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.
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Post-what? Post-when? A Conversation on the ‘Posts’ of Post-media and Post-cinema
Text.Serial.Journal
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Introduction
2016-10-01
2021-09-22
2016-10-01
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Cinéma & Cie
Vinzenz Hediger
2016/10/01
Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main
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Post-what? Post-when? A Conversation on the ‘Posts’ of Post-media and Post-cinema
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16442/16764
16
Post-what? Post-when?
A Conversation on the ‘Posts’ of Post-media and Post-cinema
Miriam De Rosa, Coventry University
Vinzenz Hediger, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main




Abstract

   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 pu-
   blished 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 contem-
   porary cinematic experience.


   The idea for this special issue of Cinema&Cié came out of a dialogue. Having
both worked on questions of post-media and post-cinema for some time, and
for a time in the same institution, we found that one point where our interests
intersected was the question of temporality, i.e. the contours of the historical
break suggested by the prefix ‘post-’. Usually, productive intersections involve
twists, negotiations, or even jolts. As befits the object of study, our exchange
saw our perspectives converge, but also deviate, sometimes clash and ultimately
interweave.
   This is why we decided to preserve a dialogic approach to introduce the ques-
tions provocatively posed by the title of this special issue, and the answers given
by our authors. The six essays, which we had the privilege of selecting from
among an impressive number of exciting proposals, offer a good survey of the
current state of the debate. We want to present this special issue as an opportu-
nity to expand the dialogue and include a variety of different perspectives on the
temporality of the ‘post-’ in post-media and post-cinema. We hope the reader
will find our exchange as productive, engaging and poignant as we felt it was
when we prepared it.

                                                 Milan and Frankfurt, October 2016


                                    Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVI, no. 26-27, Spring/Summer 2016
                              Miriam De Rosa and Vinzenz Hediger


                                                 *

   mdr: I should probably start by asking you what you think post-cinema is.
Instead, I will begin with a confession. I have been working on ‘post-cinema’
for a while now: much has been written on the topic, many, diverse voices have
contributed to set in motion what I genuinely feel is an extremely stimulating
debate.1 Yet, after all that has been said and written, I am still not quite sure what
post-cinema is.
   Is the shift from cinema to post-cinema solely a question of what we might call
the ‘nature’ of the medium? Is it determined by its material support and, there-
fore, by the technological element? Is post-cinema a broader term that describes
the fact that — borrowing from Rodowick2 — the film has entered its ‘virtual
life’? Or again, is it about the aesthetic changes that we can observe in much
of the contemporary cinematography? Or maybe a combination of both? Not
to mention other vital aspects of cinema and their most recent transformations,
such as distribution, spectatorship, etc.
   To be honest, I am not sure post-cinema is about film at all. In fact, I would
argue that cinema is not only about film either. Conversely, I suspect that the
ontological interpretation of post-cinema (to which I also adhered, at first) is ba-
sed upon a sense of permanence and immobility which I now think is inherently
extraneous to cinema. To some extent, Shane Denson’s essay which opens our
edited special issue implicitly addresses this point, in that the reflection on the
speculative nature of post-cinema he proposes focuses solely on computational
images and elaborates on the material engagement of media in a ‘discorrelated’
present. As a phenomenological object, cinema of course needs ‘a body’ delimi-
ted by a tangible skin (be it the film strip, as in the beautiful pages written by
Laura U. Marks and somewhat echoed by the texts by Sabrina Negri and Rachel
Schaff included in this volume, or the threshold of the red velvet curtains we
have so often crossed to enter the movie-theater). 3 Yet the idea of cinema is not

1
  Among the most recent and influential works, please refer at least to Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st
Century Film, ed. by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda (Falmer: Reframe Books, 2016); Félix Guat-
tari, ‘Vers une ère post-média’, Terminal, 51 (1990), trans. into English as ‘Towards a Post-Media
Era’, in Provocative Alloys: A Post-media Anthology, ed. by Clemens Apprich and others (Lüne-
burg: Post-Media Lab; London: Mute Books, 2013), pp. 26–27; Rosalind Krauss, ‘A Voyage on the
North Sea’. Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999);
Lev Manovich, ‘Post-Media Aesthetics’, <www.manovich.net/DOCS/Post_media_aesthetics1.
doc> [accessed 20 October 2016]; Chris McCrea, ‘Explosive, Expulsive, Extraordinary: The Ex-
cess of Animated Bodies’, Animation, 3.1 (2008), 9–24; Steve Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect (New
York: Zero Books, 2010); Peter Weibel, ‘Die Postmediale Kondition’, in Die Postmediale Kondi-
tion, ed. by Elisabeth Fiedler, Elisabeth Fiedler, Christa Steinle and Peter Weibel (Neue Galerie
Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum: Graz, 2005), pp. 6-13, trans. into English as ‘The Post-Media
Condition’, Postmedia Condition (Madrid: Centro Cultural Conde Duque, 2006). <http://www.
medialabmadrid.org/medialab/medialab.php?l=0&a=a&i=329> [accessed 20 October 2016].
2
  D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
3
  Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Dur-
ham and London: Duke University Press, 2000); on the red velvet curtains delimiting the movie-

10
                                    Post-what? Post-when?


about permanence and immobility. It is a powerful repository of memory and an
archive of the past, but it is in that which enlivens memory and the past, in that
which keeps memory and past alive, moving, and vivid, which I think cinema
resides.
   I am extremely simplifying but, to summarize, I believe many contemporary
cinematic forms do not provide us with anything but the constant evidence that
cinema is something variable, (positively) precarious, and changeable. Precisely
such mutability is what I feel inclined to identify as cinema — moving images
and, therefore, essentially, motion.
   I think that the notion of the apparatus can serve to illustrate this point: lo-
oking more carefully at the theory of the apparatus, it seems to me that this
concept covers a number of recurring elements, which contributed to its institu-
tionalization over the years, but a great deal of elements is not fixed at all.

   vh: To take up your point about the mutability and even the malleability of ci-
nema, we could approach the post-cinema debate from a history of science point
of view and take a page from Bruno Latour, arguing that cinema has, in a way,
never been modern. By this, I mean that cinema has never been a medium with
a consolidated specificity, but rather a medium in permanent transformation. In
that sense, the cinema which now appears to be over, in the wake of which the
suffix ‘post-’ positions us, should only be considered a snapshot of a particular
moment in that permanent transformation.
   In his book, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes,4 first published in 1991, Latour
argues that most of the concepts and conceptual distinctions of modern scientific
practice, most notably the distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘society’, are a lot
less stable than we assume. Making these concepts operable requires a constant
effort of articulation through material practices and institutional frameworks.
We can argue that this analysis also pertains to aesthetics. In the realm of aes-
thetics, one of the quintessentially modern concepts is, indeed, the concept of
medium specificity. It can be traced back to Lessing’s 1766 essay Laokoon,5 in
which the author proposes that the arts may be distinguished from each other
by the material and structural properties of their medium of expression. This
is a stance that Lessing takes against Horace’s dictum ‘ut picture poesis’, i.e. the
notion, inherited from antiquity, that the arts can mutually express each other,
independently of their medium. Lessing’s essay belongs to a broader moment in
modern thought, the emergence of aesthetics as a sub-field of philosophy. It ap-
pears a few years after Baumgarten’s Aesthetica and Burke’s essay on the sublime



theater and the sense of magic unfolding once crossed, the fascinating account by Antonello Gerbi
as reported by the equally vivid prose by Francesco Casetti in The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key-
words for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015) comes to mind.
4
  Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes (Paris: La Découverte, 1991).
5
  Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon. Oder: Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (Stuttgart:
Reclam, 1994 [1766]).

                                                                                              11
                              Miriam De Rosa and Vinzenz Hediger


and the beautiful.6 Very broadly speaking, all three are concerned with aes-
thetic value judgments, but while Baumgarten and Burke focus on questions
of logic and the logical form of value judgments, Lessing focuses on material
properties and the medium. If we fast-forward to the Twentieth century,
we find that art historians and art critics such as Clement Greenberg and
Michael Fried, but also film theorists like Siegfried Kracauer, still operate
within a Lessing-style framework. Whether a specific work has aesthetic
value continues to depend on how well it accords with the properties of the
medium.

    mdr: The lineage connecting Lessing to Greenberg, Kracauer and Fried is quite
obvious. The correlation between aesthetic value and properties of the medium se-
lected to express it reminds me of Arthur Danto’s critique of aesthetics. Rather than as
a branch of philosophy, Danto contends that aesthetics is in fact a philosophy of art.7
The ‘aesthetic’ value is for him to be understood as the result of a number of relational
properties of the work of art. It is in this frame — and this is why we could well call
them ‘relational’ properties — that he includes the essential connection among mean-
ing, process of interpretation and underlying intention of the author. I find an echo of
Danto’s argument in the text by Malcom Turvey and Ted Nannicelli included in this
special issue. This might sound like a detour, but is in fact of crucial importance be-
cause it takes us back to the ut pictura poiesis-debate that you mentioned above. If we
return to the sources, I believe we could consider Horatio as an epitome of a relational
conception of art — better yet, of the arts. This conception turns on the dichotomy
specific/general, and I think that it implicitly permeates the reflections by some of the
authors you named. Rosalind Krauss and her famous reference to Marcel Broodthaers’
‘fin(e) arts’ claim in her opening of ‘A Voyage on the North Sea’ is a case in point.8
Krauss’ argument plays with the idea of fine arts as several different media, each with its
own specificity, and their end (fin), which in a way only defers the problem. Jean-Luc
Nancy found a wonderful way to synthesize this, which in my opinion is closer to solve
the problem, when he proposed the idea of ‘être singulier pluriel’.9 According to Nancy,
arts are as a matter of fact separated but would stem from a unique essence which
found diverse modes of expression over time, thus determining the emergence of


6
  Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica, repr. as Ästhetik (Meiner: Hamburg, 2007 [1750]);
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015 [1757]).
7
  Arthur Danto, The Trasfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1981). In the same vein, the perspective adopted by analytical philoso-
phy may provide an interesting frame to look differently at issue of medium specificity. It refuses to
conceive modernity and the postmodern as separated eras, each of which characterized by specific
arts and interpretive modes, in favor of a more consistent — albeit fluid — historical continuity
along which various particularisms would characterize various historical moments. Consequently,
this view seems to offer some suggestions to tackle the question of temporality at the heart of our
inquiry.
8
  Krauss, ‘A Voyage on the North Sea’.
9
  Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

12
                                      Post-what? Post-when?


specific yet complementary arts. Therefore, the end of a certain art would stand,
in fact, for the beginning of its own plurality.10 In this view, cinema would be one
among multiple languages (arts), having its own ‘specificity’ but at the same time
sharing a common root with others and, consequently, it would not be a mono-
lithic, autotelic and, so to say, ‘closed’ medium, but would rather be in constant
connection with other media.

   vh: Well, things are not quite as harmonious for Kracauer, for instance. For him,
the specificity of film needs to be thought independently and in contrast to the
other arts. Thus, any piece of a newsreel is filmic, because it redeems physical real-
ity, while a filmed adaptation of a Shakespeare play is not filmic, because it stresses
the formgebende tendenz, the intervention of the artist, over the properties of the
photochemical reproduction of film. It is treading in those same footsteps, that
Rosalind Krauss introduces the concept of post-medium, when she is confronted
with works that are indisputably art works like those by Broodthaers, but no lon-
ger conform to the criterion of medium specificity. Now my claim would be that,
even after Kracauer, whose Theory of Film is the last, great explicitly Lessingian
attempt to get to the heart of cinema in the history of film theory, film studies and
film theory, whether explicitly or not, took a page from art criticism and art theory
when they defined their object. The challenge in the 1960s and 1970s was to de-
lineate cinema as an epistemic object that was solid and consistent enough that it
could legitimize an entire academic field devoted to its study. Now it’s important
to add a caution, in order not to overly homogenize film studies as a discipline.
Film Studies first emerged as an interdisciplinary field in post-war Europe in the
shape of the filmology movement, but it only became a discipline in the 1970s,
in the US, Germany and Britain largely by branching out from literature depart-
ments. To the extent that Film Studies has a certain coherence as a field, one
could argue that the outlines of academic film theory were formulated in Paris in
the 1960s and 1970s. Their teachings were exported to other countries through
a generation of film scholars who made a passage through Paris, to study with
such scholars as Metz and Bellour, from Constance Penley and Janet Bergstrom
to David N. Rodowick, Francesco Casetti and many others.
   Now this is where the apparatus comes into play, and where it becomes impor-
tant that, as you say, the apparatus is far from a fixed entity…

      mdr: And that ‘cinema’ does not only just equal ‘apparatus’…

   vh: Exactly. I would argue that to the extent that film studies as a field gave a
coherent answer to the challenge of delineating their object of study, it could be
summarized by a formula comprised of the triad of ‘canon + index + apparatus/
dispositif’. ‘Cinema’ was, first, a catalogue of canonical works, roughly the canon


10
     Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

                                                                                    13
                            Miriam De Rosa and Vinzenz Hediger


of auteur cinema; ‘cinema’ was, second, a photographic medium whose core ma-
terial property was photomechanical reproduction, or, to phrase it in the terms
of Peircean semiotics, a medium based on ‘indexicality’; and ‘cinema’ was, third,
a dispositif (or, to put it in more properly Althusserian terms, an apparatus), an
aggregation of a public space, a technology of projection, and the social habit of
movie-going and the mental framework of spectatorship. As it turned out, the
triad of canon, index and dispositif that defined ‘cinema’ as an object of study
proved to be prone to accidents and episodes of instability. The transition to
digital photography in the 1990s threw the index in crisis, the development of di-
gital networks and platforms ended the privilege of the dispositif of cinema over
other modes of circulation, and new modes of digital access and the discovery of
new fields of research such as ephemeral and orphan films subverted the canon.
   One way of dealing with this triple crisis is to declare, once again, the death
of cinema and adopt an attitude of protracted mourning. Krauss actually makes
a similar point with regards to the visual arts: the obsolescence of the medium
coincides with the highest point of its maturity; the ‘post-medium condition’ is
to be addressed in the mode of an elegy. In our issue, in addition to the essay by
Ted Nanincelli and Malcom Turvey a review of a new book by André Gaudre-
ault and Philippe Marion discusses these attitudes in a critical perspective. But
another way of dealing with the triple crisis of canon, index and dispositif is to
argue, quite to the contrary, that cinema has never been modern: that the search
for a media specificity of cinema is futile and misses the point, because cinema
is an unspecific medium, a medium of constantly changing and often transitory
configurations, of which ‘cinema’ was only one.

   mdr: If there is, indeed, no specificity to lose, but only a succession of transito-
ry configurations, the question in our title — post what? post when? — acquires
a new, and somewhat polemical, meaning.

   vh: Yes, there is a stance in there somewhere that could be paraphrased as
‘enough already with the post-talk; can we move on, please?’ I think it’s a good
question to ask, particularly in a situation where we are at risk of making our
lives in the long shadow of a traumatic experience of loss permanent. To argue
that cinema has ever been modern seems like a good cure for the melancholia of
a modernism, which has just ended forever.

  mdr: One might add that not only cinema has never been modern, but Film
Studies have always been a permeable field of inquiry, one — as you maintain —
with an internal coherence but with an openness to other fields of inquiry, shifting
between discipline and field, as Roger Odin recently reminded us.11


11
  Roger Odin, ‘A propos de la mise en place de l’enseignement du cinema en France. Retour sur
une experience’, in Il cinema si impara? Sapere, formazione, professioni / Can we Learn Cinema?
Knowledge, Training, the Profession, ed. by Anna Bertolli, Andrea Mariani and Martina Panelli

14
                                  Post-what? Post-when?


   Furthermore, I think the suggestion you used is very much in line with what I
was trying to touch upon earlier: cinema is fluid, and there are moments throu-
ghout history which correspond to major or minor fluctuations, that is, major or
minor variations in terms of established objects and basic notions such as the film,
the apparatus, etiquette and patterns of spectatorship, etc. When the ‘fluctuation’
is minor, then a solidifying impulse crystallizes a number of forms into canons,
behaviors into habits and, eventually, rituals. When variation prevails, then cer-
tain aspects of the medium are reconfigured and the objects, as well as the critical
and scientific approaches studying them, also undergo a process of transformation.
To push the metaphor further — we could perhaps describe these dynamics in
terms of solidification, liquefaction and sublimation: through recurrence, certain
aspects of the cinematic experience turn into stable elements; they gain consistence
and, therefore are (temporarily) solidified. Conversely, whilst certain traits raise
and come to the surface others lose their consistency and are somehow diluted,
watered down, as if liquefied throughout the folds of time and replaced by new
practices. Such a perspective ultimately describes a modulation, for I assume the
changes affecting the moving image over time we are alluding to are the results of
complex processes produced by a number of interwoven factors.
   There is one further dynamics that may complement the two I just named and
which complete my ‘alchemic’ reading, namely sublimation. When the changes
are conspicuous, we could well visualize ‘major fluctuations’ introducing a pro-
minent alteration of the ‘liquid cinematic atmosphere’ I tried to describe here
— sublimation would then indicate a more radical metamorphosis, that is, a
passage that is a faster or more evident transition from one configuration to ano-
ther, resembling a profound modification of an established filmic form, its para-
meters and surrounding critical discourses. Experimental projects such as Tony
Oursler’s environmental projections are a good example and a quite thought-
provoking metaphor of this (fig. 1).
   These mechanisms do not exclude each other. Rather, they co-exist and emer-
ge with a varying strength throughout time, readjusting the new balance at every
turn. As in a sort of cycle, certain aspects emerge and establish themselves as a
standard, whereas others are surpassed and therefore progressively abandoned,
either proposing what may be an original nuance, just a slim novelty or rather
determining a real shift and a consistent change. Such a logic rests upon a con-
ception of continuity, which, as Bolter and Grusin pointed out,12 would feature
the moving image as part of a broader media environment. Besides remediation,
which I am not sure is a concept we really need to employ here, this reminds me
some beautiful pages by Italo Calvino, as he compared Ovid’s linguistic structure
to that of cinema. I would argue his remarks offer an eloquent and valuable re-
flection to observe contemporary (audio-visual) media on the whole:


(Udine: Forum, 2012), pp. 93–101.
12
   Jay D. Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA and
London: MIT Press, 1999).

                                                                                         15
                               Miriam De Rosa and Vinzenz Hediger


     everything has to follow apace, […] every image must overlap another, emerge […].
     It is the principle of cinema: each frame, as each verse, must be full of moving visual
     stimuli. [...] A law of maximum economy dominates this poem [according to which]
     new forms draw as much as possible from the old ones.13

   Not by chance, Calvino is commenting on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I cannot but
see a similarity between his acute observations on the rough material composing
the poem, and the moving image as a rough material of sorts which is to be found
in a number of diverse contemporary cinematic forms: as the former represents
an ensemble of possible stories synthesizing the ‘living multiplicity’14 typical of
myth, so the latter is the basic malleable material that can well be shaped into
a number of different fashions giving birth to diverse cinematic forms. The sce-
nario where this complex and constant process takes place is a moving territory
crossed by clashing and convergent tensions at once,15 occurring in a transition
phase. The post-media age is one of these transformation moments in which a
“metamorphosis”, an important reconfiguration of both cinema as an object and
the critical discourse about it takes place. The reconceptualization of a number
of moving image practices including those connected to archive, exhibition and
preservation to which the volume edited by Giovanna Fossati and Annie van
den Oever reviewed in this issue is devoted, is emblematic to this extent (fig. 2).

   vh: I prefer the notion of ‘living multiplicity’ to that of ‘remediation’. ‘Living
multiplicity’ revives the long tradition of biological metaphors that address
cinema as a living organism rather than technical tool or just another art
form. This tradition stretches from early film theory and its borrowings from
Lebensphilosophie and Bergson — a connection thoroughly studied by Inga
Pollmann in a forthcoming book and, similarly, by Chris Tedjasukmana in a
book published last year — to Bazin and the life cycle metaphors of genre
theory and on to Vivian Sobchack’s concept of film viewing as an encounter
and interaction with the film’s lived body.16 Life metaphors deserve a critique

13
   Italo Calvino, ‘Gli indistinti confini’, in Metamorfosi, Publio Ovidio Nasone (Torino: Einaudi,
1987), pp. XII–XIII (my translation).
14
   Ivi, p. X.
15
   Implicitly sitting upon the idea of the ‘art after the art’, thus recalling a similar rhetoric we are
analyzing as regards to cinema, Nicholas Bourriaud also questioned the future of art looking at a
number of dynamics which led him to identify an object that he terms ‘exform’. Albeit articulating
a different theoretical framework based on a different set of labels, he seems nonetheless to identify
the necessity to address the mechanisms defining the artistic discourse and its objects proposing a
conceptual category which encapsulates the same aesthetical sensitivity we are trying to elaborate
on. See Nicholas Bourriaud, The Exform (London, New York: Verso, 2016).
16
   Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Sheba Blake, 2015 [1907]); Inga Pollmann,
Cinematic Vitalism: Film, Theory, and the Question of Life (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, forthcoming); Chris Tedjasukmana, Mechanische Verlebendigung. Eine Theorie der
Kinoerfahrung (München: Fink, 2014); André Bazin, What Is Cinema? ed. by Hugh Gray, 2
vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: a
Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

16
                                     Post-what? Post-when?


in their own right, but I think that ‘living multiplicity’ opens up a rich set of
possibilities. My problem with ‘remediation’ is the same as my problem with the
concept of ‘intermediality’: both reify the medium as an ontological unit and
turn it into an underlying substance, to which the processes of remediation and
intermediality relate as accidents. This creates what is in my view a completely
unnecessary problem of discovery: first we must find, delineate and describe
the medium, and then we can move on to an analysis of whatever it is that we
describe as ‘remediation’ and ‘intermediality’. I believe we should try to avoid
this ‘substantiality trap’, and I think that the concept of reconfiguration can
help us here. In your study about postmedia, you worked on the relationship
between the relocated moving image and space — you termed it ‘space-image’
— and proposed to define it as a ‘configuration of experience:’17 if we agree
that cinema is indeed a shape-shifting object of study, we can expand on your
insight and use the term ‘configuration’ to apprehend cinema in its varying
shapes, both as they develop over time and as they co-exist and interact with
each other.

   mdr: I think we agree on ‘living multiplicity’. Also, I do agree with the idea of
reading post-cinema in relation to a wider context and — as I argued elsewhere18
— of putting other configurations of the moving image on equal footing with
‘cinema’. Your historical take is very convincing, too; perhaps I wouldn’t sketch
the phases — the three successive crises of the index, the dispositif and the canon
— that you brought up earlier in such a linear way, though: on the one hand
there is indeed a chronological development, especially in terms of the agenda of
Film Studies as a discipline, but on the other hand I believe the three focuses you
identified do not simply make room one to the other — they somehow continue
being co-present, albeit with a different centrality in the frame of the theoretical
discourses which progressively took shape around cinema.

   vh: One of the advantages of the concept of configuration to me seems indeed
to be that it allows us to move on from modernist melancholia, and embark upon
a variety of avenues to more or less completely rewrite the history of cinema.

   mdr: Which would then mean that configurations may well emerge out of a
disruption of the institutional and established way of conceiving history. In other
words, I’d rather go for a non-linear configuration of such discourses, one which


17
   Miriam De Rosa, Cinema e postmedia. I territori del filmico nel contemporaneo (Milano: postme-
dia books, 2013), p. 66.
18
   I had the chance to approach this issue as regards to artistic moving images during my research
stay at Goethe University in Frankfurt, where this dialogue started taking shape more consistently.
The first result of that strand of my research is published as Miriam De Rosa, ‘From a Voyage to
the North Sea to a Passage to the North-West. Journeys Across the Contaminated Histories of Art
and Film’, in A History of Cinema without Names, ed. by Diego Cavallotti, Federico Giordano and
Leonardo Quaresima (Milano and Udine: Mimesis International, 2016), pp. 149–55.

                                                                                                17
                              Miriam De Rosa and Vinzenz Hediger


would enable to acknowledge the inherent complexity of our object of study.
I would suggest to adopt complex theory as a lens through which looking at
cinema and post-cinema. This would quite fit with the concept of configuration
as a key-term to understand moving images and their pattern of entanglements
(rather than evolution) in the post-media age. The essays by Saige Walton and
Monica Dall’Asta included in this collection might be seen as important contri-
butions to a similar framework, notwithstanding the fact that they do not aim
at proposing a new reading of post-cinema per se. Moreover, your account of
Agnès Varda’s photographic work, particularly her work on Cuba, which you re-
view in this issue of the journal, confirms that moving images are part of a wider
visual culture and that its components are dynamic forms19 — configurations, as
we are claiming — continuously influencing each other.

   vh: However, I do think that the concept of configuration offers an opportunity
to re-frame the post-cinema debate. Let’s get specific. In terms of unraveling the
complexity of configurations of the moving image, we could distinguish between
several levels of analysis: we could ask what it is that a given configuration of
moving images does, i.e. we can discuss a configuration in terms of its operative
aspect — which can be to provide an aesthetic experience, as in the classical
dispositif of the cinema, or to produce knowledge, as in laboratory and scientific
uses of film; we can study the ways in which the moving image relates to other
elements of its configuration — for instance, to paratexts in the case of commercial
cinema, or to writing and other modes of notation in film-based research such
as visual anthropology, for instance; and we can study the spatial dimension of a
given configuration, precisely what you called ‘space-image’. We can distinguish
between these levels for the purposes of analysis, while still keeping in mind that
the operational, relational and situational aspects are intertwined. But what such
an analysis could help us to achieve is to subvert the primacy of the object of
‘cinema’ by aligning it, on equal footing, with a multitude of other configurations
of the moving image. This would also help us understand that what remains of
cinema (to quote the title of a recent book by Jacques Aumont)20 requires no
mourning, but merely our sustained curiosity and attentiveness.




19
   The concept of ‘dynamic forms’ as key-notion to understand cinema as a language encapsulating
an essential sense motion is at the heart of an on-going research project devoted to artistic moving
images I am developing in association with Catherine Fowler. Its first output has been presented
as a joint conference paper ‘Contaminated Histories of Art and Film: Thinking Topologically’, at
FilmForum XXIII International Film Studies Conference, Gorizia, Italy, 9 - 15 March 2016.
20
   Jacques Aumont, Que reste-t-il du cinema? (Paris: Vrin, 2012).

18
        Post-what? Post-when?




Tony Oursler
The Influence Machine, 2000
Video and sound
10/19/2000 – 10/31/1000
Photo by: Aaron Diskin
Courtesy of Public Art Fund, NY

                                  19
       Miriam De Rosa and Vinzenz Hediger




     Tony Oursler
     The Influence Machine, 2000
     Video and sound
     10/19/2000 – 10/31/1000
     Photo by: Aaron Diskin
     Courtesy of Public Art Fund, NY




20
