Cinema is dead, long live cinema. What is Cinema? Semester 2, Week 10 Victoria Grace Walden v.g.walden@qmul.ac.uk

Film V Digital Film Digital coming-into-being’ (2000, 98), presenting coherence between shots, scenes, discontiguous spaces and discontinuous times through the cinematic lived-body’. (Sobchack 2000, 99) ‘centreless’, ‘network-like’ and relies on ‘discrete pixels and bits of information that are then transmitted serially, each bit discontinuous, discontiguous, and absolute – each bit being-in-itself even as it is part of a system’. (Sobchack 2000, 100)

Indexicality and the trace Optic V haptic experience Cinema as the art of motion Attention / distraction – where is cinema? Afterthought: digital ecology

Questions of truth Laura Kipnis: ‘can a photograph be considered evidence of anything in the digital age?’ (p596) Manovich: ‘what happens to cinema’s indexical identity if it is now possible to generate photorealistic scenes entirely in a computer using 3D computer animation?’ (p407)

Photographic V Painterly?

Loss of the Index ‘in photography, film, and analog video it is possible to trace a physical path from the object represented, to the light that reflects it, to the photographic emulsion or cathode ray tube that the light hits, to the resulting image. In digital imaging this path is not retraceable, for an additional step is added: converting the image into data, and thereby breaking the link between image and physical reference.’ Laura U. Marks 2002, 162

Loss of index = loss of the signifier?

However, Marks importantly contests that ‘the loss of indexicality in the digital image [does not necessarily equate to the] loss of materiality of the image. … It is assumed that digital images are fundamentally immaterial, and that, for example, to enter cyberspace or to use VR is to enter a realm of pure ideas and leave the “meat” of the material body behind. Digital and other electronic images are constituted by processes no less material than photography, film, and analog video are’. Marks, 163.

https://www.ushmm.org/online/film/display/detail.php?file_num=5221

Epstein ‘Truly, the cinema creates a particular system of consciousness limited to a single sense. […] The cinematic feeling is therefore particularly intense. […] If the cinema magnifies feeling, it magnifies it in every way. Pleasure in its more pleasurable, but its defects are more defective’. (p15) The close-up for Epstein creates new sensations of proximity, relating to a photogenic way of seeing. CCD cameras = 90% of light / human eye = 1%

Visual digital recording elsewhere – what do such images suggest about cinema’s potential? Ground penetrating radar / astrophotography

‘Once cinema was stabilized as a technology, it cut all references to its origins in artifice. […] Animation foregrounds its artificial character, openly admitting that its images are mere representations. […] In contrast, cinema works hard to erase any traces of its own production process, including any indication that the images which we see could have been constructed rather than recorded’. (Manovich, 408)

Post-cinema ‘What happens to cinema when it is no longer a cultural dominant, when its core technologies of production and reception have become obsolete, or have been subsumed within radically different forces and powers? What is the role of cinema, if we have now gone beyond what Jonathan Beller calls “the cinematic mode of production”?’ (Steve Shavito, http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=992)

Post-cinema ‘Anticipating and intimating the eradication of human perception, post- cinema is therefore “after extinction” even before extinction takes place: it envisions and transmits affective clues about a world without us, a world beyond so-called “correlationism,” a world that arises at the other end of the Anthropocene – or perhaps a world that we inhabit already.’ (Shane Denson, https://medieninitiative.wordpress.com/2015/02/05/post-cinema- after-extinction/)

Don’t these notions of the post-cinematic return us to much earlier responses to the question, ‘what is cinema?’ Epstein: cinema’s magnifying powers, photogenie – cinema allows us to see the world in different, non-human ways. It enables us to look as we have not looked before. Bazin: phenomenological realism – ‘good’ cinema as encouraging a scanning attitude similar to that we perform in the lived-world.

Digital ecology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWf-eARnf6U