1. Cinema after Film I: Emerging Approaches

2. Lecture structure Production: film vs. digital
2. Death, memory, cinephilia
3. Reception: evolving modes of spectatorship
4. The poor image

3. 1. Production: film vs. digital (recap)
Film: Transcription
‘With a film camera, a cinematographer simultaneously captures and records light as it comes though the lens and strikes the emulsion of each frame of celluloid, where it activates silver halide crystals, leaving a material imprint of the profilmic event on the film stock.’ (Willis, New Digital Cinema, p. 5)

4. ‘The photograph as such and the object in itself share a common being, after the fashion of a fingerprint’ (Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’)

5. duplication leads to loss of quality
decay

6. Digital: Conversion
‘Rather than transcription, information recorded with digital video goes through a process of conversion. A digital camera does not record an analogue signal […] but instead a series of zeroes and ones in a pattern of relationships defined by mathematical algorithms’ (Willis, New Digital Cinema, p. 6)

7. 2. Death, memory, cinephilia
Coinciding factors contributing to the sense that cinema may be ending and/or is increasingly bound up with death:
digitality
centenary of cinema in 1995
deaths of great Hollywood stars: ‘to see the star on screen in the retrospectives that follow his or her death is also to see the cinema’s uncertain relationship to life and death’ (Mulvey, Death 24 x a Second, p. 18)

8. ‘The cinema is becoming increasingly about what is past
‘The cinema is becoming increasingly about what is past. It becomes a mausoleum as much as a palace of dreams’ (Chris Petit, Negative Space)

9. ‘Perhaps it is not cinema that has ended but only cinephilia – the name of that very specific love that cinema inspired’ (Susan Sontag, ‘The Decay of Cinema’)

10. Histoire(s) du cinéma (History/ies of Cinema), Jean-Luc Godard, 8-hour video-essay (1988–1998)

13. ‘We’ve forgotten why Joan Fontaine leans over the edge of the cliff and what it was that Joel McCrea was going to do in Holland. We don’t remember why Montgomery Clift was maintaining eternal silence or what Janet Leigh stops at the Bates Motel or why Teresa Wright is still in love with Uncle Charlie. We’ve forgotten why Henry Fonda is not entirely guilty and exactly why the American government employed Ingrid Bergman. But we remember a handbag. But we remember a bus in the desert. But we remember a glass of milk, the sails of a windmill, a hairbrush. But we remember bottles in a line, a pair of glasses, a passage of music, a bunch of keys, because it’s thanks to them that Alfred Hitchcock succeeded where Alexander, Julius Caesar and Napoleon failed: to become a master of the universe.’ (Godard, Histoire(s) du cinema, chapter 4a)

14. Negative Space (originally titled Dead Cinema; Chris Petit, UK, 1999)

15. 3. Reception: evolving modes of spectatorship
‘In what has been called the “classical” Hollywood period of film history there was a consensus as to the size, shape, colour, and scope of the screen. Similarly, during the “classical” period of film studies there has been a general agreement as to what constitutes the size, shape, and scope of the discipline’s objects. Now, a variety of screens – long and wide and square, large and small, composed of grains, composed of pixels – compete for our attention. Our assumptions about “spectatorship” have lost their theoretical pinions as screens have changed, as have our relations to them’ (Anne Friedberg, ‘The End of Cinema’)

16. Artaud Double Bill (Atom Egoyan, 2007); Anna goes to see Vivre sa vie (Godard, 1962) and Nicole goes to see The Adjuster (Egoyan, 1991)

17. ‘Watching a film increasingly involves intervention by the spectators
‘Watching a film increasingly involves intervention by the spectators. If traditional spectators once modeled themselves on films, spectators now model films, or remodel them onto themselves. The effect is that the spectators become the active protagonists of the game. They are no longer asked to be present at a projection with eyes wide open; instead, they act’ (Francesco Casetti, ‘Back to the Motherland’, p. 6)

18. Mulvey, Death 24 x a Second From passivity to interactivity
We can manipulate a film’s speed: ‘Now, cinema’s stillness, a projected film’s best-kept secret, can be easily revealed at the simple touch of a button’ (Mulvey, Death 24 x a Second, p. 22)
We can manipulate a film’s narrative

19. ‘As the film is delayed and thus fragmented from linear narrative into favourite moments or scenes, the spectator is able to hold on to, to possess, the previously elusive image. In this delayed cinema the spectator finds a heightened relationship to the human body, particularly that of the star. Halting the flow of film extracts star images easily from their narrative surroundings for the kind of extended contemplation that had only been previously possible with stills.’ (Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, p. 161)

20. 4. The Poor Image
In Film Nist (This is Not a Film, Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Iran, 2011)

22. ‘Poor images are the contemporary Wretched of the Screen, the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on digital economies’ shores. They testify to violent dislocation, transferrals and displacement of images – their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism. Poor images are dragged around the globe as commodities or effigies, as gifts or bounty. They spread pleasure or death threats, conspiracy theories or bootlegs, resistance or stultification’ (Hito Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, e-flux, pp. 1-2)