Projecting Shadows from Natural Magic to the Avant-Garde,” in Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon (eds.), The Art of Projection (Ostfildern: Hatje Canz, 2009), 23-35.

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different awareness of bodily orientation and physical location. Embedded in layered spaces, navigating multiple temporalities, and interacting with data-rich, simulated, and hybrid environments probably requires redefining what we mean by “seeing”, by “images”, and how to differentiate the latter from “pictures”—an undertaking well under way in art history, media studies, and philosophy. 46 Following a line of inquiry laid out by Wittgenstein, the philosopher Martin Seel summarizes what is involved in “seeing”: To see something, to see something as something, and to see something in something are three basic instances of seeing; they come together in seeing pictures. Surveyable surfaces that in their appearance bring something to appearance call for complex seeing. […] The general concept of seeing is that of seeing something; all living beings capable of seeing can see in this way. They are in a position to distinguish objects and movements by virtue of visual perception. To see something as something, on the other hand, is a much more specialized ability; the ability of conceptual distinction is included in it. The mere seeing of something becomes seeing that such and such is the case, for example, that there is an umbrella hanging there. In contrast to a seeing that simply perceives, here it is a matter of epistemic seeing. To see a picture, we have to be able to perceive an object among other objects—and we have to be able to perceive it as a picture. Identifying and re-identifying forms in pictures (as many animals master) is not enough here. Identifying something as well as the more elaborate identifying of something as something are indeed necessary presuppositions of seeing pictures, since to recognize a pictorial presentation it is necessary to have the ability to discriminate visually what is specifically presented. 47

These distinctions are helpful, for instance, in dispelling simplistic attacks on “illusionism” in film studies and clarifying the contested concept of “representation”. 48 In order to comprehend how complex and varied the connections can be between seeing, sensing, acting, and interacting, I want 46 Hans Belting, The End of Art History? translated by Christopher S. Wood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), W.J.T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 47 Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005), 179. 48 Among the best-known studies are Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-believe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago/London: University Of Chicago Press, 1994), Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of

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to illustrate, by way of a personal anecdote, two specific problems as they affect our understanding of 3D. The first concerns our perception of moving pictures and their internal organization, the second a possible cultural shift in our response to and use of images. In May 2009, well before the launch of Avatar, I gave a talk at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne that was meant to introduce a special screening of Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954), complete with 3D anaglyph cardboard glasses and a suitably equipped viewing theater. The Bonn Cinematheque had shipped the print and brought their own crew; it took them almost a day to rig up the equipment and, given the location, the screening became more like an art event and an installation piece. However, the auditorium was packed with young people, summoned by cell phones and Facebook and producing a buzz of excitement and expectation such I had not seen it for a contemporary film since Star Wars, inadvertently proving that “going vintage” was indeed very much “in” and seen as “avant-garde”. But it also proved that while most of the thrusting effects of this 3D classic now seem inept, with the Creature’s webbed claws looking more like someone poking a garden rake in our faces, the underwater scenes were poetic, enthralling, and mesmerizing, even after all these years. Scenes that have no horizon, where characters are floating or leaping, flying or swimming work much better in 3D than scenes with people walking or talking in shot-counter-shot. This gives a clue to why Avatar is such an exhilarating kinetic and bodily experience and why Wim Wenders was well-advised to choose dance and dancers (Pina, 2011) and Werner Herzog caves and cave drawings (Cave of Forgotten Dreams, 2011) for their first serious forays into 3D documentaries. Nick James put it differently but evokes the same sense of floating motion: “As a spectator, to be positioned by the camera above, beside and amid the dancers of Bausch’s Wuppertal troupe is not unlike floating bodiless through more solid phantoms”. And in Herzog’s cave film, he felt that: “the tremendous sense of movement in these depictions of animals depends on the curvature of the walls of the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc caves. […] Together, these [two] films suggest that 3D might find its best uses in bringing real rather than imagined things to us.”49 “Bringing real rather than imagined things to us” makes a counterintuitive claim for 3D that shifts attention from its technological and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 49 Nick James, “Berlin Film Festival – Review,” The Observer, 19 February 2011, http://www. guardian.co.uk/film/2011/feb/20/berlin-film-festival-review

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archaeological to its aesthetic-perceptual impact. In a review of Up, the Disney-Pixar animation feature that was showcased as a trial balloon for 3D’s art cinema acceptability at Cannes, Hans-Georg Rodek noted the fact that “soon you forget that it is 3D, the effects are used so sparingly. In other words, the sensationally new technique is entirely subordinated to the logic of the narrative.” The decision struck him as counterproductive since, as he says, “this is where one’s doubts arise. Because D3D is marketed as a sensation: with the obvious goal of being able to charge higher admission at the box-office. And for that, it needs to be experienced as a sensation. When all you can say is that it blends in with our normal visual habits the special effect is soon special no more.”50 But herein lies the rub: if one thinks of 3D not as part of a cinema of attractions—not as startling you or throwing things at you from the depth of space—but as the vanguard of a new cinema of narrative integration introducing the malleability, scalability, fluidity, or ‘curvature’ of digital images into audiovisual space—doing away with horizons, suspending vanishing points, seamlessly varying distance, “unchaining” the camera, and transporting the observer—then the aesthetic possibilities are by no means limited to telling a silly story, suitable only for kids hungry for superheroes, action toys, or sci-fi fantasies. Most commentators, discussing 3D images solely in the context of the theatrical feature film, assume a space and a physical environment where the spectator’s gaze is directed at the vertical screen bounded by a black frame; yet in the broader scheme of things I am sketching for 3D, it is this upright forward orientation that is also challenged, making big screen 3D a special case rather than the norm within the expanded field of stereoscopy and in-depth vision. An altogether more variable array of screens is implicated or envisioned: mobile, held in the palm of the hand or so large that it envelops the entire field of vision, ambient as part of the environment, unframed and configured in any space whatever. In short, 3D would be symptomatic of the proliferation of screens that we encounter around us, picturing not a particular view, projecting not a particular kind of image, but instead producing a particular kind of spectator: to the ideal image without a horizon corresponds the ideal spectator—floating, gliding, or suspended. As already evident in the reference to phantasmagorias (as well as in the comments from The Observer), such spatio-temporal re- and dis-locations have hitherto been the privilege of ghosts, revenants, and other virtual presences from beyond. Examples from contemporary cinema include 50 Hans-Georg Rodek, “‘Oben’ beweist – 3D ist keine Kino-Sensation,” Die Welt, 13 May 2009. (http://www.welt.de/kultur/article3732236/Oben-beweist-3D-ist-keine-Kino-Sensation.html)

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Japanese films, where ghosts supply the narrative rationale for exploring three-dimensional space, foremost among them Takeshi Shimizu’s The Shock Labyrinth 3D (2009). A special case—technically in the 2D mode but requiring us to imagine ‘curved space’ or ‘space-time’ dislocations—is Korean director Kim ki-Duk’s Bin Jip (2004), whose protagonist wills himself into invisibility by staging para- or pseudo-stereoscopic situations, as if to intimate that—like a stealth bomber invisible to radar—stereoscopy gives the spectator or user a presence sensed rather than seen, creating coordinates of invisible presence, even in the field of vision.51 To this extent, such shifts in time-space perception do not require 3D rendering, even as they present “imagined things” rather than “bringing real” ones to us. In his attack, Roger Ebert, I believe, makes the mistake of thinking of 3D as enhanced realism within Renaissance space, chiding it for being “unnatural”. Francis Coppola, who worked with the spatiality of sound earlier than most, is not impressed by 3D so far but reminds us that Abel Gance had already experimented with 3D.52 David Bordwell, also rather skeptical of 3D, has nonetheless made some pertinent observations on his blog.53 For instance, he notes that in Coraline (Henry Selick, 2009) the animators have used 3D effects not in order to emphasize depth but actually to construct spaces that do not follow the rules of perspective and instead introduce slight anomalies. Artificially ‘flattening’ the picture, they simulate cognitive dissonances and introduce perceptual mis-cues, generating a subtle sense of claustrophobia or discomfort that transmits the heroine’s state of mind to the spectator as a bodily sensation. Bordwell’s points draw on the commentary by the director: I was also looking for what is the difference between the real world and the other world, besides how much depth does it have. […] I had in my mind why don’t we just turn up the 3D in the other world, compared with the real world but why don’t we in the real world, especially in the interior shots, in the kitchen, the living room, Coraline’s Bedroom, why don’t we actually build them as if they were flattened, as if they have very little depth. […] I wanted her life in the real world to feel as if it 51 A closer examination of Bin-Jip’s ‘stereo effects’ can be found in Thomas Elsaesser, “World Cinema: Realism, Evidence, Presence,” in Lucía Nagib and Cecília Mello (eds.), Realism and the Audiovisual Media (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 3-19. 52 See Jason Knott. “Francis Ford Coppola: 3D is ‘Tiresome’,” Electronic House, 11 May 2010, http://www.electronichouse.com/article/francis_ford_coppola_3d_is_tiresome/ 53 David Bordwell, “Coraline Cornered,” http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2009/02/23/ coraline-cornered/

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were claustrophobic, lacking color, a certain sense of loneliness. We did that […]. We actually built it [the other world] much deeper. And the 3D shows that off.54

Directors and writers, aided in this case by 30-odd animators and digital designers, and no doubt abetted by neuro-psychologists,55 are deploying digital 3D space to affect us, the spectators, not so much by suggesting spatial verisimilitude or depth. Instead, they may use 3D in order to give a new value to 2D, either to “go retro” or to deploy some of the effects available in other systems of spatial representation, be they Asian (Japanese woodcuts), pre-Renaissance (Fra Angelico), borrowed from Impressionist painting (Van Gogh),56 or reminiscent of the frontality of early cinema that I mentioned above. This is the case of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Scorsese’s Hugo: reviving representational modes previously repressed or discarded when making way for the classical cinema’s more narrowly pictorial “staging in depth”.57 This suggests the paradoxical conclusion I already alluded to: given that the new 3D is not a ‘return of deep space’ in the manner of 1950s ‘creature features’, with pointy objects protruding into the auditorium, 3D’s reemergence is more likely to evolve towards extending the expressive as well as conceptual registers of post-Euclidian space and thus may enlarge the scope of perceptual responses, deepen the affective engagement of the spectator, and work towards integrating the originally disruptive effects of stereoptic depth cues with other, monocular depth cues such as resolution, shading, color, and size. Hence, what is being promoted with 3D is not a special effect as special effect but as the new default value of digital vision, presuming a layered, material, yet also mobile and pliable space. It 54 Henry Selick, audio commentary, Coraline, two-disk DVD Collector’s Edition (Universal Studios, 2009), quoted in Jesko Jockenhövel, “Der stereoskipische Fimraum: Immersion und Kohärenz in Henry Selick’s Coraline und Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland,” Rabbit Eye – Zeitschrift für Filmforschung 2 (Summer 2010): 113. 55 Kevin Randall, “Rise of Neurocinema: How Hollywood Studios Harness Your Brainwaves to Win Oscars” (02-25-2011) http://www.fastcompany.com/1731055/oscars-avatar-neurocinema​ -neuromarketing 56 By digitally adjusting contrast, color saturation, and depth of focus, a technique called “tilt-shifting” transforms Van Gogh painting into 3D simulations (http://www.artcyclopedia. com/hot/tilt-shift-van-gogh-1.htm). There is even a company for 3D rendering calling itself Van Gogh Imagining (http://vangoghimaging.com/) 57 Kristin Thompson has made a preliminary inventor y of early cinema references and stylistic echoes in Hugo. http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2011/12/07/ hugo-scorseses-birthday-present-to-georges-melies/

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signifies a whole spectrum of stereo-sensations for eye and ear, but also the thrills and threats of floating, falling, disorientation, and re-alignment that we know from blockbuster spectaculars and animation films. As the default value of post-pictorial spatial vision and in-depth sensation in the digital age, 3D would be re-tooling the semantics of embodied perception as stereo space becomes the unmarked normal and mono-flatness the new retro (“vinyl”). Stereoscopy would designate, as it seems to have done for Walter Benjamin, less the specificity of a technique of depth perception and instead serve as a hitherto hidden ‘symbolic form’, shifting us from the fixed or grounded observer of the single point of view—as predicated by monocular perspective, our symbolic form for the last five hundred years—to another bodily orientation regarding images quite generally.58 This may seem counterintuitive, because at first glance, 3D tends to localize our field of vision and even restrict our point of view, but this is because (in the larger scheme of this new symbolic form and its re-setting of default values) 3D cinema plays a transitional and subordinate role: one phenomenon or symptom among many. But if its deeper logic is that of the supplement, then its role in advertising such a shift (by means of a spectacle attraction) would nonetheless be crucial, in its very marginality and transitoriness, and regardless of its possibly diminishing economic returns as a novelty and special effect.

To Lie and to Act: Operational Images The second indication for a cultural shift taking place comes from an encounter with a seven-year old. I was sharing with friends some photos of us all many years ago that I had digitized and put on my laptop. One of their daughters was standing next to me, keen to be part of the scene. But instead of looking at the picture and asking who, when, or where, she took the mouse, pointing the cursor at the picture. When nothing happened, she lost interest, even though it happened to be a photo of her parents when they were young, i.e. before she was born. For her, pictures on a computer screen are not something to look at but to click at: in the expectation of some action or movement taking place, of being taken to another place or to another picture space. The idea of a digital photo as a window to a view 58 I am referring here to Erwin Panofsky’s groundbreaking study “Perspective as Symbolic Form” first published in 1927. Perspective as Symbolic Form, translated by Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

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(to contemplate or be a witness to) had for her been replaced by the notion of an image as a passage or a portal, an interface or part of a sequential process—in short, as a cue for action, or at the very least, as a symptom of a (quasi-magical) agency inhabiting an image. How would such a change of expectation affect our idea of “what is an image” and what it means to interact, i.e. to live in, with, and through images? When considering the return of 3D within this broader challenge, a different but perhaps complementary logic becomes apparent, once we are no longer focused solely on movies or even on ocular perception. The histories and genealogies of 3D films as I have reviewed them so far contain one seemingly minor but significant omission: they did not hint at the extent to which 3D imaging has been used for scientific, military, security, and medical (ultrasound) purposes in the past and continues to be in the present. This is a vast field, one that few historians and even fewer film historians have begun to chart.59 Once one factors in some of these diverse uses and persistent practices, making them part of the overall development of vision systems and spatial projection, the ‘return of 3D’ would reveal that 3D has never gone away. On the contrary, in different mutations it has been the basso continuo accompanying cinema throughout the twentieth century.60 It is therefore 3D’s return in mainstream filmmaking and popular entertainment that obliges one to shift attention to the close alliance that has always existed between the entertainment industries and other simulation industries, as well as between media of observation and recording and media of surveillance and control. Paul Virilio’s Logistics of Perception has made explicit the many links between cinema and warfare, and others, notably Tim Lenoir, have written about what Lenoir calls the

59 Among film historians, Jacques Deslandes, in his Histoire comparée du cinema, vol. 1, (Tournai: Casterman, 1966), has shown the greatest interest in scientific films, while among historians one can cite Anthony Michaelis, Research Films in Biology, Anthropology, Psychology and Medicine (New York, 1955). More recent work includes Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), and (not specifically about 3D) Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995) as well as Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (eds.), Films that Work (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011). 60 The self-declared world expert on 3D Cinema, Ray Zone does not mention non-entertainment uses in his Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3D Film, 1838-1952 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007). But a title like “War and Depth” by AMREL (the American Reliance Corporation, specializing in medical, energy, and security computing platforms) or the news item that “Boeing launches compact, energy-efficient 3D imaging camera” http://www.gizmag. com/boeing-3d-imaging-camera/14489 (11 March 2010) reveals the tip of this particular iceberg.

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‘military-entertainment complex’.61 Explicitly or implicitly, such studies argue that the technologies of imaging today are not means of assisting sight, whether of real or imagined things, but technologies of probing and penetration. As vision machines, they generate knowledge that has little to do with human perception or seeing, in the sense of “I see” meaning “I know”, and more to do with controlling territory, occupying space, monitoring a situation, and mining it for useful information or active intervention.62 Some species of technical images may turn out to be useful to humans without being meant for human eyes, so that 3D images (or rather, spatial imaging), while deceiving the human eye into perceiving depth where there is none, reveal to machines coordinates and data that humans can never expect to “see”.63 Another historian-theorist of digital media draws from all this one significant conclusion. Lev Manovich has written about the need to reclassify media screens into those that are concerned with tele-presence (monitor, video screen) and those with tele-action (radar, touch screens, infra-red, laser), a distinction also useful in clarifying what is at stake with spatial images in the context of their non-entertainment uses. Manovich encourages one to distinguish images not according to truth and fiction or real and imagined things but between simulation (virtual action) and dissimulation (virtual presence) or, as he calls it, between “to lie and to act”.64 If one future of imaging is to be part of “the combat of surveillance against

61 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1997) and Tim Lenoir, “All but war is simulation: The military–entertainment complex,” Configurations 8, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 289-335. 62 Tim Lenoir’s research group at Duke University piggybacks on the US military’s simulation games in order to train for humanitarian interventions: http://www.virtualpeace.org/ 63 By 1910, the Lumière brothers had abandoned film and photography and set up a largescale research laboratory in Lyon in order to study problems in physiology and mechanics of motion and acoustics, using X-ray machines alongside their motion picture camera as scientific instruments. Although Auguste came to consider research in medicine more important than the invention of the cinematograph, there is a logic that unites their work on visualizing physiological processes with their interest in acoustics, color photography, and stereoscopy. See Lisa Cartwright, “‘Experiments of Destruction’: Cinematic Inscriptions of Physiology,” Representations, no. 40 (Autumn 1992): 129-52, and Bruno Salazard, Christopher Desouches, and Guy Magalon, “Auguste and Louis Lumière, Inventors at the Service of the Suffering,” European Journal of Plastic Surgery 28, no. 7 (2006): 441-7. 64 Lev Manovich, “To Lie and to Act: Cinema and Telepresence,” in Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann (eds.), Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 1998), 189-99.

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camouflage”,65 then behind the ‘return of 3D’ in its entertainment and industrial, engineering, design and military application lies the more general shift of our culture towards re-coding “seeing” into a form of “action”. Avatar would be a case in point, where simulation becomes indistinguishable from action.66 Cameron’s commercial-military-scientific mission to the planet Pandora is like an inventory of what 3D software is currently being used and promoted for: “computer game environments • unmanned surveillance and combat vehicles • oil-exploration, land-surveying • weather prediction, conservation, and environmental politics.” Without examining these “applications” in detail here, it is evident that the non-entertainment uses of 3D imaging constitute a multi-faceted appropriation and mapping of any territory whatsoever: on, above, and below ground, in which physical space, deep space, and virtual space are hybridized and matched, stitched together, or played off against one other, giving “relief” and “body” to what is visible while making visible in spatial terms what the human eye is unable to perceive at all—which by a less circuitous route than one might think brings one back to the origins of cinema. Of particular interest is the name of the software, whose versatility I have just cited: “Fledermaus”, which at first made me think, rather incongruously, of the operetta by Johann Strauss II by that title. On second thought, however, the pun is an important clue, insofar as the (originally Danish) company had used the German word for “bat”, hinting once more at the fact that 3D graphics and software have less to do with sight than with any sensory apprehension of space, considering that bats orient themselves in space and plot their trajectory via high-frequency sound rather than sight.67

65 Manovich, “The Mapping of Space: Perspective, Radar, and 3-D Computer Graphics,” manovich.net/TEXT/mapping.html 66 3D images belong to this new kind of image: not to lie with (illusion) but to act with (telepresence). The abstraction which is monocular perspective projection – the ‘window on the world’, i.e. the meaning of the Latin perspectiva is “to see through” – is replaced by another abstraction, that of the ‘game’: focused on and defined around ‘action’. Both ‘interactive’ and ‘immersive’ are hybrid terms, which do not accurately describe this new definition of the image as operational, instrumental, i.e. as an array of instructions and visual cues for action. 67 Fledermaus is a 3D interactive visualization system (IVS 3dD), which “enables commercial, academic and military clients mapping the oceans to interact with massive geographical datasets of numerous data types” (“Fledermaus Suite,” ivs3d.co.uk/companyinfo/ about_ivs. html). Having been acquired in 2011 by the Dutch software company QPS (Quality Positioning Services), it has expanded into what it calls “a true 4D space and time environment” (http:// www.qps.nl/display/fledermaus/main).

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Enlarging the Cast of Actors, Interacting To what extent, then, are stereoscopic or expanded 3D technologies about vision rather than belonging to a register where seeing, sensing, probing, and acting become indeed merged, blurred, and hybridized? One filmmaker who for more than two decades has been excavating the industrial, scientific, institutional, and military uses of images simulating depth and action at a distance while tracing their transformation from images as ‘views to be seen’ to images as sources of information to be scanned, classified, and acted upon is Harun Farocki. In titles that range from Images of the World and Inscription of War (1989) to Eye/Machine (2001-2003) and from I Thought I was Seeing Convicts (2000) to Deep Play (2007), Farocki has deconstructed and analyzed as well as historically contextualized these images on the cusp of ‘seeing’ and ‘acting’, calling them operational images.68 These include the use of stereometric photography in nineteenth century architecture and land-surveying, photo-reconnaissance flights over Auschwitz by the US Air Force in 1944, surveillance footage from supermarkets and high-security prisons, time and motion studies in factories, as well as the final of the 2006 Football World Cup in Berlin as tracked by sensors and vision machines. In many of these cases, images are not something to be contemplated, to immerse oneself in, to be looked at either with admiration or disinterestedness but are instead sets of instructions for action or sets of data for processing and translating into actions.69 The brief reference to Farocki’s work allows me to summarize what I have been arguing: that three-dimensional images (or spatial perception through mechanical means) have been important and continue to be so, under different but interrelated aspects. First, the desire to give spatial volume and body to projected light seems to have preceded the flat cinema screen, modelled on the framed view of painting and simulating depth mainly through recession and scale. In which case, the emergence of 3D imaging is indeed a return of sorts, one that returns the fixed spectator facing the fixed rectangular screen to being a historically contingent actor in a transitional but necessary arrangement, in an ongoing transformational

68 “Operational Images” are discussed in Christa Bluemlinger “Harun Farocki: Critical Strategies”, in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 318-20. 69 On Harun Farocki, see also Antje Ehmann, Kodwo Eshun (eds.), Harun Farocki: Against What Against Whom (Cologne: Walther König, 2010).

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process whose overall logic may yet escape us, which is why it cannot be pressed into either a normative state or a teleological path. The second point concerns my extended reading of stereoscopic imaging, where 3D paradoxically symbolizes the variable properties, uses, and surfaces of what we still call ‘screens’, at the same time as it does away with the level horizon, the fixed point of view. It is part of a paradigm of images as floating presence, immaterial and unbounded as well as ubiquitous and omnipresent but no less a formalized convention as was linear monocular perspective when it pretended that the earth was flat and man was the only creature that mattered in the eye of God. Now the illusion of ubiquity, simultaneity, and omnipresence compensates for being a mere speck in the universe, enmeshed in networks of plotted coordinates, trackable and traceable at every point in space or time and yet suspended in an undulating, mobile, variable “inside” for which there is no longer an “outside”, however vast, connected, or proliferating such an inside—now called “being online”—promises to be. My last point concerns the actors and agents involved, among whom I have highlighted three principal players: Hollywood and the entertainment industries, the art avant-gardes and utopians of obsolescence, and the military-industrial users of visualized-virtualized space. In each case, I tried to identify their main concerns, which I cast in counterintuitive or alternative storylines: as far as Hollywood goes, D3D is not treated as a special effect but as a means towards integration and a re-setting of default values; its vigorous promotion is not a panic reaction but part of a push towards synchronizing all platforms and screens, big and small, fixed and mobile. And in contrast to widespread assumptions, it functions as a complement of our sound-spaces rather than as an enhancement of realist image spaces. With respect to the avant-gardes, these have consistently challenged the hegemony of Renaissance perspective, in modern times from William Turner to Ken Jacobs, via Cubo-Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. However, since the mid-twentieth century, sculpture and performance rather than photography and painting have been the driving force behind time-based spatial art forms. The poetics of obsolescence, in the meantime, have kept alive alternative genealogies of cinema, going back to phantasmagoria and bypassing photography and thus promising a possible future for cinema: as installation art, digital cinema, as image into space and space into image. And finally, the military-industrial users of 3D (but also the generation of gamers) are redefining what is an image: not a representation to look at but a set of instructions to act on/to act with. In this context, stereo or

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3D includes sound, sonar, and spatial mapping of data as well as the use of the moving image as a time-index: here, too, vision is only one source of generating and extracting data from images. Given the emphasis on controlling and occupying territory, 3D becomes an integral part of the surveillance paradigm if we understand this not as observing, witnessing, contemplating but as probing and penetrating, as processing and possessing. Surprisingly then, in the light of their different histories and ideologies, the ‘actors’ involved in the ‘return of 3D’ have a number of similar concerns and agendas whose common denominators would seem to be the obsolescence of film-based photography, the historical contingency of monocular spatial projection, and the recovery of stereo-space as a variable, non-ocular, spatiotemporal (dis-)orientation. Taken together, the cultural, political, and technological significance of this re-orientation may coalesce around a new ‘symbolic form’, one that has not yet received an agreed termino­logy, since it encompasses such diverse phenomena or concepts as ‘surveillance’, ‘omnipresence’, ‘process and becoming’, ‘relational aesthetics’, ‘immanence’, and ‘virtuality’. As long as we are ‘inside’ its various manifestation, it is difficult to think of it as a coherent field, yet in order to understand the degree of our collusion and participation, we have to keep in mind—and perhaps to keep in check—all of the actors involved. Used as we are to the artistic avant-garde as resistant to commercial applications, we tend to regard scientific inquiry as pure, technology as instrumental, and the military-industrial complex as immoral. What the ‘return of 3D’ shows is how difficult it is to maintain such neat distinctions: one needs to think creatively as well as critically about their entanglement, which has been oppositional, interdependent, and cooperative-complicit all at the same time. Perhaps the reason why Hugo—snatched by the stationmaster from the tracks of the digitally onrushing train while clutching his father’s robot—yields such a memorable 3D image is because its several dimensions hint at just such an improbable but necessary constellation of collaborative mutuality among otherwise antagonistic forces or agencies.

10. Cinema, Motion, Energy, and Entropy 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. To give an example of contingency: the fact that we think of cinema as requiring projection has become a contingent fact ever since the arrival of

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television and has become even more evident with the computer monitor, giant LED screens in open air spaces, and the tiny screens on mobile devices: in each case, we can still think of the experience as ‘watching movies’ without contradicting ourselves. We can also see more clearly that several constituent factors we now consider integral to the media history of cinema have been left out or sidelined by highlighting merely projection, photography, and persistence of vision: think of the phonograph, the telegraph, telephony and wireless transmission, the photoelectric selenium cell and the cathode ray tube, but also Babbage’s difference engine or Hollerith cards that take us from the mechanical looms and IBM calculating machines to the computer and digital images, just as the development of radar has given us monitors and touch screens—both of which now belong to the genealogy of the moving image, alongside the various projection devices and traditional cinema screens. Although I have been involved in this kind of archaeological revisionism for several decades, looking at cinema from the perspective of ‘energy’ is a new departure for me, and thus what follows is a preliminary attempt to map an outline of such an approach. Given that watching movies is considered one of the less energy-consuming activities one can engage in, it is not at all evident how it connects with energy at all. Yet what I try to sketch is a new archaeology of what was once referred to as “living pictures” as opposed to moving pictures, thus hopefully also making a contribution to the ongoing discussion of what we mean precisely by “living” and “life” today. However, a disclaimer is in order: - I will not be talking about films that ‘represent’ energy and sites of work. However, several of Harun Farocki’s films and installations are devoted to precisely this topic.1 - I am not concerned with ‘representations of’, that is, with how a preexisting physical reality is being processed, represented, or misrepresented by and through the medium of film. One of the reasons why this domain of cultural studies is not on the agenda is because the turn to energy as a topic is in some ways directly related to the origins of the paradigm of representation itself, which, if we follow Michel Foucault, began in the seventeenth century and, if we follow Bernhard Siegert in his monumental “Passage of 1 Farocki contributed to this debate with films like Workers Leaving the Factory, his Eye/ Machine series, and his installation on brickmaking (By Comparison). The project Labor in A Single Shot assembled images of labor and sites of work from different countries and involving 16 urban sites of production.

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the Digital”, is marked by the ascendancy of bookkeeping, bureaucracy, and mathematics during the first Age of Globalization, i.e., the time of the great sea empires of Spain, Portugal, Britain, and the Netherlands.2 To put it more positively: I am concerned with the inherent energy of moving images (and how they convert or transmit this energy) rather than with moving images as media of energy (and how they represent this energy). A more serious lacuna—because it touches on aspects that belong to my topic—is the absence of the following questions: first, how contemporary mainstream cinema, whose images mostly have the movements of the human body as their norm, meets the challenge of visibility and visualization when more and more phenomena that govern our lives are not visible to the human eye because they are either too big or too small, too fast or too slow, or deal in magnitudes and quantities we cannot comprehend other than in visual metaphors? This issue is, of course, intimately linked to what I have just called the ‘crisis in representation’, and I have tried to address some of these issues in my various essays on what I have called “the mind-game film”.3 The other issue only touched on briefly is how to think the transition from mechanical energy and electricity to quantum physics and the cybernetic age, that is: how to think about the relation of energy to information? In what universe are they versions of each other? Perhaps we can only speak about energy in connection with moving images because energy as a topic has only arisen, because we now view it from the side of information and therefore approach its mechanical history from a perspective of obsolescence and nostalgia. Media archaeology as I understand it is intended to bridge this gap by showing how each relates to the other self-referentially and retroactively. 4

Cinema and Energy: A Multiple Agenda Given these caveats and disclaimers, my working definition of energy is very simple: “Energy is the capacity of a physical system to perform work. Energy exists in several forms such as thermal, kinetic or mechanical energy, light, 2 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970); Bernhard Siegert, Passage des Digitalen (Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose, 2003). 3 Thomas Elsaesser, “The Mind-Game Film” in W. Buckland (ed.), Puzzle Films – Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 13-41. 4 Retroaction, self-reference, and their connection to obsolescence are the subject of the final chapter.

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potential energy, electrical, etc.”5 Evidently, when talking about cinema, we are only partly concerned with physical systems, although one could argue that the photographic process is based on a physical system where energy is put to work: the photographic image is an energy system in the sense that the image produced is the result of an optico-chemical reaction, where light interacts with a silver emulsion to perform ‘work’: in this case, to produce degrees of combustion in sensitive particles that register on a transparent surface. But, as indicated, I do not want to rely solely on photography. Instead, I would like to concentrate more on other kinds of performativity of cinema, that is, on types of kinetic and thermodynamic energy, their constraints, their discharges, their transfers. In what ways can we consider, for instance, the ‘system cinema’ to be about the conservation of energy, the exchange of energy, its conversion, waste, and entropy, and with what other systems does cinema interact?6 Before I go into these questions in more detail, let me offer a few remarks about cinema as a nineteenth-century invention, as part of the epoch when people were pre-occupied, indeed obsessed, with issues of energy. Cinema arose surprisingly late in the nineteenth century but at a time when energy capture, conversion, and convection were instrumental in bringing about the industrial revolution. Cinema, as it were, is located between two types of devices that successfully harnessed thermal energy and turned it into motion: the steam engine and the internal combustion engine. Cinema also emerged in close temporal proximity to the electrical motor and urban electrification. With the first type of machine, cinema shares the problem of how to contain and harness—and thus turn into ‘work’—not the thermal energies of combustion nor the kinetic energy of motion but affect energy: the new bodily sensations, the optical data, and the acoustic stimuli that the cinematograph was able to capture. With the second source of energy, which exploits the conversion of magnetic fields into electricity and electric energy into mechanical energy, cinema shared the fact that mechanically generated movement could be converted into nervous or physiological energy, i.e. perceptions in the brain and sensations in the body of the spectators. 5 This is the definition given at, among others, http://physics.about.com/od/glossary/g/energy. htm 6 “Reibungsverlust” is a term used by Alexander Kluge when speaking about cinema. See Klaus Eder and Alexander Kluge (eds.), Ulmer Dramaturgien. Reibungsverluste (München: Hanser, 1980).

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The fact that, within less than ten years of its existence, cinema became a predominantly storytelling medium might in this light be given a different kind of explanation: cinema’s turn to sequential narrative can be seen as a way of harnessing the sensory stimuli and optical data into ‘linear’ forms of progression, articulation, and propulsion: the optical situations on the screen—together with sensory, affective, and motoric input by the spectator—are engaged in semantic ‘work’. Narrative would be the name for this work, i.e., for the energy expended in organizing these situations and data streams into units of information that are discrete but continuous, sequentially storable but recallable, causally connected but associative. In the second half of this chapter, I shall return to the cognitive and affective labor of which cinema is a crucial dispositif. Cinema—if one accepts serial photography as a precursor—emerged in part from the nineteenth-century preoccupation with how to represent motion, or rather, it was part of two complexes: how to represent (i.e., break down, analyze, and reconstitute) movement and motion, and also how to convert energy into motion via different forms of transmission and transduction, always in a tension between linearity and circularity. The linear strip of film, transported by different kinds of mechanisms and picked up by a circular reel, suggests all manner of analogies with other nineteenth-century transport and motion devices, for instance, the railway—an often invoked parallel with which it shares the framed view but also the simultaneous experience of stasis and motion, real in one case, imaginary in the other, but exploited in countless film scenarios and movie attractions such as Hale’s Tours and phantom rides. Similarly, if we take a look at the cinematic apparatus (notably the film projector), we see a typical piece of nineteenth-century technology. In its very dispositif—made up of mechanisms that are reverse-engineered or adapted from the magic lantern, the sewing machine, and even the machine gun—the film projector (as indeed the cinematograph) is a bricolage assemblage of very different but nonetheless distinct and related technologies. Apart from focusing light, they are concerned with transmission and transport, with conversion and interaction: grips and sprockets, eccentric discs like the Maltese cross, springs, and pick-up mechanisms. In its outer appearance and inner workings, the film projector has retained an identical shape and construction for more than 100 years, long after the technologies to which it owed its existence had been modified or altogether replaced. Cinema is thus not a purpose-built, fully designed, and engineered object but a hybrid that has always relied on the interaction between several heterogeneous systems. Conceiving these interactions as energy exchanges

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may be unusual and even counterintuitive, but as we shall see, they fit into an ‘archaeology of movement’ as I am proposing. For instance, the basic definition of energy just given also stipulates that any form of energy can be transformed into another form. When energy is in a form other than thermal energy, it may be transformed with good or even perfect efficiency to any other type of energy (the first law of thermodynamics). Thermal energy, on the other hand, is also subject to the second law of thermodynamics, which implies that there are often limits to the efficiency of the conversion to other forms of energy, usually called ‘entropy’. Film needs energy to be made, which is transferred to the product. If we accept that, in order to come into being as an event and an experience, cinema requires the active cooperation of an audience, and if the spectators’ total perceptual responses can be considered forms of energy transfer, then we can venture a further hypothesis, namely that the first law of thermodynamics applies to cinema. Energy, being the common denominator of any mass—prior, that is, to any distinction between the multiple manifestations of mass (electromagnetic, material, organic, inorganic, technical, and so on)—necessarily underpins the interaction of all systems. The cinema system would in this perspective not only be made up of the many different mechanical forms of mass (the apparatus) but also combine and pool physical and psychological energy, which interact with each other. The focus on cinema as networked energy where an exchange between physical, technological, physiological, and neural forms of energy takes place would thereby constitute something like a contemporary equivalent of ‘nature’; it might even prepare a new definition of ‘life’ in the digital environment.

Movement: Analytic and Synthetic A quick look at some of the origins of moving images reminds us that the second half of the nineteenth century saw the invention of all manner of devices, instruments, and types of measurement designed to capture, record, and adequately ‘represent’ not only movement and motion but also other transitory sense data and sensory information. The two outstanding names in this endeavor were Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. Their use of the photographic and cinematic apparatus was intended to record the different phases of movement. Almost as a byproduct and afterthought, however, chronophotography also produced a seemingly selfgenerated movement: with the result that the cinematic apparatus is both an analytical (breaking down) and synthetic (reconstituting) instrument,

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both active and passive, both projective and receptive. This dual nature is crucial for the history of cinema: it can be (and has been) read as either complementary or contrary. Usually, Muybridge and Marey are named together, since they are credited with developing chronophotography into workable scientif ic instruments and useful tools for the measurement of moving phenomena. But if we look at their respective projects from an ideological point of view, it would seem that rather than belonging together, each falls on a different side of a divide that later opens up between America and Europe, between optimizing and maximizing the uses that can be made of studying motion. Marey’s experiments would be in the ‘European’ tradition insofar as he set out to record, analyze, and classify by means of chronophotography the movement and exertion of energy in human bodies, animals, insects, and birds. By contrast, Muybridge belongs to the American tradition because, after the worldwide success of his book Animal Locomotion, he became a major proponent of using chronophotography for maximizing the transmission and transformation of specifically bodily energy, notably at the industrial workplace, synchronizing human and machine energy and thus becoming a pioneer of the time-and-motion studies that subsequently came to be identified with Taylorism.7 What is striking about Marey is that his efforts were concentrated on ways of tracking, tracing, and recording movement of all kind and emanating from all living phenomena: he was as interested in the possibility of recording the shapes of smoke as he was in the movement of humans; as interested in the vibrations of bees’ wings as he was in recording blood pressure, heartbeat, pulse, breath, or any other vitalist manifestations.8 His was an ideology of letting nature self-write herself by tracing its processes and emanations as closely as possible with technologies (e.g., the camera) that could also generate a symbolic code (a graph, a diagram, numbers, relations). While not forgetting what he owed to Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion, it is important to stress that Marey’s use of different recording instruments such as the cinematograph, the oscillograph, x-rays, and other evolving technologies were aimed at phenomena that previously could not be 7 On Muybridge, see Gordon Hendricks. Eadweard Muybridge, Father of the Motion Picture (NY: Dover, 1975) and David Levy, “The Anti-cinema of Eadweard Muybridge”, http://earlyamerican-cinema.com/articles/muybridge.html 8 On Marey, see Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

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recorded, stored, or imaged. In other words, he pursued and explored new forms of visualizing natural, sentient phenomena. In this respect, one might say that he continued the promise of photography, that of being ‘the pencil of nature’ (in W.H. Fox Talbot’s poetic phrase), working without the intervention of human agency.9 Thanks to the moving image in particular, apparently contingent phenomena could now be visualized, and hopefully this visualization would reveal hitherto undiscovered patterns, regularities, and ‘laws’. For Marey, machine vision captured traces of movement and the inscription of time rather than an image and a representation as we normally understand it. Indeed, his work could be called the first natural history of agency of matter and the body at the level of ‘embodied mind’ and ‘distributive action’ rather than individual volition and human consciousness.

Still/Moving Regarding the analytic-deconstructive versus the synthetic-reconstitutive treatment of movement and motion, the first years of cinema reflected the complex picture of complementariness and contrariness: on the one hand, there is the conservation/containment of motion in single images, arrested to the point of stillness, while their re-activation through mechanical movement produces also a sudden, gradual, or violent release of energy. On the other hand, montage and special effects rely on the interplay of the analytical and the synthetic. An example of the former would be the Lumière Brothers’ first presentations of their cinematograph, which initially revolved around the energy activated by sudden motion. Although cinema’s most essential feature and primary public attraction was that the images moved, the Lumières surprised their audiences by seemingly ‘animating’ photographic slides. In their shows, a ‘living picture’, a moment in time, fixed and preserved, suddenly came to life, re-animated by mechanical action as if reviving the dead.10

9 Marey seemed little concerned with the paradox that has preoccupied film theory ever since: how can such a non-human gaze as that of a camera convey so much affect, emotion, and embodied vision? 10 Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator,” Art & Text 34 (1989): 31-44.

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As an interplay of analysis and synthesis of movement, cinema soon became the site par excellence of kinetic energy: thermic-kinetic energy in its most centrifugal, explosive forms (energy as unleashed by nature in its most unbound forms: earthquakes, storms, waterfalls, as well as the mise-en-scene of the destruction of the planet now transferred to, stored, and released by moving images); kinetic energy in its technical forms (what would Hollywood movies be without explosions, destructive machinery of all kind, car chases, and smash-ups?); and kinetic energy in human forms (boxing fights were some of the first movies that convinced Thomas A. Edison that his kinetoscope had a commercial future). In short: action films, i.e., the staging and display of kinetic energy of all kinds, has been since the beginning and still is what most people consider and expect from cinema. Especially in Britain, cinema around 1900 (James Williamson, Cecil Hepworth) was a festival of kinetic energy effects, seemingly preoccupied with rendering visible these new kinds of motion and manifestations of energy, along with their often violent impact on the human body. Films with titles such as How it feels to be run over, Explosion of a Motor Car, and Mary Jane’s Mishap are typical examples and tell their own story about the public’s fears and anxieties sparked by these new forms of energy as well as the thrills derived from them.11

Five Types of Energy More generally, one can speak of five types of energy manifesting itself in cinema: agitation, animation, agency of things, assemblages of automatisms, and attention as work. a. agitation (how movement, motion, and motivated sequence came into the image); b. animation (how we attribute to motion and sequence the quality of outer and inner life, project onto lines in movement an external body and an inner soul), i.e., energy exchange of the systems cinemaphysiology (perhaps by invoking Walter Benjamin); c. agency of things (and following on from this, how we distribute agency and intentionality in moving pictures while also making room for

11 On early cinema, see Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) and Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema – Space Frame Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990).

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unconscious motivation), i.e., energy exchange of the cinema system and the psyche system (e.g. Freudian or psychoanalytic film theory); d. automation (i.e., on the one hand, the energy exchange between the cinema system and the “work/factory” system–think of Muybridge and the use of the cine-camera for time and motion studies–but also in a more philosophical sense if we think of the importance of cinema’s automatism for the film theories of André Bazin and Stanley Cavell). The fifth follows on from both Benjamin and Cavell and has special relevance for our understanding of cinema today: e. attention as work (monitoring and observation, listening and empathy, i.e. the kind of “attention economy” for which cinema—and television soap opera—trains us. This would be attention considered as reaction to a stimulus or an interpellation, but also attention as a suspended state of work, paraphrasing it as “waiting as working / working as waiting”. It may well be one of the strongest legacies of cinema, when we think about the shift from a cinematic episteme of voyeurism/disavowal to the contemporary episteme of surveillance and control. Agitation: natural motion, as the manifestation of invisible forces (of nature). Audiences had seen mechanical motion prior to the invention of the cinematograph in their magic lantern shows (one of the most popular slides was The Swallower of Rats), so that they were not that surprised by seeing motion in human beings. However, accurately capturing the waves lapping around a jetty seemed unfathomable and endlessly fascinating. For instance, in Louis Lumière’s Boat Leaving Harbor (1895) there is no action, no narrative, no particular telos or motive, but you see the effects and the energy of waves in motion: the tides. The 54-second film—a favorite among audiences for years to come—is reminiscent of the Roman poet-philosopher Lucretius, who in De Rerum Natura talks about nature not as solid but in constant motion, not uniform but ‘agitated’.12 Interestingly enough, he illustrates this agitation by two examples, both of which are relevant for cinema. One is the example of the agitated sea seen from the shore, with a hapless boat tossing and turning in the storm, accompanied by the guilty pleasure derived from watching it all from a safe distance. The popularity and attraction of Boat Leaving Harbor might be incomprehensible to us today if we do not contextualize it within the nineteenth-century motion 12 On Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, see also Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011).

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and energy discourse briefly outlined above or see it as an illustration of De Rerum Natura. The second example of Lucretius’ agitation are the motes or dust specs in a sunbeam when suddenly visible in an otherwise darkened room: Just look when sunbeams shine in a darkened room, you will see many tiny objects twisting and turning and moving here and there where the sunlight shows. It is as though there were an unending conflict With squadrons coming and going in ceaseless battle, Now forming groups, now scattering, of nothing lasting.

We can now recognize Lucretius as describing the effects of a camera obscura before the light shapes itself into an image as representation. Following his lead, what if we were to see the cinematic image not as solid picture, analogous to paint on canvas, but as precisely such a constantly agitated surface whose elements—specs of dust, which is what the silver grain particles also amount to—are in suspended animation or suspended agitation? From this photographic suspension, subsequent technologies of visible/invisible motion, such as the scanning light beam of the cathode ray tube of television and the pixels of the digital image, are once more ‘liberating’ the dust specs and particles, returning to them the kind of motion—Lucretius’ ceaseless battle—that keeps them in an aggregate state of permanent potentiality. Think of the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi’s Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams, or more recently, Andrew McCall’s now immensely popular installation Line Describing a Cone (1972) as inspired by Lucretius’ observations. The other point of interest is that Lucretius recognized agitation as movement that moves and at the same time is moved, with the visible forces only part of the energy that is in play. The philosopher might have been describing Brownian motion and thus been one of the first to reflect on what we now call ‘stochastic’ motion, whose mathematics are as crucial for modern physics as they are for electronic movement, such as the instant relay of packets of information on the Internet. Animation: here we can think of Georges Méliès’ substitution tricks and metamorphoses (The Magician, 1898) or Emile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908). Dividing an action into discrete phases and depicting them successively was a technique known to the Egyptians as well as to Greek vase painters and Leonardo da Vinci. Perhaps we can only speak of animation when there is a device to join these phases into a continuous movement

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(with a vase, the ‘device’ would have been human hands turning the vessel so that the eye could perceive movement). However, the effect of joining is such that, owing to the fundamental discontinuity of cinema (i.e., that a film strip is made up of individual frames), any succession or sequence not only affords the representation of continuous motion but also allows the objects or persons represented to change shape and form in a seemingly fluid and apparently self-generated process. Energy, when manifest as motion, is constantly being transformed or mutates into another aggregate state. But animation applies to cinema also in the sense that its ability to represent movement endows the world it depicts with intentionality and volition: animation creates situations and contexts where cinema ‘animates’ things and has the capacity of spirit and breath, that is, of giving ‘life’. It would be the point where ‘animation’ goes beyond representation and becomes a manifestation of ‘agency’. The names initially proposed for the motion picture device (e.g. cinematographe, theatrograph, animatograph, kinetoscope, bioscope) reflect its dual or triple nature: always between life (Greek: bios, zoon), vision (scopein) and writing (graphein): vision-writing-life. Motion and animation imply or presuppose energy and agency—whether attributed to humans, to vegetal and mineral life, whether to spiritual sources, natural resources, or mechanical processes. Animation also establishes a relationship between image and writing, materiality and sign, as well as between matter, energy, and information. If these intuitions of the pioneers were correct, then cinema –in its widest sense, i.e. including its digital forms – ought to be seen not as an image system only but as a ‘life system’, once we accept the idea that cells, organisms, groups, corporations, nations, networks, and other assemblageensembles all process matter, energy, and information – an idea proposed, for instance, in James G. Miller’s Living Systems Theory13 and not unfamiliar to Niklas Luhmann or Humberto Maturana.14 However, the reverse is also true and explains one of the darker sides of this “invention of the devil”, as it was once also called. If cinema animates things to make them appear endowed with ‘life’, by the same token, human beings in cinema are closer to automatons: animated from the outside, manipulated by invisible hands. Humans become ghosts or “ventriloquists of themselves”, as Jacques Derrida 13 James G. Miller, Living systems (New York: Mc Graw-Hill, 1978). 14 Niklas Luhmann, Essays on Self-Reference (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). See also F. Varela, H. Maturana, and R. Uribe, “Autopoiesis: The organization of living systems, its characterization and a model,” Biosystems 5 (1974): 187-196.

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once described himself, when interviewed, in a film tellingly called Ghost Dance.15 The Agency of Things: From its very beginnings, cinema wanted to demonstrate that motion is something that not only human beings are capable of but things, too, maybe even especially things.16 The slapstick films of Buster Keaton, Max Linder, or Charles Chaplin, while emphasizing the mechanical side of the human body just mentioned, also play on the recalcitrance of things and the wilfulness of matter. Keaton’s It’s Late (from Seven Chances, 1925) is an example of the different aggregate states of matter in motion, as nature – trees, rocks, hills, ravines – and mankind – machines, fences, doors – both mimic and impede the human motor that is the Keaton character, in his headlong rush to meet a deadline: his own wedding. Phrased more generally, one of the great philosophical challenges of cinema for film theorists from André Bazin to Jean Luc Nancy is that it does not (have to) distinguish between the motion of humans and the motion of things. Cinema is indifferent to crucial ontological distinctions we normally make between animate and inanimate, the living and the dead, the visible and the invisible: as a consequence, cinema presupposes a notion of energy that combines the mechanical with the psychological, while also fusing motion with motivation. Such a ‘cinematic’ perspective might be said to inform, consciously or not, more general theories such as Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory where such non-human entities as things, institutions, sites, and places can have agency, especially in the performative mode. Likewise, if we follow Gilles Deleuze, cinema endows thoughts with motion.17 Uncanny agency, on the other hand, is at the core of horror films, where the dead and the undead, zombies, vampires, ghosts, and apparitions all have agency, irrespective of their degree of materiality or mortality, because they embody what Freud called the ‘death-drive’: the very principle of life, when considered in terms of impersonal, biological energy, i.e., untrammelled by human volition, desire, or self-preservation.

15 Ghost Dance (Ken McMullan, 1983), with Pascale Ogier and Jacques Derrida. 16 On the agency of things, see Bruno Latour, Aramis, or Love of Technology. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). 17 On the concept of energy in Gilles Deleuze, see Manuel DeLanda, “Deleuze and the Gensis of Form” http://artnode.se/artorbit/issue1/f_deleuze/f_deleuze_delanda.html

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Assemblages (of Man-Machine-Metropolis) Although I began by excluding the representation of energy or work from my considerations, a reminder may still be relevant of how cinema, in its constructivist phase during the 1920s, was fascinated by the interaction between different social agents – human and non-human, abstract and material. The very principle of montage can be understood as an energytransfer process in that sets of relations, layers, and networks are linked by virtue of their discontinuity, each element energizing the other through rupture and collision. While a more complex interplay of material and semiotic relations can be found in the films of Eisenstein and Vertov, it is Fritz Lang (Metropolis, 1927) and Walter Ruttmann (Berlin: Symphony of a Big City, 1927) who foreground the machinic, serial, and repetitive aspects of their metropolitan ensembles, where energy relays appear to make no distinction between ‘man’ and ‘machine’. Examples of cinematic montage and motion and machine interaction and people can be found in: – Metropolis’ opening scenes: the pistons, the clock, the regimentation, the human assembly line, but then also the compensation and collusion: bodybuilding (care of the self) and dance/mating, until confronted with the social contrasts; – Berlin: Symphony of a Big City: we see water (natural energy, agitation, tides), thrusting motion (train and pistons, wheels and tracks), machine parts interacting (the workers’ mighty hand is shown in close up, illustrating the trade union slogan: “alle Räder stehen still, wenn dein starker Arm es will”), automation (when a bottling plant for milk comes into view), the city itself as a machine, traversed and mobilized by different kinds of energy: a street brawl, erotic energy (man and woman eying each other across shop window), traffic flows and switching energy, bureaucratic machineries, administration, ledgers, communication: typewriters and telephones, etc.: Ruttmann’s City Symphony is most consistently readable not as free association and not even as musical form but as a machinic ensemble of energy transfer and energy conversion at different levels and in different degrees of density and intensity.

Energy Exchange: Physical, Physiological, Psychological? One of the key questions our topic raises with regards to cinema is how one can connect these representations of physical energy depicted on the

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screen with the physiological energies set free by the screen. In other words, we need to distinguish between physical energy (transmitted to images, resulting in movement) and physiological energy (the human body/labor), as well as the transfer from physiology (body) to psychology (psyche). Among the names of those who have engaged with these modes of energy transfer and exchange are Hermann Helmholtz, Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, and Sigmund Freud. As a preliminary deduction of what has been said so far, one might be tempted to posit for cinema something like the first law of thermodynamics: energy can be neither created nor destroyed. It can only change forms. But at the same time, if we think about one of the classic distinctions of cinema between ‘documentary’ and ‘fiction’, there is a case to be made to reformulate this divide, by saying that cinema, from a media-archaeological perspective, can be situated between energy as matter in motion and energy as vital force. The first form of energy would refer us to the physical side of the world, where cinema is able to organize matter as mass, potentially capable of releasing energy into motion. The second case, energy as a vital force, highlights the degree to which anything cinema presents seems animated by a force coming from within and without, pervading every phenomenon—be it human, animal, mineral, vegetable, or mechanical—with the breath of life, the vital spark that ignites the spirit and the imagination but can also transmit itself to the body and the senses. The concept of energy that seems relevant in a consideration of cinema would have to take account of very different kinds of energy, all of which stand in a relation of exchange or transfer with each other. How ‘integrated’ are the circuits between physical modes of energy and physiological sources, between physiology and the psyche? Sigmund Freud, although no particular friend of cinema, did have, besides an archaeological model of layers and sediments, several energy models for the psyche: hydraulic (repression) but also electro-magnetic (cathexis, charge, condensation, discharge). While in film theory, his writings have been immensely influential for its narratological uses (e.g. the Oedipus complex) and for his emphasis on vision, when coupled with disavowal as a way of explaining sexual difference (castration anxiety, fetishism, voyeurism, the uncanny), there has yet to be a close examination of his energetic vocabulary, in the light of the extended agenda of finding models that allow for an energy transfer from body to mind, across the theoretical construction he called the psyche.18 18 On Freud’s energy model of the psyche in relation to media, see Thomas Elsaesser, “Freud as Media Theorist: Mystic. Writing-Pads and the Matter of Memory,” Screen 50 (Spring 2009): 100-113.

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Towards a Holistic Theory of Energy: Humans and Things If one is looking for a more philosophical elaboration of a notion of energy that encompasses the physical as well as the physiological, matter as well as the vital spirit, then next to Freud a closer look at Henri Bergson might be in order, but similar ideas can also be found in later writings of Alfred North Whitehead. Already in The Concept of Nature (1920), Whitehead had taken issue with the idea that nature can be understood as the sum of objects and their relations (conceived in terms of force and power). It is, however, in Process and Reality (1929), and Nature and Life (1934) that he outlines the notion of nature and matter as a set of ‘events’ that are in constant Heraclitean flux. In Process and Reality Whitehead specifies what he understands by ‘event’ in terms of ‘quantum expressions of energy’, while a few years later, in Nature and Life, he proposes that ‘the deficiencies in our concept of physical nature should be supplied by its fusion with life’ (1934: 58) – in other words, Whitehead wants the physical concept of energy supplemented by the physiological concept of life.19 Deeply influenced by the reformulations of the laws of physics by Einstein, Planck and Heisenberg, Whitehead even suggests that the physical transformation of energy into quanta is related to ‘its analogues in recent neurology’, without however specifying on what basis these analogies might be valid or validated. Whitehead’s line of thinking might take us to the philosophy of one of the most influential thinkers on cinema in recent decades, Gilles Deleuze who redefines it, precisely, around certain complex and philosophically sophisticated, if also highly contested, notions of energy, information, and life. In his two cinema books, The Movement Image and The Time Image, Deleuze proposes nothing less than to abandon the idea of cinema as a vision machine and to see it primarily as an aggregate of all possible modes of matter and forms of energy.20 It is not my intention here to add to the already very voluminous literature on Deleuze and his concept of cinema as a type of thought and a form of life, except to acknowledge that the presuppositions I am exploring are similar to those that Manuel DeLanda has traced,21 even if I come to them via a different route. 19 In this section and the following, I am indebted to Howard Caygill, “Life and Energy”, Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 6 (2007): 19-27. 20 Gilles Deleuze, Das Bewegungs-Bild: Kino 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996) and Das Zeit-Bild: Kino 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996). 21 See note 17.

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Cinema and Entropy: The Human Motor and Fatigue Initially inspired by Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge in my re-examination of early cinema,22 I am now taking my cue from another philosopher, i.e. Howard Caygill, when asking whether by retaining a strict division between a physical definition of energy and a physiological one, first insisted upon by Helm­holtz and generally maintained by all physicists, we might not be able to open up another, quite different line of inquiry, one that would highlight the much more ambiguous, perhaps even duplicitous, role that cinema has played in the twentieth century. This we need to confront and accommodate if, as indicated at the outset, one tries to rethink the fundamentals of cinema for the twenty-first century, but also if one wants to confront cinema’s critics, of which there have been many, both on moral as well as philosophical and political grounds. Such a line of thinking starts by first making a distinction between energy as the capacity of a physical system to perform work, i.e., work in a thermodynamic sense and work as the labor power that human beings are able to perform within different systems of exchange. In a second move, one then has to make connections between the two kinds of energy. It was Helmholtz, discoverer of the law of the conservation of energy, who promoted conservation of energy as the universal principle that applies equally to nature, machines, and humans. Helmholtz “portrayed the movements of the planets, the forces of nature, the productive force of machines, and of course, human labor power as examples of the principle of conservation of energy.”23 All work was understood as the expenditure of energy, with a crucial consequence of redefining human labor as labor power, the expenditure of the energy of a body. Thus a worker was redefined as a ‘human motor’, and it was life itself that came to be redefined as the capacity to perform work. Helmholtz bridged the gap between the physical and the physi­ological by more or less subsuming the physiological under the physical, whereas Whitehead, as indicated, was to do the opposite: infuse into the physical some of the associations that go with élan vital, with ‘process’ and ‘life’, as forces that cannot be reduced to the energy they exchange with other systems in the form of ‘work’. During the Industrial Revolution, the question of how to harness, contain, transform, and transmit the natural sources of energy into energy that is 22 Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972). 23 Anson Rabinbach in The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 3.

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useful to human beings and can be turned into work—becoming the forces of production, as is the case under capitalism, which treats humans as resources—exercised the best of the scientists and engineers. But it also preoccupied many a philosophical mind, not least that of Karl Marx. As Anson Rabinbach has argued very persuasively, by the mid and late nineteenth century, the “possibilities and limits of conserving, deploying, and expanding physical energy into productive power had become the obsession of several generations of thinkers.” Studying a wide variety of literary sources and technical manuals, Rabinbach noted that a metaphor that rapidly gained prominence was that of the working body, both individually and collectively, as a ‘motor’: capable of transforming the diverse sources of energy to be found in nature—from food and carbon-based fuel to sunlight, wind, and water—into the productive work that make up the lifeblood of industrial society. The name for this version of pragmatic utilitarianism underpinning industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is, of course, Taylorism. Interestingly enough, Rabinbach in The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity takes up the distinction I already made with respect to Muybridge and Marey, between American profit-maximizing efficiency thinking and European forms of social engineering, when it comes to turning human energy into work, thereby also highlighting aspects about the way we have been thinking about cinema along a Europe-Hollywood divide. To quote Lev Manovich, who paraphrases Rabinbach: Taylorism [in the USA] aimed for maximum productivity, and had no concern for the exhaustion and deterioration of the human motor. In contrast, European scientists aimed for optimum productivity, and therefore were concerned not only with the rationalization of the workplace, but also with the workers’ health, nutrition, safety, and the optimal length of a workday. In short, Taylorism had no reservations about replacing one exhausted human motor with another—the philosophy which in the U.S. seems to go hand in hand with the emerging ethics of the consumer society and with immigration policies which assured the constant supply of a cheap labor force. Europeans, on the other hand, were committed to caring for and servicing the human motor. The two paradigms converged after World War I, when European industrialists partly adopted the more brutal, but ultimately more effective Taylorist methods, while U.S. management experts became more sensitive to workers’ physiology and psychology.24 24 Lev Manovich, “The Labor of Perception”, 5 http://manovich.net/TEXT/labor.html.

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This passage allows me to extrapolate a further hypothesis about cinema’s critical and in many ways paradoxical relation to movement and energy in general, and to chrono­photography (especially its uses in time-and-motion studies) in particular. Cinema, from this perspective, must be seen as the direct result of three major socio-historical factors. First, cinema is unthinkable without urbanization, i.e. the large-scale migration of the workforce from the country into the cities. Second, cinema is unthinkable without electricity and electrification. And third, cinema is unthinkable without the new work-disciplinary regimes in the factory and in offices, which, besides piece work on the assembly line, created leisure time as a distinct category and then required this leisure time to be filled with mass forms of labor power regeneration, commonly called ‘entertainment’ but actually a very complex set of practices and processes that mimic (and reproduce) aspects of working life, while also compensating for (the stress of) working life. Extending Foucault’s thinking about social institutions, ‘going to the cinema’ would be a socially sanctioned activity precisely to the degree that it functions as a disciplinary dispositif. It ‘disciplines through pleasure’, that is, it invests with libido or laughter the hardships and humiliations of being a time slave and a workhorse. Put differently, one way of understanding the social uses of cinema is to grasp it as a discourse engaged in training the body and the senses in such a way that we experience as entertaining what our society requires from us as a necessity, in order for its particular form of energy transformation—in this case, capitalist production methods—to function. One of the first thinkers to appreciate cinema within this complex of the body in motion, of capitalism as a mode of energy conversion, and the modern city as the site of ‘disciplinary distraction’ was, of course, Walter Benjamin. “In a film”, he wrote, “perception in the form of shocks was established as a formal principle. That which determines the rhythm of production on a conveyer belt is the basis of the rhythm of reception in the film.”25 While it is not clear which film(s) Benjamin has in mind (other than Chaplin’s), he detects a mimetic doubling of the work-discipline in the emerging forms of mass entertainment. He is elaborating a delicately articulated theory of how the body’s regimentation at the factory when reproduced on the screen, in the form of slapstick comedy, is both terrifying and deeply gratifying. By extension, Benjamin’s model can also apply to a city symphony such as Ruttmann’s, which seems to empower the working 25 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 175.

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class (the close up of the worker’s hand on the machine), while reinforcing its exploitation. Yet following Rabinbach and Caygill, we can perhaps clarify further the roots of this duality, i.e., that the intensified self-experience of the working classes also increases their self-exploitation by pointing once more to the potentially contradictory implications of the second law of thermodynamics: the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermo­dynamic equilibrium, which is the state of maximum entropy. Cinema, considered as a psychosocial system and tied into industrial society as its necessary environment, would invariably tend towards disorder, or rather: it would constitute an unstable equilibrium. It would be both disruptive and supportive of the environment within which it functions, posing a challenge to ideological critiques because too much (psychic, affective, kinetic) energy in the film experience remains unaccounted for. Even if one considers cinema as a self-regulating, regenerative relation of work to leisure, which the compensatory model posits, it has to draw its energy from somewhere outside. While in the context of social systems, we may prefer to think of disorder in terms of chaos theory and complexity rather than thermo­dynamics, once cinema is considered as an energy exchange system—physiologically, economically, and aesthetically—the language of entropy and maximum disorder may not be out of place. Much of the above is speculative and may be valid only metaphorically. Yet ‘entropic’ could also be another name for a type of cinema encountered in the digital age, when classical—linear—narratives compete with hybrid, open-ended, or stochastic narratives. Variously referred to as video game-enabled and multiple-choice narratives, as modular narratives and network narratives, as forking path stories or fractal narratives, as database or hyperlink narratives, as puzzle films or mind game films, examples like Donnie Darko, Inland Empire, Through a Scanner Darkly, and Inception stage the interchange between a dystopic social system and the psycho-pathological of the protagonist. While several of the names given to these films gesture in the direction of digital media, their very proliferation would indicate that the actual logic underlying them has not yet been fully understood, so that metaphoric analogies have to make do instead. What is notable, however, is that many of these films not only present correlations between deviant psychologies and ‘worlds out of joint’ but also play with the coordinates of time and space and suspend linear causality through repetition and recursiveness, retroaction and loops, as if to introduce a

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different physics into popular culture, for which cinema turns out to be an apt vehicle. After what has been said about the function of linear narrative, namely that classical film narrative serves the ergonomically efficient processing of mechanically produced sensorial, affective, and motoric impulses and stimuli and thus constitutes a specific type of energy transfer (mitigating an otherwise inevitable sensory overload), it would seem that the forms of narrative that I provisionally call ‘entropic’ point towards the emergence of a new kind of equilibrium. This new equilibrium of disorder is perhaps best characterized by aligning it with ‘positive feedback’, which here signifies complex fields of reactive, interactive, and looped mechanism and effects. One of the most prominent—and for the future of cinema, especially notable—fields of positive feedback is surveillance. Put more positively, entropic narratives are aesthetic (i.e., sensory-cognitive) responses to the control societies and the security state, and thus are harbingers of a paradigm shift, with ‘cinema as surveillance’ representing the successor to two other paradigms: ‘cinema as window on the world’ (realist paradigm) and cinema as mirror of the self (modernist paradigm). But they also remind us that the moving image has always been a tracking device and a monitoring tool and thereby confirm that surveillance has always been one of the (not-so) hidden regimes of cinema, which an archaeological approach can help to uncover and recover. ‘Cinema as surveillance’ functions more explicitly as monitor and selfmonitor in today’s control society, but it corresponds, across a gap of a hundred years, also quite closely to the Muybridge version of chronophotography as the analysis of time and motion for the purposes of testing and tracking, with ‘animal locomotion’ being the name for maximizing the efficiency and naturalizing the self-monitoring of the human body—except for one difference, namely that the observer is no longer under the illusion that he stands outside that which he observes, so that the cinema of surveillance is doubled by ‘cinema as positive feedback loop’. Once we bracket off Renaissance perspective, photography, and modernist media specificity from our genealogy of cinema, we can see that its invention and history have been implicated in the monitoring and the analysis of movement right from the start. According to the compensation theory, by breaking ‘work’ down into the component parts of time and motion and newly arranging or reconstituting it mechanically, cinema has helped productivity not only at the place of work—the factory or office—in the form of maximizing the amount of labor that could be extracted from the combined energy of worker and machine but also at the sites of leisure

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and distraction, in the form of regenerating human labor power while at the same time training the body and disciplining the senses.

Workers Leaving the Factory: Cinema, the Disease of which it Pretends to be the Cure? So far, so well known, but perhaps no longer quite sufficient. What I am proposing, by introducing entropic narratives, is to modify and extend the usual lessons drawn from Benjamin’s shock theory of cinema. In particular, I want to add to it Rabin­bach’s analysis of the concept of (and concern with) fatigue: “Central to the quest for the efficiency of the human motor was the struggle against fatigue, understood as the equivalent of entropy.”26 In this struggle to eliminate fatigue, the utilization of leisure time became an important part of social engineering, which in most European countries, from around 1912 onwards, focused on the use (or abuse) that the working classes were making of the cinema, attracting armies of reformers and commentators. In this respect, one can view one of the very f irst f ilms ever made, Workers Leaving the Factory (1895), as emblematic for a whole subsequent part not only of film history but indeed as the site of one of the most crucial struggles of the twentieth century: that between the “worker/ factory” system and the “cinema/entertainment” system. For what the Lumière film says, in effect, is “as these workers are leaving the factory, the cinema (in which they see themselves) is already waiting for them”. This would be cinema’s allegorical truth for the first half of the twentieth century: moving pictures envisaged as the necessary compensation for the rigors of the industrial labor process but also as a machine for selfdisplay and self-representation. In terms of the intermediate phases, one can point to the fact that throughout the second half of the twentieth century, ever more workers are indeed leaving the factory for good, in the process of being replaced not just by robots but by screens and monitors, of which the first screen was the retrospectively ambivalent antecedent. Conversely, the computer terminals can be seen as techno-mutants of the cinematograph, now firmly installed both at the workplace and inside the workers’ homes. Benjamin’s argument on behalf of cinema now appears as a sophisticated counterargument to the concerns of the Kino-Reformer, seeing their panic 26 Rabinbach, 8.

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motivated not by the needs of the working class, but by the requirement of the social engineers trying to optimize the smooth functioning of the human motor in the productive process. By claiming that cinema became socially relevant and historically significant because of the unconstrained ‘free’ time it buys for the spectator, Benjamin can make the case for its emancipatory potential. For it puts at the disposal of the masses a privilege hitherto reserved for the aristocratic class, namely otium, leisure, which is to say the privilege of ostentatiously ‘wasting time’ and thus expending energy without doing useful work. In the context of labor and working class existence, the need to waste time, on the other hand, is itself a function of our specific Western modernity. This modernity, via the factory’s assembly line and railways’ fixed timetable (i.e., the technologies of industrial production and the technologies of mass transport) has standardized, regimented, and synchronized time to a point where leisure becomes synonymous with simply escaping these time constraints of clocked and measured time. The social uses of cinema as a ‘waste of time’ and its technical origins in chronophotography (literally, the ‘writing of time with light’ but in practice the breaking down of the movements of bodies into segmented and measurable units of time) would therefore seem to stand in conceptual conflict and irresolvable tension to each other. Put even more sharply, cinema is based on a technology (chronophotogra­phy), whose social uses (in the workplace) function as the causes of a problem (alienation from one’s own productive capacities in Marx’s sense, fatigue of the body in Rabinbach’s analysis), for which cinema’s artistic uses (telling stories, providing views) appeared to be the solution. But at the same, by being implicated in the dual process of taking away that which it gives, cinema is indeed in more ways than one the disease of which it promises to be the cure (to modify Karl Kraus’ dictum about psychoanalysis). But perhaps it also works the other way around: might cinema be the cure that allows us to better understand the disease, i.e., the bodily regimes of energy expenditure; the relation of leisure to work; the obsession with sports, workouts, and bodily directed ‘care of the self’ as has become the norm in contemporary society? For if we posit a close relationship between the classical origins and conceptions of cinema and the specific regimes of the body in the social and industrial processes of energy conversion, then it follows that changes in these societal processes will also affect our view of cinema, or at least of those aspects and practices of distraction, time management, and sensory experience we habitually associate with cinema in its widest sense. Indeed, changes have de facto occurred in these societal processes

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of energy conversion, and they can be briefly listed, by way of a provisional conclusion.

From Energy to Information: Attention, Affective, and Perceptual Labor Since the 1950s, and increasingly so in the last decades of the twentieth century, cognitive psychology has been displacing the dominant forms of behaviorism in psychology that concerned themselves with the human motor. What has caught the attention also in the social sciences are mental functions: perception, attention, problem solving, and social skills of affective comprehension, empathy, as well as individual memory, information retention, and general information processing. These developments are widely considered one of the hallmarks of the transition from an industrial and manufacturing society to a postindustrial information and service society. But by way of a footnote, it is important to remember that the result is not that physical labor has been substituted by mental labor, even in our Western societies—it has not. What is significant is that the preoccupation of social scientists as well as intellectuals in the humanities has shifted to the measurement and rationalization of the movements of the mind and the emotions rather than of the body and the muscles in the form of cognitive psychology, artif icial intelligence, and the neurosciences. Whether this endeavor also splits into an ‘American’ version of output maximization and a more socially aware, holistic ‘European’ optimization of the movement of the mind and of bodies remains to be seen. Often enough, the issue does not even arise, as researchers are trying to extract ‘useful’ information from the ever-increasing magnitudes of measurable data, which today means methods derived from biology and genetics or validated by an MRI scan, and uses that can be monetized. If we briefly recapitulate the typical form of energy conversion in cinema as it prevailed in the industrial phase, it would be in terms of the dynamic but uneven exchanges between work and leisure as just outlined, in which the latter has to compensate for the former, on the former’s terms. In Walter Benjamin’s terms, cinema would be exploiting the mimetic impulse in order to establish a relay of compensatory regeneration, which also acts as a protective shield against the overload of sensory stimuli, generated by the technological environment or urban living. Referring himself to Benjamin and leaving behind the compensatory model but addressing the problem

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of protection against sensory overload, Lev Manovich takes the argument into the information society, identifying two kinds of work, as they typify so-called post-industrial societies: a) perceptual shocks and overload as work, and b) work as waiting for something to happen: A radar operator waiting for a tiny dot to appear on the screen; a technician monitoring an automated plant, power station, or nuclear reactor, knowing that a software bug will eventually manifest itself – these are contemporary forms of work, where it is not a matter of exertion of the body, but an expenditure of attention. […] With Taylor[ism], it was the question of the speed of muscular movements; now, it becomes the question of reaction time: the minimum time in milliseconds required for an operator to detect a signal, to identify it, to press a control.27

Manovich’s argument is that to the extent that factory labor in the West is increasingly supplemented by work in the service and surveillance industries, the primary energy humans give to the system is time and attention. As part of this process, attention has become one of the most critical/crucial of energy (re)sources. It is within this attention economy that the different definitions of work redefine much more than work: if, according to Manovich, watching a screen is work, then this applies not only to the workplace but also to the home when we surf the web; monitor our incoming e-mails; update our Facebook page; upgrade our operating system; service our bank account online; or pay for water, gas, and electricity bills. At one end of the spectrum, capitalism needs our attention time for consumption (which is why advertising pays for our free access to—portions of—the Internet), and at the other end, attention time models our labor processes (whether supervising machines or servicing human beings). In this configuration, however, cinema and television (as ‘leisure’) would no longer be in a compensatory relationship to ‘work’ but would also stand for an extension of the workplace, which is to say that worker/factory, cinematic city / distracted subjectivity, office/consultancy, social system / pathological personality no longer form relationships of antagonistic co-option but are different modalities of the self-same process within which all images (even in feature films) consist of operational or technical images, i.e. images whose meaning lies in the action commands and self-monitoring controls they imply (euphemistically called “interactivity”). Rather than inviting a dialogical exchange with the spectator or demanding a relation of alterity 27 Manovich, “The Labor of Perception,” 3, 10.

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(as in avant-garde theories of cinema), the cinema of surveillance, of entropy, and of feedback loops more likely emulates the logic of the control societies, where previously Hollywood musicals or comedies had (in Benjamin’s terms) mirrored and mimicked assembly line work. In this context, then, waiting, too, is work. Earlier, I called waiting a suspended state of work, not only because in cinema suspense is the anticipation of an action or event but because active waiting requires patience and receptivity, both of which are forms of harnessing and managing the energy of expectation and anticipation. The reverse, however, is possibly even more significant: in the service industries, in retail, and in the wellness business, working means waiting, but also in the many occupations where people have to be on standby, not just in such traditional standby jobs as the fire brigade or the police. Security guards, people manning monitors of surveillance cameras, vendors in luxury boutiques at airports–all of them spend most of their lives “waiting, until something happens”. If, for Manovich, this applied above all to information processing as work (in the military or energy generation), we should not forget that empathy is work, listening to others is work: a whole range of states of body and mind that used to be seen as passive are now activities and classified (even if poorly remunerated) as “work”. This reversibility of active and passive, of moving and being moved, of agitating and being agitated we have already noted, both in relation to movement, from Lucretius to the Lumière Brothers and from Deleuze’s film philosophy to entropy in closed systems. It suggests that a new hermeneutics—searching for clues, looking for patterns, scanning the image for unusual signs and objects—is now also an integral part of the attention economy, for which the aforementioned puzzle narratives and mind game films are meant to train us: as do, of course, computer games and the physiological interaction of attention, action, and reaction they require. The vision/voyeurism paradigm that underpinned so much of film theory until now has given way to the monitoring/surveillance paradigm, where we are ‘watched’ as we watch, even if no specific instance is indicated (the logic of the Panopticon, in other words). It extends across the whole spectrum, with the double bind of commercial television, namely that “television does not deliver programmes to audiences, but audiences to advertisers”, now extending to the Web, and advertisers extending to the State. We, as spectators, are no longer in a mode of energy exchange but in an information feedback loop, where all activity on the side of the attention worker (whether spectator user or service provider) necessarily feeds more affective and biographical information into the system, than s/

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he can draw in terms of attention, waiting, and interacting. Watching has become a zero-sum game, including watching movies … Such a negative conclusion notwithstanding, I hope to have mapped the outlines of a media archaeology for cinema which, based on the energy models I have been discussing, brings together the nineteenth century with the twenty-first century. It tries to make visible (and comprehensible) some of the networks that link the period of early cinema and pre-cinema to contemporary cinema and the post-cinema of the Internet age. The former’s typical kinds of attractions—now understood as moments and modes of energy exchange within a dynamic of the body and the senses—can now be aligned with the types of information exchange known as data mining and as the feedback loops of “preferences”, “likes”, and “sharing”. In a kind of retroactive self-movement, such media archaeology could ensure that the history of cinema, far from consigning it and its pre-history to obsolescence, remains one of the indispensable conditions for understanding its present manifestations.

VI Media Archaeology as Symptom

11. Media Archaeology as the Poetics of Obsolescence This concluding chapter has a retrospective slant, not least because it comes out of a period of self-interrogation and reflection on what we have been doing these past 30 years in the study of film history and media archaeology. For film history, the North Italian triangle Pordenone-Bologna-Udine has become almost as important as the triangle Florence-Venice-Genova was some 500 years ago: in both cases, it brought a ‘renaissance’ that radiated well beyond these narrow geographical confines. My own debt to especially Pordenone and Udine is immense, and I want to thank Leonardo Quaresima and the organizers for inviting me once more to the Film Forum. And to take up a phrase from Wanda Strauven’s presentation: I am in some ways “hacking into my own history”, but for this to make sense, I briefly have to sketch this history. As an inveterate cinephile since the mid-1950s and party to the discussions around the dispositif in the 1970s, my turn to early cinema and precinema in the 1980s was determined by three factors: dissatisfaction with the lack of historical specificity in the large-scale theories that came via Paris to London and found its broad dissemination in the journal Screen; my discovery of early cinema at Pordenone (and the echoes it found in especially the New York cinematic avant-garde around the Anthology Film Archive), and third, the enormous impact of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things and the Archaeology of Knowledge. Around 1988/89, I proposed the notion of film history as media archaeology in one of the chapters of the book I edited called Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (published 1990)1—an idea that I developed further in a book called Cinema Futures in 1998.2 It was an attempt to reassess what had been happening in cinema since the advent of the video recorder and the role of television as a major producer of feature films, at least in Europe. The film and media scholars contributing to the volume also examined the shifting hierarchies of sound over image; the expansion of exhibition outlets, new delivery formats and distribution platforms; as well as the proliferation of screens, along with the diversified 1 Thomas Elsaesser, “Early Cinema. From Linear History to Mass Media Archaeology,” in T. Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (London: BFI, 1990), 1-8. 2 Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann (eds.), Cinema Futures: Cain Abel or Cable (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998).

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viewing conditions of the cinema experience that this entailed. Cinema Futures brought together essays poised on the threshold of the digital at a time when it was not altogether clear whether digital media constituted a radical break or merely the continuation of mechanical image-making by other—i.e., electronic—means, of which of course television and video were already well-established practices. I returned to the question of media archaeology in two more programmatic essays,3 which were the point of departure of this book (Part 1). In my two essays, I argued against positing a radical break between analogue and digital and instead I sought to use the advent of the digital for a more fundamental reflection on the basic assumptions of film history. In particular, I have tried to make the case for what I have called an “open-ended past” of cinema in order to counter the discussions about the “death of cinema” that the digital had once more occasioned. I searched for overlooked inventors and entrepreneurs, for discarded and dead-end experiments, I was interested in what the past had believed as being its own future—often so different from what became the immediate actual future. Today, when both the merely imagined and the realized futures of the “pioneers” are now our distant past, some of the discarded fantasies and unfulfilled futures seem uncannily prescient and visionary878 if we think of the sketches of Albert Robida or the Punch cartoon of Edison’s Telephonoscope. An essential purpose of media archaeology as I have conceived it in this book has been to shake up conventional chronologies and unsettle the standard periodizations, to challenge binaries such as ‘documentary’ vs. ‘fiction’, but above all to disprove the teleologies of ‘greater and greater realism’, to question the assumption that the medium ‘film’ would realize its essence through modernist reflexivity, whether phenomenological or epistemological, and to suggest that the “losers” of yesterday, in the race to “invent” cinema, might turn out to be the “winners” of tomorrow, and that in this sense, too, the past is never past, even where it had seemed to be lost.

3 Thomas Elsaesser, “Early Film History and Multi-Media: An Archaeology of Possible Futures?” In New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. Edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chung and Thomas Keenan (New York: Routledge, 2005), 13-25; Thomas Elsaesser, “The New Film History as Media Archaeology”, CINéMAS, vol. 14, no. 2-3 (2004): 71-117.

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Media Archaeology: Making the Past Strange Again The question that has come to intrigue me was: why did cinema when it established itself in the last decade of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth century put all its bets on photography (when the possibilities of electric image-making and image transmission were also already known), and why had cinema not broken with the Renaissance perspectival projection, with the rectangular framed view, and with the individualizing and subjectifying ideology that underpinned easel painting? Cubism and futurism—inf luenced, as we know, by chronophotography—could have shown the way, but cinema massively returned to classical modes of pictorial representation. I realized there were many reasons for this move (by no means inevitable) and also many attempts—from Eisenstein’s montage theories to the perennial efforts of the various avant-gardes—to break away, but they remained by and large minority efforts. Up to this point in this volume, it has become clear that cinema, right from the start, suffered from a certain retroaction, at least in the way its history was—wrongly, as it turned out—conceived around several teleologies that claimed that cinema developed from primitive to mature, from fairground attraction to legitimate art form, from childish prank to storytelling medium, from staged and faked enactments to greater and greater realism. Now that we are exiting the monocular perspectival era also in mainstream cinema, as discussed in several of the previous chapters, it becomes both more obvious what could have been the alternative possibilities not taken up or actively suppressed, and it becomes less inevitable that the framed rectangle and the ‘window on the world’, along with linear storytelling, had to impose themselves with such self-evident force. These, then, are some of the considerations that now make me reflect more critically before “hacking” into the discourse of media archaeology itself. Because my sense is that media archaeology has in the meantime not only become the new orthodoxy, the default value that allows some scholars to ignore cinema altogether and move straight to the sexier bits of online media forms and new media practices, it has also allowed us to rummage in film history, in early cinema and pre-cinema, as if film history was the Portobello Road flea market where you acquire this or that useless object to decorate your mental living room with. My project has been different from Siegfried Zielinski’s, who for more than three decades now has fleshed out and given body to an an-archaeology and a global variantology that successfully rescues the past for a future yet

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to come. 4 But I share some of his misgivings about the temptation to appropriate the past too quickly for our own purposes by seeing everything that strikes us as remarkable in the present as having been ‘anticipated’ a hundred or so years ago, when one of the initial impulses of media archaeology was to make the past strange again rather than all too familiar. Nonetheless, I neither want to repudiate what has been a significant part of my own intellectual history nor disavow those colleagues, students, and conference organizers who have shared and supported these travels in time, in search of hidden pedigrees and lost paternities, and who have worked on these “inventions of traditions” that have helped to make film and media studies an indispensible part of the humanities and beyond.

Obsolescence as Meta-Mechanics Instead, I have explored the borders of history, namely the increasing interest in the idea of obsolescence, as both a cover for an all-too-readily assumed (and consumed) nostalgia for several kinds of pre- or proto-cinematic golden ages and as an expression of more conflicted ways of coping with the sheer presumption of novelty and the new. Obsolescence as nostalgia tends to fetishize the “first machine age” of cinema, centered on its basic apparatus (that Hollis Frampton wisely called “the last machine”),5 in a gesture that blends the superiority of hindsight with the envy of lost innocence. Yet obsolescence as a mimetic impulse towards re-enactment, recovery, and redemption can open a rich field of further reflection precisely for remapping the borders of (film) history. The following paragraphs give a brief overview of how we might understand obsolescence today. The term ‘obsolescence’ has in recent years re-appeared in the vocabulary of both media historians6 and the art world,7 as a quick look at Google entries will also confirm.8 In the process, it has significantly changed its 4 Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Seeing and Hearing by Technical Means (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. [German edition, 2002]). 5 Hollis Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses,” Artforum vol.10, no.1 (September 1971), 35. 6 In 2013, the University of Göttingen hosted a major conference entitled “Cultures of Obsolescence” (http://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/419609.html) 7 See October 100: Obsolescence: A Special Issue: MIT Press, Spring 2002. 8 Among the googled terms were “digital obsolescence”, “media obsolescence”, “obsolescence – hardware and media”, “dead media – obsolescence and redundancy”, “dead media walking? Obsolete communications systems”, etc.

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meaning by enlarging its semantic and evaluative range. From being a negative term within the technicist-economic discourse of “progress through creative destruction”, it became a critical term in Marxist discourse when designers and marketing people advanced the principle of ‘planned’ or ‘built-in’ obsolescence, while critics of consumerism in the 1950s such as Vance Packard attacked such planned obsolescence as both wasteful and immoral.9 But now the meaning of obsolescence has once more shifted: it has entered the realm of the positive, signifying something like heroic resis­ tance to relentless acceleration, and in the process has become the badge of honor of the no longer useful (which in itself associates the obsolete with the “disinterestedness” of the aesthetic impulse).10 Obsolescence can even be the rallying point for sustainability and recycling while also making an eloquent plea for an object-oriented philosophy and a new materialism of singularity and self-sufficiency of being.11 The questions this raises are twofold: what might be the reasons for these changes in meaning and reference, and what exactly is our own speaking position, i.e. where do we film scholars stand as we re-evaluate the obsolete as potentially the new gold standard of “authenticity” or even—to use the language of Alain Badiou—as our own “fidelity to the event”? To take the second question first: no doubt, the reason we can name the concept of obsolescence and play with its meanings is that we understand our awareness that with digital media we have crossed a metaphoric Rubicon, which casts in a new light everything on the other side. Just as we had to retroactively invent the word “analogue” to distinguish it from the digital, or rebrand the word “vinyl” to designate what used to be called a “record”,12 once musical recordings became compact discs and mp3 files, so we are marking with the word “obsolescence” a rift or a rupture that seems to put us in this superior position but also in a position of belatedness.

9 Vance Packard: The Waste-Makers, Philadelphia 1960. 10 In May 2014, the punk band GRYSCL released an album called Finding Comfort in Obsolescence (http://brokenworldmedia.bandcamp.com/album/finding-comfort-in-obsolescence) 11 See Steven J. Jackson and Laewoo Kang, “Breakdown, Obsolescence and Reuse: HCI and the Art of Repair” (http://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu/Jackson&Kang_BreakdownObsolescenceRe use%28CHI2014%29.pdf) 12 Originally, vinyl referred to vinyl chloride, an industrial plastic that derives its mellifluous name from wine because of its remote kinship with ethyl alcohol. As a retronym, vinyl interestingly does not name the process (recording) or product (sound) but refers to their material substratum, thus signalling a shift in affective attention to materiality itself.

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The obsolete occupies an ambiguous place from which we may well wish to take an inner distance: either ironic or empathetic, or both. Given its previously negative connotations, obsolescence might even join those self-ascriptions where a minority proudly refers to itself by the abusive or offensive terms the majority insinuates under its breath: the obsolete understood as the bad-ass or steam punk among the shiny media gadgets of the digital era. As the cycles of updates and upgrades in the field of consumer electronics and software have speeded up, obsolescence necessarily connotes or implies the digital as its negative foil. This is reflected in some of its current definitions: Obsolescence is the state of being which occurs when an object, service, or practice is no longer wanted even though it may still be in good working order. Obsolete refers to something that is already disused or discarded, or antiquated. […] A growing industry sector is facing issues where the life cycles of products no longer fit together with life cycles of components. This [gap] is known as obsolescence, [and it] is most prevalent for electronics technology. […] However, obsolescence extends beyond electronic components to other items, such as materials, textiles, and mechanical parts. In addition, obsolescence has been shown to appear for software, [manufac­turing] specifications, standards, processes, and soft resources, such as human skills.13

The last part of the sentence is compelling, since it spells out the antiquatedness and includes the obsolescence of what are here called the ‘soft resources’—i.e., human skills and, by extension, human beings—a point I shall return to, since it hints at our own anxieties of not being able to keep pace with the accelerated turnover cycles that technology and capitalism are imposing on human life cycles.14 But here I want to suggest a slightly different context within which obsolescence has gained new currency, albeit also not without its own ambivalences and potential pitfalls. This context I want to call the need to re-invent history.

13 “Obsolescence” Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsolescence (last accessed 25 August 2015) 14 Acceleration has become another ambiguous word in this context, connoting on the one hand the bad object, against which “slow” has been valorized, while on the other hand, the Acceleration Manifesto claims that only the need for speed will ensure our future.

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The Ends of History or the Borders of History? For the past 25 odd years, we have heard about the “end of history”. Francis Fukuyama’s essay by that title from 1989, even though commenting on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism that occurred that year, was itself the tail end of debates throughout the 1970s and 1980s about the end of the grand narratives, the end of the Enlightenment belief in progress: in short, the post-Marxist, post-modern arguments associated with the names of Jean Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Foucault. When Baudrillard denounced “la mode retro” as fetishistic, arguing that “the cinema is fascinated by itself as a lost object as much as it (and we) are fascinated by the real as a lost referent”, 15 he was speaking from a position where history (i.e. political and social change) was still considered a possibility, even as he acknowledged that “history is the lost referent”. When Foucault recast the order of things so as to lay bare the archaeology of knowledge, its epistemes, and the micro-politics that bind power to discourse, he no longer assumed a historical force whose loss or absence one might mourn but posited instead that the distinct epistemes followed each other more or less only by the rupture that separated them. Much of media archaeology initially arose from this Foucauldian moment, casting doubt on linear film history or mono-causal accounts of the emergence of cinema. But this ‘turn’ is also echoed in several other challenges to history as a discipline that aligned facts and evidence in orderly sequences. In particular, two distinct but related concepts—namely “the archive” and “memory”—came to compete with the idea of history as it had developed since the nineteenth century. As revolutions, wars, and other human disasters of the twentieth century presented those who came after with events whose aftermath and consequences exceeded the categories usually associated with history, both the archive and memory emerged as alternative organizing principles. Neither is subject to a strictly linear trajectory, nor are they obliged to follow the unidirectional arrow of time. Instead they have accustomed us to a spatialization of time that allows for simultaneity and co-presence of distinct moments in time and space. The spatial turn has altered our notions of causality away from the billiard ball model to more complex and contradictory relations of multiple causal chains, to seriality and repetition, to stochastic causality, as well

15 Jean Baudrillard, “History: A Retro Scenario”, in J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 43-48 (47).

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as a bias towards associationist causal agents, all the way to the present preoccupation with contingency as the sole causal ground of a new ontology. Another consequence of the spatial turn in history has been the reliance on narrative as a mainstay of historiography. In the 1970s, Hayden White’s Metahistory taught us that certain rhetorical and narrative tropes have been at the core of the argumentative modes that secured plausible historical explanation. No more: perhaps the days are not far off when narrative— already under pressure from game theory—comes to be seen as only one possible, even if widely used, way of ordering or organizing perceptual data, actions, and events in a comprehensible and easily communicable way. Along with song, poetry, and prayer, narrative has been mankind’s privileged storage mode for some 5,000 years, modelling itself on the human experience of time as a succession in sequence, and thus following the logic of the “post-hoc ergo propter hoc”, while taking as its dramatic arc (as well as its default value) the life cycle of beginning, middle, and end. But now that archival principles increasingly compete with narratives, other storage modes and methods of access and recall may arise that reduce narrative, also with respect to history, to one special instance of how to render the past both present and intelligible. The memory turn has also affected our view of history, especially when memory is associated with trauma. After all, it is usually the catastrophes of the twentieth century—and among these above all the Holocaust—that are most often cited as the reason why we have become so preoccupied with collective and cultural memory.16 The purported objectivity of history—the account of who did what to whom, when, where and for what reasons—has proven to be inadequate as an appropriate response, so that memory—the living testimony, the subjective-affective account, and the partial perspective—steps in to fill the gap or acts as a placeholder for the incom­prehensible that we need to hold on to as proof that we are still committed to seeking out the truth, even as understanding eludes us for the events that most affect us. Yet memory and trauma are also at the forefront of our dealings with the past for reasons other than the disasters of the twentieth century. Thus, the fact that digital media have put at our disposal quantities of machine memory and archival storage space hitherto unimaginable in both depth and breadth, in both speed of access and ease of arrangement and manipulation, has also contributed to the crisis in history. The database and the 16 See, for instance, Michael S. Roth, Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

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archive: on the one hand, the freedom to create new orders of being that comes from random access, and on the other hand, the pressure to find new levels of generality and constraint—in the form of meta-data—in order to cope with the sheer quantity of information (or big data) has made memory and trauma useful concepts for giving a human face and an experiential dimension to the challenges of information overload and the deluge of data. Yet the archive, as Jacques Derrida has eloquently argued, is not a neutral repository of documents or a Wunderkammer of collected curiosities but is something that imposes its own power structures and meaning-making mechanism.17 Social media are the negative proof of Derrida’s ‘archive fever’, insofar as whoever organizes and reorganizes their own data, their own memory, their own archive is thereby reorganizing and inventing him/herself. By their very transitoriness which contagion and proliferation (reposting and retweeting) turn into a permanent record, social media testify not only to a need to live for the instant but also to the desire for an archive—the two sides of an identity we wish to invent for ourselves, retroactively, at any given moment. Social media are invitations to outsource our person, i.e. to delegate to others our inner and outer lives, our daily routines, and our most precious sentiments. By attaching more and more of our lives to social media’s database logics, probability calculus, and algorithmic preference routines, the ‘archive’ inexorably eats away at history’s two main functions, namely to assure us of our place and identity in the succession of generations and to allow us to anticipate the future by learning from the past. More often than not, history has become either risk assessment, projected backwards, or a sea of information and a set of data ready to be collected and marshalled in support of present needs, political imperatives, or national preoccupations. At the borders of history, then, lies data mining and information management.

Media Memory as a Challenge to History There is also a reason more directly pertinent to film studies and cinema history why especially memory has become such a prominent challenge to history. Our cinematic legacy, which is to say, the quantities of moving images—both their abundance and precarious survival, their vivid 17 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

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testimony and evidentiary power—has become a reality whose force we are only beginning to fully reckon with. Within the category of recorded sound (speech and music)—equally strong markers of the past in relation to memory, nostalgia, and the poetics of obsolescence—popular music has proven itself to be easily the most evocative medium, as already hinted at in the discussion around the semantics of ‘vinyl’ in the chapter on “The Return of 3D”. If history takes over from memory precisely at the point where the past is no longer embodied in a living substance but is only accessible through the material traces that an event or a person has left behind, then recorded sound and moving images present history and memory with a conundrum and a paradox. For recorded sound and moving images are both more than mere traces and less than full physical embodiment; they have the uncanny power of conjuring up the living presence while also remaining mere echoes and shadows of what once was. On film, the past has never really passed, so how can it become history? Instead, the ghostly para-life or after-life of movies—whether fictional or documentary, whether whole or in bits and pieces, whether carefully crafted or taken on the fly—is by its very nature closer to what passes for traumatic memory when understood as the sudden presence of past events that can recur or repeat themselves with the full force of the lived instant, at once separate from us and yet all too familiar. Even the most realistic film is, as it were, haunted by its phantasmagorical double. Our present tendency to privilege memory over history as the more authentic and truthful and to associate memory above all with trauma may to some extent be less due to actual historical traumata and more a symptom of our culture’s way of coping with the fact that the history of the twentieth century is also made up of the repositories of its mechanically and electronically recorded sounds and images: archives for which we are only beginning to find the sorting routines and narrative tropes that can manage their meanings and make bearable their magnitude. The call for digital humanities and the discussions about metadata are further symptoms of both the challenge the filmic legacy poses and our present disarray in adequately dealing with it.18 18 Scholars like Franco Moretti, Alan Liu, and Lev Manovich have been at the fore­f ront of the debate around the ‘perils and promises’ of digital humanities. See Alan Lui’s blog (http://liu. english.ucsb.edu/is-digital-humanities-a-field-an-answer-from-the-point-of-view-of-language), Scott Kleiman (http://scottkleinman.net/blog/2014/02/24/digital-humanities-as-gamif iedscholarship/), or the critical notes sounded by Adam Kirsch (http://www.newrepublic.com/ article/117428/limits-digital-humanities-adam-kirsch).

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Confronted with this immense material presence of images which won’t join the natural cycle of decay—since motion pictures of whatever kind are both lost to life and yet survive the death of what they display—the full resonances of the term ‘obsolescence’ makes its reappearance as perhaps the code word for some of the ambiguities and contradictions that the undeadness of moving images have burdened us with. Obsolescence names the grieving and mourning, the denial and disavowal, but it also nurtures the hope and the hubris that we might be able to bring this embalmed past back to life.19

Obsolescence Begets Scarcity, and Scarcity Creates Value A good example of both the hope and the hubris but also a sign of a more parasitic appropriation of the filmic legacy is the archaeological impulse that feeds the web with millions of videos on YouTube or Vimeo, effectively living off (and trying to monetize) the accumulated capital of past generations. Although we all benefit from this cornucopia of so many past films having become instantly present, this scattering of the family silver may have long-term cultural implications even beyond the knotty problems of copyright and ownership. If media archaeology originally set out to impress upon us the otherness of the past, its singularity and strangeness, then the universal availability of so much material now requires the creation of new kinds of scarcity in order to confer ‘distinction’, preserve ‘status’, or generate ‘value’. Obsolescence begets scarcity, and scarcity creates value.20 The art world and museum spaces are the traditional environments where scarcity—tagged as uniqueness, autonomy, and originality—is turned into value. In the chapter entitled “Stop/Motion”, I already pointed out that these are also the sites where obsolescence has become a major factor in the reflexive turn that cinema has taken at the end of its first century. Some reasons are internal to the development of modern art 19 It is here that André Bazin’s intuition about photography’s ability to store and preserve life, comparable in this respect to Egyptian mummies, shows prescience, since it is now the materiality of the support of the image as much as what the image depicts that engages the present-day artist or viewer. 20 In this context, a remark by Tacita Dean is instructive: “obsolescence hounds my working life. Laboratories close down. Shops no longer stock spools […] And so obsolescence ends in an underworld of people dealing from dark rooms and flea-market stalls, until enough time passes, so that whatever it was that was obsolete, has now become rare. And rare no longer holds my attention.” October 100 (Spring 2002): 26.

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practice, if one accepts that for many of today’s artists, a digital camera and a computer are as much primary tools of the trade as a paintbrush and canvas were a hundred years ago. Other reasons are part of a complicated trade-off between avant-garde cinema—agonizing and near death since the 1980s—and blockbuster exhibitions, Biennales, bi-annuals, and documentas. Art, supported by networked or franchised brand museums, has become a mass medium, with blockbuster exhibitions becoming the theme parks for the world’s middle-classes, while art tourism now sustains cities like Amsterdam and Venice, Paris and Berlin, Belfast, Bilbao, and Brisbane. Many works pay tribute to cinema’s past and do so preferably by displaying the rattling machinery of projection almost as often as they feature the projected image itself. There has been, for instance, this love affair of artists with the 16mm projector, repurposed or retrofitted, to show celluloid strips in a loop or, when exhibited, as a piece of light sculpture without any film at all, but reassuringly obsolete thanks to the purring sound of the gears and spools, becoming mechanical wind-up toys. As I have said, one reason is that there is now a general sense of ownership of cinema on the part of the art world, manifest most clearly in the changing approach of the museums. The museum world has essentially “acquired” or “appropriated” the cinematic avant-garde—not only by commissioning new work but by contextualizing its display in their own terms. The career of an artist I have been following closely for more than forty years—Harun Farocki—is exemplary in this respect: he moved from being a relatively little-known political filmmaker between the 1960s to the 1980s to becoming an internationally acclaimed installation artist specializing in warfare and surveillance, manual labor and monitor-controlled machines. He, too, is a media archaeologist, finding for his political concerns and contemporary themes in the gallery a public sphere that seems to have disappeared from cinema history and even media archaeology as currently practiced.21 Artists, too, many of whom now see themselves as curators, sometimes just of their own work but also more boldly as curators of the cinematic archive, claim ownership to cinema, and derive from it the right of appropriation. Symptomatic of artists’ cinema—the term now widely used in English for what the French call cinema d’exposition—is the recycling, re-staging, or reworking of the classics, preferably the works of Alfred Hitchcock as seen in Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, Matthias Müller’s 21 See the commemorative issue of e-flux on Harun Farocki, October 2014 (http://www.e-flux. com/announcements/issue-59-harun-farocki-out-now/)

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The Phoenix Tapes, Johan Grimonprez’s Looking for Alfred, to name only three out of a dozen that come to mind.22

The Museum: A Politics of Obsolescence The new sense of ownership of cinema by contemporary art museums, artists, and art spaces is not altogether unconnected with the curious conjuncture of the forever foretold “death of cinema” and an anniversary. It was as if the centenary, in 1995, of the Lumière Brothers invention became the ideal occasion to praise cinema in order to bury it. The success of a number of ambitious, large scale exhibitions, such as Hall of Mirrors (1996) at MoCA in Los Angeles, Spellbound (1996) at the Hayward Gallery in London, Into the Light (2001) at the Whitney Museum in New York, X-Screen (2004) at MUMOK in Vienna, Le Mouvement des Images at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image (2008) at the Hirshhorn Gallery at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. helped to promote the notion that the proper place for the history of cinema—and not just avant-garde cinema—is now the curated exhibition in the museum: In the age of digital convergence, film is increasingly becoming a touchstone for new media and video art—no longer as antipode to these media (themselves divergent), but as constructed archetype for all moving images. Whereas earlier surveys have posited film as metaphor or have emphasized sampling and mimicry, the Hirshhorn’s two-part endeavor focuses on cinema’s cognitive effects. The first instalment explores the ways time-based media transport us to dreamlike states; the second, their ability to construct new realities. Forty works made between 1963 and 2006 will be contributed by nearly as many artists. The roster suggests we can expect everything from the sumptuous qualities of celluloid (Tacita Dean) to interpellation into the cinematic apparatus (Anthony McCall) to surreal projected video (Paul Chan).23

22 For a more extended analysis of Hitchcock in the museum, see my “Casting Around: Hitchcock’s Absence”, in Johan Grimonprez, Looking for Alfred: The Hitchcock Castings (Ostfieldern: Hatje Cantz, 2007), 139-161. 23 See “The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image,” Hirshhorn Museum And Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. Curated by Kerry Brougher, Anne Ellegood, Kelly Gordon, and Kristen Hileman, 2008.

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The Hirshhorn statement confirms a dictum by Boris Groys to the effect that today, art is not made by artists but by curators, because in order to decide what is art, you have to be in control of first, the space where it appears; second, the institution that guarantees its authenticity; and third, the discourses that legitimate it.24 This seems to be true of the cinematic archive, too, and what I call the ‘politics of obsolescence’ here works entirely in favor of the museum, in the sense that it constitutes a kind of takeover bid where it is not yet clear whether it is a hostile or friendly takeover bid, leaving it an open question whether it is the museum (popularity) or the movies (status) that benefit most from their mutual re-alignment.25 And yet an undeniable fascination with obsolescence also stands behind the new cinephilia: one that no longer merely venerates the cinema d’auteur but also no longer shuns the Hollywood genre film; one that makes little distinctions between high culture and popular culture—it happily raids the icebox and, in the process, it makes films anonymous and turns them into fragments. It celebrates cinema in the form of found footage compilations using home movies (Peter Forgacs), industrial films (Gustav Deutsch), medical films, pornography—in short, it poeticizes all those areas where the moving image has been used to record and document processes, events, and actions. And artists are often welcomed and invited by the film archives themselves because they are seen to add value to holdings that have lain dormant in vaults or storage facilities all over the world, for which no uses could as yet be found. Artists’ sense of ownership means that sometimes they forget or ignore prior authorship or provenance, sometimes they deliberately strip context, and sometimes they obfuscate the origins of the material in question so as to present their re-working and re-staging as a surreal collage of fresh fragment or as the walk-in installation of an uncannily familiar space. The black box then also becomes a black box in the technical sense, as a space within which anything is possible, where input and output are not predetermined.26

24 Boris Groys, “The Art Exhibition as Model of a New World Order,” in Open 16: The Art Biennial as a Global Phenomenon – Strategies in Neo-political Times (Rotterdam: nai010 publishers, 2009), 56-65. 25 For a similar survey of the major exhibitions, see “The Video That Knew Too Much”, Steven Jacobs, Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 149-179. 26 On found footage films, see the essays collected in Cecilia Hausheer and Christoph Settele (eds), Found Footage Film (Luzern: VIPER/zyklop, 1992), and Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).

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At the other end of the spectrum, the collage and compilation can produce its own kind of apotheosis, as with Christian Marclay’s The Clock, which has raised the stakes considerably for anyone dreaming of making a cinephile ‘found footage film’, at once proving and disproving that film history’s undiscovered riches are lying right there at the surface in the myriad of objects, details, sounds, gestures, and textures by working—indeed laboring—on this film history’s ‘optical unconscious’. For it is with works like The Clock (and to some extent the films of Matthias Müller or Gustav Deutsch) that a ‘poetics of obsolescence’ encounters–and counters–the art world’s ‘politics of obsolescence’. Poetics is a slippery term, situated as it is between critical theory and self-imposed creative constraints, between media archaeology and free-form improvization, but by ‘poetics of obsolescence’ I am not only referring to the already mentioned totemic use of 16mm celluloid by a Tacita Dean, the regular clacking of a carrousel slide projector of a Nan Goldin or a James Coleman installation, or the recurring typewriters in William Kentridge and Rodney Graham. These are the outward signs—the trademarks, as it were—by which artists flag the value they attach to such a mise-en-scene of obsolescence. In many ways, obsolescence has become the overarching concept under whose broad etymological expanse and varied figurations the appropriation of cinema as shared heritage—but also its valorization as the artists’ privileged domain of (self-)reflexivity and re-assessment—proceeds most effectively, forming a slender bridge between an institutional trafficking with nostalgia and retro fashion and the artists’ tentatively optimistic reexamination of cinema, a medium that art history has assiduously ignored for the best part of the twentieth century. What is crucial, it seems to me, is that the poetics of obsolescence announces a different relation between present, past, and future, not just by acts of creative anachronism but also by treating technological obsolescence like an anchor cast into the churning sea of an uncertain future, brought on not only by the episteme of the digital but also by the globalization of art and museum practice. In this reflexive-retroactive turn, artists enact something of deeper significance, also for the rest of us. The present moment, cognizant of its (social) stasis and (political) paralysis, can look at the past’s obsolescence as if into a mirror of its own fate, and not only take comfort from it, but by actively preserving these obsolete objects and treasuring their uselessness, we protect, love, and redeem ourselves in a proxy gesture of half-acknowledged narcissism. The big museums that are now appropriating cinema’s rich history and varied legacy are seizing the opportunity to service our generalized nostalgia and longing for lost innocence by giving it the rationale of guarding the

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archive and preserving the heritage. In its shadow and under its patronage, film artists, video artists, and digital artists can thus practice their own poetics: proactively and prophylactically deploying obsolete technologies in order to counter the ephemerality of work that increasingly depends for its performance and presence on audio-visual hardware or digital software. Such work demands that future curators turn themselves into archivists: they need to catalogue, store, and study not only the work as such but also the technologies required to put it once more on display. These supporting technologies—hardware-like tape recorders or overhead projectors, software-like disk formats or operating systems—may yet become the most valued part of the artwork in a kind of master-slave dialectical reversal, where the obsolete is respected for its self-oblivion and resistant materiality, for what Roland Barthes called “the obtuse meaning” as an antidote against too much signification, too much intentionality and meaning.27 Thus, it is not only the case that trash becomes treasure in a value cycle where obsolescence has always been an integral part: discarded objects may be rubbish, but if they are kept long enough, they become collectibles, and as collectibles, they can advance—if they become scarce enough—to being classics and even, given the proper discourse, art.28

The Artist: A Poetics of Obsolescence Obsolescence, understood as the survival of a witness to past ‘newness’ while renouncing past utility, can therefore also harbor utopian aspirations and even be the vehicle of lost promises and unfulfilled potential. This positive view of the poetics of obsolescence we can trace back to Walter Benjamin and his reflections on the surrealist object.29 Freed from utility and market value, both the handcrafted implement and the industrially made commodity can reveal unexpected beauty and deploy a potent charm: out of the transition from use value to display value and from cult object to the disenchantment of the world, Benjamin derived not only an exalted view

27 Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on some Eisenstein Stills”, in Stephen Heath (ed.), Image Music Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 49-68. 28 On value cycles, see M. Thompson, Rubbish theory: The creation and destruction of value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 29 Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia”, New Left Review I/108 (March-April 1978): 47-56.

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of the collector30 but also a whole theory of the origins of art. Extending his thinking, one can say that when reclaiming the discarded, preserving the ephemeral, and redeeming the newly useless, we are also paying tribute to sustainability and the ethics of recycling, even if only in the form of the symbolic act that is the work of art or the scholarly discourse of the media archaeologist. At this point it is worth recalling Marshall McLuhan’s tetrad of media effects: “What does the medium enhance and amplify? What does the medium discard and make obsolete? What does the medium reverse or how does it flip when pushed? What does the medium retrieve that had been discarded?”31 With only minor adjustments—for instance, by inverting the direction of McLuhan’s causal arc from old to new and allowing for the discovery of the new in the old medium and not only the effects of the new on the old medium—the current interactions between the art world and the cinematic archive are holding all these parts of McLuhan’s tetrad in suspended animation. This is the case whether we think of art historian Rosalind Krauss advocating the post-medium condition as the ‘new medium specificity’ in her effort to rescue modernism,32 whether we take the museum space as the critical site at the intersection of enhancement (value creation) and retrieval (public access), or whether we study artists like Tacita Dean, Rodney Graham, or William Kentridge, pushing the old medium to the point where it flips, in the full awareness that the digital has effected a kind of figure-ground reversal, with the old emerging as the new ‘new’.33 At the heart of many of these processes and phenomena is our own deeply paradoxi­cal cultural moment in which to be retro is to be novel, where “going vintage” is “avant-garde”. The wider implications, however, suggest that the poetics of obsolescence and the idea of progress (or what is left of it) have become the recto and verso of each other: through obsolescence we negatively conjure up the ghost of progress past. In this sense, one of 30 On collecting, see Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking my Library,” in H. Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books), 59-67. 31 Marshall McLuhan, “The Tetrad of media effect,” in Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (University of Toronto Press, 1988). 32 Rosalind Kraus, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000). 33 “Everything that excites me no longer functions in its own time. […] I court anachronism – things that were once futuristic but are now out of date – and I wonder if the objects and buildings I seek were ever, in fact, content in their own time, as if obsolescence was invited at their conception.” Tacita Dean, October 100 (Spring 2002), 26.

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the strategic uses of obsolescence as a critical concept can be found in the fact that, being a term that is inevitably associated with both capitalism and technology, it is of special interest in the context of both the art world and the audio-visual media, both old and new, because it implicitly acknowledges that today there is (almost) no art outside capitalism and technology. Both our historical and critical thinking needs to take account of this fact, and as film scholars and media archivists, this insight comes more easily to us than it does to art historians and curators. Obsolescence, then, would hint at a political dimension, since the contemporary art world seems to have succumbed to the dialectics of (technological) innovation and (capitalist) obsolescence rather than remaining the bulwark against creative destruction, impervious to the cycles of fashion that it claims to be. Yet how could it be otherwise? If capitalism is indeed the most revolutionary—which is to say, the most disruptive—force in the contemporary world, it is at the same time the untranscendable horizon of our thinking and being. This not only means that there is no outside to the inside, which renders any critical stance that much more difficult to protect from being co-opted, it also gives obsolescence a new kind of self-contradictory dignity: it is on the inside but makes its stand against the inside and thus speaks a paradoxical truth of which it is itself the embodiment. The fact that obsolescence can be the new ‘new’ is therefore not only a sign that the fashion system now fully pervades cultural production (as Boris Groys would have it); it also confirms the point with which I began, namely, that we have lost our faith in progress and thus our belief in history. Obsolescence is “history at a standstill”, to modify Benjamin’s famous aphorism about the allegorical image. But by arresting history, suspending time, and reversing its flow, obsolescence can be a moment of reassessment as well as of renewal, which is why I want to insist that obsolescence implies a special relation of past to present that no longer follows the direct linearity of cause and effect but takes the form of a loop, where the present rediscovers a certain past to which it then attributes the power to shape aspects of the future that are now our present. Remaining within Benjamin’s frame of reference, we can cite his messianic conception of Jetztzeit or Now-time and say that “the past is always formed in and by the present. It comes into discourse analeptically in relation to a present, and since it is read from the standpoint of the present, it is proleptic as well, in that it forms ‘the time of the now’.”34 This analeptic-proleptic relationship I call the “loop 34 Jeremy Tamblin, Becoming Posthumous: Life and Death in Literary and Cultural Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 4.

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of belatedness”, which is to say, we retroactively discover the past to have been prescient and prophetic, as seen from the point of view of some special problem or urgent concern in the here and now. Much of our work as media archaeologists is, for good or ill, caught in this loop of belatedness, where we retroactively assign or attribute uncanny agency to a moment or a figure from the past that suddenly speaks to us in a special way. As media archaeologists, we have often favored the archaeology of cinema over the history of films. There were indeed film historians, who were proud of doing their work without actually watching films and pitied those who were extrapolating social history or ideology on the basis of some more or less obscure hermeneutic process. If, however, I am right in saying that film, by its peculiar ontology of undeadness and not-aliveness, effectively suspends or undermines the very possibility of a history as traditionally understood, our move to archaeology is not going to help us forever. The gap between film on one side and cinema on the other is bound to open up again, if it has not done so already: for what exactly lurks at the borders of the historical? If we consult system theory, for instance Niklas Luhmann, we learn that history does not exist; indeed, the very idea of the past is only a prosthetic fiction we have invented in order to map our perception of repetition and difference, to which we add causality in order not be swallowed up by the inexorable contingency of our lived reality. Thus, it would seem that the loop of belatedness, which I associate with the poetics of obsolescence, is neither as tautological nor as retrograde as it might appear. For at the borders of the historical lies also our mortality and the irreversibility of the arrow of time for all living beings. “Films” (in the digital age), with their apparent suspension of this irreversibility, would seem to mock us with the promise of some sort of immortality, whereas “cinema” (envisaged once more as the dark space, the cave, the camera obscura) preserves all the terrors of mortality and becomes the very epitome of our precariousness as individual subjects and as a species. This is perhaps why Jacques Aumont wants to call “cinema” only that which insists on the irreversibility of the projected image.35 But it also suggests that the gap that has opened up between the ontology of ‘film’ and the archaeology of ‘cinema’ is an important one, indeed an essential one: it helps us keep 35 “La projection vécue d’un film en salle, dans le noir, le temps prescrit d’une séance plus ou moins collective, est devenue et reste la condition d’une expérience unique de perception et de mémoire, définissant son spectateur et que toute situation autre de vision altère plus ou moins. Et cela seul vaut d’être appelé « cinéma ».” Raymond Bellour, La querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma – installations, expositions (Paris, P.O.L. 2012), 14.

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the faith in the potential of a future, even if as a species, it is not certain that we have one, and reconciles us to the knowledge that as a blip in the universe, we never had a past. Media archaeology, understood as part of a poetics of obsolescence, would be the perfect balancing act between both these possibilities, where the future of cinema renews itself whenever we experience its obsolescence as a promise. It is, as Hollis Frampton indicates, “an appealing fiction”.

12. Media Archaeology as Symptom 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.1 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. 1 I already mentioned the overview essay by Wanda Strauven: “Media Archaeology: Where Film History, Media Art and New Media (Can) Meet”, but there are several searching book reviews of Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka’s Media Archaeology, while the journals Equinox: Journal of Contemporary Archaeology (vol. 2 no. 1 [2015] on Media Archaeologies) and View: Journal of European Television History and Culture (vol. 4 no.7 [2015] on Archaeologies of TeleVisions and -Realities) have published special issues.

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Such sudden popularity has not gone without discontent, critique, and outright rejection, not only from professional archaeologists or, on the other side of the divide, from social and cultural historians but also from within the fields most directly affected and addressed by media archaeology such as cinema studies, film history, media studies, media theory and art history. Without going into details, one can summarize their disquiet and points of contention by saying that the problem most keenly felt is that there is no discernible methodology and no common objective to media archaeology.2 And that, consequently, there seems to be no persuasive or pertinent formulation of the problem that media archaeology is supposed to address, and no specific research agenda by which its success might be measured or its value assessed.3 The counterargument provided by a number of media archaeologists, including Huhtamo and Parikka, is that this is precisely its strength and value: that the research is heterogeneous and diverse, that the method is deconstructive and non-normative, that its aims are to be subversive and resistant, and that media archaeology is a traveling discipline without fixed boundaries. Such claims are useful in creating some leg and elbow room in the crowded environment of contemporary media ‘theory’, but they can also look a little overblown, for instance, when Huhtamo and Parikka assert that “a wide array of ideas have provided inspiration for media archaeology” and then enumerate: “Theories of cultural materialism, discourse 2 Reviewing Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media and Huhtamo/Parikka’s Media Archaeology, Simone Natale comes to the conclusion that there “is a substantial methodological anarchy, which is often characteristic of the work of media archaeologists. [… Huhtamo and Parikka] confirm the impression that media archaeology should be regarded as quite a heterogeneous set of instruments and inspirations to be used by historians of media, rather than as a coherent theory about the development and history of media technologies. […] However, this choice also brings some risks: by merging media archaeology with a wide range of perspectives in contemporary media history, one ultimately risks losing the significance of this approach – as when you dilute a small amount of salt in a much too large pot of water.” Simone Natale, “Understanding Media Archaeology,” Canadian Journal of Communication 37, no. 3 (2012): 526-527. 3 Even someone as sympathetic as Garnet Hertz has major misgivings: “does media archaeology as a displacement of the notion of media run the danger of making media archaeology even more marginal? Does displacement glorify the trivial, unfinished, and irrelevant without providing a synthesis? Part of the reason I ask this is that I see some of the same problems within the history of media arts practice: reveling in obscure technologies, projects continually stuck in prototype mode, and work that lacks a connection to “real world” issues and politics. […] What is the value in being uncategorizable? Isn’t part of the task of mobilizing sidelined objects and discourses to make them legible and understood?” ‘Archaeologies of Media Art: Jussi Parikka in conversation with Garnet Hertz”, Ctheory (1 April 2010) http://www.ctheory.net/articles. aspx?id=631

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analysis, notions of nonlinear temporalities, theories of gender, postcolonial studies, visual anthropology, media anthropology, and philosophies of neo-nomadism all belong to the mix”. 4 This is giving the enemy (too) much ammunition. One way to clarify this situation was to point to several key thinkers as reference points. Always mentioned in this regard are Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin, and almost as frequently, the mercurial influence of Friedrich Kittler, even though Kittler himself strenuously avoided calling what he did media archaeology, at least during his lifetime. He preferred to “drive the human out of the humanities”.5 But these writers are helpful in setting up a kind of intellectual duopoly between a “French” and a “German” paternity for media archaeology, which is further strengthened by pointing to the many areas of overlaps—not least the common, though in each intellectual tradition differently interpreted, philosophical legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. We saw how media archaeology means different things to different practitioners, but nonetheless, a certain consensus has emerged: besides the discontent with linear narratives of the “from … to” variety, the need to “read [media history] against the grain”, to provide “friction”, uncover “layers”, “probe strata”, and to “dig out” forgotten, suppressed, and neglected histories, there is also a strong sense/consensus that one should be “doing media archaeology” rather than merely using it as a conceptual tool.6 Finally, there is also the suggestion that an archaeological approach to the past of media (looking at media phenomena in their material-technical manifestation as fragments of physical and imaginary worlds no longer available) will clear a perspective: not so much for the use of the present (where harvesting the past can become an act of appropriation) but for thinking about a different kind of future.7 While sympathetic to almost all of these objectives and especially interested in the way media archaeology reconfigures the temporalities of 4 Erkki Huhtamo & Jussi Parikka (eds.), Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 2. 5 Friedrich Kittler (ed.), Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften. Programme des Poststrukturalismus (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1980). 6 For the exact references to these quotations, see the introductory chapter, footnotes 8-11. 7 Siegfried Zielinski’s anti-establishment instincts are particularly offended by the imperial gesture of revolution and innovation with which digital media promote themselves: “ […] judged to be a revolution, entirely comparable in significance to the Industrial Revolution […] every last digital phenomenon and data network [is] celebrated as a brilliant and dramatic innovation.” Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 8.

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past and future, I have been less concerned with defining “what is media archaeology” and have instead asked myself “why media archaeology (now)”: thus neither ‘doing’ media archaeology with original or practical research, nor promoting it as a panacea for the various problems now besetting the study of cinema. Instead, I have been inclined to treat media archaeology as a symptom rather than a method, as a placeholder rather than a research program, as a response to various kinds of crises rather than as a breakthrough innovative discipline. I ask myself to what extent is media archaeology itself an ideology rather than a way of generating new kinds of secure knowledge. This may be an unexpectedly challenging way of closing a book dedicated to establishing media archaeology as an important research area, but it seems the only productive way of advancing the debate if media archaeology is to prove viable. In response to “why media archaeology (now)”, I have offered three key sites or configurations that have led to its emergence as well its function as a symptom. First, there is the rediscovery of early cinema as part of a complex visual culture with its own traditions, rules, and logic (i.e., presenting itself as a distinct ‘episteme’), which would be seriously misread if understood merely in relation to what followed (e.g., as classical narrative cinema’s ‘pre-history’). If treated sui generis, early cinema can open up illuminating perspectives and surprising parallels, especially when viewed from the present situation of equally rapid changes in the overall mediascape. Second, the present situation thus provides a second site that favored a media archaeological approach, since digital media, too, confronts one with several points of rupture and discontinuities that require a historiographic ‘perspective correction’. Among the points of rupture was the swift adoption and quasi-universal acceptance of digital media in so many areas of art and daily life—not just in cinema, music, or writing (i.e., the entertainment, education, and information media) but also for business transactions, global finance, and trans-border communication. Equally surprising was the combination of political conservatism with a discourse of “disruptive technologies” around digital media, while at another level, disruption was ‘business as usual” because, as usual, it was (a) business. The question then becomes: is media archaeology hitting the brakes or stepping on the accelerator? Third, a further site for media archaeology (in the form of what I call a ‘poetics of obsolescence’) was the entry of moving-image-based art in museums, galleries, and arts spaces generally, coinciding with the centenary of cinema, with frequent pronouncements of the ‘death of cinema’, while coming after some sixty years of tense relations (with often hostile

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stand-offs) between the art world and the film world, and especially during the ferment of the 1970s even between museums of modern art and the film avant-garde. These three sites are very heterogeneous, differently located, and attract uneven kinds of notice in both the academic fields of film and media studies and in the public sphere of media reception and perception. Nonetheless, they are interconnected and at times mutually determining, even in their antagonisms. For many of us, the rediscovery of early cinema began in the mid-1970s. Often cited is the 34th congress of the Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF) in Brighton in 1978 devoted to “Cinema 1900-1906”. One of the impulses that made this event so significant was that it managed to rally scholarly and public support for the salvage of (nitrate) film material. Rapidly deteriorating physically, the films from the early decades needed large injections of funds in order to be properly preserved and to be recognized as valuable not just for film scholars but as national and international cultural patrimony. Alongside the archivists who gathered in Brighton, film historians and film scholars were invited to join, almost for the first time in FIAF’s existence. The rest, as they say, is history–or rather, the rest is ‘media archaeology’. Because among these scholars were some–Noël Burch, Tom Gunning, André Gaudreault, and Charles Musser, to name only four8 —who inaugurated paradigm changes in our understanding of cinema, and not just its earliest period and its so-called pre-history. In subsequent years, especially since the 1990s, annual festivals like the Giornate del cinema muto in Pordenone and Il cinema ritrovato in Bologna made the study of this period immensely fun, intellectually fertile, and (dare I say) internationally fashionable. The circumstances of its coming properly into view meant that ‘early cinema’—later renamed ‘the cinema of attractions’—was not only a descriptive term but also polemical in intent and militant in its effect: a militancy that media archaeology wanted to inherit, with its claim to counterhistories. Since traditional film history tended to be linear accounts, 8 Key figures that made the Brighton conference possible were in fact from an older generation, notably David Francis (from the National Film Archive, London) and Eileen Bowser (from MoMA, New York). Also present were John Fell (San Francisco State), John Gartenberg (MoMA), Paul Spehr, and Martin Sopocy (Library of Congress). Among the younger generation, Tom Gunning, Charles Musser (and Noël Burch) had been nurtured by Jay Leyda’s and Annette Michelson’s courses at New York University in the 1970s. Their links with the New York/North American f ilm avant-garde led to an especially lively cross-fertilization between f ilm historians and filmmakers in the subsequent decade.

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relying on ‘organicist’ models of birth, adolescence, maturity, decline, and renewal, the first 20 years of cinema initially fared badly, partly out of ignorance, partly because up to 80% of the films had perished, but partly also because of the historiographical models then in use. These consigned the period—when narrowed down to a single medium rather than taking in the entire mediascape—to the stage of infancy and the status of the primitive. Thus even the few films that were known and had survived were devalued and undervalued because they were measured by inappropriate categories, wrong assumptions, and false expectations. Given their focus on one medium, their reliance on conjecture, but perhaps most of all, their (by no means dishonorable) aim to establish cinema as a legitimate art form, historians had much of this early history ‘wrong’, both factually and by omission. A far too restricted set of causal determinants, a much too narrowly self-selected cast of players, and a disregard for the sophistication and diversity of the media technologies flourishing in close proximity to cinema made those who identified with the ‘new film history’ or ‘revisionist film history’ feel they had better ‘start from scratch’.9 Laying the groundwork of what became media archaeology with respect to cinema, this new generation of scholars began rethinking how cinema had emerged, how many hands and brains (but also non-human agents and fortuitous factors) had actually been involved in ‘inventing’ it, and above all, what exactly it was that was invented around 1895 and eventually given the name ‘cinema’. Thus, the ‘great man’ theory of history was out: Burch and Musser championed the then barely known Edwin S. Porter over both the world-famous Thomas A. Edison and D.W. Griffith, while the questions ‘where is cinema’ and ‘when is cinema’ were already raised from the start. An example of omission in the service of establishing cinema as art would be the implicit teleology of greater and greater realism and the insistence on linear narrative (continuity editing and cross-cutting) as more ‘natural’ and ‘mature’. Whenever a historian tried to map cinema’s progress as additive, i.e. developing from silent and black-and-white to sound and color, from rectangular screen to cinemascope and IMAX, and from 2D to 3D, a fairly

9 By ‘New Film History’, I am referring to the intervention of a generation of scholars, beginning with Noël Burch and Barry Salt and continuing with Charles Musser, Tom Gunning, Andre Gaudreault, Robert Allen, Kristin Thompson, Steve Bottomore, and many others since. Some of the terms of the debate are set out in my article entitled ‘The New Film History,’ Sight and Sound vol. 55, no. 4 (1986): 246-251 and subsequently in the introductions to the various sections in T. Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (London: BFI Publishing, 1990).

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naive notion of realism was in place.10 Yet the knowledge that early films were often in color, cinema performances were rarely silent, that there were giant screens around 1900, and that there was 3D (stereoscope) before there was 2D was not so much absent but ignored or suppressed because of their inconvenience to the ideological project.11 For example, as mentioned in an earlier chapter, a vivid debate ensued over two versions of Porter’s Life of an American Fireman (1903), one of which used cross-cutting to drive the action forward, and the other using parallel editing and repetition to establish distinct points of view. The more linear one, held by the Museum of Modern Art, turned out to be a later re-edition to make it seem more ‘modern’, which is to say, more normative in relation to post-Griffith storytelling practice. What was lost was the knowledge of the ‘external’ narrative point of view (the performative or ‘monstrative’ character of early cinema) which, for instance, pointed to the possible presence of a film lecturer, a vital aspect of early cinema practice whose textual evidence the well-meant ‘improvements’ obliterated.12 In short, it was not only a matter of more research, preservation of, and access to extant films or freshly verified facts; new historiographic models were needed for evaluating this early period, one that could cope with non-linear developments, with inconsistencies and open questions, with apparent breaks and dead-ends, and which was able and willing to see cinema within broader media formations that could place very different phenomena—as well as the different media—into specif ic historical contexts. These contexts were the emerging and evolving constellations of media use that included all manner of entertainment venues but also encompassed non-entertainment purposes for the cinematograph.13 In 10 The widely read and in its heartfelt enthusiasm very enjoyable study by Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art: A Panoramic History of the Movies, first published in 1957 and revised in 1972, is one of the clearest cases of an organicist history, relying on great men to perfect the art of film and lead it to greater and greater realism. 11 At the Paris Exhibition of 1900, for instance, the Lumière Brothers projected their films on a screen that measured 16 by 21 meters. 12 For a full account of the debate over Life of an American Fireman, see André Gaudreault, “Detours in Film Narrative: The Development of Cross-Cutting,” in T. Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema – Space Frame Narrative (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 133-150. 13 See the chapter “Digital Cinema and the Apparatus: Archaeologies, Epistemologies, Ontologies” in this volume as well as, for instance, Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989); Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1995); and Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (eds.), Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009).

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other words, early cinema studies also dared to ask whether cinema had to be defined as a predominantly storytelling medium or whether other ways of deploying the cinematic apparatus had also been important for its history and development. For instance, while the revisionist historians’ approach was to say: “for some problems in film history, it is better not to watch films” (in order to draw attention to the industrial, technological, and financial infrastructure of cinema as determining factors even for the development of its aesthetic forms), one of my media-archaeological slogans was “cinema has many histories, not all of which belong to the movies”, by which I meant to make room, among other things, also for re-evaluating the non-canonical holdings of film archives, including the vast array of scientific and medical films, of home movies and instructional films. These, in turn, would prove to be a veritable gold mine for video and installation artists, giving rise to the different genres of the ‘found footage’ film, the essay film, and other modes of recycling, repurposing, and appropriating the filmic patrimony, the photographic archive, and the cinematic heritage.14 However, even before digitization had the impact that it did, there was sufficient reason to question the historiographical models in use in film and media studies. While this book has focused on the seismic shifts that the rediscovery of the first twenty years of cinema were to force on to film history by correlating them above all with the equally dramatic changes wrought by digital media, it should not be forgotten that, among the scholars whom I identified with the ‘new film history’, many were applying new research tools, pattern analytics, and cross-media perspectives also to problems and periods other than early cinema. A field for major revisions was the history of film sound and the so-called transition to sound in the late 1920s, now seen in context and competition with radio and the emerging gramophone industry (as also indicated in several chapters in this volume).15 A similar shift in method and perspective occurred in the historiography of American cinema of the post-WWI years. The very rapid implementation of new technologies in filmmaking during the late 1940s and 1950s—such as color, wide-screen formats, new lenses, 3D, but also handheld camera work and portable audio recording, along with alternative exhibition practices such as drive-in cinemas and art houses—could not be accounted for with 14 I touch on some of these developments in the chapter on obsolescence, but the subject of found footage and non-theatrical f ilm has received extensive attention by scholars such as William Wees, Catherine Russell, and André Habib. 15 For their work in reconceptualizing the history of sound in cinema, Douglas Gomery, Rick Altman, and James Lastra would be among the names to cite, while the commanding theorist of sound is Michel Chion.

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reference to some internal logic of cinema or specific goal-oriented strategy. The period required a broader media-historical perspective, where change occurred in response to the competition with television and to other leisure opportunities provided by the motorcar and portable music devices, including the transistor radio. Another ‘new film history’ area of reinvestigation that had a major impact, changing our understanding of a whole period and proving innovative with respect to film historiography, were the decades between 1965 and 1980. At issue was the vexed question of the demise of the studio system in the mid-1960s, the emergence of a ‘New Hollywood’ in the 1970s, and the resurgence of a new ‘Global Hollywood’ of blockbusters, event movies, and superhero franchises in the 1980s.16 Such uneven developments and contradictory transitions had to be plotted against the background of both emergency measures and maintaining continuity rather than following any kind of telos or overall master plan. If the challenges of television, new business models in the film and media industries, and changes in censorship and state control did not make for a clear causal scheme, they also did not constitute radical breaks, nor did they suggest media convergence. At first, antagonistic models of competition and rivalry seemed most appropriate, but as the cinema-television battle mutated into co-operation, division of labor, and all manner of ‘synergies’ across the different media through conglomerate ownership and the pooling of talent and resources (some of which came down to containing television within a reinvented studio system), more sophisticated models of interaction were needed, one of which—that of the logic of the supplement—I proposed in the chapter on “The ‘Return’ of 3D”.17 None of these revisionist historians would call themselves media archaeologists, and yet the pressures to rethink historiography and causality were not dissimilar. Thus, in some disciplines such as literature and architecture but also cultural studies and media studies, the vocabulary of postmodernism came to replace Foucault because it supplanted the discourses of rupture and epistemic breaks with the ‘softer’ ones of intertextuality and remediation, of pastiche and allusionism, of emulation and appropriation. These concepts helped to accommodate (if not always 16 Tom Schatz, Richard Maltby, Jon Lewis, Douglas Gomery, and many others who studied changing business models, censorship, mergers, technologies, marketing copyright, branding, etc., and thereby altered the way we think not only about contemporary Hollywood but also its previous history, would never call themselves media archaeologists. 17 In the chapter on “The Return of 3D”, I propose one such model—that of the ‘supplement— but historians of television have elaborated their own. William Boddy, Lynn Spigel, or John Thornton Caldwell are the scholars that come to mind.

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to adequately comprehend) the co-existence of the different media, their mutual interference and interdependencies, as well as the surprising kinds of survival and afterlife of film forms and narrative formulas, the recycling and retrofitting of genres and stereotypes that made the film industry at once so ‘opportunistic’ with regard to its rivals (radio, the music industry, television) but also so adaptable with regard to changing tastes and expanding markets: keeping, for instance, Hollywood’s prestige for (technical) innovation high even as it maintained a surprisingly stable practice (with respect to its product) over close to a hundred years. More than digitization as such (and, in some cases, preceding it), it was the growing interpenetration of cinema, television, and the new media delivery and distribution systems—embodied in the remote control, the time shifting of the video recorder, and the individual ownership of a film thanks to the videotape and later the DVD—that demanded a rethinking of historiographical models and revision of mono-causal explanations and single-media genealogies.

Media Archaeology as Crisis Management It should be clear by now that media archaeology can also be regarded as a symptom responding to a number of crises, several of which extend well beyond the scope of cinema and indeed media in general. Most prominent among these crises is the loss of belief in ‘progress’, i.e., the critique of the Enlightenment as it has been formulated by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectics of Enlightenment, Jean Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, Jacques Derrida’s critique of logocentrism (Of Grammatology), and other major European thinkers in the last half of the twentieth century. Almost every writer’s definitions of media archaeology includes an objection to teleology and linearity, doubts that have their common root in this loss of faith in unlimited progress and human selfperfection. This philosophical critique—aligned, as in Lyotard, with the ‘end of [other] grand narratives’ argument—became conspicuous after the failure of the May 1968 revolts in Western Europe and almost commonplace after the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. In the new millennium, it has become urgent once more by being linked to explicitly ecological concerns about the sustainability of the ‘growth and production’ model of neo-liberal capitalism. Flowing from this loss of faith in progress (but also philosophically distinct from it) is the crisis in history and causality, which has amplified into a crisis in memory and recall, reflected in turn in the crisis of narrative and storytelling. More specifically related

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to cinema and to the question I posed in the introduction, namely that film history as media archaeology also challenges me to ask: “what is cinema (good) for”, is another crisis—the crisis of representation and the image. As it is one of the purposes of this epilogue to return to cinema’s place in the wider scheme of things, it requires me to elaborate on one or two of these crises, which hopefully allows me to offer also an outlook on some alternative genealogies of cinema that media archaeology can point to or delineate, trying to make good the promise that by approaching the past as a ‘site’, one may discover the material remains of bold thoughts, eccentric ideas, and brave hopes that allow one to entertain the vision of a different future from the one already prepared, processed, and pre-mediated for us.18 Such expectations of renewal and redemption, of course, reflect the reverse side of the loss of faith in progress, namely the pragmatism of cost-benefit calculus, and the hedonism of living in the here-and-now, substituting itself for those broken, abandoned, and grounded utopias littering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of which media archaeology imagines itself to be the collector, preserver, and placeholder. I have discussed the crisis in narrative, linearity, and storytelling in the introductory chapter, and so here I will briefly dwell on the crisis of causality (as part of a different historiography) and on the crisis of representation (as part of cinema freeing itself from its own erstwhile self-definitions). We saw that one of the key characteristics of media archaeology, whether centered on early cinema or taking its cue from digital media, was the attempt to break with models of linear history, which also meant challenging Newtonian notions of causality, where actions and events are plotted along a single continuum of cause and effect. A Kittlerian line of attack—extrapolating from Foucault—was to argue that a historiography that relies on chronological narratives merely reflects the cultural technology of writing and script, and thus is based on print as its medium, thereby proving itself not to be universal or necessarily true but historically determined.19 If historians have until quite recently been reluctant to accept as valid evidence material 18 For the idea of premediation as a feature of the state control of the future (rather than corporate control), in the form of a combination of surveillance and action replay, see Richard A. Grusin, “Premediation,” Criticism vol. 46, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 17-39; and also Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (Basingstoke: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2010). 19 As Wolfgang Ernst puts it: “The crucial question for media archaeology, then, resides in whether, in this interplay between technology and culture, the new kind of historical imagination that emerged was an effect of new media or whether such media were invented because the epistemological setting of the age demanded them.” W. Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 42.

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that could not be presented in the form of written documents or printed sources, this surely cannot be right for media history, at least not a media history that encompasses the technical media of cinema, the electric media of television and telephony, and the electronic-algorithmic media of the digital era. At first glance, a break-up of mono-causality would appear to be a liberating moment, one that takes more accurate account of contingency in human affairs and of actions having unforeseen consequences. However, the same logic that tries to overturn linearity by pointing to its technological underpinnings applies to the philosophical, psychological, or political arguments that favor “contingency as our new causality”. They are at least in part also the superstructural elaborations—the ideology, to use this old-fashioned term—of the technologies that are now in use and that we are increasingly dependent upon. On the other hand, such a charge of ideology can overlook the extent to which changes in our idea of causation are also due to different environmental challenges or may arise in order to meet specific practical problems, as argued below. Underlying the charge of ‘ideology’ would be a version of ‘technological determinism’. A change in media technology, so the determinist argument would go, invariably brings with it a change in models of reality, of the mind, and of the conceptual means by which we interpret both mind and reality. No universe as a clockwork and God as a watchmaker without the mechanical timepiece; no Descartes dividing the world into res cogitans and res extans without the telescope. By the same reasoning, the contemporary preference for coincidence and contingency over linear cause-and-effect chains aligns itself with such eminently cinematic techniques as montage and the cut, indicative of the presence of cinema (as a media technology), even where it is not explicitly invoked. Extending such techno-determinism into the digital, might there also be suggestive parallels between ‘repetition and difference’ as a way of deconstructing history (as both Gilles Deleuze and Niklas Luhmann have done) and the manner in which digital images do not follow each other in succession but remain the same and are merely ‘refreshed’, with only a portion of the pixels being replaced with different numerical values? Speaking generally, the use of causally motivated narrative for rendering and retaining the past in the form of history is, in media archaeological terms, a relatively recent attainment 20 compared with the much longer 20 On tropes, metaphors, and narrative in structuring historical events, besides Hayden White’s Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), see also Thomas Elsaesser, A

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prevalence of the memory arts, of history in the form of myths, allegories, memoirs, sagas, and chronicles—all of which often function in non-linear ways or are conceived as ‘open forms’ that deliberately avoid mono-causal explanations or proof in favor of enumeration, reversible causal relations, and the accumulation of emblematic events.21 In this light, certain features of digital culture are not new but return us to a previous norm, without replacing linearity or causal chains. Conventional notions of history as the most accurate accounts of what happened, how and why (or ‘who did what to whom, when, where, and why’) are now in competition with probabilistic calculations, for which the past is primarily an accumulation of data that can be usefully analyzed for recurring patterns, which in turn are winnowed in order to calculate probable outcomes. Such post-positivist theories of history thus cut both ways. While they might appear at first glance to finally take serious account of contingency in human affairs by seeking to control or contain it, the discovery of meaningful patterns nonetheless turns unforeseen consequences retrospectively into causal agents not only in order to eliminate what might have been, in favor of what has been, but also in order to predict and pre-empt the future, which makes probability studies or risk assessment a form of reverse-engineered history. It leaves as unclaimed residue what is of interest to media archaeologists, making some of them the ‘gleaners’ of technological progress—but to that extent also dependent on the data-hungry combine harvesters of the high-tech conglomerates or the security state. It highlights once more how a media archaeology of the digital is ambiguously poised between serving up the past (to data miners and aggregators) and preserving the past (for a different kind of future). Is there a middle way, one that mitigates both the technological determinism and the ideological charge by taking a more pragmatic approach? Looked at operationally, causation as we apply it to past events and dignify with the name of history is nothing more than an organizing principle. Therefore, it may well be dependent on models of the mind and conceptions of the world that are themselves dependent on both the tasks at hand and the tools at hand. If the nature of the phenomena or the size and quantity of the material that an ordering principle is supposed to keep under Comparative Study of Imagery and Themes in Thomas Carlyle’s and Jules Michelet’s Histories of The French Revolution (PhD thesis, University of Sussex, 1971). 21 There is an etymological link between telling and counting whose history is explored by Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, 147-157. See also Wolfgang Ernst and Harun Farocki, “Towards an Archive for Visual Concepts,” in Thomas Elsaesser, Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 261-286.

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control changes dramatically, the ordering principle itself may have to be adapted or even be replaced altogether. Thus, given that the amount of data now gathered about the world by cameras, sensors, probes, telescopes, microscopes, and similar (digital) devices has risen exponentially, this poses precisely the problem of whether classical causality as an organizing principle is still adequate or appropriate. At the same time, because we can use computers as our organizing machine, we will use the computer as organizing machine—and computers, as the tools at hand, seem to be better equipped than humans to deal with contingency and random access, with correlation and pattern recognition, when faced with such masses of data and information. But a change in organizing principle (in this instance, causality) is also a matter of the tasks in hand. In his account of causality in modern science, Robbie McClintock argues that, up to around 1950, causal explanation dominated research: “Researchers looked for causes in an effort to predict effects, expecting thereby to gain an ‘if-then’ ability to produce desired outcomes. The results were wondrous in physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology and in their application through industry, technology, and medicine.” However, in the latter half of the twentieth century, scientific research focused on more complex systems with complicated dynamics: “Here causes and effects are both bi-directional and manifold. The researcher recognizes that numerous phenomena are taking place simultaneously within an extended time and area.” The problem for the researcher becomes one of modelling this complex system not only to understand its complexity but also in some cases to control it. McClintock lists the study of “ecologies, climate changes, environmental pollution, weather, macro­economics, and large-scale social change” as prominent examples. He concludes that “The human payoff of these studies is not in the ability to produce predictable effects through a given action, but the ability to anticipate complex interactions and to exert adaptive control within them.”22 Consequently, a media archaeology that starts from the heterogeneous, multi-dimensional, and multi-directional emergence of cinema, invented simultaneously several times in different locations, already reflects the likelihood that today it is easier to work with contingency than with monocausal chains and that modelling multiple determinations—or ‘multiple variables in simultaneous interaction’—is not only more plausible and part of the Zeitgeist but also faster and cheaper. Which means that media archaeology 22 Robbie McClintock, “Social History Through Media History,” 2002: http://robbiemcclintock. com/shelving/E-02a-R-BnB-7-CivLife.html

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is not by itself some more objective method or approach to either history or causality than the methods or approaches that preceded it but already carries within itself the very principles it is supposed to investigate, thereby running the risk of producing not new knowledge per se but reflecting the prejudices and preferences of our present age. Thus it merely introduces to this knowledge new ordering principles, i.e. those of media archaeology. It is a point worth keeping in mind as one asks what the most urgent tasks or most important questions are that media archaeology can tackle with respect to cinema today, and also when one hears the complaint I started off with, namely that media archaeology does not have a proper method or has not yet identified the problems clearly enough it is meant to be an answer to. As so often in the humanities, it is the inherent reflexivity and selfreference—what we used to understand by the term ‘critique’—that justifies certain procedures and approaches, not the problem-solving routines of the hard sciences. Wolfgang Ernst rightly insists: “Media archaeology, which is concerned with techno-cultural processes, is both a self-reflexive method and an archival object of research.”23 In this perspective, media archaeology is only one among several parallel developments, where a discipline becomes reflexive in order to redefine its object of study, which in this instance includes revisionist film history, counterfactual history, memory studies, and trauma theory, as well as ‘the archive’ as a distinct area of inquiry and study in the humanities and philosophy.

Alternative Genealogies: Friedrich Kittler So far, my main concern has been to show how the question ‘why media archaeology now’ identifies it as a response—by way of discovery, amazement, or shock—to the kinds of ‘otherness’ of early cinema, the ‘newness’ of digital media, and the surprising entry of the moving image in the museum. Whether such ruptures are to be understood as ‘otherness to ourselves’ and therefore ways of recognizing and recovering more of the human in humanity, or whether this otherness is a reminder of our precarious position as a species (meaning that this very reflexivity, in the form of media archaeology, necessarily speaks from the position of the post-human) is a question that leads to Friedrich Kittler, the third thinker who inspired much of what today passes for media archaeology. Kittler’s project of ‘driving out the human from the humanities’ (die Austreibung des Geistes aus den 23 Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, 41.

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Geisteswissenschaften) would point to the latter. The phrase is introduced by Kittler himself with a passage from the New Testament, where Jesus is exorcising a “legion of demons” who beg him “to send [them] to the herd of swine, so that [they] may enter them” (Matthew 8:31). The parable, as used by Kittler, suggests a post-human vantage point, the demons of the human having to be chastised and cleansed by means of some drastically ‘unclean’ measures. Kittler’s remedy for the humanities may thus also point to an alternative genealogy of cinema by introducing a radical (‘quick and dirty’) reductionism. In his book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Kittler addresses the question of modern media as a crisis for the human senses, brought about by the change from print dominance to the audio-visual and the shift from mechanical to electronic transmission. The three analogue media constitute for him a ‘discourse network’ (Aufschreibsystem, literally ‘inscription system’) that has the exterior character of distinct technologies; but as technologies of hearing, seeing, and speaking, they are interdependent and intimately related to the human body and the senses. In Kittler’s view, then, such technologies are not mere instruments with which ‘man’ (Mensch) communicates, produces meaning, and ‘makes sense’ by ‘extending his senses’: rather, such media technologies determine the conditions of what passes as meaning and even decides what constitutes the human. Thus, discourse networks cannot be grounded in anthropology or in McLuhan’s concept of the medium as an extension of man. Seeking to ground materially both Derrida’s critique of speech and Lacan’s theory of the subject as a function of one’s place in language, Kittler locates the embodied sensory subject at the intersection of the historically specific communication technologies that in their discursive arrangements organize information processing—what David Wellbery calls Kittler’s “presupposition of mediality”.24 In Kittler’s media analysis, it is the gramophone, not the cinematograph, that provides the basis for rethinking the modern discourse network of the human. In one sense, he is right: Edison ‘invented’ his kinetoscope–the precursor of the Lumière cinematograph–after he had developed the phonograph, and he initially maintained that “the kinetoscope would do for the eye what the phonograph had done for the ear”, giving sound recording, also in respect of their combined function, priority over the mechanical recording of images. But what is key for Kittler is the fact that both phonograph and cinematograph record quantities of sense data of the 24 See David E. Wellbery, introduction to Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990), xiii.

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ear and eye by technological-mechanical means, i.e. with a purely technical interface, and this shifted the entire discourse network circa 1900. “The technological registration of the real entered into competition with the symbolic registration of the symbolic.”25 [Prior to the phono/ cinematograph,] all data flows had to be cut up, spaced, symbolized, in order to pass through the ‘gate’ of the signifier: alphabet, grammatology, writing. […] As technological media, the gramophone and film store acoustical and optical data serially with superhuman precision. […] They launched a two-pronged attack on a monopoly that had not been granted to the book until the time of universal alphabetization, [from which point onwards, writing had the] monopoly on the storage of serial data. The gramophone empties out worlds by bypassing their imaginary aspect (signifieds) for their real aspects (the physiology of the voice). For the first time in human history, writing ceased to be synonymous with the serial storage of data.26

The concept of ‘serial storage of data’ aligns the technologies of sound, image, and writing with digital data and thus establishes the computer as the technology that both completes and supersedes previous storage media: Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interfaces. Sense and the senses turn into eyewash. Their media-produced glamour will survive for an interim period as a by-product of strategic programs. Inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number: quantities without image, sound, or voice. With numbers, everything goes. Modulation, transformation, synchronization; delay, storage, transposition; scrambling, scanning, mapping.27

In this way, Kittler’s emphasis on the recording (the trace), the storage (memory), and the transmission (access) of sensory data privileges the phonograph and cinematograph (as well as the typewriter, the technology of alphabetization) over photography.28 From a media archaeological perspective, this is a shrewd tactical move because it avoids some of the apparent 25 Kittler, Gramophone, Film Typewriter (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999), 230. 26 Ibid., 246. 27 Ibid., 1-2. 28 Mary Ann Doane comments on Kittler in her chapter “Temporality, Legibility, Storage: Freud, Marey and the Cinema” in The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 63-64.

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problems when thinking about cinema, since the individually framed image with celluloid as its material support, i.e. the photographic ontology, stand in the way of adequately understanding cinema in and for the twenty-first century. For Kittler, photography does indeed belong more to the history of art than media theory; similarly, the cinematograph is important less for its iconicity, mimetic properties, or indexicality of place, site, and space but rather because of its indexicality of time: both gramophone and film were revolutionary media by their capacity of storing time (what we now call ‘real time’). The crucial point, however, is that the storage of time as the direct, unimpeded, automated data flow is inimical not only to art but also to sense: the cinema is historically significant for Kittler in that in essence, it is ‘meaningless’: not non-sense, but n-sense (n- here standing for ‘noise’, ‘neural’, and the nth degree: the ‘too much’ of sense and for the senses, i.e. the stimulus overload that the technical media challenge and tax the human sensorium). Mise-en-scene, montage, compositional aesthetics, etc. would not be part of cinema’s inherent nature but a secondary response—a hysterical symptom or merely a disciplinary reflex—to cinema’s automatism, now understood as another name for the Lacanian Real. 29 Rather than extracting sense from sensory data, a film’s narrative, genre, style etc. would constitute ways of imposing sense on n-sense, but always ultimately failing to quite tame the kinetic presence of the technological Real, or to altogether mute what Heidegger would call das Grundrauschen der Existenz, the all-encompassing white noise of sheer existence as captured by the technological apparatus. Regarding cinema’s automatism, it will be recalled that film theory has almost since its beginnings struggled with this aspect of technological reproduction in the medium. For many film theorists and writers in the 1920s, this disqualified cinema from being defined as ‘art’, while for a later generation–starting with André Bazin (and later taken up by philosophers such as Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, and more recently Ranciere, Jean Luc Nancy, and Alain Badiou)–the fact that cinema could capture, record, and store the world without the intervention of the human mind, the 29 Writers on melodrama in the 1970s (Elsaesser, Mulvey, Nowell-Smith) were keen to point out that the stylistic excesses of this genre were part of a displacement, where conflicts, which could not—for ideological or psychoanalytic reasons—express themselves directly, manifested themselves obliquely in the film’s ‘body’. Best known is Nowell-Smith’s formulation: “In the melodrama, where there is always material which cannot be expressed in discourse or in the actions of the characters furthering the designs of the plot, a [hysterical] conversion can take place into the body of the text”. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Minnelli and Melodrama,” Screen 18, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 117. We can now rewrite such psychosocial critiques in terms of a media-archaeological or techno-materialist analysis and extend it to cinema as a whole.

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human hand, or the human obsession with finding and making meaning was precisely what rendered it so unique and precious. Yet this very same automatism reminds us of the incontrovertibly technological condition for cinema to be not just an apparatus for image-making among other such machines but also a form of thought, sine ira et studio, i.e. both disinterested and indifferent, and thereby turns every philosophy of cinema that highlights this automatism always already into a form of media archaeology. Yet Kittler’s assertions can be taken further: for him, the technical media and their automatic generation of sensory (sonorous and optical) data put all symbolic systems–including film philosophy and presumably media archaeology–into crisis. However, there is an interesting obverse to this, namely that cinema has helped bring this automatism of thought to prestige and prominence (a feature extensively explored in Gilles Deleuze’s cinema books). On the other hand, free association and the talking cure (Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis) along with automatic writing (André Breton’s surrealist techniques) could then be understood as the mimetic responses or rearguard actions to the uncanny automatism of the cinematograph. However, for Kittler, such automatisms of perception, cognition, and action are now better served by algorithms and electronic circuits than they are by celluloid or vinyl. It would make cinema–along with psychoanalysis– a transitional phenomenon, a historically vital and valuable but finally expendable help maiden on the way to some other technology that can automate cognitive processes and the calculation of consequences: the computer.

Two Kinds of Media Archaeology Reading Kittler (against Kittler) for a media archaeology of cinema (when cinema is mere “eyewash”—a temporary interface between data and the human senses) serves as a sharp reminder that there is, perhaps, an insurmountable split: between a film history conducted as media archaeology, such as I have been trying to explore in the preceding chapters, and a media archaeology that is firmly dedicated to tracking the arche of the digital.30 30 The split I am referring to may be related to but also different from the one noted by Jussi Parikka, when he writes that “a binary division has usually been drawn between the socially and culturally oriented Anglo-American studies and the technohardware approach of German scholars, who have taken their cue from Friedrich Kittler’s synthesis of Foucault, information theory, media history, and McLuhan’s emphasis on the medium as the message. One way of

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Cinema’s archaeo-logic requires that we materially ground ‘projection’, the ‘screen’, the ‘camera eye’ in technologies that refer us to the machine age and that have to do with the transmission and conversion of energy, as I argued in the chapter on “Cinema, Energy, Entropy”. For instance, Wim Wenders has Bruno, the projectionist in Kings of the Road, explain that the inconspicuous Maltese cross is a key device in its relation not just to the impression of movement, by creating spacing and interval, but as part of an energy transfer mechanism that turns circular movement into linearity through alternation and interruption.31 It also aligns the cinema projector with the lever escapement mechanism of pocket watches. By contrast, the particular techno-logic of the digital takes us into the realm of electromagnetism, and away from electricity as a source of power, light or heat. With writers like Kittler and Ernst, the logic of electromagnetism is to be sought in switches and relays, in circuits and grids, and is made possible by harnessing electricity and mastering electromagnetic fields rather than by mechanical devices arranged in a particular spatio-temporal order, what Stephen Heath calls the ‘geometry of cinematic representation’.32 Whereas cinema comes to life with the cut and montage or the long take and deep space, the digital is animated and brought to life by a combination of mathematics, logic, and linguistics. The consequence of this split or rift in media archaeology is that, from the perspective of the electronic image, as we saw, cinema has always been obsolete, as obsolete as the mechanical watch has been made by digital time pieces, yet surviving as ornament and luxury accessory. Might it be possible, if not to heal this rift, to nonetheless come to a better understanding of why and how it occurred? The stakes are significant: it would, on the one hand, help answer my question what is/was cinema (good) for, and on the other, clarify how cinema might become—either despite of or because of its supposed obsolescence—the repository for that different kind of future that seems to lie at the heart of media archaeology’s explaining this division is to see it as a consequence of different readings of Foucault.” Huhtamo/ Parikka, introduction to Media Archaeology, 8. 31 “Without this little device, we wouldn’t have the film industry. 24-times a second it pulls the film forward with a jolt. It turns a rotating movement into pull-movement.” Cited in Kirsten Hagen, “Filmgeschichten sind wie Reiserouten,” in Axel Gellhaus et al. (eds.), Kopflandschaften (Weimar: Böhlau, 2007), 333. See also Lorenz Engell, Sinn und Industrie (Frankfurt: Campus, 1992), 35. 32 Stephen Heath, “Narrative Space” Screen 17, no. 3 (Autumn 1976): 68-112. Heath also gives a very lucid account of Renaissance perspective and its impact on classical cinematic representation, using Hitchcock’s Suspicion as one of his chief examples.

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utopian aspirations. In several of the preceding essays, the digital turn of cinema was treated as a rupture, but not primarily in terms of technology or by juxtaposing the analogue to the digital. Instead, it served as (yet another) reflexive turn in thinking about cinema, in a move that displaces and estranges what we think we know, so that—thanks to early cinema and digital media—we can re-situate cinema’s emergence and persistence (along with the impression of obsolescence and marginality) within the wider field of human endeavor. Rather than forcing the divide between analogue and digital or between the indexical and the (merely) iconic, the success (and succession) of the digital image in emulating, enhancing, and appropriating the photographic image as one of its interfaces and ‘special effects’ can be a welcome occasion to rethink the history and purpose of images more generally. One might then ask: is it possible to locate more precisely the common arche as well as the parting of ways between the mechanically generated and the electronically produced moving image? It would give substance to the claim that, in media archaeological terms, we can retroactively identify cinema as belonging to several alternative imaginaries and that it is part of several parallel histories. For such a possibility we are becoming more receptive than we used to be, precisely because we encounter cinema today in so many different manifestations, modalities and media: with the result that the discussion around digital cinema has opened up our awareness of the past in new ways, and this in turn has generated new impulses and fresh energies for thinking about cinema’s future. Traditionally, f ilm historians, when discussing the genealogies or pre-histories of the devices, practices, and technologies that have made possible the ‘invention’ of cinema, focus on four strands: the ancient arts of projection (camera obscura), the history of photography (light-sensitive substances), the modern developments in optics (telescope, magnifying glasses), and the peculiarities of human perception when visualizing movement (‘persistence of vision’). Film theories (of the ‘cinematic apparatus’) add to these the dominance since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of monocular perspectival representation in Western art, adopted by cinema when constraining the projected image within a rectangular frame. Concentrating on just some of these factors—the camera obscura, modern optics, and Renaissance perspective—one can draw up a chart of names and dates, of devices and discoveries that seem to lead, quite naturally and even inexorably, to the invention of cinema. While perspective projection depended on the camera obscura, modern optics as the science of light was re-thought and consolidated from various Greek and Arab sources by

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three generations of mathematicians-astronomers-philosophers.33 Some such chronological sequence of names and events tends to make up the conventional narrative, with brilliant men passing on their discoveries to each other. In the process they consolidate diverse observations and theories, refine practical gadgets and perfect scientific tools, until the various strands converge to produce serviceable prototypes or recognizable antecedents of what we are ultimately interested in, namely the projector and the cinematographe, a combination of the magic lantern and photographic camera. The ‘archaeological’ approach proceeds differently, presuming neither inevitability nor convergence. Instead, it emphasizes the heterogeneity of the cinematic apparatus—as hinted at by the discontinuous and improbably surreal assemblage of the magic lantern—and the photographic camera, driven by mechanisms borrowed from the machine gun and the sewing machine, using strips of cellulose first developed for gunpowder as well as a potentially lethal cocktail of assorted chemicals. What an archaeology might also highlight are a number of tensions and contradictions embedded in cinema as we know it, along with the complex genealogies of sound, which a shift in attention resituates or even resolves, but now within an enlarged context or extended time frame. One such inherent tension, for instance, is the very set-up of the cinematic apparatus and stems from the fact that the light emanating from the movie projector or beamer extends and scatters over a wide area: it fills the given space in varying degrees of density and intensity, not unlike sound which also ‘fills a space’. However, in order to achieve an ‘image’, this light has to be re-absorbed by a black surround and a rectangular frame, thus countering the scatter effect by bundling the light and redirecting it towards the carefully delimited part of the overall space that is the screen. Without such a frame, off-screen space would not be possible and the entire theory of suture would not have the hold that it has or did have on certain film 33 These three generations would comprise, among others, the names: Galileo (1564-1642) and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), followed by René Descartes (1596-1650) and Frans van Schooten (1615-1661) followed by Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), Robert Hooke (1635-1703), and Isaac Newton (1643-1727). Lens grinding, the optical microscope, and the refracting telescope were perfected around 1600 in the Netherlands, while Hooke and Huygens refined the practical uses of the camera obscura. Assisting artists as a drawing aid since the days of Leon Battista Alberti (1404 –1472), Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and including Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), the camera obscura was fitted with a lens by Giambattista della Porta (1535-1615) which in turn allowed Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) to convert the camera obscura into a dual-lens magnifying projection device, the magic lantern.

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theories. More generally, with screens today often so large that the image actually or potentially exceeds the human field of vision, this constraint inherent in the traditional cinema screen loses its normative status and becomes more noticeable as a historical convention hiding a contradiction. Furthermore, such unbounded images, projected—thanks to the technology first developed for anti-aircraft search lights—onto any surface whatsoever, open up the possibility of retroactively returning to a longstanding practice among the arts of projection that appeared to have become obsolete with the arrival of cinema, namely the phantasmagorias of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of, among others, Paul Philidor and Étienne-Gaspard Robert.34 This practice, once so prevalent and popular—and a highly significant metaphor for a philosopher such as G.W. Hegel35—has been known to film historians and is regularly mentioned in passing. However, it has only achieved the status of a ‘neglected’ tradition worth revisiting since our own visual environment once more resembles phantasmagoria spectacles.36

Mobility, Portability, Commodity Another tension that is also not unknown but often ignored is how cinema inscribes itself in the long history of making images mobile and portable, which takes us back to Renaissance Italy, the secularization of imagemaking, and the establishment of a market for pictures in the way that other goods are manufactured on demand and marketed. The move from fresco walls to oil painting is a complex one with far-reaching consequences, which among other things proves that such transitions and transformations are 34 Tom Gunning, “Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusions and Wonder: Towards a Cultural Optics of the Cinematic Apparatus,” in Andre Gaudreault, Catherine Russell, and Pierre Veronneau (eds.), The Cinema, A New Technology for the 20th Century, (Lausanne: Editions Payot 2004), 31-44. In this context, Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), offers “essays on […] the dream-like world of the eighteenth-century masquerade, magic-lantern shows, automata, and other surreal inventions of Enlightenment science, and the hallucinatory obsessions of Gothic f iction” (dust-jacket). See also Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 35 See, for instance, Stefan Andriopoulos, Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013, 67 36 I am thinking of visual displays that ‘fill’ a space rather than be focused and bounded, utilized by artists, as in the works of Krzysztof Wodiczko and Doug Aitken, Anthony McCall, and Mat Collishaw.

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neither linear nor gradual. One simple point to make is that a mobile picture can become a commodity, be bought and sold, traded and transported, owned and displayed in ways and places quite different from a mural commissioned by a monastery or a church. This process of mobility and portability affected both size and subject matter, but it also determined the mode of representation and made special sense of monocular perspective, reinforcing the spectator’s single point of view as if to ‘anchor’ the image via the sight lines or to compensate for the picture’s sudden mobility and variability in physical space. Photography is, of course, the medium that has most decisively intensified these ‘economic’ aspects of image-making and image trading and has accelerated the mobility of images as well as the ‘trading places’ between mechanical images and mass-produced objects in the form of commodities. The interesting question, which I raised in the introduction, of why the moving image relied so heavily on photography when electronic imagemaking and image transfer were already so close technologically and so speculatively fantasized might here find an answer of sorts. Cinema, as a photographic medium, was able to inherit and to exploit both traditions—that of wall paintings or murals and that of the miniature and oil printing—combining the advantages of size and extension provided by an image-wall with the framed and centered view of the oil painting as well as the attention to detail and close-up inherent first in the miniature and later in the photograph. Yet while getting the best of all possible image worlds, cinema also embedded another tension in its dispositif so that the different parameters of fixed and mobile, of the focused gaze and the wandering eye had to be renegotiated and played off against each other. It required the moving image to leave the cinema theater and make its way into the gallery space for us to become once more acutely aware of these parameters, so that a video and installation artist like Bill Viola can, as it were, rediscover for his films the Christological drama of the triptych altar piece of the Gothic cathedral and reinvent the interior of Giotto’s Scrovegni chapel in Padua for his Going forth by Day (2002) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. By a paradox that perhaps only the media archaeologist can fully appreciate, contemporary art is reinvesting in the unique aesthetic value of location and site specificity. This primacy of site artists sacrificed at the point in time when images became secular, and the need to create a market required mobility: patrons and primacy of site versus market and mobility would appear to constitute some of the trans-historical variables when it comes to the status of images.

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The ‘increased mobility and circulation’ argument about images since the ‘invention’ of easel painting, and thus their closer alignment with commodities which can be traded, owned and possessed is also a thesis advanced by Fred Jameson in his essay “The Existence of Italy”, and similar reflections can be found in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing.37 What this means for a genealogy of cinema is that the circulation and mobility of images in the form of framed pictures turns them into physical objects, while the material objects depicted become immaterial representations—a move often commented on in connection with Dutch still-life paintings (the ‘pronk’ pictures of the 1660s-1690s), where food and precious objects are arranged and displayed in ways that shop windows were to exhibit luxury goods in the grand department stores on the boulevards of Paris or on New York’s Park Avenue. Across a two-hundred-year gap, then, cinema around 1900 would be taking up this Dutch art of transubstantiation, ‘remediating’ it from painting, photography, and the shop window display to film, tableau, and the moving image.38 Indeed, cinema would thus not only be a storytelling medium but function also as a mediator that prepares and reshapes the physical world as image, picture, and spectacle in a process that only intensified and accelerated throughout the twentieth century. This led a political filmmaker like Harun Farocki to concede that even his kind of critical cinema inevitably contributed to ‘making the world superfluous’, as images absorb the real in the very act of representing the real.39 It is no secret that Hollywood movies are (among many other things) the site, the engine, and emblem for franchising, brand advertising, and continually repackaging the American Dream. But the admission of making the world superfluous also targets documentarists and any filmmaker who forces the real world (and real people) to compete with (their screen) images. The two chapters on the ‘Rube’ in this volume speak to the issue of objecthood and commodity, each with a different focus but both concerned with the relation of sight to touch, of eye to hand, of gazing to grasping, as 37 Fredric Jameson, “The Existence of Italy,” in Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992), 155-230; and John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972). See also Warren Buckland, “Delay of the Cinema Age,” in Winfried Noth (ed.), Semiotics of the Media (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997), 219-229. 38 Ann Friedberg has tracked these developments in two studies, which build on each other: Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). 39 Harun Farocki, “Making the World Superfluous: An Interview with Harun Farocki,” in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight Lines (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 177–92.

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well as with the fascination and fetish function that cinema inaugurates and colludes with as it intervenes in the world and interacts with the spectator. 40

Geometrical Optics and Physiological Optics Important in the ‘from … to’ linear narrative I have just sketched—from fresco wall and mural to oil painting, from easel painting in the studio to the easel al fresco in the landscape, from portable easel to portable photographic camera, and from portable photographic camera to the Lumières’ cinematograph–is to note the mobility of the image and the automation of its registration but also what resists this progression. Obstinately holding mobility in check—containing, focusing, and fixing it within the image—is the single point of view, itself subjected and directed by the rules of monocular representation but also, one could argue, specifically introduced to act as a counterpoint. Insofar as we associate cinema with this Renaissance model of perception and argue that this single point of view reinforces both bourgeois individualism and a strict subject-object division, we may want to hold on to the notion that cinema is based on an unresolved contradiction. Is it going to be resolved, now that our contemporary media landscape (of multiple screens, both big and small, both indoors and out in the open) and our contemporary media use (watching movies on our smartphones, using YouTube and Vimeo or Hulu and Netflix as our video store) encourage us—indeed oblige us—to adopt multiple points of entry and access (if not points of view), to be multi-tasking and to be flexible both in our object relations and our subjectivities?41 To be held in thrall by the double geometry of linear narrative and monocular perspective is now experienced more palpably as the arbitrary constraint it has always been, merely by the fact that other modes of interacting with moving images have become so 40 This last point implies once more that a certain subject position—one that translates physical fixity into psychic fixation—may be bound up with this mobility, making cinema inseparable from commodity fetishism (a position often ascribed to Walter Benjamin) but also doubly re-inscribing perspective as both symbolic form and the vector of phantasmatic possession (polemically sharpened into a gendered asymmetry in Laura Mulvey’s theory of the ‘male gaze’). 41 As an aside, it is worth reflecting on the fact that contemporary social media persuade us that every relation we have with the world is a subject-subject relation (in the form of friending, sharing, re-tweeting, etc.) rather than a subject-object relation (as in cinema). Yet closer to the truth may be that the companies that control these social media, as they aggregate our subjectivities, de facto treat us as objects, i.e. as primary sources of raw data, so that these subject-subject relations (the so-called “network effects’) are merely the cover-up for object-object relations.

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readily available and have found so little resistance in becoming habitual and commonplace. 42 Yet this is not the only conclusion one can reach. There are ways of thinking about cinema outside the constraints of the cinematic apparatus and past the apparent blockage that the ontology of photography has created for post-photographic cinema. Philosophically, it has been the revival of phenomenology on a broad front that is symptomatic of the blockage as it attempts to address the limits of the fixed geometry of representation. Yet media archaeology, too, should be able to rise to the challenge and offer an alternative genealogy that grounds cinema differently and shows how there are genealogies that can help us formulate such an alternative. For instance, in what might seem to be a counterintuitive and even counterfactual move, one can enlist Bazin—champion of cinematic automatism, proponent of the ontology of the photographic image, and counted among the phenomenologists of cinema—as also an eminent media archaeologist of cinema for whom photography is only one possible physical and metaphysical support.43 As recent scholarship has shown, there are many more Bazins, and one Bazin has always proposed plausible arguments for regarding cinema as part of a very long history of human preoccupation with mortality and death under the dual heading of preservation and afterlife. Cinema for Bazin belongs to the same spiritual urge, fed by anxiety and dread, out of which humans have wanted to preserve the dead by mummifying them. Reminding his readers, among other instances, also of the Turin shroud, Bazin insisted on cinema’s role as trace and index in the way that plaster casts and death masks preceded photography and at the same time were continued by photography, even to the point of eventually using the same negative-positive reversal in order to preserve the uncanny likeness of human beings after death, fixing their faces and expressions as if they were alive. 44 Defined in this way, cinema is both very ancient and very modern, 42 A further point should be added. If one follows the traditional genealogies of cinema— camera obscura, laterna magica, monocular perspective, a fixed geometry of representation, the photographic ontology—then the arguments for why this form of cinema is obsolete are not only hard to refute but also help to explain why certain media archaeologists are right in showing little interest in cinema as they attempt to reverse engineer the future in order to better manage the present. 43 I have written about André Bazin as media archaeologist at greater length elsewhere. See “A Bazinian Half-Century,” in Dudley Andrew and Hervé Jubert-Laurencin (eds.), Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory & its Afterlife (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 3-12. 44 Originally, of course, photography did not use the positive-negative reverse process. For instance, the daguerreotype does not have a negative: the metal film plate in the camera is developed as a positive. Each image is unique, and each daguerreotype is also reversed (mirror

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and therefore, as long as human beings fear death and wish for an afterlife that is both immanent and tangible, cinema will persist and survive. Bazin’s film history as media archaeology, in other words, makes room for a genealogy that embeds cinema in a history of opacity rather than transparency, of material objects like an envelope or a cast rather than identifying it solely with a view to be contemplated and as a window on the world. In Bazin, these alternatives do not preclude each other but exist side by side. Similarly, I believe it should be possible to develop a media-archaeological account from which analogue cinema and digital cinema can be seen to be equally valid if differently weighted ways of understanding both the material basis of cinema and its different manifestations over time, so that apparent ‘returns’—such as the ‘return’ to site specificity, the ‘return’ of 3D, or the ‘return’ of phantasmagoria as installation and of the diorama as triptychs of multiple plasma screens—need not be plotted on a chronological timeline and therefore need not be seen as returns at all but instead appear as ever-present resources that filmmakers and artists are able to deploy as options and possibilities. Once again, however, media archaeology appears in its ambivalent role as symptom: on the one hand, it suggest a freeing up of historical inevitability in favor of a database logic, and on the other hand, it turns the past into a self-service counter for all manner of appropriations. Can film history benefit from media archaeology opening up parallel trajectories that do not split analogue from digital but assign epistemological stringency also to today’s seemingly hybrid cinema? We might start with the nature of light itself, its propagation through space, its absorption by physical bodies, and its perception by a sentient subject. The discussion might take us to the Dutch Republic around 1650, when a young Christiaan Huygens, brilliant mathematician and indefatigable experimenter, was writing a study of probability calculus, which already in 1657 challenged linearity as a causal organizational principle.45 Acquainted with professional lens grinders such as Baruch Spinoza and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, both of whom made significant advances in constructing better microscopes and telescopes, Huygens in 1659 sketched the first drawings of a working magic lantern. Interested throughout his life in the science of light and projection, image). The similarity between the death mask and the photograph still holds but would then lie in the photograph bearing the direct imprint from reality. 45 Christian Huygens, “Van Rekeningh in Spelen van Geluck,” translated into Latin as De ratiociniis in ludo aleae (“On Reasoning in Games of Chance”, 1657). See also Anders Hald, A History of Probability and Statistics and Their Applications before 1750 (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 1990), 106.

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he devoted a considerable amount of his research to elaborating what was then a minority view, namely the ‘wave’ theory of light. 46 Huygens discussed optics also with Isaac Newton and knew about the controversy between Newton and Robert Hooke over the properties of light (wave or particle). Given Newton’s towering reputation, it was assumed that Newton was right (i.e., that light is made up of particles that travel in straight lines), and for many practical purposes (including the projection of a transparent slide), the particle theory of light seemed both confirmed and adequate. Yet as we know, the nature of light never became an either/ or, open-and-shut case, and today the particle-or-wave argument is one, albeit simplified, way of distinguishing between two kinds of optics: a geometrical optics and a physical or physiological optics. It is geometrical optics (where light travels in rays along straight lines and may be absorbed, reflected, and penetrate transparent surfaces) that by and large underpins our traditional genealogy of cinema, implying that from the magic lantern, as developed by Athanasius Kircher, a direct and uninterrupted evolutionary line leads to the cinematograph and thus to the cinematic apparatus, i.e. what I have referred to as the fixed geometry of representation. As someone who brought together in his thinking innovative (and alternative) theories of light and interference with even more avant-garde theories of contingency and probability, Huygens would seem to deserve a recognizable place in today’s media archaeology of both cinema and the digital media. The f irst to challenge geometrical optics in modern times from a Foucault-inspired perspective was Jonathan Crary in Techniques of the Observer (1990), a media archaeological account in all but name, by an art historian documenting the diversity and heterogeneity of visual culture in the nineteenth century. In a perceptive review, Tom Gunning highlights the book’s significance for film theory and film history: Crary’s originality lies in interrelating [the romantic valuation of the subjective and the embodied] to the nineteenth century’s technical investigation of the physiology of perception. The model for perception no longer parallels the rational and disembodied vision of the camera obscura but rather founds itself on an actual examination and, in Foucault’s sense, discipline of the physical organs of the senses. 47 46 Christiaan Huygens, Traité de la Lumière (Leiden: Pieter van der Aa, 1690). For a more detailed account, see Alan E. Shapiro, “Kinematic Optics: A Study of the Wave Theory of Light in the Seventeenth Century,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences vol. 11, no. 2/3 (1973): 134-266. 47 Tom Gunning, “Techniques of the Observer,” Film Quarterly vol. 46, no. 1 (Autumn, 1992): 52.

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Crary, however, not only compares the scientists’ account of perception with artists’ experiments with different ways of seeing. It is pre-cinematic devices such as the phenakistoscope or the hand-held stereoscope—popular pastimes that were once found in almost every bourgeois home—that hold the key to the changed physiological optics. As Gunning notes: The “philosophical toys”, devices that produced optical illusions of motion or three-dimensionality, resulted directly from these physiological investigations, usually as demonstrations of recently discovered properties of vision. In contrast to the camera obscura, such devices claimed no access to a stable reality. Rather, the realism they produced fascinated observers precisely through its illusory power, recreating a realistic simulacrum independent of an actual referent. The physiology of the eye, the body of the observer herself, produced the superimposed images of the thaumascope, the apparent motion of the phenakistoscope, or the three-dimensional illusion of the stereoscope. Instead of an image of the tangible exterior world created by the reassuring illumination of sunlight, these visual devices cast light on the dark processes of the body, the ability of perception to be manipulated divorced from an actual referential reality. […] Crary’s thesis breathtakingly ruptures the myth that three-dimensional illusionism [of Renaissance perspective] has a constant ahistorical significance. 48

Crary’s rehabilitation of physiological optics as having existed throughout the nineteenth century alongside geometrical optics (with the most popular optical toys and vision machines being based on physiological optics) would constitute a first step also towards understanding how and why, in contemporary cinema (and film studies), there is a strong tendency to think of spectatorship once more in terms of embodied perception (i.e., immersivity, interactivity, tactility). However, while most film theorists proposing such a ‘turn’ to embodiment support their case either with the ‘return’ of phenomenology (Merleau Ponty) or by applying theories developed in the cognitive sciences (Antonio Damasio’s writings about the ‘embodied mind’, for instance), the media archaeological argument would derive such a notion of embodiment both from the contrasting, complementary, and still debated theories of optics that first divided the minds in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, precisely when the magic lantern became a popular source of entertainment. From the evidence adduced by 48 Ibid.

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Crary it seems that embodied perception in the form of physiological optics was indeed prevalent and typical of much of nineteenth-century visual culture. Giving equal weight to physiological optics alongside geometrical optics in a media archaeology that seeks to excavate alternative genealogies of cinema would therefore be in line with the argument that contemporary cinema is best understood in terms of embodiment—even without invoking digitization or the digital media as the main determinant. In other words, once monocular perspective—the prime symbolic form that gave geometric optics its normative status—is no longer the default value of our ways of seeing and our modes of representation, one begins to discover ample evidence that suggests that in the history of visual media there have been vision machines, optical toys, and para-cinematic devices that are either explicitly based on or implicitly acknowledge physiological optics as opposed to geometrical optics. Extending Crary’s argument, one could say that a physiological optics rather than geometrical optics as starting point makes room also for considering cinema more in terms of energy and intensity, with images regarded as emanations and presences rather than as iconic likenesses or ‘representations’. This I have done in several of the preceding chapters, albeit on the theoretical basis more of Whitehead and Benjamin than Hooke or Huygens. Likewise, a wave theory of light also brings the image into closer proximity with sound, with sonic spaces and sound design. Long recognized as one of the key changes that has transformed mainstream cinema since the mid-1970s, sound continues to shape today’s film experience, as discussed in the chapter on “The ‘Return’ of 3D”. Retroactively, Walter Ruttmann’s theory of the ‘optical wave’, as discussed in the chapter on Ruttmann, also fits into this line of thought, underscoring his importance for a media archaeology of cinema that pays appropriate attention to sound.49 A name that comes up in Crary as well as in my discussion of energy and entropy is that of Hermann von Helmholtz, who in this conjuncture might well emerge as a key figure, in whose work the different media-archaeological accounts of cinema intersect. Helmholtz is the author of the foundational treatise of physiological optics, the Handbuch der physiologischen Optik as well as a study of the physiological basis of music, Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik.50 49 See also Michael Cowan, Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde Film – Advertising –Modernity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014). 50 Hermann von Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (Leipzig: L. Voss, 1867) and Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1863).

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Helmholtz was also a crucial figure, along with Clerk-Maxwell, Faraday, and Hertz, in analyzing electromagnetic fields and thus in laying not only some of the groundwork that harnessed electricity for the generation of energy as both labor and light but also for electronics—another way of controlling electricity, in the form of circuits, switches, and relays—as the basis of signal and information processing, as well as radio and telecommunication. Given the dependence of the digital image on precisely these functions and properties of electricity, it may offer the opportunity to align the complementary fields of physiological optics with those electromagnetic theories of circuits and relays, where waves, interference, diffusion, and diffraction as well as energies, perturbations, and intensities play a significant role. Almost all of the physics that has made possible the Internet, wi-fi, and satellite transmission relies on sophisticated versions of the wave theory of light and on electromagnetism. It therefore makes sense to think of the moving image as sharing some of these properties as well: not only reaching the retina and stimulating the ocular nerves but also affecting the other senses, impacting and enveloping the body, now considered as a total perceptual surface and receptive to the energy fields that surround it and into which it is immersed. For instance, blockbuster films at the multiplex increasingly depart from the framed view, affording the spectator neither a fixed horizon nor images at the human scale: think of Avatar, Life of Pi, Gravity or Interstellar: deep space, the earth’s oceans, or other planets seem merely the narrative pretext for altering our spatial coordinates in order to re-calibrate perception by disorienting our vision. At the micro level, a similar tendency operates in inverse: the image comes too close, both visually and viscerally, for the viewer to gauge scale or to keep her distance: “GoPro aesthetics”—i.e. small cameras as used in certain documentary films (I am thinking of Leviathan,51 immersing us in deep sea fishing)—frequently reinforce and exploit these possibilities inherent in the digital image of conveying tactile sensations and haptic qualities and thereby making the image appeal to the sensorial register of touch and the sensitivity of skin. As examples of physiological optics, such films not only render images more tactile but also fill the space and are absorbed by our senses through their highly elaborate spatial sound design. Through this surround sound, we receive sensory information not only from all directions but also to different parts of our body—the ear, of course, but also the skin and the solar plexus—which means that the main organ of perception is no longer 51 http://www.arretetoncinema.org/leviathan/

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the centered eye of Renaissance perspective with everything aligning along the visual cone but a different kind of scanning of the optical as well as the sensory field, leading to an involvement of the body. It is in this sense that the whole body becomes a perceptual surface—eyes, ears, skin, belly, fingers. Realignments of the (embodied) mind and (perspectival) space might well be one of the indications that, with regards to vision, a different episteme is about to establish itself right across culture, from avant-garde film to installation art to mainstream cinema.

Media Archaeology as the Ideology of the Digital? One of my main arguments for media archaeology not only as the most appropriate contemporary form of historical research, in that it is of its time and for its time, but more specifically the argument for a film history as media archaeology would be that since the beginning of the twenty-first century, our visual culture has undergone several kinds of change. And while on the surface it seems to be connected to and even ‘caused’ by the digital turn, a closer look and a wider horizon—i.e., a media archaeological perspective—would suggest that this ‘turn’ is also a ‘return’ to an earlier engagement with images except that ‘return’ implies a linear sequence, which media archaeology explicitly sets out to ‘upturn’ and to distribute spatially rather than chronologically. Does this help us answer the initial question: what is or was cinema (good) for? I tried to make an argument that, for much of its history, cinema has not only served as the prime storytelling medium of the twentieth century but also greatly accelerated the mobility and circulation of images as pictures of the world and thereby aided the commodity status of objects as images and images as objects. These (ideological) functions, however, have now largely been taken over by different media configurations (television, the Internet) and the respective institutions and corporate entities that control and own them. It thereby ‘frees’ cinema for other purposes and functions so that its ‘obsolescence’ may be the most paradoxical but also the most appropriate name for this ‘freedom’—not from practical use but from ideological servitude. Yet this freedom, which I have epitomized as a “poetics of obsolescence”, may also have a hidden underside, as it were, which can take several forms. First, media archaeology, despite the brave calls for going against the grain, for making a last stand against the tyranny of the new, for digging into the past in order to discover there an as yet unrealized future, nonetheless

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does not escape our culture’s most prominent pathology: the need to preserve the past, to fetishize ‘memory’ and ‘materiality’ in the form of trauma and loss, even as we lose faith in history and make our lives every more dependent on the ‘virtual’. Second, media archaeology has carved out a disciplinary niche for itself in media studies and the field of new media of the 1990s because it offered a historical perspective that countered the claimed memory loss of digital media and what Wendy Chun calls “the enduring ephemerality” of Internet culture. In this sense, the insistence on the relevance of the old and the obsolete may well be the necessary double to mirror and counter the celebration of the new we have been living. After all, obsolescence is a term that not only belongs to the discourse of capitalism and technology but speaks from the position of relentless innovation and ‘creative destruction’, which cannot but include media archaeology as part of the ideology of digital media. Third, media archaeology, especially in the realm of media art, has been instrumental in promoting the notion that everything that used to be non-art can become art. This is not altogether new because it is the axiom at the heart of conceptual art and pop art from Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol. Yet it, too, risks being merely the flip side of the general appropriation of the past for the benefit of our corporate future and thus merely the lure or bait that the beauty of the no-longer-useful holds out instead of being the resisting reminder of unfulfilled potential and the reservoir of utopian promise, which is how Benjamin regarded the objet trouvé in his essays on Surrealism and photography.52 The consequence is that a media archaeology considering itself cutting edge in the contemporary art world is not only a proxy avant-garde. It allows every past scientific experiment or pseudo-scientific practice, every failed media device, every obsolete technology, every disproven theory, and every mad hatter’s invention to be revived as “art” or recycled as “vintage” and 52 Hal Foster, too, seems not entirely convinced that these hopes are still tenable: “For the Surrealists to haunt these outmoded spaces [i.e. “the arcades and interiors, the exhibitions and panoramas”], according to Benjamin, was to tap “the revolutionary energies” that were trapped there. But it is less utopian to say simply that the Surrealists registered the mnemonic signals encrypted in these structures-signals that might not otherwise have reached the present. This deployment of the outmoded can query the totalist assumptions of capitalist culture, and its claim to be timeless; it can also remind this culture of its own wish symbols, and its own forfeited dreams of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Can this mnemonic dimension of the outmoded still be mined today, or is the outmoded now outmoded too – another device of fashion?”, Hal Foster, “The ABCs of Contemporary Design,” October 100 (Spring 2002): 195-196.

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“classic”. Museums and art spaces are reverting to the curiosity cabinets from which they emerged in the nineteenth century, repeating the imperial and colonizing gesture of the collector of captured exotica, except that the wonders of nature and the noble savages of bygone times are now the remnants of the industrial revolution, of the first machine age, of consumer culture—which includes cinema as that age’s “last machine” (Hollis Frampton). Might it be that ‘culture’ and ‘art’ are in the process of usurping industry and technology rather than the other way round (as T.W. Adorno and others had predicted and feared)? In the face of an electronic present that exceeds us at every turn and eludes our grasp, media archaeology in art spaces becomes symptomatic of the material fetishes we require in order to reassure ourselves of our material existence, or rather: in the mirror of these media machines’ sculptural objecthood, we can mourn and celebrate our own ephemerality and obsolescence. Making a fetish of obsolescence would thus be part of media archaeology’s ideological function by giving digital media not only a pedigree but also a ‘soul’, allowing the nostalgic appropriation of anything that preceded it. The digital is such a powerful lure, not merely because it thinks it owns the future and can accommodate every past, and not merely because it puts an end to the humanities and enlightenment humanism, itself endlessly critiqued and deconstructed since Nietzsche and Heidegger. The digital is such a lure because it promises to put an end to the human as we know it, which is to say, an end also to the human condition—including our individual finitude. Who can tell the promise from the threat? Even a media archaeology that recognizes itself as yet one more symptom of how our current way of life is unsustainable, both morally and ecologically, or thinks of itself serving as the emergency break on the express train that is travelling on a bridge to nowhere, does not escape the risk of merely being the whistle that blows off steam. On the other hand, a media archaeology that promotes itself as a materialist epistemology of knowledge reflects the awareness that all knowledge (of self and the world) is henceforth (or as Kittler would say, has always been) technologically mediated. Therefore, the epistemological bases of how we know what we know, of what is evidence and what is presence, of what is material and what is embodied, of what is dead and what alive—all these (ultimately ‘ontological’) questions must be put to the media technologies that surround us. Their study cannot be reduced to the engineering blueprint of their mechanisms, nor is their meaning to be sought solely in their use, since so much of what makes us human would seem to be baked into them, if we follow Benjamin, Foucault, or Kittler. It

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gives media archaeology—as the determinate ‘reading’ of these technologies, in the spirit of recovering the fantasies sedimented in their functions and reviving the aspirations embedded in their design—the status of an allegorical device by which the human and the machine interpret but also interpenetrate each other. The more ‘life’ becomes ‘designed’, the more reality becomes ‘virtual’, and the more ‘intelligence’ becomes ‘artificial’, the more, it seems, ‘art’ has to include ‘non-art’ and be lifelike: glitchy, objectbased, and un-intended (or: failure-prone, thingy, random, and contingent). Such an ‘allegorical’ archaeology epitomizes the two-way processes and encapsulates their mutual compatibility. My brief example of geometrical optics and physiological optics as being two sides of the phenomenon of light, with both optics feeding into what we know as ‘cinema’, was meant to show how a binary divide might be overcome by enlarging the context, as it were, and extending the horizon. It does not dissipate the fundamental ambivalence of media archaeology but rather gives this ambivalence its place as placeholder (of the human). As the discourse that shadows the digital (indeed as what may have been secreted by the digital) but also at that which resists the digital, media archaeology is the symptom of the disease of which it also hopes to be the cure: deconstructing and reconstructing the human after the digital and through the technological. It is in the interstices of such a media archaeology that our view of cinema of the twenty-first century is taking shape. Having handed over its primarily ideological functions to television and the Internet, cinema is ever more part of life, which is to say, ever more omnipresent, filling not only each available screen but every accessible space: becoming invisible, as it were, by virtue of its ubiquity. In this respect, Hollywood event-movies are in full alignment with the digital culture in which they thrive and with the futures this culture presumes to own.53 We seem to have come full circle: digital cinema revives and reinstates nineteenth-century physiological optics, ‘harking back to’ phantasmagoria spectacles, to panoramas and dioramas, bridging the divide between interior and exterior and creating 53 Mark Zuckerberg, on acquiring the VR system Oculus for Facebook, proclaimed that “Oculus’s mission is to enable you to experience the impossible. Their technology opens up the possibility of completely new kinds of experiences.” This oxymoronic ‘possibility of experiencing the impossible” was advertised under the heading: “The Samsung Gear VR Is Your Window Into The Future”, accompanied by the picture of a man peering at us while wearing a headset that effectively makes him blind to his surroundings. http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/20/samsunggear-vr/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 last accessed 20 November 2015.

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perceptions that augment or add reality to the world rather than represent or reflect the tangible realities of the world. Sidelined though not suppressed are geometrical optics, which—ever since Descartes and Locke defined ‘man’ by a strict subject-object divide—indexed the camera obscura as the most appropriate metaphor for the rational mind. Emulated by the cinematograph, the optics of the camera obscura led cinema (with the exception of the brief period of early cinema, when a film like The Big Swallow could swallow up not just the cameraman but the entire episteme of geometrical optics) towards the disembodied eye and the mobile view, useful ideological tools, as we saw, for both dominance and discipline. If cinema’s digital reincarnation seems to ‘undo’ all this by once more giving the spectator both body and sight, and the image both volume and site, it is helpful to remind oneself that we are dealing not with antagonistic or incompatible systems but with the dual manifestations of light itself, complemented by the (aural and visual) genealogies of imprint and trace, of index and signal. On the other hand, cinema’s purported obsolescence—initially debated around the nature of indexicality, photographic and post-photographic, but now put in the wider context of instantaneity, interactivity, and simultaneity by a media archaeology focused on television and the electronic media— also means that the cinema’s freedom from ideological tasks—its indifference, its inoperativeness, its uselessness—can also be assigned a different value. This value dovetails with the moving image’s increasing importance for museums and galleries, given that one of the traditional conditions of an object or a practice for entering the art space is its ‘autonomy’ and thus its freedom from practical uses, from ‘context’ and its independence from instrumentalization: the post-photographic obsolescence of a certain (idea of) cinema would thus converge with a newly acquired status as ‘art’, at least within the definitions of art as conventionally formulated. Film history as media archaeology can thus be understood as also a way of readying cinema for this special kind of inoperativeness, the one we associate with art. In other words, film theorists do not have to claim for cinema the status of art a priori as they have so often done since the 1920s, with the consequence that—as the study of early cinema has shown—in pursuit of this ideological project, vital aspects of cinema’s history and pre-history were suppressed, ignored, and even deliberately distorted. Instead, cinema in the twenty-first century has become art: now in Walter Benjamin’s sense of something taken out of circulation, thereby preserving, accumulating, or setting free energies inherent in the useless and in the free play of the disinterested. Such a dimension of art would have emerged

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out of the medium’s material histories, treated as allegorical archaeology rather than floating above history in the timeless realm of the beautiful and the true. Here, too, a circle seems to complete itself: media archaeology, initially indifferent or even opposed to the question of whether cinema was an art form, turns out to have provided—under the conditions of a digital culture, to which it partly owes its existence—the arguments for cinema to assume the historical as well as theoretical status of art, assuring it of a future thanks to it being an intermezzo, a detour, and obsolete. Does this answer my question ‘what is cinema (good) for’? Probably not in any exhaustive way and possibly not even to anyone’s satisfaction, but hopefully it supplies enough ‘conceptual friction’, enough ‘reading against the grain’ and ‘food for thought’, to put the question on the agenda.



Media Archaeology – Selected Bibliography

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Nead, Lynda. The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography and Film around 1900. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Parikka, Jussi. Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. —. Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. —. What is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity, 2012. Parks, Lisa. Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Perriault, Jacques. Mémoires de l’ombre et du son: Une archéologie de l’audio-visuel. Paris: Flammarion, 1981. Pias, Claus. Computer Spiel Welten. Berlin: diaphanes, 2002. Rabinovitz, Lauren, and Abraham Geil, eds. Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Riis, Morten. “The Media Archaeological Repairman.” Organised Sound 18, no. 3 (December 2013): 255-265. Roca, José. Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence. New York: Independent Curators International, 2007. Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Rossel, Deac. Laterna Magica: Magic Lantern 1. Stuttgart: Füsslin, 2008. —. Living Pictures: the origins of the movies, New York: State University of New York Press, 1998. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Angela Davies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995 [1983]. —. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986 [1977]. Schwartz, Vanessa R. Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Schwartz, Vanessa R., and Leo Charney, eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Screech, Timon. The Lens within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan. 1996. Reprint, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002. Siegert, Bernhard. Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System. Translated by Kevin Repp. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1999 [1993]. Smith, Mark M., ed. Hearing History: A Reader. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago/ London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Stafford, Barbara Maria, and Frances Terpak. Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001. Sternberger, Dolf. Panorama of the Nineteenth Century: How Nineteenth Century Man Saw Himself and His World and How He Experienced History. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Urizen Books, 1977 [1938]. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Media Archaeology – Selec ted Bibliogr aphy

395

—. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Strauven, Wanda, ed. The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. Thomas, Brook. The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. Tichindeleanu, Ovidiu. The Graphic Sound: An Archeology of Sound, Technology and Knowledge at 1900 (PhD dissertation). Binghamton: State University of New York, 2008. Tomas, David. Beyond the Image Machine: A History of Visual Technologies. London: Continuum, 2004. Toulmin, Vanessa, and Simon Popple, eds. Visual Delights: Essays on the Popular and Projected Image in the 19th Century. Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 2001. —. Visual Delights II: Exhibition and Reception. Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2005. Tresch, John. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Väliaho, Pasi. Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema Circa 1900. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. Veeser, H. Aram, ed. The New Historicism. New York: Routledge, 1989. Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2008 [2000]. Warburg, Aby. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance. Translated by David Britt. Los Angeles: Getty Research Instititute, 1999. Wark, McKenzie. The Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Warner, Marina. Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Weium, Frode, and Tim Boon, eds. Material Culture and Electronic Sound. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2013. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Fontana, 1974. Willoughby, Dominique. Le cinéma graphique: Une histoire des dessins animés, des jouets d’optique au cinéma numérique. Paris: Les editions textuel, 2009. Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. Kittler and the Media. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. Winston, Brian. Media Technology and Society: A History. From the Telegraph to the Internet. London: Routledge, 1998. Zielinski, Siegfried. Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History. Translated by Gloria Custance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999 [1989]. —. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. Translated by Gloria Custance. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006 [2002]. —. Zur Geschichte des Videorecorders. Berlin: Wissenschaftsverlag Volker Spiess, 1986. Zielinski, Siegfried, and Silvia Wagnermaier, eds. Variantology 1: On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies. Cologne: König, 2007.

396 

Film History as Media Archaeology

Zielinski, Siegfried, and David Link, eds. Variantology 2: On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies. Cologne: König, 2007. Zielinski, Siegfried, and Eckhard Fürlus, eds. Variantology 3: On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies in China and Elsewhere. Cologne: König, 2008. —. Variantology 4: On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies in the Arabic-Islamic World and Beyond. Cologne: König, 2010. —. Variantology 5: Neapolitan Affairs; On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies. Cologne: König, 2011.



Index of Film Titles

24 Hour Psycho 132, 342 Adventures of Tintin, The 270 After Lumière 109 âge d’or, L’ 161 Alice in Wonderland 270, 275, 292 Anaglyph Tom 286 Apocalypse Now 279 Arbeitsdienst 164 Arrival of a Train 200, 269, 283 Artist, The 279 Asphalt 158 Atlantic 158 Avatar 270-272, 275, 289, 296, 382 Beowulf 270 Berlin, die Sinfonie der Grossstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Big City) 161, 170, 174, 183, 314 Bête Humaine, La 269 Big Swallow, The 31, 284, 387 Bin Jip 291 Black Diamond Express 200 Blackmail 141 blaue Engel, Der 148 blonder Traum, Ein 141 Blues Brothers 247 Boat Leaving Harbor 310 Breaking Bad 63 Büchse der Pandora, Die 158 Bwana Devil 271 Cabinet des Dr Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari) 139, 173 Capitalism: Slavery 285, 286 Cave of Forgotten Dreams 270, 289 Chinoise, La 109 Citizen Kane 141 City Symphony 172, 314, 319 Clock, The 345 Coraline 275, 291, 292 Corner in Wheat, A 284 Corrections Please 109 Countryman’s First Sight of the Animated Pictures, The 199 Creature from the Black Lagoon 271, 289 Deep Play 297 Déjà Vu 206, 207 Deutsche Panzer 170 Deutsche Waffenschmiede 170 Deutscher Rundfunk / Tönende Welle 157, 178, 183, 184 Dial M for Murder 272 Disorient Express 286

Donnie Darko 206, 320 Dr Mabuse 140 Drei von der Tankstelle, Die 141 Easy Rider 272 Einbrecher (Burglars) 147, 152 Erl King, The 249 Explosion of a Motor Car 309 Eye/Machine 297, 302 Fantasmagorie 311 Fantomas 160 Feind im Blut 186 Film gegen die Volkskrankheit Krebs, Ein 186 Fin du Monde 168 Frau, nach der man sich sehnt, Die 158 Fred Ott’s Sneeze 221 French Line, The 272 Gesolei 186 Ghost Dance 313 Glückskinder 141 Going forth by Day 374 Goldfinger 215 Golem, The 139 Grandma’s Reading Glasses 284 Gravity 382 Great Train Robbery, The 283 Green Hornet, The 270 Hallo Caesar 140 Harry Potter 86 Homeland 63 Honda Cog 214-220, 224, 227 House o Cards 63 House of Wax 271 How it feels to be run over 309 Hugo 269, 292 I Thought I was Seeing Convicts 297 Ice Age 275 Ich bei Tag und Du bei Nacht 141 Ich küsse Ihre Hand Madam 151 Images of the World and Inscription of War 297 Inception 320 Ingenious Soubrette, The 31, 284 Inland Empire 320 Interstellar 382 It’s Late 313 Jahre der Entscheidung 164 Jaws 279 Jazz Singer, The 148, 158, 204

398  Jurassic Park 46 Kameradschaft 140 King Kong 232 Kings of the Road 370 Kuhle Wampe 140 Labor in A Single Shot 302 Land ohne Frauen, Das 158 Lauf der Dinge, Der (Way Things Go, The) 216-220, 224, 227 Leopard, The 74 Let There Be Whistleblowers 286 Leviathan 382 Lichtspiel Opus 1 173 Lied einer Nacht, Das (Tell me Tonight) 141-143, 145-154 Lied für Dich, Ein 151 Life of an American Fireman 357 Life of Pi 382 Line Describing a Cone 287, 311 Looking for Alfred 343 Lord of the Rings 86 Lost 63 M 145, 180 Mad Men 63 Madame Dubarry 140 Magician, The 311 Man with a Movie Camera 57, 255 Manuscript Found in Saragossa 224 Mary Jane’s Mishap 309 Melodie der Welt 157, 168, 174, 178-182 Metropolis 314 Milky Way, The 224 Minority Report 206 Musketeers of Pig Alley 284 mystères de Château de Dé, Les 161 mystères de Paris, Les 160 Nanook of the North 182 Nashville 279 Nibelungen, Die 232 North by Northwest 240 Nosferatu 139 Nostalgia 109 One from the Heart 234 Ontic Antics Starring Laurel And Hardy; Bye Molly 286 Opus (i-v) 170, 172, 173, 183, 185, 187 Orphee 207 Outer and Inner Space 285 Palindromes 210 Pandora’s Box 140

Film History as Media Archaeology

Panoramic View of Niagara Falls In Winter 198 Parisian Dance 200 Phantom of Liberty, The 210 Phoenix Tapes, The 343 Pina 270, 289 Rashomon 249 Razzle-Dazzle 286 Roadrunner 219 Rocky Horror Picture Show 247 Rough Sea At Dover 198 Serene Velocity 109 Seven Chances 313 Shock Labyrinth 3D 291 Shrek Forever After 270 Shrek 275 singende Stadt, Die 151 Singin’ in the Rain 152 Singing Fool, The 148 Sonata 249 Song of Ceylon 182 Sopranos, The 63 Sous le toits de Paris 140 Stahltier, Das 182, 184 Star Wars 86, 235, 279, 289 Stewardesses, The 272 Student of Prague, The 139 Swallower of Rats, The 310 Testament of Dr Mabuse , The 140, 145, 146, 152, 153 Threepenny Opera, The 140 Through a Scanner Darkly, 320 Time Delay Rooms 285 Titanic 46 Tom Tom the Piper’s Son 109 Toy Story 3 270, 275 Toy Story 46 Tristram Shandy 210 Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) 170, 182 Two Sides to Every Story 285 Uncle Josh At the Moving Picture Show 199, 200, 207 Up 275, 290 Vertigo 127, 207, 240 Ways of Seeing 375 Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit 166 Weihnachtsglocken 54, 284 Wire, The 63 Workers Leaving the Factory 109, 302, 322



Index of Key Words

3-D 94, 255, 256, 262 Allegory (allegorical) 18n4, 29, 54, 65, 93, 143, 153, 202, 204, 322, 348, 386, 388 Appropriation 22, 47, 73, 74, 104, 174, 181, 217, 269, 296, 341, 342, 345, 353, 359, 384, 385 Archaeology passim Archive 19, 50, 53, 58, 59, 90, 154, 168n30, 187, 238, 262, 331, 337, 339, 342, 344, 346, 347, 351, 358, 365 Art spaces 13, 22, 46, 47, 343, 385, 387 Attention 18n4, 90, 126, 152, 173, 191-196, 198, 203, 205, 207, 214, 275n14, 276, 309, 310, 324-327, 351, 372 Attention economy 193, 310, 325, 326 Attraction 61, 76-78, 94, 109, 151, 157, 158, 195, 245, 255, 265, 270, 271, 274, 276, 293, 305, 308, 310, 327, 333 Auteur 17, 18, 47, 86, 187, 198, 218, 219 Avant-garde 22, 31, 36n51, 37, 38, 47, 51, 54, 61, 66, 76-80, 83, 85, 101, 104, 105, 107, 109, 111, 129, 139, 142, 155, 157, 160-169, 174, 176, 181-185, 194, 198, 212, 216, 236, 255, 263, 282, 286, 289, 299, 326, 331, 342, 343, 347, 355, 379, 383, 384 Black box (white cube) 125, 128, 130, 132, 205n25, 206, 344 Bologna (Il cinema ritrovato) 42, 79n14, 331, 355 Camera Obscura 24, 108, 282n33, 287, 311, 349, 371, 372n33, 377n42, 379, 380, 387 Causality 32, 39, 40, 43, 59, 63, 64, 80, 85, 209, 219, 320, 337, 349, 359-365 Retroactive- 80, 85 Chronophotography 23, 48, 88, 120, 134, 221, 283, 306-307, 321, 323, 333, Cinema as art 18, 20, 164, 356 Cinema of Attractions 42, 52, 61, 77-80, 84, 95-97, 120, 192, 198, 199, 236, 255, 290, 355 Cinematic apparatus 19, 24, 25, 37, 54, 82, 103-108, 114, 121, 126, 128, 129, 133, 134, 147, 259, 261, 263-265, 284, 287, 305, 306, 343, 358, 371, 372, 377, 379 Cinematographe 38, 55, 72, 120, 312, 372 Connectivity 40, 43, 64, 66, 92, 98 Convergence 32, 48, 61, 66, 72, 74, 75, 81, 83, 86, 87, 90-95, 113, 147, 153, 231, 251, 343, 359, 372 Media convergence 93, 359 Medienverbund 112, 113 Counterfactual history 23n19, 53-55, 99, 365, 377 Creative Destruction 40, 112, 335, 348, 384

Data (data mining, big data) 18, 26, 42, 59, 60, 65, 99, 102, 108, 122, 123, 131, 132, 134, 173, 192, 195-197, 202, 203, 209-211, 223, 256-258, 264, 266, 273, 280, 288, 295, 297, 299, 304-306, 324, 327, 338, 339, 363-369, 376n41 Dead Media 41, 47, 334n8 ‘Death of Cinema’ 17, 19, 46, 76, 102, 258, 301, 332, 343, 354 Deep Time 44, 56 Diegesis (diegetic) 61, 76, 96-98, 140, 144, 146, 152, 203-207, 223-226, 262 Digital (digitization) 13, 17, 18n4, 22n18, 23, 26, 36-42, 45-53, 56-58, 61, 62, 64-66, 68, 72-104, 109, 112, 113, 128, 129, 132, 134, 187, 205, 207, 212, 213, 219, 224, 231-266, 269, 270, 274, 275, 279, 280, 286, 287, 290, 292, 293, 295, 298, 299, 302, 303, 306, 311, 312, 320, 332, 334n8, 335, 336, 338, 340, 341, 343, 345, 346, 347, 349, 353n7, 354, 357, 358, 361-365, 367, 369, 370, 371, 378, 379, 381-388 Digital cinema 37, 41, 45, 48, 50, 52, 65, 96, 231-266, 371, 378, 386 Discursive formation 33, 34 Dispositif 46, 101-136, 146-149, 205, 206, 264, 301, 305, 319, 331, 374 Distraction 127, 156n5, 192n1, 193-194, 196, 226, 270, 319, 322-323 Early Cinema 22, 24, 27, 30-33, 36-39, 41, 42, 46, 48-56, 60, 61, 69, 74-80, 82, 83, 85, 87, 88, 90, 93-98, 109, 110, 120, 123, 124, 130, 134, 148, 191, 194, 197, 198, 200, 203, 204, 206, 208, 210, 253, 255, 258, 260-262, 278, 283, 292, 309n11, 317, 327, 331, 333, 354-358, 361, 365, 371, 387 Electricity 26, 89, 195, 213, 257, 303, 304, 319, 325, 370, 382 Electromagnetism 58, 195, 370, 382 Entropy 124, 223, 226, 227, 301, 304, 306, 317, 320, 322, 326, 381 Epistemology (epistemological) 18, 37, 41, 42, 68, 114-120, 123, 132-136, 205, 253, 257, 332, 361n19, 378, 385 Experience 18, 19, 21, 27, 49, 63, 65, 71, 73, 78, 84, 91, 92, 97, 98, 104, 110, 118, 124, 128, 130, 132, 135, 143, 152, 153, 157, 173, 192, 196, 221, 226, 239, 243, 250, 251, 264, 270, 279, 282n32-33, 289, 302, 305, 306, 319, 320, 323, 332, 338, 350, 381, 386n53 Film history 17, 22, 28n32, 30, 71, 74, 79-86, 94, 197, 253, 356n9 Found footage 31, 47, 181, 286, 344, 345, 358

400  Games (video games, computer games) 17, 31, 61, 78, 79, 123, 192, 207, 208, 210, 232, 240, 250, 251, 256, 271n5, 277, 295n62, 326 Genealogy 33, 36, 42, 56, 87, 106, 108, 120, 132, 259, 280, 287, 301, 302, 321, 366, 375-379 Geometry (geometrical optics) 57, 107, 108, 114, 119, 125, 130, 133, 134, 222, 264, 281, 370, 376-381, 386, 387 Gramophone 20, 83, 85, 88, 144, 147, 150-152, 159, 165, 195, 358, 366-368 Hollywood 17, 30, 47, 53, 61, 74, 76, 78, 80, 82, 132, 140, 141, 159, 164, 165, 167, 207, 214, 218, 232, 234, 235, 246, 254, 271-274, 276, 278-280, 298, 309, 318, 326, 344, 359, 375, 386 Hybridity 43, 54 IMAX 84, 262, 277, 356 Imagined Futures 48, 50, 51, 55n81, 99n38, 102n2, 104, 123n54 Immersion 191-192, 194, 196, 211n4, 292n54, Indexicality 84, 86, 98, 119, 205, 238, 240, 368, 387 Inscription 39, 73, 108, 148-149, 153, 295n63, 297, 308, 366 Installation (art) 8, 31, 46-48, 50, 61, 72, 97, 101, 120-123, 124, 125n56, 129, 130, 133-135, 205208, 214, 224n15, 225, 249-250, 262, 263n27, 289, 298, 302, 311, 342, 344-345, 349n35, 358, 374, 378, 383 Interaction 64, 66, 79, 89n24, 106, 112, 114, 131, 181, 191, 205, 207, 237, 241, 250, 251, 305-306, 314, 326, 347, 359, 364 Interface 18n4, 26, 36n51, 78, 119, 130-132, 168, 203, 207, 209, 211n5, 223, 226, 250, 265, 266, 294, 367, 369 Internet 19, 39, 51, 64, 75, 81-83, 87, 91, 92, 93n30, 94n31, 96, 101, 186, 193, 209, 212-214, 217, 219, 220, 223, 237, 256, 260, 264, 271, 276, 277, 311, 325, 327, 382-386 Kinetoscope 38, 84, 88, 89, 200, 309, 312, 366 Magic Lantern 25, 83, 88, 116, 131, 133, 260, 264, 305, 310, 372, 373n34, 378-380 Marxism 31, 110 Materiality (material) 20, 22, 25, 26, 29, 33-35, 42, 47, 54, 65, 86, 98, 11-113, 132, 136, 148, 149, 153, 171, 174n48, 175, 178, 179, 182, 197, 238, 239,241, 257, 265, 279, 292, 306, 312-314, 335n12, 340, 341n19, 344, 346, 353, 361, 363, 368, 375, 378, 384, 385, 388 Media passim Memory (machine memory, memory arts) 17, 38, 46, 53, 58, 59, 64, 71, 108, 153, 264, 270, 271, 301, 324, 337-340, 351, 360, 363, 365, 367, 384 Meta-mechanics 334 Mobile phone 51, 101, 220, 256, 257

Film History as Media Archaeology

Mobility 27, 92, 98, 130, 144, 168, 206, 249, 256, 260, 373-376, 383 Mode of representation 75, 77, 120, 133, 283, 374 Modernism 31, 141, 142, 147, 153, 164, 166, 167, 170, 175, 177, 181, 347 Modernity 21, 26-28, 37, 57, 72, 73, 115, 116, 120, 132, 142, 152, 157, 159, 164, 166-168, 192-194, 201, 265, 323 Modernization 102, 141, 142, 153, 159, 164, 166, 167, 175, 181, 182 Monitor 26, 82, 90, 92, 102, 127, 249, 295, 302, 321, 325, 342 Movement 24, 25, 27, 58, 64, 102, 106, 108, 116, 127, 171, 177, 191, 221, 249, 264, 281, 286n43, 289, 293, 301, 303-309, 311, 312, 315, 317, 319, 321, 323-327, 370, 371 Multimedia 26, 37, 156, 165, 177, 255 Museum 22, 46-49, 86, 102, 120, 123-131, 134, 205, 206, 237, 262, 263n27, 284 37, 289, 341-347, 357, 365, 374 Narrative passim New Film History 30, 31, 74, 79-83, 86, 94, 197, 356n9 Obsolescence (obsolete, obsolescent) 5, 18, 22, 24, 40, 42, 44, 47, 48, 59, 66, 67, 76, 85, 91, 94, 107, 112, 232, 253, 256, 286, 298, 299, 303, 327, 331-350, 354, 370, 371, 377, 383-388 Ontology 71, 94, 98, 115, 240, 242, 265, 287, 338, 349, 368, 377 Operational images 37, 121, 293, 297 Orphans (of the cinema) 36, 98 Perception 14, 24, 27, 51-52, 65, 72, 79, 84, 101, 102n5, 104, 117-118, 121n44, 127, 130-131, 133, 152, 170, 192-198, 202, 259n14, 280n27, 282n33, 288-295, 297, 304, 318n24, 319, 324, 349, 355, 357n13, 369, 371, 376, 378-382, 387 Phantasmagoria 25, 63n94, 86, 133, 134, 287n45, 298, 373, 378, 386 Phantom Ride 60, 83, 94, 305 Phenakistoscope 24, 89, 380 Phenomenology 18, 188, 377, 380 Philosophy 18, 29, 42, 71, 116, 117, 132, 259, 288, 316, 318, 326, 335, 365, 369 Phonograph 81, 88, 195, 302, 366, 367 Photography 23, 24, 29, 31n36, 38, 39, 48, 51, 52, 71n3, 76n7, 80, 88, 101, 102, 109, 111, 115, 121, 126, 128, 129, 158, 167, 173, 193, 209, 259, 261, 263, 265, 282, 287, 295n63, 297-299, 301, 302, 304, 305, 308, 319, 321, 333, 367, 368, 371, 374, 375, 377, 384 Physiognomy (physiognomic optics) 170, 172, 173, 187 Pordenone (Giornate del cinema muto) 42, 49, 79n14, 331, 355 Post-production 234, 235

401

Index of Key Words

Projection 23, 25, 28, 45, 62, 68, 80, 88, 103, 107, 112, 113, 119, 121, 124, 128, 132, 133, 192, 205, 234, 246, 255, 259, 260, 270, 271n8, 272, 274, 275, 281, 282n32, 294, 296n66, 299, 301, 302, 333, 342, 370-373, 378, 379 Radio 8, 19, 24, 51, 52, 81-83, 88-89, 101-102, 142-148, 150, 152, 159, 162, 164, 165n24, 167, 171, 177-179, 183, 195, 220, 238, 259, 358-360, 382 Realism 23, 30, 31, 38, 45, 75-78, 81-85, 89, 109, 110, 114-118, 135, 139, 148, 163, 172, 197, 216, 232, 278, 282, 291, 301, 332, 333, 356, 357, 380 Recording 48, 75, 90, 101, 108, 142-146, 149, 151-153, 156, 195, 238, 264, 294, 301, 307, 335, 358, 366-367 Reflexivity 9, 21, 30, 36-37, 43, 64n95, 97, 122-123, 126, 142, 147, 152-153, 196, 198-200, 202, 205, 207, 225, 332, 341, 345, 365 Remediation 44, 73, 74, 113, 207, 217, 351, 359, 361n18 Reproduction 28-29, 62, 72n4, 107, 143, 145, 195-196, 202, 212, 238, 282n32, 368 Renaissance 25, 31n36, 56, 76n7, 106, 135, 283, 285, 291, 292, 331, 373, 376 Perspective 31, 106, 108, 109, 125, 130, 133135, 281n29, 283, 298, 321, 333, 370n32, 371, 376, 380, 383 Revisionism 96, 103-105, 109, 117, 302 Scarcity 89, 242, 341 Social media 17, 61, 64, 339, 376n41 Sound passim Sound cinema 81, 88, 146 Special effects 45, 46, 76, 77, 83, 86, 133, 139, 166, 231, 234, 235, 257, 260, 269, 271-273, 290, 292, 293 298, 308, 371 Spectator(ship) 18, 19, 28, 71-72, 77n9, 78n12, 87, 90, 92n28, 96-98, 106n11, 107, 109n17, 113-114, 117-119, 123-129, 131-132, 144, 146, 174n48, 191-193, 196, 198-208, 209-210, 221, 226, 244, 255, 262, 288n48, 289-292, 297, 304-306, 323-326, 374, 376, 380, 382, 387 Stereoscope 24, 25, 262, 285, 357, 380 Still 102, 120, 129, 256, 261, 281, 286, 308, 309, 375

Stillness 92, 103, 112, 127, 172, 308 Subject (effects) 18, 42, 61, 65, 77n10, 84, 92, 96, 98, 107, 110-111, 113-114, 124, 126, 129-131, 133, 147, 196, 209, 226, 239, 242-243, 249-251, 264-265, 325, 333, 338, 349, 366, 376n40-41, 378-379, 387 Supplement 7, 22, 25, 135, 149, 174, 276-278, 281, 293, 316, 325, 359 Surveillance 17, 37, 39, 84, 85, 92, 102, 116, 121, 122, 135, 146n8, 196, 206, 258, 259, 261, 294-299, 310, 321, 325, 326, 342, 361n18 Technical media 23, 38, 51, 56, 57, 142, 194, 195, 197, 232, 362, 368, 369 Technology 34n43, 40, 47, 51, 54, 56, 62, 66n96, 73, 81-84, 89, 92, 101, 103-105, 110-112, 115, 119, 124, 130, 140, 142, 143, 148, 149, 152, 161, 164, 178, 185, 196, 205, 231, 232, 241, 247, 256, 260, 261n21, 264, 265, 270, 271n5, 274, 299, 305, 323, 336, 348, 361, 362, 364, 367, 369, 371, 373, 384-386 Television (TV) 17, 19, 21, 49-129 (passim), 141, 192-280 (passim), 302-387 (passim) Transmedia 60-62, 232 Transparency 47, 84, 85, 103, 112, 128, 129, 205, 301, 378 Trauma 53, 59, 183, 338-340, 365, 384 Touch (screen) 40, 197, 201, 204, 205, 265, 277, 278, 295, 302, 382 Vaudeville 75, 88, 199, 255 Video 40, 47, 51, 55, 57, 61, 72, 76, 83, 90-92, 94n31, 97, 101, 103, 107, 111, 112, 120, 121, 123, 128-130, 132, 205, 208, 210, 215, 217-219, 225, 226, 232, 234, 236-238, 240, 244, 255, 256, 258, 262, 264, 271, 295, 320, 331, 332, 343, 346, 358, 360, 374, 376 Video recorder (VCR) 57, 76, 90-92, 107, 256, 331, 360 Virtual Reality 17, 82, 84, 98, 211n4, 236, 253, 254, 281 Vision Machines (mechanical vision) 56, 73, 116, 295, 297, 380, 381 Weimar cinema 26-29, 139



Index of Names

Adie, Kate 242 Adorno, Theodor W. 360, 385 Agamben, Giorgio 67, 68 Akerman, Chantal 47 Albera, François 13 Alexandrov, G.V. 156 Althusser, Louis 265 Allen, Richard 106 Allen, Robert C. 30, 60 André, Carl 128, 214, 217 Andrew, Dudley 117 Andriopoulos, Stefan 13 Anschütz, Ottomar 260 Archimedes 221, 222 Aristoteles 58 Arnheim, Rudolf 103, 163 Arnold, Jack 289 Asendorf, Christoph 28 Aumont, Jacques 349 Babbage, Charles 81, 259, 302 Badiou, Alain 335, 368 Bagier, Guido 184 Baker, Josephine 159 Balász, Béla 103, 163 Barbra, Rosa 47 Bardou-Jacquet, Antoine 215, 216 Barthes, Roland 126, 226, 239, 248, 346 Bathrick, David 29 Baudelaire, Charles 103, 193 Baudrillard, Jean 337 Baudry, Jean-Louis 105-108, 110, 134, 259 Bausch , Pina 289 Bazin, André 68, 72, 94, 103 110, 115-117, 126, 253, 254, 265, 281, 310, 313, 368, 377, 378 Belasco, David 83 Bellour, Raymond 92 Beloff, Zoe 47 Belting, Hans 113, 114, 127, 129, 131 Belton, John 30 Benjamin, Walter 18, 26-29, 31, 38, 53, 58, 65, 103, 116, 126, 148, 193-197, 201, 284, 285, 293, 309, 310, 319, 322-324, 326, 346, 348, 381, 384, 385, 387 Berger, John 375 Berger, Ludwig 141 Bergerac, Cyrano de 145 Bergmann-Michel, Ella 168 Bergson, Henri 121, 134, 315, 316 Berkeley, Bishop 135 Bernhardt, Kurt 158 Beuys, Joseph 128 Bolter, Jay David 44, 103, 113, 207, 351 Bolvary, Geza von 141 Bordwell, David 30, 31, 106, 254, 265, 271, 291

Borges, Jorge Luis 224 Bottomore, Stephen 198 Bourdieu, Pierre 201 Bourdou-Jacques, Antoine 225 Brakhage, Stan 85 Branigan, Edward 113 Braun, Marta 261 Brecht, Bert 37, 140, 169 181 Brewster, Ben 97 Briggs, Asa 19 Buñuel, Luis 161, 210 224, 251 Burch, Noël 30-33, 37, 42, 75-77, 109, 120, 355, 356 Burke, Peter 19 Burton, Tim 270, 292 Cage, John 186 Calder, Alexander 214 Cameron, James 46, 270, 278, 280, 296 Carroll, Noël 106 Cartwright, Lisa 121, 259 Caruso, Enrico 141 Cavalcanti, Alberto 155 Cavell, Stanley 116, 310, 368 Caygill, Howard 317, 320 Ceram, C.W. 23 Cervantes, Miguel de 210 Chagall, Marc 173 Chan, Paul 343 Chanan, Michael 32 Chaplin, Charles (Charlie) 159, 216, 313, 319 Charcot, Jean-Martin 261 Chomon, Segundo de 255 Chun, Wendy 384 Cicero 58 Clair, René 140, 165, 180 Cocteau, Jean 207 Cohl, Emile 255, 311 Coleman, James 47, 345 Comolli, Jean-Louis 110 Conan Doyle, Arthur 54 Connery, Sean 215 Copjec, Joan 110 Coppola, Francis Ford 234, 291 Crary, Jonathan 24, 108, 262, 351, 379-381 Crosland, Alan 158 Cruise, Tom 206 Cubitt, Sean 103, 113 Cürlis, Hans 164 Currid, Brian 143 Curtius, Ernst Robert 45 Cusa, Nicolas de 135 Daguerre, Louis 81 Dali, Salvador 219

404  Damasio, Antonio 380 Damisch, Hubert 108 Dayan, Daniel 106 Dean, Tacita 47, 206, 343, 345, 347 DeLanda, Manuel 316 Deleuze, Gilles 37, 39, 72, 108, 115, 116, 118, 133, 134, 218, 259, 264, 265, 269, 313, 316, 326, 362, 368, 369 Demenÿ, Georges 55, 121, 260 Derrida, Jacques 58, 108, 248, 312, 339, 360, 366 Descartes, René 362, 387 Deutelbaum, Marshall 109 Deutsch, Gustav 344, 345 Dickson, W.K. 262 Disney, Walt 180, 232 Doane, Mary Ann 103, 110, 261, 351 Dotzler, Bernhard 13 Douchet, Jean 253 Douglas, Stan 206 Druckrey, Timothy 21, 42 ,43 Duchamp, Marcel 161, 216, 283, 285, 286. 384 Dudow, Slatan 140, 161 Dupont, E.A. 158 Ebert, Roger 270, 273, 277, 291 Eco, Umberto 258 Edison, Thomas Alva 38, 55, 88, 89, 199, 200, 260, 261, 309, 332, 356, 366 Eisenstein, Sergej 30, 103, 155, 156, 163, 165, 168, 169, 172, 176, 195, 196, 314, 333 Eisler, Hans 140 Elias, Norbert 201 Ellis, John 13, 246 Emerson, Lori 20 Epstein, Jean 103 Ernst, Wolfgang 26, 40, 42, 351, 365, 370 Everson, William 29 Export, Valie 263 Falkenberg, Paul 185, 186 Falwell, Jerry 278 Fanck, Arnold 164 Faraday, Michael 58, 382 Farocki, Harun 13, 37, 47, 109, 121, 122, 297, 302, 342, 375 Feuer, Jane 240 Fischerkoesen, Hans 161 Fischli, Peter 216, 218-220, 222, 224, 225, 227 Flaherty, Robert 182, 185 Flaubert, Gustave 208 Flusser, Vilem 258 Forgacs, Peter 344 Fort, Tim 220, 221, 225 Foucault, Michel 24, 26, 32-34, 37-40, 42, 45, 53, 58, 67, 68, 75, 80, 87, 99, 116, 135, 196, 220, 264, 302, 317, 319, 331, 337, 353, 359, 361, 379, 385 Fox Talbot, W.H. 81, 259, 308 Fra Angelico 292

Film History as Media Archaeology

Frampton, Hollis 109, 206, 334, 350, 385 Francastel, Pierre 107 Franken, Mannus 163 Freud, Sigmund 27, 45, 59, 106, 108, 313, 315, 316, 369 Friedberg, Ann 90 Fritsch, Willy 147 Fukuyama, Francis 337 Furstenau, Marc 13 Gabin, Jean 269 Gaines, Jane 13 Gallone, Carmine 151, 158 Gance, Abel 168, 169, 171, 291 Gaudreault, André 13, 52, 77, 120, 124, 355 Gehr, Ernie 109 Genette, Gérard 61, 203 Giacometti, Alberto 214 Giotto 31, 374 Godard, Jean-Luc 109 208 Goebbels, Joseph 145, 169 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 108 Goldberg, Rube 216, 220-225 Goldin, Nan 47, 345 Gomery, Douglas 30 Gondry, Michael 270 Goodall, Mark 13 Gordon, Douglas 132, 106, 342 Graham, Dan 47, 206, 285 Graham, Rodney 47, 345, 347 Gramsci, Antonio 80 Greenaway, Peter 47 Grierson, John 165, 185, 186 Griffith, D.W. 30, 31, 76, 97, 284, 356, 357 Grimonprez, Johan 47, 343 Groys, Boris 344, 348 Grundmann, Roy 13 Grusin, Richard 44, 103, 113, 207, 351 Gunning, Tom 13, 31, 37, 42, 45, 52, 60, 61, 77-79, 95, 97, 99, 109, 120, 198, 255, 355, 379, 380 Hammershoi, Vilhelm 311 Hansen, Miriam 29, 31 Harvey, Lilian 147, 148, 152 Hayles, N. Katherine 211 Hazanavicius, Michel 279 Heath, Stephen 106, 259 265, 370 Hediger, Vinzenz 13 Hegel, G.W. 133, 373 Heidegger, Martin 264, 353, 368, 385 Heisenberg, Werner 316 Helmholtz, Hermann von 108, 315, 317, 381, 382 Hepworth, Cecil 309 Heraclites 58 Hermann, Bernard 150 Hertz, Garnet 382 Herzog, Werner 270, 289 Hitchcock, Alfred 86, 140, 207, 272, 342 Hockney, David 262

Index of Names

Hofer, Franz 54, 97, 284 Hollein, Hans 245 Honda, Soichiro 215 Hooke, Robert 379, 381 Hopper, Dennis 272 Horkheimer, Hanns 183 Horkheimer, Max 360 Hugenberg, Alfred 161, 165 Huhtamo, Erkki 20, 42, 45, 351, 352 Hussein, Saddam 242 Huvelle, Didier 14 Huygens, Christiaan 116, 378, 379, 381 Huyghe, Pierre 206 Ivens, Joris 165, 168, 176, 184 Jackson, Peter 270 Jacobs, Ken 37, 47, 109, 206, 263, 285, 286, 298 Jacquard, Joseph Marie 258 James, Nick 289 Jameson, Fredric 240, 375 Janssen, Pierre Jules César 120, 260 Jenkins, Henry 61, 62, 210 Jennings, Humphrey 165, 186 Jesus 366 Jolson, Al 148, 204 Joyce, James 168 Junghans, Carl 164 Jutzi, Piel 161 Kafka, Franz 265 Kagel, Maurizio 186 Katz, Ephraim 170 Katzenberg, Jeffrey 278, 279 Kaufmann, Nicholas 166 Keaton, Buster 208, 313 Kelly, Kevin 259 Kelly, Richard 206 Kentridge, William 345, 347 Kermode, Mark 271, 273, 277 Kerr, Alfred 173 Kim, ki-Duk 291 Kiepura, Jan 141, 144, 149-152 Kircher, Athanasius 116, 133, 287, 379 Kittler, Friedrich 37, 42, 57, 80, 103, 121, 195, 197, 259, 264, 265, 353, 365-370, 385 Klitzsch, Ludwig 165 Kluge, Alexander 183 Knight, Arthur 29 Kracauer, Siegfried 27-29, 31, 103, 148, 194 Kraus, Karl 323 Krauss, Rosalind 347 Kreimeier, Klaus 13, 14, 169, 181 Kuntzel, Thierry 106, 108 Kurtz, Rudolf 179 Lacan, Jacques 106, 366 Lambert, Christopher 215 Lancaster, Burt 74

405 Landow, George 248 Lang, Fritz 30, 31, 97, 145, 169, 171, 180, 208, 314 Lanier, Jaron 212 Lant, Antonia 205 Latour, Bruno 313 Lawder, Standish 263 Le Grice, Malcolm 109, 206 Leeuwenhoek, Antoni van 378 Lenoir, Tim 294 Lethen, Helmut 169 Levin, Tom 13 Liedtke, Harry 151 Ligensa, Anemone 13 Linder Max 313 Lippit, Akira 281, 282 Litvak, Anatol 141 Llewelyn, Desmond 215 Locke, John 387 Lorde, Albert 121 Lorentz, Pare 185 Lovelace, Ada 259 Lovink, Geert 13, 20 Lubitsch, Ernst 140 Lucas, George 234, 236 Lucretius 310, 311, 326 Luhmann, Niklas 88, 112, 312, 349, 362 Lumière Brothers (Louis, Auguste) 38, 72, 85, 88, 109, 110, 120, 148, 255, 260, 262, 269, 278, 280, 283, 308, 310, 322, 326, 334, 366, 376 Lundemo, Trond 13 Lye, Len 165 Lyotard, Jean Francois 265, 337, 360 Mannoni, Laurent 53 Manovich, Lev 36, 57, 86, 103, 113, 131, 207, 235, 236, 249, 255, 257, 265, 295, 318, 325, 326, 351 Marclay, Christian 345 Marey, Étienne-Jules 27, 102, 120-122, 134, 260, 306-308, 318 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 102, 163 Marks, Laura U. 205 Marley, Bob 215 Martin, Paul 141 Masahiko, Sato 225 Mattelart, Armand 19 Maturana, Humberto 312 Maurier, George du 55 Maxwell, James Clerk 58, 382 May, Ernst 168 May, Joe 97, 151, 158 McCall, Anthony 47, 206, 263, 287, 311, 343 McClintock, Robbie 364 McLuhan, Marshall 44, 202, 347, 366 Méliès, Georges 85, 109, 231, 255, 269, 278, 311 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 380 Messter, Oskar 37, 53, 102, 121, 255, 261 Metz, Christian 106, 114, 259, 265, 279 Michelson, Annette 205, 265 Miller, James G. 312

406  Mitchell, W.J.T. 13, 113 Mitry, Jean 31 Montagu, Ivor 155 Moussinac, Léon 155 Müller, Corinna 95 Müller, Matthias 342, 345 Mulvey, Laura 79, 92, 265 Münsterberg, Hugo 103 Münzenberg, Willi 161 Murch, Walter 270 Murnau, F.W. 30, 169 Musser, Charles 13, 31, 37, 60, 77, 95, 355, 356 Mutzenbecher, Heinrich 179 Muybridge, Eadweard 27, 102, 122, 260, 283, 306, 307, 310, 318, 321 Nancy, Jean Luc 68, 313, 368 Nasta, Dominique 13 Neale, Steve 30 Newton, Isaac 379 Nietzsche, Friedrich 53, 67, 87, 353, 385 Noldan, Svend 164 Ottinger, Ulrike 47 Otto, Gerda 161 Otto, Hedwig 161 Paalman, Floris 14 Pabst, G.W. 140, 141, 158, 169, 180 Painlevé, Jean 129, 165 Pal, Georg 165 Panofsky, Erwin 108, 264 Parikka, Jussi 13, 20, 42, 351, 352 Pathé 78, 262 Paul, Robert W. 121, 199, 200 Pavarotti, Luciano 151 Penley, Constance 110, 111 Perriault, Jacques 23 Philidor, Paul 373 Pinschewer, Julius 161, 176 Piscator, Erwin 168 Planck, Max 316 Plateau , Joseph 89 Plato 58, 106, 116, 135 Poe, Edgar Allen 193, 194, 202 Pollock, Jackson 128, 217 Polonyi, Eszter 13 Pommer, Erich 159 Porter, Edwin S. 30, 31, 76, 199, 200, 207, 222, 283, 356, 357 Pound, Ezra 181 Propp, Vladimir 210 Proust, Marcel 208 Pudovkin, Vsevolod 156, 176 Pulfrich, Carl 286 Pynchon, Thomas 208 Pythagoras 58, 221, 222, 225

Film History as Media Archaeology

Quaresima, Leonardo 331 Quintilian 58 Rabinbach, Anson 27, 318, 320, 323 Ramsaye, Terry 29 Rancière, Jacques 68, 368 Ray, Man 161, 285 Reiniger, Lotte 161, 165, 171 Reitz, Edgar 245 Renoir, Jean 30, 269 Resnais, Alain 249 Rhode, Eric 29 Richter, Hans 155, 163, 165, 183, 184, 219, 285 Riefenstahl, Leni 169, 170, 182, 185, 186 Rischert, Christian 183 Rist, Pipilotti 206 Robert, Étienne-Gaspard 133, 373 Roberts, Ben 13 Robertson, Étienne 287 Robida, Albert 55, 332 Rodek, Hans-Georg 290 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 185 Rose, Jacqueline 110 Røssaak, Eivind 13 Rotha, Paul 29 Russell, Jane 271 Ruttmann, Walter 155-158, 160, 161, 164-172, 174-187, 285, 314, 319, 381 Saatchi, Charles 216, 217 Sadoul, Georges 31, 68 Salt, Barry 30, 31, 77 Scheugl, Hans 185 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 28 Schmidt, Ernst Jr. 185 Schneider, Magda 149 Schünzel, Reinhold 140 Schwarz, Hanns 141, 147 Sconce, Jefffrey 103, 95 Scorsese, Martin 86, 269, 270, 292 Scott, Tony 206 Seeber, Guido 161 Seel, Martin 288 Selick, Henry 291 Serra, Richard 217 Shimizu, Takeshi 291 Siegert, Bernhard 42, 58, 302 Silliphant, Allan 272 Simmel, Georg 27 Simonides of Ceos 58 Smith, G.A. 284 Snickars, Pelle 13 Snow, C.P. 104 Snow, Michael 37, 47, 285 Sobchack, Vivian 42, 205, 263 Solondz, Tod 210 Sondervan, Jeroen 14 Souriau, Étienne 203 Speer, Albert 169

407

Index of Names

Spielberg, Steven 46, 85, 206, 208, 270, 278 Spinoza, Baruch 378 Spolianski, Mischa 144 Staiger, Janet 30 Stam, Mart 168 Steinhofff, Hans 141 Sterling, Bruce 41, 42 Sterne, Laurence 208, 210 Stewart, Garrett 103 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 186 Storck, Henri 165, 184 Straub, Jean-Marie 183 Strauss II, Johann 296 Strauven, Wanda 13, 44-46, 50, 52, 331 Sue, Eugène 160 Tarantino, Quentin 86 Tauber, Richard 151 Tesla, Nicola 58 Thiele, Rolf 141 Thompson, Kristin 30, 31, 97, 254, 271-273 Thomson, David 170 Tinguely, Jean 214 Toeplitz, Jerzy 29 Tortajada, Maria 13 Trier, Lars van 86 Tröhler, Margrit 13 Tsivian, Yuri 97, 198 Turner, J.M.W. 282, 286, 298 Uricchio, William 13, 57 Vacche, Angela della 205 Van Gogh, Vincent 292 Vaughn, Dai 109 Velásquez, Diego 135, 264 Verne, Jules 261

Vertov, Dziga 57, 165, 168, 176, 255, 314 Viola, Bill 47, 206, 374 Virilio, Paul 37, 121, 259, 294 Visconti, Luchino 74 Vonderau, Patrick 13 Voss, Christiane 13 Wall, Jefff 129 Warhol, Andy 85, 128, 206, 285, 384 Washington, Denzel 206 Wechsler, Lazare 168 Wedel, Michael 13, 50, 53 Wegener, Paul 171 Weibel, Peter 263 Weinbren, Grahame 249 Weis, David 216 Weiss, Elizabeth 30, 218-220, 222, 224, 225, 227 Wellbery, David 366 Welles, Orson 141 Wenders, Wim 270, 289, 370 White, Hayden 59, 338 Wildenhahn, Klaus 183 Williamson, James 284, 309 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 118, 288 Woolf, Virginia 173 Wright, Basil 182 Youngblood, Gene 61, 263 Zecca, Ferdinand 284 Zemeckis, Robert 270 Zielinski, Siegfried 13, 20, 37, 42, 44, 56, 57, 76, 80, 121, 333, 351 Zielke, Willy 182, 184 Žižek, Slavoj 265



Film Culture in Transition General Editor: Thomas Elsaesser

Thomas Elsaesser, Robert Kievit and Jan Simons (eds.) Double Trouble: Chiem van Houweninge on Writing and Filming, 1994 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 025 9 Thomas Elsaesser, Jan Simons and Lucette Bronk (eds.) Writing for the Medium: Television in Transition, 1994 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 054 9 Karel Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp (eds.) Film and the First World War, 1994 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 064 8 Warren Buckland (ed.) The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind, 1995 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 131 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 170 6 Egil Törnqvist Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs, 1996 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 137 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 171 3 Thomas Elsaesser (ed.) A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades, 1996 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 172 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 183 6 Thomas Elsaesser Fassbinder’s Germany: History Identity Subject, 1996 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 059 4; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 184 3 Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann (eds.) Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, 1998 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 282 6; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 312 0 Siegfried Zielinski Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’Actes in History, 1999 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 313 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 303 8

Kees Bakker (ed.) Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context, 1999 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 389 2; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 425 7 Egil Törnqvist Ibsen, Strindberg and the Intimate Theatre: Studies in TV Presentation, 1999 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 350 2; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 371 7 Michael Temple and James S. Williams (eds.) The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1985-2000, 2000 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 455 4; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 456 1 Patricia Pisters and Catherine M. Lord (eds.) Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari, 2001 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 472 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 473 8 William van der Heide Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film: Border Crossings and National Cultures, 2002 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 519 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 580 3 Bernadette Kester Film Front Weimar: Representations of the First World War in German Films of the Weimar Period (1919-1933), 2002 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 597 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 598 8 Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (eds.) Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, 2003 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 494 3 Ivo Blom Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade, 2003 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 463 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 570 4 Alastair Phillips City of Darkness, City of Light: Émigré Filmmakers in Paris 1929-1939, 2003 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 634 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 633 6

Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath and Noel King (eds.) The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, 2004 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 631 2; isbn hardcover 978 905356 493 6 Thomas Elsaesser (ed.) Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines, 2004 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 635 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 636 7 Kristin Thompson Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American Film after World War I, 2005 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 708 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 709 8 Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (eds.) Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, 2005 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 768 5; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 769 2 Thomas Elsaesser European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, 2005 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 594 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 602 2 Michael Walker Hitchcock’s Motifs, 2005 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 772 2; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 773 9 Nanna Verhoeff The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning, 2006 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 831 6; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 832 3 Anat Zanger Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguise: From Carmen to Ripley, 2006 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 784 5; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 785 2 Wanda Strauven The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, 2006 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 944 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 945 0

Malte Hagener Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919-1939, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 960 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 961 0 Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris and Sarah Street Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 984 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 980 1 Jan Simons Playing the Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 991 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 979 5 Marijke de Valck Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 192 8; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 216 1 Asbjørn Grønstad Transfigurations: Violence, Death, and Masculinity in American Cinema, 2008 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 010 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 030 7 Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (eds.) Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, 2009 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 013 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 012 3 François Albera and Maria Tortajada (eds.) Cinema beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era, 2010 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 083 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 084 0 Pasi Väliaho Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema circa 1900, 2010 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 140 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 141 0 Pietsie Feenstra New Mythological Figures in Spanish Cinema: Dissident Bodies under Franco, 2011 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 304 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 303 2

Eivind Røssaak (ed.) Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms, 2011 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 212 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 213 4 Tara Forrest Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination, 2011 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 272 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 273 8 Belén Vidal Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic, 2012 isbn 978 90 8964 282 0 Bo Florin Transition and Transformation: Victor Sjöström in Hollywood 1923-1930, 2012 isbn 978 90 8964 504 3 Erika Balsom Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art, 2013 isbn 978 90 8964 471 8 Gilles Mouëllic Improvising Cinema, 2013 isbn 978 90 8964 4551 7 Christian Jungen Hollywood in Canne$: The History of a Love-Hate Relationship, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 566 1 Michael Cowan Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde Film ‒ Advertising ‒ Modernity, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 585 2 Temenuga Trifonova Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 632 3 Christine N. Brinckmann Color and Empathy: Essays on Two Aspects of Film, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 656 9

François Albera and Maria Tortajada (eds.) Cine-Dispositives: Essays in Epistemology Across Media, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 666 8 Volker Pantenburg Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 891 4 Paul Cuff A Revolution for the Screen: Abel Gance’s Napoléon, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 734 4 Thomas Elsaesser Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema, 2016 isbn 978 94 6298 057 0 Scott Loren and Jörg Metelmann (eds.) Melodrama After the Tears: New Perspectives on the Politics of Victimhood, 2016 isbn 978 90 8964 673 6 Steve Choe Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium, 2016 isbn 978 90 8964 638 5 Melis Behlil Hollywood is Everywhere: Global Directors in the Blockbuster Era, 2016 isbn 978 90 8964 739 9