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This presentation shows how early Weimar German film culture may be read to theorize the death of cinema as concerning the existential ontology of the film medium. While it draws from known discourses that describe film as having to do with animation and vital life, the presentation also looks at writings on the cinema such as Stefan Zweig, Arnold Zweig (no relation), Friedrich Sieburg, and others, while referencing films such as The Golem<\/em> (1920) and Fritz Lang\u2019s Destiny<\/em> (1921), to argue that the language of inanimacy and mortality implicitly accompanies that of life. This analysis reveals the relevance of the classical Latin formulation, nascentes morimur<\/em> (\u201cfrom the moment we are born, we begin to die\u201d), to the ontology of cinematic life. Grounding this ontology further, the presentation draws from Weimar writings by Simmel and Heidegger that coincidently reference this Latin phrase and seem to be informed by the experience of loss and the thinking of mortality following WWI.<\/p>\nThis paper concludes by considering the implications of these insights around mortality and endings in contemporary culture. In a context where moving images stream endlessly, demanding that they be experienced without sleep, the finitude of film reminds us of the ontology of moving images in general as implicated in the lived experience of time. This critical explication of time proposes a new ethics between humans and our precarious technologies of the moving image.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Matt\u00a0Noble-Olson<\/strong> (NYU Washington DC)
\nLessons for the End of History from the Invention Without a Future<\/span>\n
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Louis Lumi\u00e8re famously initiates the spectral discourse around cinema almost as soon as the medium appears with his declaration that it is an \u201cinvention without a future.\u201d The question that emerges now, in the midst of cinema\u2019s \u201cdeath\u201d is: does the medium still lack a future? And what lessons might this invention that lacks a future have for a world where the future feels increasingly tenuous, or at least uncertain? I argue that cinema is a late medium, forever displaced from its own time, never of its moment. Lateness expresses something that is outdated, past, obsolescent, dead, but also what is most up-to-date, most recent, and most fashionable. While distinct, these versions of lateness share a particular relation to time. Specifically, lateness signifies excessive time<\/em>; it is time that is exhausted, has no purpose, lacks a crucial element, or exists solely for itself. Using examples from Robert Smithson and Michael Snow, I argue that an ongoing project of the cinematic avant-garde is the production of an excess temporal reserve. This excess cinematic temporality, this cinematic lateness, provides the ground for beginning to think about the possibilities for a future after the end of history. This cultivated excess temporality offers the possibility of a way forward, and not just beyond the present instance of cinematic death, but past the ahistorical flux of contemporaneity and its foreclosure of the future.<\/div>\n<\/div>\nJennifer Peterson<\/strong> (Woodbury University)
\nThe Anthropocene and the Death of Cinema<\/span>\n
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While the concept of the Anthropocene may be up for debate, it undoubtedly presents historians of cinema an opportunity to rethink our perspective on historical time. The Anthropocene* forces us to think about time in terms of geological rather than human history. In the context of climate collapse, the end of cinema may seem trivial, but I want to make a case that a new ecologically-informed historiography of cinema can help us envision the future in this era of many deaths. From the perspective of the Anthropocene, 123 years of cinema history look like a small moment in time. But as many commentators have noted, it is very difficult to see and comprehend the scope and scale of the Anthropocene. What we can<\/em> see is the environment on display in countless films shot on location in the outdoors across film history. Today, old films about ecosystems take on new meaning. Early classroom films are particularly interesting, for many of them document landscapes, animals, and ecosystems that are now threatened or on the verge of obliteration. Using visual examples from 1930s educational films such as An Alaskan Glacier<\/em>, Four Seasons: Summer<\/em>, and Nature\u2019s Handiwork<\/em>, and drawing from work on the philosophy of history by Reinhart Koselleck and Manuel De Landa, this presentation aims to develop an ecologically-inspired nonlinear historicism that can help us rethink the so-called end of cinema. As it heralds new forms of media, perhaps this end of cinema can also help us shift into a new mode of thinking to meet the challenge of living with limited possibilities.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/a>
\nPost-Cinema 1: Thinking Through Cinema<\/strong>
\nCurtin 119
\nPanel Chair: Alison Staudinger, Democracy and Justice Studies, UW-Green Bay<\/p>\nSteen Ledet Christiansen<\/strong> (Aalborg University)
\nPost-Cinema's Modes of Thought<\/span>\n
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Post-cinema has expanded the forms of cinema and audiovisual culture in general with the introduction of new image and media technologies. No longer contingent on profilmic reality or continuity editing, post-cinema allows for a new image of time beyond that of indirect and direct images of time, q.v. Gilles Deleuze\u2019s work on cinema. This article investigates how post-cinema thinks about contemporary audiovisual culture through new forms, arguing that the new media machines of post-cinema produces other thoughts than articulated in Jean Epstein\u2019s The Intelligence of a Machine<\/em>. These post-cinematic thought forms are crucial to understand how the 21st century is organized.<\/p>\nThree forms are detailed \u2014 animacies, capture, and flows \u2014 showing how digital workflows revise earlier versions of cinema, producing new insights into how our world is organized, suggesting that post-cinematic media are what Carol Vernallis term unruly<\/em>: accelerated soundimages that induce new sensations of life and control. The fourth form, plastic temporalities, challenges classic cinematic time as reaching beyond continuity through contiguity, suggesting instead that time has become increasingly flexible to adapt to a new spatiotemporal organization. In other words, time has become a resource, more than simply the labor time of value that Mary Ann Doane argues for in The Emergence of Cinematic Time<\/em> \u2014 today, the plastic temporalities have become techniques of control. Post-cinematic works allow us to think through this redistribution of the sensible; a new spatiotemporal regime and episteme of what we might call post-capitalism, following Mckenzie Wark, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, and Paul Mason.<\/div>\n<\/div>\nSara Matetich<\/strong> (University of Salerno Italy)
\nPost-Cinematic Architextures: Images in the Age of Imaginativity<\/span>