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Malte Hagener
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Where Is Cinema (Today)? The Cinema in the Age of Media Immanence
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2008-10-01
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2008-10-01
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Cinéma & Cie
Malte Hagener
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Leuphana-Universität Lüneburg
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Where Is Cinema (Today)? The Cinema in the Age of Media Immanence
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/19103/16886
8
WHERE IS CINEMA (TODAY)?
THE CINEMA IN THE AGE OF MEDIA IMMANENCE
Malte Hagener, Leuphana-Universität Lüneburg




  It has recently been proposed that the cinema is losing much of its (textual, cultural, econom-
ic) stability, dispersing into a multitude of (material and immaterial) fragments. Yet, what does
this argument for the instability, fluidity and malleability of a medium mean at a time of rapid
technological development and device convergence? In this paper I will sketch a theoretical
framework for the cinema in an era of radical change and transformation in many sectors of the
cinema: economy (globalisation, post-industrialism), technology (digitally based), synergy (mar-
keting), mode of production (special effects), delivery (hard-drive, satellite) and exhibition
(IMAX, 3-D). So, instead of proclaiming once again the death of the cinema or its eternal well-
being I will provide a toolkit for the cinema in the age of media immanence that opens a differ-
ent avenue towards an understanding of the current configuration of our media culture.


What, when and where is cinema?
   There are many ways to tell the history of film studies; one possibility to be explored here is to
introduce three separate phases which can be summarised by three different questions. From the
1920s until the 1970s film theorists asked themselves “What Is Cinema?” or “What Is Film?”, try-
ing to find an essence, something that is special for the cinema as an artistic expression, as a social
force and a cultural phenomenon. The answers to this issue of medium specificity were different,
depending on who replied to the question: a realist such as André Bazin would consider the cin-
ema as the indexical trace of a past presence, a sociologist such as Siegfried Kracauer would con-
clude that the cinema foreshadowed in intricate ways the future course of a society, while a struc-
turalist such as (the early) Christian Metz would see a vast and complicated sign system and a
feminist poststructuralist such as Laura Mulvey would see an omnipotent and overpowering
machine for perpetuating and naturalising sexual difference in society. What is important though,
is that in this phase basically all theoretical writing aimed at uncovering the same thing: the
essence that made film and cinema special, distinct from other cultural expressions and art forms.
   Starting in the late 1970s with the historical turn of the New Film History, exploring such fields
as pre- and early cinema, the question transformed from “What Is Cinema?” into “When Is
Cinema?”1. One of the most lively and vigorous debates that peaked around the centenary of the
film in 1995, itself a contested date at that time, revolved around the origins and beginnings of
the cinema. At stake was the question of how exactly we can pin down the “invention of film”
and what criteria we use in order to pick a date. As a result, the legendary Lumière-event at the
Galerie des Capucines was no longer called “the birth of the cinema”, but instead “the first pres-

CINÉMA & CIE, no. 11, Fall 2008                                                                     15
MALTE HAGENER

entation of projected film with a specific mechanism before a paying audience”. Several other
contestants such as Edison’s Kinetoscope, Ottomar Anschütz’s Schnellseher or the Bioscop of the
Skladanowsky-brothers consequently did not qualify as a “first” for various reasons. The geneal-
ogy of pre-cinematic devices in the 19th century has been thoroughly researched and rewritten in
the 1980s and 1990s – all the way from Jonathan Crary and Laurent Mannoni to Werner Nekes2 –,
putting into question the stable configuration of the cinema as it was viewed in the period before.
The question “When Is Cinema?” implies a historical doubt about the origins of the cinema as
medium and cultural expression. This interest in the historical dimension of the cinema as an
institution has been more recently shifted towards an epistemological doubt concerning the sta-
bility of the cinema in its current configuration.
   Today, at a time when the cinema is enjoying at least its third or fourth life, yet when it is also
strangely dislocated we could rephrase that same basic puzzlement about the object of film and
cinema studies as “Where Is Cinema?”. Even asking oneself this question was pretty pointless for
a long time because the cinema was an architectural unit that one could point to, walk around and
enter. Also, when thinking about the cinema as a social event, as a production method or as a serv-
ice, practices and institutions were stable as well as easy to delineate and describe. Yet today the
situation has changed: cinema is delivered as a physical print by a courier or it is transmitted via
a satellite link, it is downloaded illegally at home from the Internet or bought on a ripped DVD
at a street market, it comes into the private realm via broadband cable and WiFi-networks, it is
consumed on laptops and mobile phones, it is found in the gallery and the museum, but also in
the games arcade and on YouTube. Cinema is in fact ubiquitous, it is everywhere and nowhere at
the same time. It is the question of the location of cinema – materially, culturally and metaphor-
ically – that I want to address in this essay, trying to think through the logic of a cinema that is
no longer bound and stable as a commodity and as a textual object, but that is increasingly hard
to grasp because of its dispersed and fluid status.


The instability of cinema
   The cinema as an institution and as a system is constantly transgressing its boundaries and
breaking its limits in at least three ways. First of all, film can no longer be described as a fixed
material and textual object. A film used to be delivered physically, as a material set of reels that
could be inspected and examined. The reels were put together in a particular order to be project-
ed to a group of people that shared the time and space of this particular performance with one
another, often with complete strangers. Today, no such collective and shared basis can be found
as a film can be on a video tape or a DVD, it can be stored digitally on a computer or transmit-
ted via data lines. Not only was the length of a film given, but also the life span of a film used to
be predetermined as each film took a near-identical course from first-run- to second-run- and
third-run-houses in a couple of weeks – afterwards it became media junk which ironically now
forms the most valuable asset of the studios, the so-called back catalogue that is endlessly recy-
clable and repurposable on TV and as DVDs, generating remakes, sequels and spin-offs, creating
synergies and merchandising of endless variation3. The material stability and objecthood of film
is under pressure and so is also its textual stability – in the cinema, film had a prescribed duration
and order that could neither be changed nor slowed down or sped up by any single spectator. The
VCR was the first step towards a more flexible and changeable form whereas today a DVD or
clips on YouTube allow multiple entry and exit points, unlimited replay, fast forward, slow

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motion and frame-capture. These changes are fundamentally transforming film as a material
object and as a textual artifact, therefore also affecting the cinema as a cultural institution.
   The second major transformation can be linked to the changed economic framework of the
media industry within which the cinema is operating. The logic of synergy and cross-marketing
endows a film quite purposefully with great instability. Films may be adapted from computer
games, comics or TV series, they engender their own sequels, toys, happy meals or websites, they
give rise to T-Shirt production and discussion groups, to cult followings and internet spoofs.
Today, a film is only one node within a vast and complicated network of products and services
that extends far beyond itself. The ten most successful films at the box office in the year 20074 –
Spider-Man 3 (Sam Raimi, Columbia), Shrek the Third (Chris Miller, DreamWorks),
Transformers (Michael Bay, DreamWorks), Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (Gore
Verbinski, Disney), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (David Yates, Warner), The
Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass, Universal), 300 (Zack Snyder, Warner), Ratatouille (Brad
Bird, Disney), I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, Warner), The Simpsons Movie (David Silverman,
Fox) – are all in different ways part of a franchise transcending the film itself in economic terms.
Five of those ten films (Spider-Man, Shrek, Pirates, Harry Potter, Bourne) are sequels, four
(Spider-Man, Transformers, 300, Simpsons) are based on previously existing comics or anima-
tion, one is based on an amusement park ride (Pirates), two are linked to previously existing nov-
els (I Am Legend, Harry Potter) and all of them gave rise to multiple DVD releases (collector’s
edition, director’s cut, extended version, ultimate critical review, gold/platinum edition etc.)5. It
would in fact take up too much space to work through the multiple and overlapping ramifications
of these ten movies that are so successful thanks to the fact that they can – a bit like the
Transformers themselves which in this respect stand in an allegorical relationship to their eco-
nomic status – change their shape so easily. Therefore, also in economic terms a film is no longer
stable and fixed, but multiple and malleable. Yet, in this respect the shape-shifting capability is
an economic necessity as the cinema no longer guarantees return on investment, but a successful
run in the cinema is a precondition to obtain that most scarce commodity that is to be had today:
attention. It is on secondary and tertiary markets (DVDs, sequels, TV, toys, soundtracks, com-
puter games, books, rides etc.) that the studios controlled by media conglomerates can subse-
quently cash in on the attention thus generated with the cinema. Therefore, it has been said that
the cinema is a “billboard in time”6, garnering free advertisement in the cultural economy for
gains to be realised in the future in ancillary markets.
   Thirdly, a film is also more than its multiple platforms or synergistic apparitions as the cinema
is present in the culture at large in different forms. An indicator in this respect is contemporary art
which is inconceivable without the cinema as a conveyor of concepts, percepts and affects. I am
not only referring here to direct quotations and allusions from films or to found footage as a new
major genre in film and installation art7, but also to vague feelings and indirect innuendos alluding
not to specific films, but evoking rather the cinema as a machine that provides affective encoun-
ters and strong perceptions: Jeff Wall’s carefully constructed photographs appear like snapshots
from a film scene, Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills with their strange poses and weird cos-
tumes anticipate stills of films yet to be made, Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle successfully
transposes the logic of the blockbuster (multiple entry and exit points, endless reiteration of the
same material, fetishist exhibition of objects from the film, landmarks of architecture and culture,
anecdotes around the production history) to the art world and the “museum film”8, while Shirin
Neshat’s polished cinematographic installations are inconceivable without our cultural knowledge
of cinematographic codes of mise-en-scène and narrative9. The cinema has more than ever turned
into a lingua franca which is understood all over the globalised world and it has thus acquired cur-

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MALTE HAGENER

rency and relevance. The cinema is a means of contact – like sports, cooking or fashion – in which
communities establish contact among themselves and with outsiders. In the way people dress, talk
and behave, but also in the way we perceive and understand images we live in a cinematic universe
– the cinema has become a culture, a way of life as Raymond Williams would have it10.


The cinema in the age of media immanence
   If I am correct in arguing that the cinema has lost much of its material, textual, economic and
cultural stability, and has instead given way to a fuzzy and unstable ubiquity, it is important to
add that these three fields – cultural, economic and aesthetic, to give them schematic names – that
I have been sketching are in fact not distinct and clearly circumscribable entities, but that they
overlap and describe rather different layers than separate objects. What might be an aspect of the
economic ramifications of a film for a business analyst or a stockholder could be an indicator of
the textual instability for a spectator while culturally it might shed light on the relation a specific
film has with other works of popular culture. Any attempt at unravelling and distinguishing these
different layers in a definite way is bound to fail as they are different perspectives on the same
phenomenon rather than separate objects to be studied in isolation. What follows from these
observations is that the cinema has penetrated the fabric of everyday life to such a degree that it
appears senseless to talk of the relationship between reality and cinema in any traditional way.
Thus, we can no longer claim that there exists on the one hand a reality which is real and
untouched by media while on the other hand there is the media which is depicting or represent-
ing this world. We live in an age of the immanence of media, meaning that there is no transcen-
dental horizon from which we can confer judgement upon the ubiquitous mediatised expressions.
   The term immanence evokes Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy which attempts to break out of the
binary logic between subjectivity and objectivity, between percepts and perceiver, between inside
and outside. The plane of immanence – as described by Deleuze and Guattari – forms the absolute
ground from which one has to start working, an immanence not opposed to transcendence as in a
binary logic, but immanent unto itself. In this sense, the media could be said to form a plane of
immanence since there is no possibility of thinking outside and beyond it. Our experience – our
memory and subjectivity, our percepts and affects – are always already mediatised, so in a cer-
tain way we are in the cinema, even if we are not physically in the cinema. We have entered into
an era of camera consciousness in which our sense of self and world are determined by frame-
works related to the cinema and media at large.
   My main proposition then is that there can be no fundamental doubt about the audiovisual
world that has become so pervasive and omnipresent in the world we inhabit because there is no
outside position, no place where one can escape mediated images. In today’s oversaturated media
universe even our perception and our thinking have become cinematic. Or, as Patricia Pisters, par-
aphrasing Gilles Deleuze, has put it: «We now live in a metacinematic universe that calls for an
immanent conception of audiovisuality and in which a new camera consciousness has entered our
perception»11. This moves us beyond the classical philosophical opposition of pitching ontology
– something being outside the subject in the world – versus epistemology – everything being
located in the perceiving subject. Instead, this position argues for the immanence of mediatised
images in us and the immanence of us in these images – the distinction between an act of per-
ception and the perceiving subject breaks down as the plane of immanence offers a realm that is
beyond the traditional opposition between transcendence and immanence.

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                                                                         WHERE IS CINEMA (TODAY)?

Psycho around the clock
   Two very different examples from opposite ends of the cultural spectrum which are in some
ways complementary, in some ways irreconcilable, might help to illustrate my point. The first is
an already classic installation work from the 1990s, Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993).
The art work consists of an ordinary video version of Hitchcock’s classic movie slowed down to
a speed of approximately two frames per second, so that a normal shot of, say, 10 seconds takes
approximately two minutes. The whole movie shown this way takes, as the title already
announces, twenty-four hours, a full day after which the cycle closes on itself and endlessly
repeats itself. The fixed time frame of the cinema showing (specific starting time and certain
length of the film/programme) has given way to an endless replay of the same material. Gordon’s
artistic work is not to be found in the creation of new images, but simply in choosing a particular
element from the bottomless pit of popular culture and transforming it by adapting several param-
eters. Gordon not only changes the temporal, but also the spatial dimension of the film: the film
is projected onto an obliquely hanging screen in a dark room and it is furthermore stripped off its
soundtrack. The position in the room is such that the visitor can walk around the screen and see
its backside where the same image is visible in reverse. The effect is one of profound alienation
by turning into something strange what has become overtly familiar: Psycho and especially its
breakneck montage in the shower scene are cultural icons that are instantly recognisable even to
people who are not familiar with the film. Indeed, this is a further argument for the immanence
of today’s media culture: even if you have never seen Psycho, you can still recognise the film.
Yet, in the case of 24 Hour Psycho, most visitors will never come to see the famous shower
sequence that has secured the film its place in film history as they are hardly willing to wait sev-
eral hours in an art gallery for a scene that could be easily watched at home.
   Of course, it is possible to assign terms such as appropriation or kidnapping to Gordon’s artis-
tic practice12, but what is won with such an operation? It solely shifts the terms back to known
territory, in this case the biographical and arthistorical approach, thereby opening an interpreta-
tive frame centred on the person (and mind) of the artist. What seems to me most crucial in rela-
tion to Gordon’s work is the fact that it is no longer possible to access the outside world without
using frames and references that are borrowed from the cinema, so logically artistic practices
refers back to other media. In a twist that could have been borrowed from cybernetics, the self-
enclosed system and the environment become interchangeable: the cinema is the world with
which contemporary art has to deal, yet the world is also the cinema without any clear-cut limits
that would make it possible to find an Archimedean point outside of itself.
   This new configuration of media immanence also has consequences for the status of the image
as it appears in paradigmatic form in Douglas’ art work. For the longest time of its history the
image was seen as a representation, a sign that substituted for something absent, a system of ref-
erence pointing from a culturally generated symbol to something naturally existing beyond. I
believe that this relationship has been profoundly shaken: an image today is first and foremost
nothing but itself – an image. In Douglas’ installation the images from Hitchcock’s film are not
representing something in a semiotic fashion, they are not a presence denoting an absence, but
they present themselves as images, pure and simple: the way the screen is hanging allows the vis-
itor to go around the installation and to also see the back, reverse side of the image that is entire-
ly flat and literally without depth or beyond. This spatial arrangement has the effect of taking
away the (imaginary) three-dimensionality of the image instead highlighting the image as a two-
dimensional plane. This is further enhanced by blowing up a video that visibly exhibits traces of

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MALTE HAGENER

grain and the poor resolution of the VHS standard. Moreover, the absence of sound further weak-
ens the centripetal pull of the classical film form constructed by central perspective, narrative tra-
jectory and diegetic coherence. Consequently, the image is transformed from an indexical sign,
the trace of a past presence into an oblique two-dimensional information table. The image today
can be (re-)constituted in real time, it may consist of multiple frames mixing images, text and data
of different kind13. The seeming transparency of the classical cinema – all the way from D.W.
Griffith to the new waves – gives way to the oblique data screens of the information age as has
been theoretised also by Gilles Deleuze:

  The new images no longer have any outside (out-of-field), any more than they are inter-
  nalised in a whole; rather, they have a right side and a reverse, reversible and non-superim-
  posable, like a power to turn back on themselves. They are the object of a perpetual reor-
  ganization, in which a new image can arise from any point whatever of the preceding image.
  The organization of space here loses its privileged directions, and first of all the privilege of
  the vertical which the position of the screen still displays, in favour of an omni-directional
  space which constantly varies its angles and co-ordinates, to exchange the vertical and the
  horizontal. And the screen itself, even if it keeps a vertical position by convention, no longer
  seems to refer to the human posture, like a window or a painting, but rather constitutes a
  table of information, an opaque surface on which are inscribed “data”, information replac-
  ing nature, and the brain-city, the third eye, replacing the eyes of nature14.

  This somewhat pessimistic statement by Deleuze in the end of the second volume of the
Cinema Books sum up quite succinctly the new logic of the image as we encounter it more and
more frequently today: reversible and modular, omni-directional and generated in real-time from
a data base, not any longer photographically based and indexically linked to the past.


Undead pirates
   On the other end of the spectrum, talking about the contemporary blockbuster film many crit-
ics15 have lamented that today’s cinema is no longer interested in an outside world being accessed
through realistic portrayal in film. Implicit in this argument is a normative realist aesthetic: the
cinema is supposed to reflect reality, whatever that might be in the first place, to the spectator.
Instead, contemporary blockbuster like Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) recycle plot elements and
stock characters, genre stereotypes and visual tropes, spectacular effects and overwhelming
images in order to create their own self-contained universe. The film even allegorises its own sta-
tus as neither alive nor dead by having undead pirates perform in the film – an undead genre
showing undead stock figures as allegories of its own condition of possibility. The worlds of such
films as The Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001), Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, 2002) or Pirates
of the Caribbean bear only faint resemblance to the world we inhabit; yet again, instead of mourn-
ing the fading away of traditional realism we should maybe rather face the fact that we inhabit a
meta-cinematic universe in which all our affects and percepts are regulated by tropes and stereo-
types we have learned from the media. Indeed, what has been lost is not reality as such or the abil-
ity to represent it in film and television, but rather our belief that the complexities of the world
can be translated easily into a filmic display based on rules of realism.
   Having outlined above the consequences of the new immanence of cinema, I will now try to

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sketch the corollary for narrative, another central category in film studies. First of all, Pirates of
the Caribbean is based on an amusement park ride in Disneyland, an unlikely source of story
material to begin with. The ride does not consist of a clear-cut story-line with developed charac-
ters and a forward-thrusting narrative, but rather of a series of self-contained tableaux that create
atmospheric vibrations and vague affects rather than solid structures. The film, one could say, is
similar in its modular approach to narrative: a series of relatively autonomous set-pieces unfold
in an order that appears arbitrary rather than necessary. This modular – or, if you will, data-base
– approach to narrative logic has several advantages for a cultural situation characterised by the
immanence of media. In economic terms, it allows the recombination of modules from the film
in other configurations, the “repurposing” and “repackaging” as the media industry itself calls it.
Thus, a spectacular action sequence can be made into a computer game, a love scene might resur-
face as a music video, while props such as pirate ships or exotic costumes can be marketed as chil-
dren’s toys. It is difficult to image the same kind of endless possibility of recombination for film
classics from former periods such as Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), Hiroshima mon amour
(Alain Resnais, 1959) or Der amerikanische Freund (Wim Wenders, 1977). For the spectator, on
the other hand, the modular narration allows direct access, flexible formatting as well as person-
al belonging. Whereas classical cinephilia is based on the fleeting nature of projected images and
the inaccessibility of the film as a material object, the contemporary form relies on instant access
and absolute ubiquity16. The spectator can endlessly rewatch his/her favourite scene, he/she can
own the film in electronic form and thus it is even open to alteration and recombination once
again.


Conclusion
   At last year’s documenta Alexander Horwath, director of the Austrian Filmmuseum and
cinephile par excellence, curated a film programme that addressed similar issues of the imma-
nence of the cinema. Concentrating on what Deleuze has labelled “modern cinema” – the oldest
film as well as the programmatic opening was Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1954) –
Horwath named the programme “Second Lives”, referring both to the medium’s capability to let
us as spectators (for a limited time span) participate in someone else’s life, but also alluding to
the era of Second Life, the networked virtual world that is populated by millions of avatars
online17. Horwath’s curatorial statement on the documenta website opens with a motto by
Deleuze, underlining the complicated relationship between the cinema and the world we live in:
«It is doubtful if cinema is sufficient for this; but, if the world has become a bad cinema, in which
we no longer believe, surely a true cinema can contribute to giving us back reasons to believe in
the world and in vanished bodies». This argument turns the classical hierarchy between cinema
and the world on its head. In today’s universe of media immanence, the cinema is no longer rep-
resenting reality, but it is becoming the world in the sense that we can find no site where an
unmediated universe is imaginable. The cinema – if it is successful and no matter whether we
encounter it in the cinema, on TV, in the gallery or on the mobile phone – always offers us at least
two things: a second life we can inhabit temporarily, but also a different life for us to live. If a
film succeeds, it makes us inhabit another life temporarily, but it also changes us forever as we
come out of the cinema radically transformed. It is this capacity to cross thresholds and transgress
boundaries that is fundamentally important for the cinema. Even though there are those who claim
that the cinema is a vanishing art form, as they take medium specificity, indexicality and other

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MALTE HAGENER

essentialisms that dominated the debate through much of the 20th century as their measuring stick,
I believe that the cinema is more present than ever, even if dispersed and flexible, modular and
fleeting, as popular culture or as high art. Seen from this vantage point then, we continually live
inside images, just as images live inside us.



1    See Thomas Elsaesser, Das Digitale und das Kino – Um-Schreibung der Filmgeschichte, in Daniela
     Kloock (ed.), Zukunft Kino. The End of the Reel World, Schüren, Marburg 2008, pp. 43-59. See also for
     a genealogical investigation into the first years of the cinema Deac Rossell, Living Pictures. The Origins
     of the Movies, State University of New York, Albany NY 1998.
2    See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century,
     MIT, Cambridge MA 1990; Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow. Archaeology of the
     Cinema, University of Exeter, Exeter 2000; Bodo von Dewitz, Werner Nekes (eds.), Ich sehe was, was
     Du nicht siehst! Sehmaschinen und Bilderwelten. Die Sammlung Werner Nekes, Steidl, Göttingen 2002.
3    See Vinzenz Hediger, The Original Is Always Lost. Film History, the Copyright Industries and the
     Problem of Reconstruction, in Marijke de Valck, Malte Hagener (eds.), Cinephilia. Movies, Love and
     Memory, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam 2005, pp. 135-149.
4    The data has been drawn from http://www.the-numbers.com, 10 May 2008.
5    For the cultural reassessment of the cinema via home technology see Barbara Klinger, Beyond the
     Multiplex. Cinema, New Technologies and the Home, University of California, Berkeley CA 2006. More
     specifically on the DVD see James Bennett, Tom Brown (eds.), Film and Television after DVD,
     Routledge, New York-London 2008.
6     See Thomas Elsaesser, The Blockbuster: Everything Connects, but not Everything Goes, in Jon Lewis
     (ed.), The End of the Cinema As We Know It. American Film in the Nineties, New York University, New
     York 2000, pp. 11-22.
7    See for example the ongoing work by Christa Blümlinger on found footage and by Matthias Steinle on
     the compilation film.
8    Alexandra Keller, Frazer Ward, “Matthew Barney and the Paradox of the Neo-Avant-Garde
     Blockbuster”, Cinema Journal, vol. 45, no. 2, 2006, pp. 3-16.
9    Philippe Dubois’ ongoing research on the intersection of cinema and art is mapping the various ways in
     which these two worlds are interacting.
10   See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1963.
11   Patricia Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory, Stanford
     University, Stanford CA 2003, p. 16.
12   See for example Holger Broeker, Das Kino ist tot! Es lebe der Film! Die Sprache der Bilder in den
     Videoarbeiten Douglas Gordons, in Id. (ed.), Douglas Gordon. Between Darkness and Light, Hatje
     Cantz, Ostfildern 2007, pp. 22-31.
13   See Malte Hagener, The Aesthetics of Displays. From the Window on the World to the Logic of the
     Screen, in Leonardo Quaresima, Laura Ester Sangalli, Federico Zecca (eds.), Cinema e fumetto / Cinema
     and Comics, Forum, Udine 2009, pp. 145-155.
14   Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (L’Image-temps, Minuit, Paris 1985), University of
     Minnesota, Minneapolis MN 1989, p. 265.
15   See for example Kent Jones, “The Summer of Our Malcontent”, in Film Comment, no. 5, September-
     October 1996, pp. 3-8. See also, for a less pessimistic statement, Herbert Schwaab, Wie es möglich ist,
     von einem Riesenaffen berührt zu werden – Blockbusterkino, CGI und die Essenzen des Films, in
     Daniela Kloock (ed.), Zukunft Kino. The End of the Reel World, Schüren, Marburg 2007, pp. 125-143.
16   For these different forms of cinephilia see Marijke de Valck, Malte Hagener, Cinephilia in Transition,
     in Jaap Kooijman, Patricia Pisters, Wanda Strauven (eds.), Mind the Screen. Essays in Honour of
     Thomas Elsaesser, Amsterdam University, Amsterdam 2008, pp. 19-31.
17   See: http://www.documenta12.de/786.html?&L=1.




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