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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion The End of Cinema? A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age New York, Columbia University Press, 2015, pp. 256 (trans. Timothy Barnard)
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2016-10-01
2021-09-22
2016-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Emily Ming Yao
2016/10/01
Columbia University
2036-461X
26-27
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André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion The End of Cinema? A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age New York, Columbia University Press, 2015, pp. 256 (trans. Timothy Barnard)
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16459/16781
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André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion
The End of Cinema? A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age
New York, Columbia University Press, 2015, pp. 256 (trans.
Timothy Barnard)




   The adjective ‘digital’ seems to attach itself to everything these days, ac-
companying anguished hand-wringing as often as it does excitement. This
kind of descriptive promiscuity, not unlike that often vexing prefix ‘post-’
invites an obvious question: if everything is ‘digital’ today, what does it mean
that any thing is? As the subtitle suggests, André Gaudreault and Philip-
pe Marion’s The End of Cinema? takes a broad approach, acknowledging
the range of digital technology’s transformative effects while taking seriously
the definitional questions at stake. The volume offers a playful and readable
survey of various debates from the field’s technophobes and technophiles
alike. Situating cinema’s so-called ‘end’ within a longer genealogy of multi-
ple ‘births’ and ‘deaths’, the titular crisis refers to cinema’s decline in pre-
eminence in an increasingly crowded field of moving image cultures, as well
as evolving modes of viewing and engagement. Translated from the French,
the volume leans unsurprisingly towards French-language sources, contribu-
ting a refreshing array of Francophone examples — from Air France ad copy
to the re-branding of the Cinémathèque québécoise — to a discussion often
palpably American in focus.
   The authors frame ‘the digital’ as yet another transformation in a medium no-
tably prone to change, insisting: ‘cinema’s entire history has been punctuated by
moments when its media identity has been radically called into question’ (2−3).
They distinguish between ‘digitization’, the process of digital encoding, and ‘di-
gitalization’, ‘the process of cinema becoming digital in general terms’ (40), in-
cluding the proliferation of screens, the decline of the movie theatre and changes
in the method and means of cinematic production. ‘Digitalization’, then, is just
another ‘death’ alongside the introduction of sound and the emergence of televi-
sion: ‘le Cinéma est mort. Vive le cinéma!’ as a 1967 pamphlet would have it. Tra-
cing the recent re-emergence of such ‘attractional’ tendencies as special effects,
motion capture and the re-transmission of ‘live’ opera, the volume proposes a
return to medium diversity that cinema’s 20th century institutionalization has,
they claim, attempted to obscure. This return (with a difference) to cinema’s ‘at-
tractional mode’ is a central feature of the current crisis, and is a reminder of how
much the medium has historically oriented itself towards narration. Following in

                                   Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVI, no. 26-27, Spring/Summer 2016
                                 Reviews / Comptes-rendus


the work of Lev Manovich,1 the authors assert that we ought to characterize this
‘post-cinematic’ cinema as ‘animage’; ‘[animage is] an image that moves to the
beat of animation. Animation is thus returning to cinema, or rather the contrary:
cinema is returning to animation’(175). These many deaths belong to a medium
that was both stillborn and born thrice; historic lags between cinema’s ‘births’
as technological possibility, socio-cultural practice, and now attractional mode
were heralded, we are told, by Antoine Lumière’s pronouncement that ‘Cinema
is an invention with no future’ (26).
   There remain, however, ways in which the recent ‘death’ of cinema is distinct:
for one, according to Gaudreault and Marion, digitalization is processual, less an
‘event’ than a ‘passage’ (37) or perhaps a ‘transubstantiation’(38). Secondly, this
passage is not the replacement of one system by another, in the way that ‘talkies’
replaced silent film, but the fragmentation of a media system more broadly. This
fragmentation unsettles the relation between media across the entire field, mo-
ving towards what the authors’ call ‘intermediality’, or the ‘fusion of all media
(accompanied by a confusion of genres)’ (42). The burden of determining media
specificity then shifts to the frontier between medium and intermediality, for it
is now determined by how a medium negotiated its ‘necessarily intermedial rela-
tions with other prisms of media identities’(112).
   The volume develops an impressive terminological arsenal, full of neologisms
and acronyms to identify particular moments in cinema’s short history. While
many may prove useful for scholars in a field where so much is in flux, the vo-
cabulary can occasionally appear to favour inventiveness over theoretical clarity.
For example, the question of whether these transformations qualify as ‘revolutio-
nary’, to which the authors devote several pages, seems a second-order semantic
tussle, and far less significant than tracking the socio-cultural effects of the tran-
sformations themselves across diverse contexts. Do we truly see the ‘post-cine-
matic’ landscape better when we use expressions such as ‘cinematographiation’
(98), DiMuMi syndrome (digital, multiple and migrating) or ATAWAD (Anyti-
me, anywhere, any device)? Furthermore, the specifying impulse of ever-more
neologisms betrays an ontological focus that may let cinema’s sociality fall away:
broadly, the authors seems to suggest, if we could say precisely what cinema is,
then we would understand what cinema does, or what it means to us. This is not
accidental: as the authors make clear, they intend to make their case by ‘driving
the digital’s innermost ontological entrenchments into the open’ (181). However,
their second aim, to bring this approach up against the digital’s ‘social uses and
cultural practices’, is a little less successful. For example, although the authors
do consider the effects of the shift to digital stock on spectators, their ‘spectator’
has a generic quality, an abstraction particularly remarkable given the diversity of
viewing experiences globally, and considering the question of which spectators
have access to what, where, when, how, and how this makes them feel. This last

1
 Lev Manovich, “What is Digital Cinema?”, in Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st Century Film, ed. by
Shane Denson and Julia Leydas (Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016).

174
                  André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, The End of Cinema


question of feeling would have been a welcome addition to the work: the recent
efflorescence of scholarship on the question of affect from, for example, Brian
Massumi and Steven Shaviro,2 demonstrates the richness of this line of inquiry
for the digital age. Finally, there is very little in the volume that acknowledges
that the digital age is also the era of globalisation, and as such relies on material
and political networks of unevenly distributed access, resources and authority.
   ‘What is cinema?’, that infamous question of André Bazin’s, continues to
orient discussions among film scholars in the digital era, and many readers will
find the authors’ ‘births and deaths’ model compelling. Although, as the authors
recognize, concerns over the model’s biologistic inflection exist, there may be
more to it than metaphoric convenience. For within the text’s account of cine-
ma’s genealogy is a vision of media development more generally, asking how a
medium comes to know itself through failure and change. As distorting as the
metaphor may be, it nonetheless foregrounds how much of what we think we
know about cinema comes into focus at a moment of dissolution: invention, de-
struction and crisis, in such a model, emerge as not only unavoidable, but indeed
part of the self-constitution of the medium itself. It is a reminder, therefore, that
cinema is, and always has been, a living medium.


                                               [Emily Ming Yao, Columbia University]




2
 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Steven Shaviro,
Post-Cinematic Affect (New York: Zone Books, 2010).

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