The New Film History as Media Archaeology · media conjuncture. Faced with this challenge, the essay makes a case for a new historiographical model, “Media Archaeology,” in order

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CinémasRevue d'études cinématographiquesJournal of Film Studies

The New Film History as Media ArchaeologyThomas Elsaesser

Histoires croisées des images. Objets et méthodesVolume 14, Number 2-3, Spring 2004

URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/026005arDOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/026005ar

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Cite this articleElsaesser, T. (2004). The New Film History as Media Archaeology. Cinémas,14(2-3), 75–117. https://doi.org/10.7202/026005ar

Article abstractThe article assesses the impact of digital technologies on our understanding offilm history. While the “New Film History” has revitalized the study of thecinema’s “origins,” it has not yet proven itself equally successful in analyzingthe subsequent turn-of-the-century multi-media conjuncture. Faced with thischallenge, the essay makes a case for a new historiographical model, “MediaArchaeology,” in order to overcome the opposition between “old” and “new”media, destabilized in today’s media practice. The field of audio-visualexperience needs to be re-mapped, clarifying what is meant by embodiment,interface, narrative, diegesis, and providing new impulses also for the study ofnon-entertainment uses of the audio-visual dispositif.

https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/https://www.erudit.org/en/https://www.erudit.org/en/https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/cine/https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/026005arhttps://doi.org/10.7202/026005arhttps://www.erudit.org/en/journals/cine/2004-v14-n2-3-cine863/https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/cine/

The New Film History as Media Archaeology

Thomas Elsaesser

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article évalue l’impact des technologies numériquessur notre conception de l’histoire du cinéma. Alors que la«nouvelle histoire du cinéma» a revitalisé les études des«origines » du cinéma, elle n’a pas encore montré autantde succès dans l’analyse de la conjoncture multimé-diatique du dernier tournant de siècle. Cet article proposeun nouveau modèle historiographique, l’« archéologie desmédias », afin de dépasser l’opposition entre vieux médiaset nouveaux médias, mise à mal par les expériencesmédiatiques contemporaines. Le terrain des pratiquesaudiovisuelles a besoin d’être à nouveau cartographié : ilfaut clarifier les concepts d’incorporation, d’interface, denarration, de diégèse et donner une nouvelle impulsion àl’étude des utilisations du dispositif audiovisuel en dehorsdu secteur du seul marché du divertissement.

ABSTRACT

The article assesses the impact of digital technologieson our understanding of film history. While the “NewFilm History” has revitalized the study of the cinema’s“origins,” it has not yet proven itself equally successfulin analyzing the subsequent turn-of-the-century multi-media conjuncture. Faced with this challenge, the essaymakes a case for a new historiographical model,“Media Archaeology,” in order to overcome the opposi-tion between “old” and “new” media, destabilized intoday’s media practice. The field of audio-visual experi-ence needs to be re-mapped, clarifying what is meantby embodiment, interface, narrative, diegesis, and pro-viding new impulses also for the study of non-enter-tainment uses of the audio-visual dispositif.

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IntroductionFor more than two decades now, it has become commonplace

to discuss the cinema in terms that acknowledge its function asa medium that has introduced a universally comprehensible andyet deeply contradictory logic of the visible. So ubiquitous is themoving image in our urban environment that its impact cannotsimply be located in individual films, however many canons ofcult classics or masterpieces we choose to construct. In makingmuch of human life and history “visible,” the cinema has alsocreated new domains of the “invisible.” Key elements of cine-matic perception have become internalised as our modes of cog-nition and embodied experience, such that the “cinema effect”may be most present where its apparatus and technologies areleast perceptible. Cinema’s role in transforming the past and his-torical representation into collective memory is now a matter ofintense debate,1 while its “invisible hand” in our affective lifeand in our modes of being-in-the-world—our ontologies—haspreoccupied psychoanalysis and philosophy.2 Likewise, theoriesof cinematic spectatorship, initially elaborated around class and(immigrant) ethnicity, have been extended to gender, race andother forms of cultural identity. Broadened out to encompassissues of modernity, mass-consumption and metropolitan life,research on the spectators of film and television has also beenasking political questions about media citizenship, or worriedabout the ethics of performativity, where authenticity is “hidingin the light.” At the same time, cinema as perception, thought,affect and body has moved centre-stage in film theory, debatedby followers of Gilles Deleuze as passionately as by cognitivists,while the relation between seeing and knowing is at the concep-tual core of much contemporary video and installation art. Thecinema is part of us, it seems, even when we are not at themovies, which suggests that in this respect, there is no longer anoutside to the inside: we are already “in” the cinema with what-ever we can say “about” it!3

This renewed reflection about “what is cinema”—some fiftyyears after André Bazin last put this question—may initiallyhave been occasioned by the centenary of the first public pre-sentation of the Lumière cinématographe celebrated in 1995. But

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it is safe to assume that such inquiry is made necessary andurgent also by the growing realisation that by the turn of themillennium, the technologies of sound and vision had under-gone a decisive shift in paradigm. This shift requires a new map-ping of the moving image, and a new location of cinema in cul-ture, for which the term “digitisation” suggests itself as the mostobvious common denominator, but not always as the most con-vincing analysis. For instance, it is widely assumed that the con-vergence between image-, audio- and print media is inevitable,modifying and even overturning our traditional notions of cine-ma. But the assumption rests on several unstated premises bothabout this convergence and about the separate histories of cine-ma, television and electronic audio-vision. While it may be truethat the analysis of digital media cannot simply be treated as anextension of film studies as currently practised, it is not at allproven that digitisation is the reason why the new media presentsuch a challenge, historically as well as theoretically, to our ideaof cinema. Perhaps it merely forces into the open inherent flawsand contradictions, shortcomings and misconceptions in theaccepted picture? If so, we need to ask further questions. Doesthe digital image constitute a radical break in the (Western) cul-ture of imaging, or is it merely a technological continuation of along and complex history of mechanical vision, following a his-torical logic (of “improvement,” adaptation, emulation andremediation) which traditional film theory has not yet fullyencompassed? How aware have we been of culturally distinctmodes of representation and the technologies as well as institu-tions regulating the “life-cycles” of these modes? Have we beenfixated too exclusively on “the image,” and forgotten aboutsound; have we been concentrating on films as texts, andneglected the cinema as event and experience? Is film studiesvulnerable because its idea of film history has operated withnotions of origins and teleology that even on their own termsare untenable in the light of what we now know, for instance,about the so-called origins of cinema and its early (i.e. pre-1917) practice?

In what follows I want to treat the so-called “digital revolu-tion” as a moment of rupture, to be sure. Yet it does not follow

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that this rupture must be (in the first instance) technological, oreven a matter of aesthetics. Besides being a powerful device ofsignal conversion, a new standard in the techniques of informa-tion, and a process of inscription, storage and circulation, “thedigital” in this context is also a metaphor: more properly, ametaphor for the discursive space and enunciative position ofrupture itself. Rather than directly enter the debate aboutwhether digitisation is merely an improved or accelerated tech-nology of the visible and the audible, or whether it is indeed aradical, qualitative change in their respective ontologies, I takedigital media as the chance to rethink the idea of historicalchange itself, and what we mean by inclusion and exclusion,horizons and boundaries, but also by emergence, transforma-tion, appropriation, i.e. the opposite of rupture. It permits meto once more query what I think I know already, namely thespecificity of film and the role moving images occupy within thehistory of modernity and the mass media. The digital makes theplace from which I speak a space at once a “zero-degree” and a“ground zero.” It acknowledges the situation just sketched: theremay not be an “outside” to the “inside” from which to derive afixed position or a critical (di)stance, but also there may not be a“before” and “after” the digital in the way we speak of beforeand after Christ. Without an eschatological-ontological break,we can scrutinise not only the chronological-linear models offilm history we have been working with, but also their opposite:the notion of “origins” and “beginnings.” For reasons that Ihope will become clear, I propose to call this alternative approach“film history as media archaeology.”

Early Cinema as Key to the New Media Paradigms?A first step would be to see whether the insights gained over

the past twenty years from the study of early cinema could lead,if not to new paradigms, then at least to a better understandingof the actual or apparent changes in audio-visual media, on thefar side of boosterist future-speak, as well as of an equally blindcultural pessimism.4 For this, I am suggesting, we have to re-examine the idea of continuity and rupture, as well as thedynamics of convergence and divergence, of synergy and self-


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differentiation. To cite an obvious example: given the ruptureposited by the New Film History between early cinema (the cin-ema up to 1917) and the classical narrative cinema underHollywood hegemony (itself replaced by the “New Hollywood”of the 1970s), scholars have been trying to accommodate thecontinuities as well.5 The vocabulary of postmodernism provedto be one solution, because it supplanted the discourses of revo-lution and epistemic breaks with those of transformations andtransitions, of pastiche and parody, of remediation and appro-priation. These helped to comprehend, in the study of main-stream cinema, the surprising kinds of survival and afterlife, ofrecycling and retrofitting, that seem to have kept Hollywoodpractice so stable over nearly a hundred years. But is Hollywoodchanging in order to stay the same (the way Burt Lancaster putit, refering to the bourgeoisie, in Visconti’s The Leopard), orhave the body-snatchers of global finance turned the stars andgenres of classical cinema into pod-personalities and pseudo-events, to the acquiescence of all concerned (as critics of theblockbuster era would have it)? Where are the ruptures, in lightof the interpenetration of cinema, television and electronicimages in mainstream entertainment? If it is easy to yield to theshared presumption of convergence, of multi-, hyper- and inter-mediality, do we mean by this a new universalism of symboliclanguages (or “codes”), once more reviving the fantasy of themoving image as the “Esperanto of the eye?” Or does conver-gence merely designate the strategic alliances between the own-ers of traditional media, where multinational business conglom-erates (Time Warner/AOL, News Corporation, Bertelsmann)invest in the print-media (newspaper and publishing), in televi-sion (terrestrial and cable), in the film business, in audio-record-ing media and delivery systems such as the internet, expectingto effect “synergies” that will re-establish the old trusts andmonopolies of the studio-era, while further globalising theirreach? Do we see convergence as a broad sweep of universalaspirations of leisure and entertainment, entailing commonvisual icons and modes of representation? Or, on the contrary,do we witness the emergence of powerful sectional interests, ofniche markets, of regional and local enclaves and the ever more


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self-differentiating trends typical of complex systems and net-works?

This is where a look at early cinema suggests alternative mod-els for thinking both change and continuity, both the concen-tration of power and the very divergent practices adopted by“users.” The so-called origins and pre-history of the cinema haveattracted scholars precisely because of these debates. On the oneside, the sudden, almost simultaneous “birth” of the movies atthe turn of the previous century. And on the other, the hetero-geneity, the long gestation, the uneven developments and thefact that very divergent conceptions of what the cinema was orcould be existed side by side, not to mention the co-presence ofdifferent media-forms and practices such as vaudeville, panora-mas and dioramas, stereoscopic home entertainment, Hale’stours and world fairs. Both pictures—here: determinism andteleology; there: an almost prelapsarian picture of creativechaos—have been checked and corrected by a tendency to rep-resent early film history as a series of (more or less) distinct, self-contained moments. Noël Burch’s formulation of a “primitivemode of representation” and an “institutional mode of represen-tation” was part of a trend towards other kinds of boundarydrawing, such as European art cinema versus mainstream com-mercial cinema, “classical” versus “postclassical” cinema, andother bi-polar models. The penchant for emphasising disconti-nuity and epistemic breaks was itself a Foucault-inspired reac-tion against traditional (or “old”) film history’s tacit assumptionof linear progress, either in the form of a chronological-organicmodel (e.g. childhood-maturity-decline and renewal), a chrono-logical-teleological model (the move to “greater and greater real-ism”), or the alternating swings of the pendulum between (out-door) realism and (studio-produced) fantasy.

Countering these traditional modes of writing film historywas one reason why cinema studies in the last decades hasdevoted itself so intensively to early cinema, and the “emer-gence” of the medium. By demonstrating the alterity and other-ness, but also insisting on the sophistication, of early cinema, itwas possible to disprove implicit notions of infancy, tentative-ness or incompetence found in standard histories. But when


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Noël Burch, in his 1978 essay, played Edwin S. Porter offagainst D.W. Griffith as the true pioneer of early cinema, hespoke above all in the name of a film-aesthetic avant-garde thatwanted to go back to the cinema prior to Griffith in order tochallenge, at least conceptually if not in practice, Hollywood’sdominance (and that of the narrative feature film). The redis-covery of the “primitive mode” seemed like a vindication ofmore than fifty years’ indefatigable efforts on the part of theavant-garde in both North America and Europe to rethink thebasis of “film language.” It raised the hope of retiring once andfor all the notion that the development of cinema towards fic-tional narrative in the form of representational illusionism hadbeen its pre-ordained destiny. As Burch liked to say: “it couldhave been otherwise…”6

The polemic was the more timely since during the 1970sspeculation was rife about the decline of the hegemony of classi-cal cinema from an altogether different perspective. The changesin film reception, i.e. the dwindling audiences for both first andsecond-run theatres in the 1960s and 1970s and the parallel re-grouping of the family audience in the home and around televi-sion, indicated that the cinema was indeed being replaced. Itwas even argued that, due to the combination of television, thevideo camera and the domestic VCR, cinema had become obso-lete. This encouraged especially left-wing media historians to tryand integrate film history (assuming the widely propagated andlamented “death of cinema” as a fait accompli) into the broadercultural and economic context of the entertainment and con-sciousness industries. Siegfried Zielinski for instance, a Germanhistorian of the video-recorder, spoke of cinema quite generallyas an “intermezzo” in the history of “Audiovisions.”7 At theother end of the scale, the revival of Hollywood since the 1980saround the re-invention of special effects was also interpreted asa breaking away from the classical cinema’s form of narrative-realism-illusionism, with its psychologically motivated charac-ters and single diegesis anchored in time-space verisimilitude.What in the very early years of the last century had been theattraction of the technical apparatus itself—with its miraculouscapacity to bring images to life and to animate photographed


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street-scenes, panoramic landscape views or human beings intheir everyday surroundings—became by the end of the centurythe attraction of digital images and fantasy worlds, which alsocast a spell on audiences and drew from them gasps of disbelief.Then as now, the eye was seeing things that the mind couldbarely comprehend. As an “aesthetics of astonishment”(Gunning 1989) took over from realism, the cinema seemed tobe witnessing the return of a “cinema of attractions” (Gunning1990).

The Cinema of Attractions: Early Cinema, Avant-garde,the Post-Classical and Digital Media

By taking up the notion of the “cinema of attractions,” thediscussion of this contemporary cinema of (digital) specialeffects found a certain genealogical place and stylistic orienta-tion within an overall film and media history that privilegedearly cinema.8 As will be remembered, Tom Gunning and AndréGaudreault had launched the phrase in 1985, in a sense sum-marising the debates between Burch, Charles Musser, and BarrySalt over the kinds of otherness and degrees of autonomy mani-fested by the cinema up to the First World War. Opposed to the“cinema of narrative integration,” the “cinema of attractions”named the different features of the early cinema’s distinctivemode, quickly displacing not only Burch’s “primitive mode ofrepresentation,” but also Musser’s “exhibition-led editorial con-trol,” as well as Gaudreault’s “monstration” and other, similarlyaimed locutions. Not the least of the reasons why Gunning’sformulation won the day was that at the end of his article hespeculated that this mode may offer surprising parallels withcontemporary filmmaking, where physical spectacle seems oncemore to gain in importance over carefully motivated and plottednarrative. Action-oriented heroes predominated over psycholog-ically rounded characters, heralding a performative style, againsimilar to early cinema practice, where spectacular set pieceswere responsible for a discontinuous rather than a smooth visualexperience. More generally, one could extrapolate from Gunning’sargument that realism in current cinema was subordinated todifferently motivated types of fantasy and spectacles of excess,


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again not unlike the rough-and-tumble of early chase films,farces and slapstick. What the frantic pursuit or the graphichumour was to early film genres, so the roller coaster rides, thehorror, slasher, splatter, or kung-fu sequences to contemporarycinema: skilfully mounted scenes of mayhem and destruction.These scenes do not have to build up the classical arch of sus-pense, but aim for thrills and surprise, which in the action gen-res are delivered at close range and with maximum bodilyimpact. As in early cinema, audiences expect such set pieces,which suspend or interrupt the narrative flow, and in this senseexternalise the action. The cinema of attractions, by focusingless on linear narrative progression, manages to draw the specta-tor’s attention to a unique form of display.9

Following these thoughts further and extending them to therealm of the digital, it would appear that the electronic, so-called interactive media also fall under the heading of the cine-ma of attractions, by encouraging viewers to immerse them-selves in the image as total environment rather than to relate tothe screen as a window on the world. “Attraction” also seemedan apposite term to describe the thrills of video-games, becausethey, too, foster a different contact space between player and thescreen as interface. Finally, parallels could be drawn betweentoday’s Hollywood big budget feature films as multi-functional,multi-purpose, multi-platform audiovisual products for theglobal entertainment market (merchandising, music, fashion)and the surprisingly multi-medial and international context ofearly cinema. For the event-driven appeal of the modern block-buster, with its ability to colonise social and media space withadvertising and promotional “happenings,” also has its predeces-sors from the 1910s onwards. For instance, we see the samekind of thinking behind the very successful Passion films ofPathé, the elaborate publicity around certain films specially pro-duced for Christmas release, or the large-scale disaster films thatItalian and German producers first specialised in.10 Everywhere,it seems, references back to early cinema practice offered them-selves, which in turn made these nearly forgotten films appearstrangely familiar and once more popular in retrospectives andat festivals.11


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Thus, Gunning’s initial reflections on the relation betweenpre-1917 cinema and the avant-garde have been used for amuch broader hypothesis, suggesting that early cinema, under-stood as a cinema of attractions, can encourage us to think offilm history generally as a series of parallel (or “parallax”) histo-ries, organised around a number of shifting parameters whichtend to repeat themselves periodically, often manifesting a rela-tion of deviance to norm, or the subversion of a standard.12

Coming some ten years after “Visual Pleasure and NarrativeCinema,” which established a gendered opposition betweenspectacle and narrative and between two different modes of dis-play (voyeurism and fetishism), the “cinema of attractions” tookover from Laura Mulvey (whom Gunning cites in his essay) asthe magic formula of film studies, the Sesame opening newdoors of perception, critique and classification.

There is no doubt that the binary pairs “spectacle/narrative,”“numbers principle/linear action,” “interaction with the audi-ence/passive reception,” etc. provided a typology, which provedmost effective as a conceptual grid for initially sorting and slot-ting in the new modes of cinema, such as blockbusters, but alsofor post-cinematic media-effects and practices, such as video-games. It helped to keep the new digital media products withinthe theoretical reach of film studies and cinema history. But bypositing similarities between two “cinemas of attractions” oneither side of classical narrative, this intervention in the NewFilm History took a further step. The assertion that early cine-ma is closer to post-classical cinema than it is to classical cinemaalso reverses the relation of norm and deviance. Now early cine-ma appears—flanked by the powerful, event-driven and specta-cle-oriented blockbuster cinema—as the norm, making the clas-sical Hollywood cinema seem the exception (or “intermezzo”).The “cinema of attractions” thus joins in the attack on classicalcinema which, since the 1960s, has been fought, in quick suc-cession, by the American avant-garde, by Althusserian ideologi-cal criticism, by feminist Lacanian film theory, by Gramsci andFoucault-inspired cultural studies, and—as indicated in the ref-erence to Zielinski—by television history and media theory ofthe kind also represented by Friedrich Kittler. But such a move


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need not only be taken polemically and as a polarising strategy.It could lead to suspending all norm/deviancy models of think-ing, and append a question mark to all teleological film andmedia histories. In the spirit of our attempt to treat early cinemastudies as a possible template for the study also of other periodsof film history and other paradigms of cinema practice, thiswould mean applying even more radically some of the foundinggestures of the New Film History. For instance, its break with alinear causality in cinema historiography should also be appliedto the argument that the new and old media are destined toconverge into a digital “hypermedium,” and its argument infavour of alterity and discrete epistemes should alert us to thenon-congruent and a-synchronous moments today. In sum, theproblems and perspectives of the digital media perhaps supplymore pertinent reasons for returning to early cinema and themethodologies by which it has been studied than any polemicalattempt to dislodge classical cinema. Ideally, the task would beto recast film history as a whole: whether this implies settingoneself off from (previous theories of ) classical cinema is animportant point, but it cannot be the main aim of the exercise.

Media Archaeology I: Film History between ShiftingTeleologies and Retroactive Causalities

One such case where a contemporary media perspective, sen-sitised by the proliferation, rapid change and competitionamong different audio-visual dispositifs, has changed the waywe regard the past is in the question of the “emergence” of thecinema. Among proponents of the New Film History, it is nowgenerally accepted that the cinema has too many “parents,” aswell as too many “siblings,” for its origins and identity to addup to a single (linear) history. That this insight is owed to ourpresent situation can be seen by a simple test: open any text-book that is older than twenty years and look up the genealogiesof the techniques and technologies required for the “inventionof cinema.” There, the history of photography, the history ofprojection and the “discovery” of persistence of vision are listedas the triple pillars that sustain the temple of the Seventh Art.Or, to change the metaphor: they appear as the three major


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tributaries that finally—miraculously but also inevitably—joinup around 1895 to become the mighty river we now knowas the cinema. Today we notice, above all, the other sourcesupstream not included: all that is absent, missing or that hasbeen suppressed in the genealogical chart. Sound, for instance,since the silent cinema was rarely if ever silent, in which case:why is the history of the phonograph not listed as another tribu-tary? And as we now understand the cinema as part of a multi-media environment, how about the telephone as an indispens-able technology? Radio-waves? Electro-magnetic fields? Thehistory of aviation? Do we not need Babbage’s difference engineranged parallel to his friend Henry Fox-Talbott’s Calotypes orLouis Daguerre’s sensitised copper plates? These questions inthemselves show how much our idea—and maybe even our def-inition—of cinema has changed even without appealing to digi-tisation as a technology, which is nonetheless implicit as a pow-erful “perspective correction” and thus counts as an impulse inthis retrospective re-writing of the past.

But what are the consequences? Suppose we took thegenealogical chart just quoted, and extended it across the differ-ent media (cinema, television, internet), by including the tele-phone, radar, the computer, and all the other technologies saidto be driving these media towards convergence. We would thencome to something like the following “canonical” account of thedifferent phases: the early, primitive period (of “living pictures”)lasted from 1895 until 1917; the second phase coincided withthe “maturity” of silent cinema and lasted to 1927. The thirdperiod comprises sound cinema, from 1928 to 1948. The post-war years to the mid-1960s are dominated by the twin poles ofneo-realism and wide-screen colour, after which television takesover as the leading medium. The reign of television lasted untilthe mid-1980s, since when the digital media have begun toencroach on both cinema and television. Such a neat periodisa-tion sutures a series of clear markers of difference in order totrace a sequence of changes, inscribing themselves in more orless self-evident (though also self-cancelling) teleologies: those ofrealism, of perfect illusionism, of live-ness and of simultaneity.While this may be the most commonsensical approach to media


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succession and is the one still widely prevailing in survey coursesas well as popular publications, its flaws in the eyes of a scholartrained in the New Film History or a media historian are all tooevident. The account takes as its main points of reference forplotting “change” either the basic technology (sound, colour,screen format), or economically motivated legislation (e.g. theParamount decree, or the abolition of the Hays Code, in thecase of Hollywood). Added to this: the aesthetic parameter ofrealism, whose implementation becomes the ever closer, yet alsoconstantly receding, telos of moving image history. But if onewere to spell out the technologies involved, one would immedi-ately note a radical discontinuity. For instance, the first, cine-matic apparatus is made up by the projected moving imagefixed on celluloid, and subsequently synchronised by opticalsound. The second, televisual apparatus is an illuminated screenattached to a cathode ray tube. The third, electronic apparatusfocuses on the digitised transmission of the audio- and visualsignal, processed by a computer and reproduced on a monitorvia external or built-in storage devices such as zip-drives, CD-ROM, DVD, or an internally accessed server, on-line with theworld wide web. The telos turns out to need a set of moveablegoalposts, chasing the chimera of what—realism? instant com-munication? virtual reality?

In other words, not only the chronological stories of succes-sive technologies or devices but also the genealogical chartsquickly come to a conceptual dead-end. They take little accountof the very different institutional histories of the media thatarose around these technologies, their uses or implementations:the film industry, radio, television, the internet all have distinctinstitutional, legal and economic histories. Genealogies may reg-ister but cannot explain key similarities of “content” across thesemedia. For instance, the persistence of the full-length featurefiction film, which is the basic commodity of the film industrybut also serves as the standard currency of television program-ming and domestic media use, is implied but not named. Nordoes such a chart illuminate the vexed question of “classical”cinema already alluded to: its consolidation around 1917 (not atechnological point of change or rupture) and its demise or


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transformation in the 1960s (determined, by common consent,through economic and institutional changes). Moreover, boththe succession model and the expanded chart relegate filmto the margins and make it a thing of the past, which contra-dicts the internalised ubiquity of the “cinema-effect” mentionedat the beginning. But it also underestimates the cinema’s contin-uing economic significance as a generator of (cultural) capital,where festivals and first releases secure intense media attentionand star-status for a relatively small number of films, directorsand actors.

Yet there are also problems the New Film History finds hardto tackle, once it steps outside its preferred terrain of early cine-ma. So far, for instance, “revisionist” film historians have notbeen very successful at picturing the relation between the differ-ent stages of film form (editing, montage, close-up, insert-shots,deep staging, framing) and film style (all we have are successivemovements, cycles of genres, formally defined -isms). Or howcan we account for cross-media configurations (adapting or re-purposing the same “content” or stories in different periods orfor different media), and how explain the coexistence, the over-lap and sometimes interference among historically successive orwholly different technologies? Causal models, problem-solvingroutines or even evolutionary explanations are of little help.Cinema did not relate to the magic lantern in strictly causalterms nor did it “respond” to it by solving problems that hadarisen in the practice of magic lantern shows. It re-purposedaspects of magic lantern technology and parasitically occupiedpart of its public sphere. Television has not “evolved” out of cin-ema nor did it replace cinema. Digital images were not some-thing the film industry was waiting for, in order to overcomeany felt “deficiencies” in its production of special effects.Likewise, the coming of sound in the late 1920s and through-out the 1930s still poses major problems of how to factor in the“media-interference” from radio and the co-presence or compe-tition of the gramophone industry. The same goes for the histo-ry of television in the 1950s and its relation to radio, to cannedtheatre or to the more avant-garde or experimental uses ofvideo. In all these cases, the methods of early cinema have yet to


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prove themselves as decisive conceptual tools of either historicalexplanation or informed prediction (with regards to conver-gence versus self-differentiation, for instance). What help canarchivists expect from the New Film History when trying todeal with their non-fiction holdings, with industrial, education-al or advertising films? And when will we have theoreticallyinformed accounts of all the (other) non-entertainment uses ofmoving image technologies? To deal adequately with theseissues, the New Film History may have to break with its cyclicalmodels as well as with its genealogical ones. Especially whengenealogies simply become ways of waiting for the “next bigthing” to be declared the implied goal, so that selectively chosenpredecessors can then be seen to lead up to just this point. Wenow have several perfectly plausible accounts of how instanttransmission, media networks, and even the internet havealways already been just what humankind was waiting for. Andthe wonderfully rich recovery work done by historians on stere-oscopy, phantom rides, Hales Tours, dioramas, world exhibi-tions, wax museums, stuffed animals, natural history habitats orDavid Belasco-type complexly engineered theatrical spectaclescourts similar historiographical objections. Wherever the NewFilm History charts its longue durée accounts around “multi-medial,” “immersive,” “panoramic” or “haptic” media experi-ences, it also serves to legitimate a covert but speculative and, inall likelihood, transitory teleology.

Such caution may seem ungenerous. After all, these perspec-tive shifts have been salutary: they continue to be immenselyvaluable in producing new knowledge in the best historicist tra-dition. They add unexpected genealogies to our contemporaryvisual culture and serve to defamiliarise the cinema, and thus torefresh our awareness of it. They can put in crisis habitual classi-fications and categories, such as text, work or author, ratherthan put the digital forward as a surreptitious (and even moredeterministic) new teleology. Studies such as those devoted tothe history of movie-houses and exhibition practices reaffirmthe specific history of cinema. They once more privilege thefilm theatre and the big screen as the normative reception con-text, as if to counter the urban ubiquity of the cinema experi-


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ence, and the fact that we are more likely to encounter movingimages on monitors and television screens. It points to anotherparadox, namely that the immersive and transparent experienceof the contemporary multiplex screen exists side by side with itsapparent opposite: the multi-screen hyper-mediated experienceof television and the billboard-and-poster cityscape. On the onehand, “virtual reality,” on the other, the web-site or the comput-er’s “windows” environment. Can we explain both as versions ofthe “cinema of attractions,” without evacuating the concept?

At the same time, the question of realism has not gone away.Although the prevalence of fantasy genres may prove just howuntenable the grand narrative of the cinema’s traditional telos ofgreater and greater realism is, why should fantasy have becomethe preferred mode since the 1980s? Surely not because “real-ism” is taken care of by television, whose images are increasinglybroken up into multi-mini-screens and a moving frieze of textand figures. The classic evolutionary scheme from silent tosound, from black and white to colour, from the flat, two-dimensional surface to 3-D, from the peephole kinetoscope tothe IMAX-screen not only does not hold up. We can see howmuch of it was underpinned by certain definitions of realism, asa technology of panoramic, total perception and transparency.Realism’s invisible underside, so to speak, has been surveillance.The panoptic gaze highlights a key differentiation of cinemahistory as an apparatus history, often neglected when discussingthe realism effect as a subject effect: that between private andpublic. To the extent that this divide today is threatened, if ithas not already collapsed, the distinction becomes relevant alsofor theory. The separation of cinematic realism from the corre-spondence theory of truth (anchored in the so-called “indexical-ity” of the photographic image) and its redefinition within acoherence theory of truth (based on trust, belief and shared con-ventions) makes more urgent a clarification of what we mean byreference, authenticity and transparency. Once more, the digitalplays an odd role in this: it did not cause the rise of the surveil-lance paradigm, but it certainly made it more “visible,” retro-spectively proving that in its “invisibility” it had been there allalong. If the arrival of the digital pixel “created” the concept of


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the post-photographic image, the consequence was that it alsochanged the meaning of photographic realism.13 Such semanticshifts—a sort of constitutive inversion of cause and effect—arewell known in media history: black-and-white was an “effect” ofthe introduction of colour, just as the arrival of the compactdisk (after the audio-tape) revived interest in gramophone disksand created the concept of “vinyl.” Seen from the perspective ofthis type of Nachträglichkeit, i.e. retroactive causality, LouisLumière and Andy Warhol have more in common with eachother than they have with Georges Méliès and Stan Brakhage.But this is because our present interest in the storage and index-ing of time has re-shuffled the categories of documentary, avant-garde and fiction, seemingly keeping in place and yet also mak-ing obsolete such traditional divides as that between “realism”versus “fantasy.”

Questions such as these encourage film historians trained inthe field of early cinema to look beyond the boundaries andextend their competence more generally. For example, early cin-ema has taught us to think of film history no longer as a collec-tion of masterpieces, but to look for normative practices, epis-temic breaks, symbolic forms or distinct modes. Nor do wecontinue to regard filmmakers as participants in some trans-national baton relay race, where the inventor, pioneer or geniuspasses on the art of cinema from one generation to the next.Rather, the whole balance sheet of “winners” and “losers” is con-stantly revised—retrospectively, with “undeservedly neglected”figures being “rediscovered” all the time. The electronic and dig-ital media provide a similarly corrective reference point to thenotion of “author” and “work”: their products are often present-ed as “worlds,” even more than as stories, and as audiovisualevents, rather than as single “works.” As a consequence, new dis-tinctions arise that in turn have repercussions on how we viewthe cinema. Films now tend to be part of a culture of “experi-ences” and an economy of spectacle, where neither individualauthors nor individual films are placed at the centre. But thisdoes not mean that there are no iconic figures, such as StevenSpielberg and George Lucas, or retrofitted auteurs, like QuentinTarantino or Lars van Trier. However, not even for these undis-


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puted creators of personal works is “self-expression” the chiefindicator of authorship. Instead of playing the auteur off against“the system” (as was claimed by the auteurists of Cahiers ducinéma), the auteur now is the system. Directors have becomesmall-scale or large-scale entrepreneurs, image-engineers of filmsas “multi-media” concepts and total environments, with auteuristoeuvres replaced by fantasy worlds and cosmologies (Star Wars,Lord of the Rings, Kill Bill). On the other hand, almost the samefilms (say, Hitchcock’s) that have become part of the worldrepertoire of cultural commonplaces are also entering the muse-um, where they are performed, sampled and displayed with thefull aura of the auteur-artist reinstated.

Some of this may apply to what Lev Manovich once saidabout “theory”: that it is the funeral of a practice.14 Will it cometo be said of film history that it is the (retroactive) resurrectionof collapsed distinctions? We care about the indexicality of thephotograph because we miss it in the post-photographic pixel.We celebrate the “materiality” of clunky 18th century stagemachinery or the elaborate illusionism of a Pepper’s Ghostphantasmagoria because of the effortless creation of such three-dimensional “special effects” in computer graphics virtual space.We marvel at the sheer “diversity” of 19th century visual cul-ture—maybe because we sense its imminent disappearance? Inwhich case, “convergence” might be less our inescapable fatethan the name of our inadmissible fear, nostalgically but alsofrantically driving our excavation and preservation efforts.

Media Archaeology II: Family Tree or Family Resemblance?How can we begin to “think” such a changing media-land-

scape, and what implications does it have for our idea of placingfilm history within the “expanded field” of media-practice? TheNew Film History has taken initial steps in this direction, inso-far as it deliberately eschews focusing on the “origin” of a praxisor refuses to be excited by who was the “first” to use such andsuch a device or technique. This procedure is inspired by MichelFoucault, who in his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”warned the reader to identify Nietzsche’s notion of “descent”with “origins” or “inheritance.” Neither should one confuse


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genealogy with the search or tracing back in time of an unbro-ken lineage. On the contrary:

[…] an examination of descent permits the discovery,under the unique aspect of a trait or a concept of themyriad events through which—thanks to which,against which—they were formed. Genealogy’s… dutyis not to demonstrate that the past actively exists in thepresent, that it continues secretly to animate thepresent, having imposed a predetermined form to all itsvicissitudes (Foucault 1977, p. 146).

Practically, this means considering the history of image andsound technologies as made up less of a family tree and more of“family relations”—belonging together, but neither causally orteleologically related to each other. Almost all “from… to” his-tories have been, as we now realise, in one way or anotherdeeply flawed. In fact, they seem factually so inaccurate as tomake one wonder what kind of intellectual sleight of hand oracts of self-censorship must have taken place for so muchknowledge about early cinema and so many discourses aboutcolour, sound and the many experiments with giants screens or3-D glasses to have been “forgotten.”

Thus, a real challenge even for the genealogical approach isour lack of knowledge about the many interconnections—buteven more so, about the gaps—between the media. No mediumreplaces another, or simply supersedes the previous one.15 Today,cinema, television and digital media exist side by side, feedingoff each other and interdependent, to be sure, but also stillclearly distinct and even hierarchically placed in terms of cultur-al prestige, economic function and spectatorial pleasures. Thequestion is: how can we describe or analyse these mutual links,while also marking the spaces that distinguish the media, with-out falling back into writing their “separate” histories ?

A possible approach would be that of “system theory,” whichassumes that instead of the different media, say of cinema, tele-vision, internet, heading towards convergence, they are movingtowards greater differentiation in both their (pragmatic) usesand their underlying relation to each other.16 Again, early cine-ma studies has shown the way. The film strip’s antecedents are,


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on the one side of the “family,” the industrial production of cel-lulose sheets (as opposed to the hand-made glass plates of earlyphotography), but also chronophotography, made possible by“fast” emulsions (such as Louis Lumière’s famous étiquettebleue). Yet chronophotography is not cinema: it needed flicker-free projection secured by the mechanical intermittence devicethat we know as the Maltese cross. This opens up the other sideof the family, leading to the screen arts of projection, themselvesas different as magic lantern slides, fog pictures and phantas-magorias. Our two parental genealogies, however, leave out athird, constituting on the exhibition side the very conditions ofthe cinema as public performance and entertainment form,namely the history of music hall, vaudeville and the variety the-atre.

Sound cinema has, as one of its “parents” the experiments insynchronisation that run parallel to the history of cinema rightfrom its beginnings, with Edison having, as we know, conceivedof his kinetoscope as an illustrating device to complement hisphonograph (whether these experiments were in each case suc-cessful or not is of secondary importance). On the other side ofthe genealogical tree, sound cinema has to do with the develop-ment of the gramophone as a prime domestic leisure commodi-ty, and the popular appeal of radio in the 1920s.17 The first suc-cessful sound pictures all featured hit songs also marketed asrecords, and played on the radio. At the more directly industrialand economic level, the rapid development of sound equipmentand the sound film’s almost instantaneous introduction interna-tionally refers us directly to the power-struggles and patent warsof the major multinational electricity companies, such asWestinghouse, General Electric, Siemens, AEG.

Radio is also a key parent in the history of television, sincethe scarcity of airwaves as well as the size of the infrastructuralinvestment made television in most countries, and for most ofits history, a state controlled monopoly, whose institutionalstructure had everything to do with national broadcasting cor-porations and little to do with the film industry until the 1970s.Even in the United States, the history of (commercial) televisionand the history of the cinema began to dovetail significantly


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only in the mid-1960s and then again in the wake of the majortake-over and merger wave of the 1970s.

The cathode ray tube and its ability to transmit images was“discovered” at about the same time as the cinema, and thuscannot be said to be a “successor” to the photographic process:it is quite simply an alternative technology, engaged in transmis-sion rather than storage, valorising instantaneity rather thanpermanence, and putting a premium on simultaneity and “live-ness” rather than realism and illusionist presence.

At the limit and if pressed, one could perhaps name thephenakistoscope—understood genealogically, rather thancausally—as the common ancestor of both cinema and televi-sion, insofar as the optical slit of Plateau’s device is not onlyrepeated in the keyhole principle of Edison’s kinetoscope, andthen “translated” into the Maltese cross of the projector, but italso “anticipates” the rotation of Nipkow-disk, a distant precur-sor of television. Put differently: cinema and television have atone and the same time absolutely nothing in common and yetare closely related to each other. Only because television has insome respects “taken over” and established itself as the prioritymedium can we now recognise that the phenakistoscope offersitself as the joint ancestor of both. This would be a case of agenealogical demonstration after the fact, rather than a chrono-logical-causal “explanation.”

Is the question of family relations, networks and synergiesalways as fragile as this? Film scholars such as Ann Friedberghave rightly pointed out that certain audio-visual technologies(notably the video recorder and cable television) began to chal-lenge the differences between the cinema and television at atime when personal computers, fibre-glass optics or digitalimages had not yet been introduced.18 If, for instance, one wereto argue (as scholars did in the 1970s) that a key distinguishingtrait between cinema and television was the fact that the latterwas “live,” this difference seemed to be eroded with the arrivalof the video recorder, which—with its ability to store time—also undermined another distinctive feature of television, the“schedule” and the monopoly of programming the nation’s dailyattention. One might say that the “invention” of CNN was tele-


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vision’s counter-move to the VCR, trying to recover live-nessand the event though “covering” the “stories” of the world asthey “break.” Yet what brings cable-TV and the video-recorderclose to the cinema is the large “archive” of readily availablemovies. Here the VCR leapfrogs the cinema, in that the choiceand selection become at once customised and arbitrary. It eman-cipates itself from the schedule, a feature that the cinema and“live” television used to have in common. Did not the battlebetween VHS and Betamax prove that the video-recorder beganits entry into the world’s living rooms mainly as a playbackmachine and not as an off-air recording apparatus? What familyresemblance there was between cinema and television was thus aconsequence of an adjustment of the spectator’s field of visionto the television screen as the default value. Or put more gener-ally, a new definition emerged of the idea of the “window,”which already hints at the metaphoric slippage that occurredfrom film screen towards the computer monitor and its multi-media applications, part of the blurring of the distinctionbetween viewer, participant and user.19

The remote control may have changed the structure of televi-sion programming even more decisively than cable and theVCR, affecting the genres, the pace and the mode of address oftelevision, while also making its impact on film form, as weshall see. Cable and satellite reception also managed to break upthe institutional arrangement of television, especially in Europe,by not only extending the overall amount of choice, but by tak-ing control over this choice increasingly out of the hands andguidelines of governments, which until then had largely policedaccess. This push in the direction of commercial criteria forchoice and selection brings television once more closer to thecinema and already points in the direction of the internet.

From such an incomplete sketch one can at least deduce thatit was a whole range of very different technologies at differentpoints in time, with very different agendas, which have con-tributed to changing our idea of the audio-visual media andtheir respective relation of medium-specificity and multi-medi-ality. It also shows how many battles, conflicts and unresolvedincompatibilities run alongside any narrative of media-networks


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or system-synergies. What we can note instead of convergence isa slightly different phenomenon. Since the time portable video-equipment became professionally available towards the middleof the 1960s, each decade appears to have produced a kind ofprototype. It not only dominated the market in its field andcaptured the imagination of the mass consumer, but often initi-ated a new cultural configuration—an episteme—as well, bypromising novel uses and leading to changes in life-style andleisure. Thus, while not belonging to the “digital revolution,”the video recorder and the remote control have helped to alterirrevocably both structure and uses of television, as well as ournotion of what watching movies at home would mean. TheDVD has technologically improved this experience, but can itbe said to have added a cultural transformation? Undeniably,the DVD (with its bonus packages and audio-commentary) isreshaping our film culture and thus our film history, while alsoinitiating new debates about originality (the director’s cut),authenticity (digital remastering), and the relation between textand context (“the making of” materials).

The video recorder never laid claim to authenticity, but itpermanently affected our relation to time. With it, time couldbe stored, reversed and shifted, which means it became availablefor other types of measurement, for other kinds of experience—to the point of becoming interactive, establishing a temporalregime that was parallel and virtual, just as it was “real time”and actual (and this, again, well before the signal or the devicebecame “digital”). The video recorder’s most prominent use nowis in surveillance, as the medium for measuring “empty time.”Ten years later, it was the portable personal stereo, better knownas the Walkman, that reconfigured the experience of space andsubjectivity, and established a different ratio between privateand public, between motion and emotion.

The mobile phone, of which the Walkman can in some sensebe seen as the precursor (but certainly not a ‘parent’), has givena further incremental twist to our notions of time and space, ofinteractivity and mobility. These technologies, so seeminglyremote from the film experience and the cinema, nonethelessappear to have modified our ideas of spectatorship and partici-


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pation with respect to the traditional cinematic medium. Onecan begin to speculate what the common denominators betweenthese devices are—ease of access, instantaneity, mobility, thecombination of personal intimacy and public space, etc. None-theless, it is obvious, once one takes such a long view, that digi-tisation—the usual denominator, in the name of which conver-gence is assumed to be inevitable—while it has its part to play,is not the only motor of these changes. “Digital media” are, fur-thermore, themselves hybrid phenomena, when looked atgenealogically. The technologies they rely on also have at firstglance little to do with the cinema: the computer was developedfor military purposes in order to help break the codes and inter-cept the messages of Nazi-Germany’s “Enigma” machines. Themodern monitor screen with its “interactive” potential equallybelongs to the sphere of the military and has as its predecessorthe radar screen, first devised for scanning the skies and trackingenemy aircraft. Digital media are also associated with the mili-tary via the development of the internet, which relies on thetelephone and its extensive and intricate web of world-wideconnections. These in turn are supported by satellites orbitingthe earth, again a development referring us both to the ColdWar and to the fact that advances in audio-visual technology forthe entertainment business invariably represent spin-offs or bas-tard children of military aims and priorities.

In other words, if a genealogical model of film history,whether straightforwardly linear or pictured as a more complex-ly branching family tree, lands us with far too many black sheepcousins, promiscuous parents or profligate grandparents to cre-ate a credible line of descent, the “rupture” represented by thedigital will oblige us to break with the genealogical model aswell as the chronological. Hence my insistence that digitisationbe treated not only as a new technical standard (which itundoubtedly is), but that it also names the situation which Ihinted at in the beginning. We seem to be on an inside forwhich there is no clear outside, and we seem to be in a “now”for which there is no clear “before” or “after.” Thus, the move tothe digital marks a threshold and a boundary, without therebydefining either. A radicalised version of the genealogical way of


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thinking would lead us, in other words, to a properly “archaeo-logical” perspective, where no continuity is implied or assumed.The past is recognised as at once irrecoverably “other” and sepa-rate from us, and it can be seized only by a hermeneutics of thefragment, a discourse of metonymies, and an “allegorical” viewof (always already lost) totalities.

The project of a “film history as media archaeology” is thusintended to liberate from their straight-jackets all those re-posi-tionings of linear chronology that operate with hard binariesbetween, for instance, early cinema and classical cinema, specta-cle versus narrative, linear narrative versus interactivity. Instead,film history would acknowledge its peculiar status, and becomea matter of tracing paths or laying tracks leading from therespective “now” to different pasts, in modalities that accommo-date continuities as well as ruptures. We would then be map-ping media-convergence and self-differentiation not in terms ofeither a teleology or a search for origins, but in the form of fork-ing paths of possibility, i.e. as a determined plurality and a per-manent virtuality. For such a programme, the current confusionaround New Media provides a refreshingly provocative opportu-nity.20

Media Archaeology III: What is Cinema or When is Cinema?Thus, given the problematic status of all media genealogies,

one has to conclude that even the efforts of the New FilmHistory to rethink the cinema and its history as a whole havebeen partial, and in any case present us with an incomplete pro-ject.21 The provisional and variable nature of the pre-cinematicpleasures and attractions (the already mentioned dioramas andpanoramas, Hale’s Tours and phantom rides, haptic-tactileimages and bodily sensations) make it evident how much thecinema, even after more than a hundred years, is still in perma-nent flux and becoming. Or, again put differently: given thecinema’s opportunistic adaptation to all manner of adjacent orrelated media, it has always been fully “grown up” and completein itself. At the same time, it has yet to be “invented,” if one islooking for a single ancestor or wonders about its purpose inhuman “evolution”—as André Bazin, who left us with the


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question “what is cinema” and himself speculated on its “ontol-ogy,” knew only too well.22

This is why the example of early cinema suggests a “systems”approach (of self-differentiation), rather than a linear dynamic(the argument from convergence obviously lets linear history inthrough the back door), or even the sort of dialectic of binaryoppositions by which the “cinema of attractions” is sometimesdescribed. The “unfinished” nature of both the cinema and theefforts to write its histories help to highlight one of the draw-backs of this seminal concept—its interpretation as a cyclicaltrope of “return”—which in recent film historical work hasfunctioned as a template determining the object of study as wellas serving as an explanatory method. However didactically stim-ulating it is to find historical parallels to our own preoccupa-tions and obsessions, the illuminating effect may have to be paidfor by tautology and circular reasoning.

To mention one instance: the notion that the cinema ofattractions can explain post-classical cinema distorts both earlycinema and post-classical cinema. Other attempts have beenmade to explain the features said to be typical of the cinema ofattractions in the early period. I am thinking of Charles Musserand Corinna Müller’s arguments that the life-cycle of short filmsand the numbers principle (modelled after variety acts) as a pro-gramming and exhibition practice in early cinema can best beunderstood in terms of a set of economic parameters obtainingin the latter part of the first decade of the 20th century.23 Thedisappearance of “editorial control” and of variety act program-ming around 1909-1912 in favour of the longer film wouldthen have to be directly correlated to the conditions necessary toestablish the film business as an industry, among which “narra-tive integration” might be one way of providing a functionalequivalent to the numbers principle. Gunning’s binary formula,strictly applied, would screen out the industrial-institutionalcontext that gives his formal distinctions their reality and histor-ical ground.24

Likewise, there are other models of how to explain post-clas-sical cinema, if we admit that there is such a thing: for instance,the revival of a numbers principle in modern action cinema has


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more to do with the fact that a feature film is made today with aview to its secondary uses on television. Television, at least inthe US context (but increasingly also in the rest of the world)means commercial breaks during the broadcast of a feature film.The “return of the numbers principle” is thus a direct conse-quence of the cinema adapting to its television uses, rather thanits inherent affinity with early cinema. In other words, too easyan analogy between “early” and “post-classical” cinema sacrificeshistorical distinctions in favour of polemical intent, too keenperhaps to squeeze the hegemony of the classical cinema in asort of pincer movement at either end of a hundred year contin-uum.

As presently employed, the notion of a recurrent, or evendominant, “cinema of attractions” is thus perhaps both toopolemical and yet not radical enough, if one really wants tobreak with the dominance of “narrative integration” and theclassical cinema. A more thoroughgoing revisionism would haveas its aim to once more re-assess the relation of the cinema—allcinema, including digital cinema and the electronic media—todiegesis, narrative and narration. For these are the main parame-ters that constitute the cinema’s textual and ideological func-tioning, and they also regulate how a spectator is addressed asboth (imaginary) subject and physical, embodied presence in adeterminate space. Paradoxically, after what has just been saidabout works and texts, these different tendencies toward provid-ing images and sounds with some “diegetic” ground—differentin early cinema, in classical cinema and in the new mediaobjects—can best be studied, in their temporal and spatial coor-dinates, via close attention to individual films or to a particular“corpus.” Gunning himself has done so, and has robustlydefended close textual analysis, and so have others: Yuri Tsivian,Ben Brewster, Kristin Thompson. I, too, have looked at filmsfrom the teens and early twenties by D.W. Griffith, FranzHofer, Joe May and Fritz Lang with the question “when is cine-ma” in mind. Especially the period of the teens is emerging asrich in materials for a new concept of diegesis in relation to nar-ration and commentary, to screen space and auditorium space,but also in relation to display and mise-en-abyme. These last


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two characteristics of the “cinema of attractions” have hithertobeen constructed in opposition to narrative, partly, I suspect, forlack of an appropriate concept of diegesis, or “world-making.”25

In all these cases of early cinema practice, narrative integrationis a process taking place between screen and audience. Theseinteract at all times and cannot be rigorously separated fromeach other, as is the case if the oppositional pair of cinema ofattractions versus cinema of narrative integration is to be main-tained. And just as the shifting parameters of screen space andaudience space help redefine the “world-making” of early cine-ma, while the relations of diegetic, extra-diegetic and “imag-ined” sound offer new insights into the films especially of theearly sound era, so parameters like fixed spectator/mobile view,mobile spectator/fixed view (and their possible permutations)are important clues to the embodied or site-specific “diegeticreality” of video-installations and digital art.

The question, then, is not so much: on one side spectacle, onthe other narrative. Rather: we need to ask how the cinemaestablished itself as a symbolic form to such a degree that theevent character of the film performance (one meaning of “thecinema of attractions”) was able to enter into a seemingly natur-al union with linear, causally motivated, character centred narra-tive? This raises a counter-question, from the perspective of cin-ema as event and experience: under what conditions (be theycultural-historical and/or technological-industrial) is it conceiv-able that the moving image no longer requires as its main sup-port the particular form of time/space/agency we know as classi-cal narrative, yet still establishes a coherent “world?” Are otherkinds of diegesis conceivable that similarly accommodate thespectatorial “body” and give the impression of “presence?” Whatforms of indexicality or iconicity are necessary in order to acceptother combinations of sounds and images as relating to a“me”—as subject, observer, spectator, user? The answer mightbe “virtual reality,” “interactivity,” “immersivity.” But are thesenot mere attempts at re-labelling the question of cinematic die-gesis—with the possible disadvantage of being too focused onthe single individual, and giving priority to only one of the cine-ma’s effects, that of “presence,” understood as “real-time?” It is


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thus the question of diegesis (as the combination of place, space,time and subject) more than the issue of digitisation thatrequires us to redefine the very “ground” of the moving imagein its multiple sites. Media archaeology takes a first step in thisdirection, since it would try to identify the conditions of possi-bility of cinema (“when is cinema”) alongside its ontology(“what is cinema”).

While initially, one might say, scholars of early cinema had tobecome archaeologists, if only because of the sheer number ofincoherencies, inconsistencies and errors in the traditionalaccounts, which could not be rectified simply by adding more“facts,” film historians today should remain media archaeolo-gists for a variety of reasons. Take, for instance, archival policyand preservation practice of the past twenty years. Just as in his-torical archaeology, where one finds a split between those dig-ging for art-works, treasures and “gold,” and those makingstraight for the rubbish tips and fireplaces of lost civilisations, sothere is a split between film archivists. There are those who areabove all interested in restoring “masterpieces” which can be“rediscovered” at festivals, shown during retrospectives and cele-brated in handsome publications, and those archivists who aremore concerned with cataloguing, interpreting and thus rescu-ing the “bits-and-pieces” of their collection. Adding value, bycalling them the “orphans of the cinema,” they study what wasonce thought the detritus of film culture and the cinematic her-itage, in order, for instance, to focus on what can be learnedfrom “programming.” Some are interested in dating the consoli-dation of historical “norms” and identifying studio-styles of set-designs, camera placement and figure blocking, and others stillare mining advertising, industrial, educational or medical filmsfor the information and data they provide.

History as archaeology adds to this a further insight: it knowsand acknowledges that only a presumption of discontinuity (inFoucault’s terms, the positing of epistemic breaks) and of frag-mentation (the rhetorical figure of the synecdoche or the parspro toto) can give the present access to the past, which is alwaysno more than a past (among many actual or possible ones),since for the archaeologist, the past can be present to the present


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with no more than its relics. Finally, an archaeology respects thepossible distance the past has from our present perspective, andeven makes it the basis of its methodology. Nonetheless, posit-ing breaks too quickly as ‘epistemic’ invites the charge of for-malism. A more rigorous media archaeologist’s point of viewwould assume that the breaks point to gaps in our knowledge,though one would be careful not simply to fill in the blankswith new “facts” before considering that a “missing link” maywell have its own meaning—as a gap.

Media Archaeology as Memory Art and World MakingChronology, genealogy, opposition, alternation—these are

some of the modes of temporal sequence and causal dispositionby which historians make sense of the continuities and ruptures,the lines of force and the piles of fragments in the records ofhuman actions and events. The same goes for film historiansfaced with the family of media that rely on the moving image.Trying to make sense of the elements of specificity and interde-pendence, noting overlaps and functional equivalences, andinterpreting moments of competition, influence or emulation assigns of convergence and synergy, they have usually opted for achronological, a dialectical or a genealogical approach. To theseI suggest adding an archaeological “turn” in order to describethe emergence and development of cinema, not in its own termsor when competing with television, but within the technical andelectronic media of the 20th century generally. I take my cuefrom Foucault, who had already recommended that thegenealogical method should break with the conventional nexusof causality, but who also cautions about understanding geneal-ogy as a lineage that can trace the present back to its “begin-nings.” Where Foucault separates cause from effect in order tore-articulate the lines of force of his chosen field as an archaeol-ogy of discourses and practices, the model of media-archaeologythat I am proposing involves two stages, one historiographic,the other ontological. This archaeology, too, knows no “begin-nings,” and does not make a division between the history andprehistory of the cinema. But neither does it hold the historiesof the moving image, the photographic and post-photographic


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image or the panoramic view, suspended in a purely conceptualspace, ready to be re-arranged by the different discourses ofpower and knowledge. It also feels no need to re-integrate thedisparate parts from the point of view of the present, with orwithout teleological inevitability, with or without leaving roomfor the virtual next to the actual.26

What, then, are its features, and how are these related to theidea of a two stage approach? Taking the historiographical stagefirst: it will be recalled that the problem a film history conceivedas media archaeology is meant to address is not only the inco-herence of certain historical accounts of how the different mediaof the moving image relate to the cinema. The problem is alsohow the “revisionist” picture of the many alternative historiesand parallel genealogies, which I briefly outlined, can be madepertinent to the specific question posed initially. What can earlycinema studies tell us about the kinds of rupture represented bythe digital, and thus what does it teach us about our presentmultimedial, intermedial, hypermedial moment? If the “digitalmedia” are a taxing test for film history, I argued, it was becausethey oblige us to extend the archaeological approach to includethe present, rather than give the present the hindsight (ad)van-tage on the past. The challenge thus lies in finding a place thatis not fixed in respect to either position or direction, one thatpermits spaces to coexist and time frames to overlap. This place,I also suggested, can only be an enunciative one, in which thepresent features not in relation to the past or future, but as the“I” and “you,” the “here” and “now” of discourse. Discourse ishere understood in Emile Benveniste’s sense of being cruciallyconstituted by these shifters and deictic marks just mentioned,whose characteristic is to be at once universal in their use andunique in their reference, but in each case requiring additionalspecifications of time, place and self, provided by the speaker’spresence. The enunciative act, in other words, is always a func-tion of making explicit the implicit reference points, the self-ref-erence (deictics), the data or evidence, on which the speakingposition, and thus the meaning of an utterance, depend.

But such an enunciative position within discourse identifiesan “empty” place, activated only when filled by a presence. The


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place-holders of this presence vary, determined by the discoursethey help bring to life. If the Freudian unconscious was such aplace-holder in the enunciative theories of psychosemiotics, acase in point today would be the discourse of “cultural memo-ry.” There, “history” intersects with retrieval, collection and rec-ollection, to produce the enunciative position of personal mem-ory, testimony or even trauma. Indeed, the kinds of selectivityof evidence, the processes of remembering and forgetting, of ret-rospective re-writing and retroactive causality which I have beendiscussing as typical of the New Film History, in both its aporias(from the historiographic perspective) and its achievements(from the media-archaeological perspective), are also a fairdescription of what we understand by “personal memory.” Is theloss of one (the “objectivity” of history) always the gain of theother (the “authenticity” of memory)? Memory is an awarenessof the past, in which the data is continually re-organised andsorted, according to new priorities and thus also new categories.In the case of an individual, memory is the locus of personhood,assuring a sense of identity across the discontinuity of livedmoments in time. By contrast, collective or public memory hasalways been a contested territory of rival claims. There, not onlythe narratives of history are re-written to suit the present.Power-relations, too, are being re-negotiated, continually raisingquestions of appropriation and expropriation around the stakesof recognition and legitimacy. To slightly vary a line fromWalter Benjamin: if history is indeed written by the victors, col-lective memory has often been regarded—notably also byFoucault—as necessary acts of resistance to this history.

Into this division between history and memory, the audio-visual media have introduced a further dimension, in one sensemitigating or even bridging the divide, but in another senseaggravating the opposition. Never in the history of humankindhas there been such an extensive, exhaustive, instantaneous andimmediate storage medium as the moving image for the inscrip-tion of human actions and events. Yet in spite of having nowbeen in existence for more than a hundred years, the cinema hasbeen eyed with extreme suspicion by those institutionally incharge of public records and official memory, namely archivists


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and historians. They have never accepted even so-called “docu-mentary film” (never mind the feature film) as a source of evi-dence for the historical record. This suspicion has only increasedwith our entry into the post-photographic age and the arrival ofdigital images, though one could argue that this is a rationalisa-tion after the fact, since the distrust has been there since thebeginnings, even if, in each epoch, it is being argued on differ-ent grounds.

In this sense, the cinema seems to have aggravated the split,suggesting that moving pictures (despite the fact that as part ofmechanical memory they are also a pure storage device, whereeverything is recorded, for future retrieval, sorting, manipula-tion and access) belong to the category of human memory, andthus always require an enunciative act in order to be intelligible.For phenomenologists and realists, such as Henri Bergson,Siegfried Kracauer, André Bazin or Gilles Deleuze, this argu-ment is strengthened when considering that many formal orstylistic devices of the cinema—from flashback and superimpo-sition to editing and close-up—have a remarkable affinity evento some of the empirically verifiable properties of visual memo-ry. In addition, the reason why people allow their own memo-ries to be overwritten by photographs and moving images (see-ing them often as more “accurate” or more “vivid” versions oftheir own perceptions and recollections) lies precisely in thisnatural affinity between photography and memory, and in anuncanny ability of cinema to mimic or “model” certain process-es of human consciousness, of the unconscious and of memory.

But if I am right about the presence of the “cinema in ourheads” and about the ubiquity of the electronic media in oureveryday environment, there has been a blurring of the bound-aries between public and private, between individual testimonyand collective experience. This further complicates maintainingany categorical distinction between “history” and “memory,”and to this extent, mediatised versions of history on televisionand in the cinema have also mitigated the split. The data avail-able though the cinema corresponds much more to the active,evolving and incessantly worked-upon concept of memory,where the information-richness of the moving image, the


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resources of visual rhetoric and of narrative, the filmic modes ofenunciation and address, of focalisation and identification, areshaping memory in a way that is perceived as both more rele-vant to individuals (and more empowering to groups) than offi-cial history: because its active, affective nature appears moreauthentic and closer to lived experience. Perhaps as a conse-quence, displays of personal memory and public commemora-tion—now so often in the presence of the media—have becometouchstones of authenticity, giving the act of testimony and rec-ollection (especially when embodied in the witness as privilegedmodel or form of spectatorship) a new kind of legitimacy.

At the same time, such bottom-up authenticity cannot but beunsettling to institutions and their gatekeepers, because of thetechnical malleability of the source material and the suggestibili-ty of subjective memory through the filmed images and photo-graphic records. The historian’s distrust—well-founded in his orher mind by the fact that testimony from eye-witnesses is unreli-able at the best of times and can so easily be interfered with byimages they may have been exposed to subsequently—is thusthe acknowledgement of an implicit struggle. This contest isbetween two kinds of recording-system (the human mind andpsyche on the one hand, the camera and sensor on the other),whose data in each case are treated by the historian as (raw)material or information, rather than as documents or embodiedaction.

In order to resolve this issue, or at least to focus on it morefirmly, media archaeology requires a second step—what I havecalled the “ontological” one, regarding both the spectators’ par-ticular “being-in-the world,” and the status of the movingimages as “world-making.” Earlier on, I discussed this under theheading of “diegesis,” the form of space/time/agency/subjectarticulation, which ensures that the flow of images—irrespectiveof genre (thriller/musical), style (montage/continuity editing) ormode (documentary/fiction)—is perceived as constituting a“world.” At that point in the argument, I wanted the referenceto diegesis to overcome several kinds of dichotomies: the onebetween documentary and fantasy as well as realism and illu-sionism, but also the one between the “cinema of attractions”


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and the “cinema of narrative integration.” These seem to me tostand in the way rather than help when “revising” film histori-ography or when determining the place of cinema in the con-temporary multi-media landscape. Focusing on one of early cin-ema’s most crucial variables, namely the relation between screenspace and auditorium space, I argued that both spaces, takentogether in their mutual interdependence, made up early cine-ma’s unique diegetic space. Abstracting somewhat, one can sum-marise it as follows: each viewing was a distinct performance,the spectators felt themselves directly addressed by the on-screenperformer, and the audience was assumed by the film to be pre-sent as a collectivity, rather than envisaged as individuals inter-pellated through imaginary subject positions.

If I am now arguing for an expanded concept of diegesis, it isbecause I not only want early cinema studies to be able to pro-vide the paradigms for studying the cinema as a whole. I alsothink these paradigms can become productive for understand-ing the kinds of interactions (converging or self-differentiating)between old and new media, which digitisation may not haveinitiated, but which it certainly accelerated. In other words, inorder to make headway with the idea of “cinema as event andexperience” (next to films as works and texts), we need to find aterm that allows for the conjunction of the variables of time/space/place/agency that is explicit in the use of diegesis. It alsoneeds to encompass the deictic markers that are implicit in theterm discourse, as defined above, and not exclusive to cinema.In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich put forward adifferent contender for the same role, using the term “interface”to designate the meta-space that enables and regulates the kindsof contact that can be made between audience space and screenspace, but also between computer user and software. I have cho-sen “diegesis” because, unlike Manovich, who looks at the cine-ma from the perspective of digital media, I come to contempo-rary media practice from the study of cinema, and also because,as I hope to show, the ontological, world-making associations ofthe term diegesis are relevant to my overall argument. The kindsof changes—architectural, social, economic—that eventually ledto the separation of the two types of spaces in early cinema,


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making screen space autonomous, and dividing the audienceinto individual spectators, would thus be the conditions of pos-sibility of the emergence of classical cinema. In their totalitythey establish a new diegetic space, with formal, pictorial andnarratological consequences. It is this totality I would want tocall classical cinema’s different “ontology.”

How much of a learning process this separating/re-aligningactually involved can be gauged by the “Rube” or “Uncle Josh”films popular in the earlier years of the transition. From theRube films, which show a character repeatedly making categorymistakes about the ontology of the cinematic, filmic and pro-filmic spaces he finds himself in, one can, however, also arguethat early cinema’s diegetic space comprised a complex but com-prehensible arrangement of time, space, place and diectic mark-ers. Fixed or mobile spectator, continuous or single shot, editedsequence or tableau, the look into the camera or off-frame: all ofthese parameters are staged as variables in their different permu-tations. The conclusion I would draw is that the successivephases of the cinema, but also the cinema’s relation to othermedia-forms, such as television, video art and digital media, canbe mapped by analysing their different and distinct diegeticworlds, comprising the technical apparatus and mental disposi-tifs, but also dependent on the temporal, spatial and enunciativelocators/activators that together constitute their particular“ontology.” For instance, the viewer who has the set on all dayto accompany his or her daily routine has activated a differentontology of television than the viewer who sits down to watch aparticular programme, lights dimmed and remote control safelyout of reach.

Thus, early cinema, classical cinema and digital cinema (toname only these) could be mapped on the matrix of particularprocesses of “ontologisation.” Each mode would be defined bythe relation an actual spectator constructs for the images andt

The New Film History as Media Archaeology · media conjuncture. Faced with this challenge, the essay makes a case for a new historiographical model, “Media Archaeology,” in order

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