Ethical Code

Coventry University

Miriam De Rosa is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Coventry University. She’s the author of the monograph Cinema e Postmedia (2013) and of a number of texts focusing on film theories, artistic moving images, media archeology and new screen media.

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

The text retraces the current debate around the notions of post-cinema and post-media. Employing a dialogic approach, the editors propose a theoretical framework to provide context for the main contributions on these topics published in recent years, highlighting the conceptual connections to the previous scholarship. The resulting reflection serves as a platform to introduce and situate the contributions to this special issue. In particular, the editors propose to use the term configuration to account for the various aspects and facets of contemporary cinematic experience.

Stanford University

Shane Denson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art & Art History (Film & Media Program) at Stanford University. Previously, he held appointments and affiliations at Duke University, Leibniz Universität Hannover, and in the “Popular Seriality—Aesthetics and Practice research collective” based at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (2014) and co-editor of several collections: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (2013), Digital Seriality (special issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2014), and the openaccess book Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (2016).

What comes after post-cinema? Such a question calls for speculation as a central mode of inquiry. However, this speculative turn is engaged not only by the question of what comes after the ‘post’; for post-cinema, at its best, is itself already a speculative term — despite the fact that it grows, historically, out of theories of loss (the loss of the index, the end of celluloid, the demise of cinema as an institution). Against this backdrop of mourning and melancholia, postcinema is speculative in at least two senses. First, the concept of post-cinema is future-oriented at root, as it purports to gain purchase on movements along an unfinished trajectory, hence speculating of necessity about its own future course as a determinant of present actuality. Second, post-cinema refers to media engaged materially in a speculative probing of the present. The ‘presence’ of experience is now more radically than ever — because materially, medially — dispersed, not just as a play of signifiers but across and within an ecology that is materially redefining the parameters for life and agency itself in post-cinematic times. Accordingly, the question of post-cinema’s passing is the question of time’s passing in the space of post-perceptual mediation.

University of Queensland

Ted Nannicelli is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Queensland. He is the author of A Philosophy of the Screenplay (Routledge, 2013) and Appreciating the Art of Television: A Philosophical Perspective (Routledge, forthcoming). He is co-editor, with Paul Taberham, of Cognitive Media Theory (Routledge, 2014), and associate editor of Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind.

Tufts University

This essay contests one version of the post-cinema thesis, namely, that the cinema is no longer a distinct medium because it has merged with other media into a monomedium of digital code or software due to digital technology. The cinema remains a distinct medium, the authors argue, identified and individuated in much the same way as before the digital era. Proponents of the ‘monomedium’ version of the post-cinema thesis arrive at their unwarranted conclusions, the authors show, because they are ‘medium materialists’, defining a medium by way of its materials. Hence, because digital materials have replaced celluloid-based ones in filmmaking, and other media use these digital materials, monomedium advocates conclude that the medium of cinema has been subsumed into a digital monomedium. However, a medium cannot be individuated by its materials, but is instead defined, in part, by the practice of using materials. Hence, a transformation in the artistic medium of cinema would require a revolution in the practices governing the use of materials in the cinema. Yet if we examine those practices, as the authors do in this essay, there is no evidence that the artistic medium of cinema has been subsumed into a monomedium by digital technologies.

This essay contests one version of the post-cinema thesis, namely, that the cinema is no longer a distinct medium because it has merged with other media into a monomedium of digital code or software due to digital technology. The cinema remains a distinct medium, the authors argue, identified and individuated in much the same way as before the digital era. Proponents of the ‘monomedium’ version of the post-cinema thesis arrive at their unwarranted conclusions, the authors show, because they are ‘medium materialists’, defining a medium by way of its materials. Hence, because digital materials have replaced celluloid-based ones in filmmaking, and other media use these digital materials, monomedium advocates conclude that the medium of cinema has been subsumed into a digital monomedium. However, a medium cannot be individuated by its materials, but is instead defined, in part, by the practice of using materials. Hence, a transformation in the artistic medium of cinema would require a revolution in the practices governing the use of materials in the cinema. Yet if we examine those practices, as the authors do in this essay, there is no evidence that the artistic medium of cinema has been subsumed into a monomedium by digital technologies.

University of Chicago

Sabrina Negri is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. From the Università degli studi di Torino, she earned a B.A. and an M.A. in Film Studies, as well as an M.A. in American Studies. She is also a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, where she was awarded the Haghefilm Foundation Fellowship in 2009. From 2009 to 2012, she worked as a film archivist and restorer at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Torino, Italy.

In the past decade, the discourse around digital cinema has flourished and given birth to a long series of ontological and phenomenological reflections around the status of the medium in the digital age. Can digital cinema still be called ‘cinema?’. Does cinema conserve its indexical nature, or is digital cinema just a simulation? What are the effects of the proliferation of screens, and the consequent loss of the centrality of movie theaters as the place for consumption of moving images? With my essay, I would like to investigate the status of digital preservation within the world of digital cinema. How is digital preservation different from analog preservation, if at all? And how are digitally restored moving images different from a film shot digitally? If a digital image is a simulation of reality, rather than a trace left by it (as the analog image supposedly was), what is the status of the digitization of an analog photographic image? I will argue that digital preservation forces us to reconsider the analog-digital opposition, and provides a framework through which to rethink not only the present state of cinema, but also its past and the future of its history.

University of Udine

Diego Cavallotti is a PhD candidate at the University of Udine. His doctoral research concerns amateur film and video practices in Italy between the 1970s and the early 1990s. He published several papers concerning these topics for Cinergie, Fata Morgana and Mimesis Scenari. In 2016 he co-edited (with Federico Giordano and Leonardo Quaresima) the proceedings of the XXII International Film Studies Conference A History of Cinema Without Names. He is currently a member of the steering committee of the MAGIS Spring School and one of the coordinators of its Media Archaeology section.

University of Insubria (Varese-Como)

Elisa Virgili is an indipendent researcher. She completed her Ph.D. in Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Insubria (Varese-Como). In 2015 she spent her visiting year researching at the Center for Gender Research in Uppsala (Sweden). Her research interest lies in the area of language and gender, queer theory and the relationship between sport and gender. Some of her pubblications are: Olimpiadi. L’imposizione di un sesso (Mimesis, 2012); Ermafroditi (Mimesis, 2013) e Antigone, o l’eterna ironia della comunità (Alboversorio, 2014). She is currently the Theory Coordinator for Archivio Queer Italia.

Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach, this article aims to outline some theoretical issues concerning the archival structure of videos developed during the Eighties and the Nineties in Bologna’s alternative scene. More specifically, we will focus on two archives, Cassero CDOC Centre’s video archive and Home Movies — the Italian National Amateur Film Archive, which host two different video repositories that stemmed from a common background: Bologna’s countercultural environment, in which we can find the “1990 Student Movement” (the so-called Pantera) and the gay and lesbian scene that belonged to Arcigay and Il Cassero. These materials shared not only some production/fruition modalities, but, very often, the same people took part in them: we can see members of the gay community who were, in the meantime, students who participated in the university occupations. Therefore, the main questions we have to answer are: which kind of archival framework is the most appropriate for such materials? Are the current archival practices correct in order to abide by the original context and motivations that fostered their production? Our reply refers to the notion of transarchive.

Università degli Studi di Udine

The article discusses the concept of ‘radio-film’, a term which repetitively entered the vocabulary of practitioners and theoreticians during the transition to sound, and raises several well acknowledged historical notions by adopting a slightly different question: has an idea of cinema as an entirely aural art — i.e. sound cinema as ‘cinema made of sound’ — ever come up in media history? Starting by considering the European scenario and by focusing more specifically on the case of the early Italian radio-play between 1925 and 1935, this article explores this path as a concrete historical possibility: in this context, the surfacing of two hybrid terms such as fonoquadro [phonoscene/phonoframe] and suonomontaggio [sound-montage] will represent the case studies for a discussion on ‘intermediality’ both as an epistemological framework to apply and ‘a state of historical transition’ to investigate. By questioning the role of cinema as an always present term of comparison in the debate on the medium specificity of radio and the ways in which a cinematic imagination has affected the development of entertainment genres in radio production, the essay aims at demonstrating how a hypothesis of aural cinema as a radio art can be grounded in several concrete aesthetic and technological intermedial exchanges.

Ecole supérieure d’art du Nord-Pas de Calais, Dunkerque/Tourcoing

This paper seeks to weave a path through some of the temporal forms of moving images. These are models that were created with the development of video, videoinstallations and later exposed film, in a crescendo of possibilities dictated by the exploration of technology and the desire to place the viewer in a temporal flow which is controlled to a greater or lesser degree. At least three different lines of temporal forms which determine the image have been developed in the comparison of the “real” duration and the “manipulated” duration of artwork. The first group of forms includes manipulations based on the linearity of the image such as delay and slow motion. A second line is related to the particular practice of the loop, while the third concerns the temporal intermissions caused by the overlaying of several lines, of space and time, within a single piece of work or the itinerary created by the artist. This set of forms shows how the practices of relocation and installation in cinema are the result of the combination of the temporal and spatial values of the works themselves, the places in which they are exhibited and of the spectators.

Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań

Kamil Lipiński is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań. He has published in the Journal of Aesthetics & Culture and Cultural Studies Review. He has edited a special issue of the journal Sensus Historiae entitled ‘French Cultural Theory. Contexts and Applications’. His research interests oscillate between French Theory, spatial analysis, the aesthetics art film and media, and visual culture. He is currently preparing a book based on his PhD thesis under the working title: Mapping an Image. Between Aesthetic Theory and Practice.

The paper discusses the haunting narratives of amateur home movies in Péter Forgács’s multipart project Private Hungary (1988-2002), reading found-footage documentaries as a spectral repetition of a past era. It suggests that the tool-character of ‘revenant’ narratives may provide a new interpretative dimension for the archival collection of Central European micro-narratives, presenting photographs, freeze-frames and colour filters as an innovative form of reiteration. The project’s found footage films employ re-personalize film form, re-writing forgotten archival stories over a backdrop of the grand récits (and national upheavals) of the Holocaust and ‘goulash’ communism. In particular, I read two Jewish stories, Dusi & Jenő (1989) and Free Fall (1996), in terms of their intermingling historical narratives, which ‘doubly occupied’ time, and formed the plurality of revenant visions. This ‘aesthetics of ruins’, which is presented as an effect of the coalescence of time, attempts to pose new questions and redefine our understanding of the visual heritage of past generations.

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Universités Rennes 2 / Lausanne

Hong Kong Baptist University

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

La Sapienza

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

Columbia University