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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Thomas Elsaesser Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2016, pp. 416
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2017-10-01
2021-10-06
2017-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Giorgio Bertellini
2017/10/01
University of Michigan
2036-461X
29
en
Thomas Elsaesser Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2016, pp. 416
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16574/17299
17
Thomas Elsaesser
Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema
Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2016, pp. 416




   Thomas Elsaesser’s Film History as Media Archaeology is a tour de force of
monumental theoretical, historical, and bibliographic insights. The volume
collects more than a dozen essays published between 1998 and 2016 and makes
frequent references to works he authored even before the late 1990s, that is even
before Media Archaeology (MA) became a familiar expression. At the same time,
Elsaesser never refrains from acknowledging his debts to the work of others
— from past master thinkers and notable peers to many of his students and
collaborators — while continuously engaging with their work, in both celebratory
and critical ways. Because of the volume’s modular architecture, readers should
not expect it to be as systematic as a Tractatus. Still, while this reader believes
that the author did not expect such an outcome, the final result is more than the
sum of its parts.
   Divided into seven parts, the volume’s essays are indebted to the history of
Elsaesser’s many activities. These include teaching courses on media archaeology
at the University of Amsterdam as well as designing graduate degrees; direction
of a research initiative, the Amsterdam media archaeology project (1993-2011),
which in 2005 culminated in his co-direction of the Imagined Futures (iFut) PhD
Programme; and editorial direction of the Amsterdam University Press series
‘Film Culture in Transition,’ of which this is the 50th volume. From the homages
to his colleagues in the Netherlands, Europe, and the U.S., the reader becomes
aware of the wealth of debts and decade-long collaborations that the author
not only acknowledges, but also reveals as the fabric of his own writing and re-
writing process.
   The extensive introduction (pp. 17–68) traces the author’s personal and
scholarly trajectory, from his first use of the term ‘archaeology,’ in mid-1980s
debates on early cinema, to a retrospective consideration of the development of
film studies in reaction to the historical and theoretical disruptions associated
with the digital turn. From the beginning, three working frameworks appear
to have sustained the author’s work: the Foucauldian conceptual vacillations
between archeology and genealogy; the Benjaminian-informed Vexata Quaestio
of the modernity thesis in all its rich articulations; and, albeit in a more engaging
and critical mode, Friedrich Kitter’s notion of technology as form-schemata

                                                Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVII, no. 29, Fall 2017
                               Reviews/Comptes-rendus


of human knowledge. By variously engaging with these frameworks, Elsaesser
approaches critically the scholarly views that regard the digital universe as a
normative status in need of a multilayered excavation. Instead, he reveals how
his own approach is more ‘film history conducted as media archaeology’ rather
than a ‘media archaeology that is firmly dedicated to tracking the arche of the
digital’ (p. 369).
   While adopting Wanda Strauven’s map of MA’s four key practices, with their
emphases on 1. the old in the new (David Bolter and Richard Grusin); 2. the
new in the old (Siegfried Zielinski); 3. recurring topoi (Erkki Huhtamo); and 4.
ruptures and discontinuities (Elsaesser), the author further clarifies this notion. In
his writings, MA constitutes an expanded epistemology of film historiography; an
expanded epistemology of archival policy, preservation, and museal exhibition;
and an expanded epistemology of digital revolution and transmedia/participatory
engagement. Compared to Manovich’s The Language of New Media (2001),
which Elsaesser celebrates for its intermedial in-betweenness, Film History as
Media Archaeology approaches ‘digital media practice by having cinema firmly in
mind — its apparatuses, its affordances, its supposedly defining characteristics.’
(pp. 36-37). Early and pre-cinema, on the one hand, and digital media on the
other are kept in a parallax perspective. This position enables the author to look
at cinema beyond specific cinematic techniques, more philosophically that is, as a
‘thought experiment’ (p. 37) along three main lines: epistemological, ontological,
and aesthetic.
   At the center of Elsaesser’s notion of MA is the dialogue between the rich
historiography of early and pre-cinema and the pressing conceptual and
historical solicitations of the digital turn. This nodal point inspired the Imagined
Futures research programme, which identified two key periods of transformation
for a broad spectrum of media technologies: 1870-1900 and 1970-2000. With
this bifocal optics in mind, the key question is not just ‘what cinema is,’ but
more productively ‘where cinema has been, is, and will be’, even in its ubiquitous
invisibility. Thus, Elsaesser’s notion of archaeology does not primarily result
in a retroactive recovery legislated by mono-causality, but it privileges a
metahistorical heterogeneity and interconnection of causes that allow old and
new media to interpenetrate one another — in the mode more of alliances and
family resemblances than in those of evolution, heritage or family trees. The
ultimate terrain is what he calls the Medienverbund, or ‘tactical alliance of media
practices,’ which is something utterly different from the notion of ‘“transfer” or
“translation” of the properties of one medium into another.’ (p. 112).
   From the very beginning, we observe the author’s parallax approach which,
in order to connect past and present with future, allegorizes early cinema, new
media, and cinema’s contemporary museal destinies. In one of his most celebrated
essays, ‘Film History as Media Archaelogy’ (first published in 2005), Elsaesser
explores the multidimensional consequences of positing the digital not as
moment of rupture along an alleged continuity, but as metaphor, and specifically
as ‘a metaphor for the discursive space and enunciative position of rupture

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       Thomas Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema


itself’ (p. 73). To put it in other words, the rupture of new media is not to be
understood primarily in technological terms, but as a ‘reflexive turn in thinking
about cinema’ (p. 371). In thinking about the conditions for such a rupture,
Elsaesser identifies in early cinema the key prolepsis to the new media paradigms,
the crucial site where discussions about change, continuity, and disruption have
taken place more vigorously than in most areas of film historiography. Early
cinema’s alternative, non-hegemonic, and quickly obsolescent forms of visual
engagement — together with the critical language they inspired (i.e., ‘cinema of
attractions’) — resonate with both avant-garde experimentations and their new
media reactivations. Passed the trap of old and new teleologies, the profitable
historiographical trajectory of New Film History can help to discourage all forms
of telos, whether related to realism, instant communication or virtual reality, as
long as new genealogical ways of thinking do not insist on continuity, whether
‘implied or assumed’ or on ‘unfulfilled promises and incomplete precursors’ (p.
93).
   The author adopts an archaeological perspective and performs a productive
recasting of such loci classici of film discourse as ‘cinematic dispositif’ (Part I),
Sound (Part II), Interactivity (Part III), ‘Digital Cinema’ (Part III), ‘3D,’ ‘Energy’,
and ‘Entropy’ (‘New Genealogies of Cinema,’ Part V), arriving at the conclusion
that MA is both a symptom of obsolescence, a digital ideology, and a form of
cure or crisis management, ‘deconstructing and reconstructing the human after
the digital and through the technological’ (p. 386).
   An archaeological approach to cinema cannot be reduced to discussions of its
default discourse (i.e., cinematic apparatus, photographic ontology, monocular
perspective), but it should also take into consideration those practices that
cinematography itself made obsolete, including phantasmagorias, panoramas,
dioramas, and other installations. Once we disengage cinema from its
conventional association with photography and the movie theater, once we move
away from chronological trajectories, then we can recognize cinema’s inscription
in a longer and broader history of images’ mobility, portability, commodification.
Further, once we move away from the prescribed notion of representation, other
considerations emerge, including those of energy, intensity, and emanation. The
necessity to overcome the notion of cinema as an iconic and storytelling medium
should open it up to its appreciation as a ‘mediator that prepares and reshapes
the physical world as image’ (p. 375). The conclusion (of the introduction) is
also the conclusion of the volume. ‘Film history as media archaeology is, among
other things, dedicated to [cinema’s] invention’ (p. 68), a task that had only just
begun and for which this reader finds Film History as Media Archaeology to be
its indispensable Baedeker.

                                        [Giorgio Bertellini, University of Michigan]




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