The New Film History as Media Archaeology Notes – Theo X

Film 6245 – Presentation – Theo X

Work to be Discussed

The New Film History as Media Archaeology by Thomas Elsaesser.

Context on Elsaesser

Born in Berlin in 1943.
Educated at Heidelberg University and the University of Sussex, where he received a BA in English Literature and a PhD in Comparative Literature.
Worked as a film critic in Britain before starting the Film Studies program at the University of East Anglia in 1976.
Other Key Publications: Film Theory: An Introduction to the Senses and German Cinema – Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory since 1945.
Source: <http://www.thomas-elsaesser.com>.

The New Film History as Media Archaeology

Introduction

Elsaesser begins by ruminating on cinema’s impact on human life and history, influencing both the ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ domains of our lives.
As such, elements of cinematic perception have become internalized as our modes of cognition and embodied experience even when its apparatus and technologies are not present.
Elsaesser then foregrounds the work of Gilles Deleuze and other cognitivists that have brought cinema as a form of perception, thought, affect, and bodily experience to the centre-stage of film theory.
Since the cinema is a part of us even when we are not watching a film, for Elsaesser, there is no longer an outside to which we can escape from cinematic perception.
He then pivots away to reflect on the question of “what is cinema?” and briefly mentions the various debates that have surrounded this topic since cinema’s inception.
Elsaesser then notes how the turn of the millennium and new technologies of sound/vision have led to a paradigm shift, thereby necessitating, “a new mapping of the moving image, and a new location of cinema in culture” (77).
Accordingly, Elsaesser uses digital media as a starting point to re-think the history of the moving image.
However, he acknowledges, “that the analysis of digital media cannot simply be treated as an extension of film studies as currently practiced, it is not at all proven that digitization is the reason why the new media present such a challenge, historically as well as theoretically, to our idea of cinema” (77).
Therefore, the rise of digital media forces us to recognize the inherent flaws,contradictions, shortcomings, and misconceptions in our commonly accepted picture of cinema history.
As such, we need to question if the digital image truly constitutes a radical break in the history of Western cultural imaging or if it is simply an ‘improved’ technological continuation of a vast and complex history of mechanical vision that has developed over centuries.
For Elsaesser, we also need to pay attention to culturally distinct modes of representation, technologies, and institutions that regulate the ‘life-cycles’ of such technologies.
Elsaesser believes that film history is too defined by notions of origins and propagating a teleological narrative of progress.

Therefore, Elsaesser uses this piece to (re)examine the continuities and ruptures in the relationship between digital media and cinema as a whole.
Explaining further, Elsaesser states, “I take digital media as the chance to rethink the idea of historical change itself” (78).
Correspondingly, Elsaesser sees this a chance to scrutinize the chronological-linear models of film history and in the process, propose an alternative approach of doing film history through media archaeology.

Early Cinema as Key to the New Media Paradigms?

Elsaesser suggests that in our understanding of early cinema and how we can use the insights gained from it to apply to the study of new media and cinema as a whole, we need to “re-examine the idea of continuity and rupture, as well as the dynamics of convergence and divergence, of synergy and self-differentiation” (78 – 79).
The study of early cinema was diverse in the sense that by looking its origins and pre-history, scholars connected it to a variety of proceeding media forms including vaudeville, stereoscopic home entertainment, world’s fairs, carnivals, and panoramas/dioramas.
As such, these scholars explored how early cinema converged and diverged from these assorted forms of media, thereby creating something new but which had elements of proceeding forms of entertainment.
Therefore, despite its uniqueness, early cinema did not function as a complete rupture from the past.
Accordingly, we should think about the relationship between film, television, and new media (predominantly digital artworks) in a similar vein.
Elsaesser then goes on to foreground the importance of Tom Gunning’s notion of a ‘cinema of attractions’ as a way to explore the continuities and ruptures with early cinema and the action-orientated/special effects driven cinema of the 1980s onwards.

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

By discussing the special/digital effects driven contemporary cinema through the lens of the ‘cinema of attractions,’ the former finds its “genealogical place and stylisticorientation within an overall film and media history that privilege[s] early cinema” (Elsaesser 82).
Correspondingly, we can see the similarities between the two in the sense that both types of cinema focus less on narrative progression and more on drawing the viewer’s attention to unique forms of display.
Elsaesser then extends his study to look at how this mode of address is not only prevalent in digital cinema, but other spheres of media that utilize digital technology such as interactive media and video games.
Interactive media and video games can be understood as being part of the paradigm of the cinema of attractions since they both engage the spectator/user at a direct level, meeting their gaze and encouraging them to interface with the mediatic text.
Beyond these connections, Elsaesser finds Gunning’s re-conceptualization of early cinema through the optic of the cinema of attractions as useful for thinking through film history in general, “as a series of parallel (or ‘parallax’) histories, organized around a number of shifting parameters which tend to repeat themselves periodically, often manifesting a relation of deviance to norm, or the subversion of a standard” (84).
By employing a similar methodology and using it as a template for the study of other periods of film history as well, this can lead to suspending all norm/deviancy models of thinking, as well disrupting teleological film and media histories. In the process, film history as a whole would be recast. This is what the New Film History would seek to do according to Elsaesser.
Lastly, this approach could also be useful for understanding the convergence between old and new media into a digital ‘hypermedium.’

Media Archaeology I: Film History Between Shifting Teleologies and Retroactive Causalities

For proponents of the New Film History, teleological narratives no longer have any validity since it is now generally accepted that cinema has too many ‘parents’ and ‘siblings’ (i.e. forms of media/technology that either proceeded it, developed concurrently with it, or grew out of it) to write a single linear history.
As such, Elsaesser is critical of typical film histories since they emphasize the visual elements of cinema but neglect sound and the related media that helped with the development of sound in cinema.
Elsaesser is also critical of standard media histories since they seldom take account of, “the very different institutional histories of the media that arose around these technologies, their uses, or implementations: the film industry, radio, television, the Internet, all have distinct institutional, legal, and economic histories” (87).
The proponents of the New Film History take these aspects into account in their study.
However, Elsaesser also notes the difficulties the New Film History has once it moves beyond its preferred terrain of early cinema.
Such difficulties include examining the relation between the different stages of film form and film style, as well as accounting for cross-media configurations, and explaining, “the coexistence, the over-lap and sometimes interference among historically successive or wholly different technologies” (Elsaesser 88).
Elsaesser ponders how to overcome these problems.
For him, causal models, problem-solving routines, and evolutionary explanations are of little help. The same goes for a genealogical approach, “especially when genealogies simply become ways of waiting for the ‘next big thing’ to be declared the implied goal, so that selectively chosen predecessors can then be seen to lead up to just this point” (Elsaesser 89).
Nonetheless, a genealogical approach to film history still has some validity for Elsaesser when it avoids this shortcoming of building towards a preordained narrative end, as we will see in the following section.

Media Archaeology II: Family Tree or Family Resemblance?

For Elsaesser, in order to think about our changing media landscape and the implications it has on our idea of placing film history within a broader discourse of media practice throughout time, we need to employ a genealogical methodology based on the concepts of Michel Foucault.
This version of genealogy eschews of focusing on origins and other teleological dead ends, but instead examines the discourse of a respective field in its totality, thereby leading the scholar to ponder the continuities, ruptures, and interconnections between the various components that constitute the field of study.
Therefore, when it comes to considering the history of image and sound technologies, for Elsaesser, it is useful to see them as “less of a family tree and more [as] ‘family relations’ – belonging together, but neither causally or telelogically related to each other” (93).
Elsaesser then goes on to chastise standard histories for being deeply flawed in the sense they omit huge areas of study, leaving significant gaps in the discourse.
Nevertheless, Elsaesser also recognizes that the genealogical approach is flawed in this regard as well (albeit to a much lesser extent) due to film scholar’s lack of knowledge about the multiplicity of interconnections and even the gaps between the various forms of media.
Explaining further, Elsaesser states, in a quotation that is central to the themes of his paper and this presentation as a whole,

No medium replaces another, or simply supersedes the previous one. Today, cinema, television, and digital media exist side-by-side, feeding off each other and interdependent, to be sure, but also still clearly distinct and even hierarchically placed in terms of cultural prestige, economic function, and spectatorial pleasures. The question is: how can we describe or analyze these mutual links, while also marking the spaces that distinguish the media, without falling back into writing their ‘separate’ histories? (93)

For Elsaesser, a possible solution to address these issues would be to employ an approach called system theory.
In this approach, instead of assuming that all the various forms of media are heading towards convergence, they are alternatively moving towards greater differentiation in regards to their pragmatic uses and their underlying relationships to each other.
Skipping ahead a few pages, Elsaesser goes back to the genealogical model to discuss digital media.
As such, Elsaesser notes how when looked at genealogically, digital media themselves are a hybrid phenomena in the sense the technologies they rely on at first glance have little to do with the cinema.
According to Elsaesser, many advances in audiovisual technology for the entertainment business have had their start as military projects or priorities.
Therefore, since film history leads us to examine a complex series of interrelations between forms of entertainment and technology, the ‘rupture’ represented by the digital will help us break with the genealogical and chronological models of writing film history.
This is because for Elsaesser, “we seem to be on an inside for which 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 to the digital marks a threshold and a boundary, without thereby defining either” (98).
Elsaesser ends this section by stating that one of the aims of ‘film history as media archaeology’ is to move beyond linear chronologies and hard binaries. Correspondingly, film history would acknowledge its peculiar status and trace a multiplicity of paths connecting the ‘now’ with the past, employing a methodology that accommodates continuities and ruptures. Concurrently, film history as media archaeology would map media convergence and self-differentiation through exploring forking paths of possibility that disavows of teleology and a search for origins.

Media Archaeology III: What is Cinema or When is Cinema?

Elsaesser starts the next section by acknowledging that due to the problematic nature of all media genealogies, the efforts of the New Film History to rethink the cinema and its history has been partial.
As such, Elsaesser comes to the realization that cinema is in a permanent flux.
Correspondingly, history on the whole and histories of cinema remain ‘unfinished.’
Therefore, this accounts for why certain methodologies and paradigms come and go, while others have consistent resonance such as the cinema of attractions.
Accordingly, Elsaesser refers back to the cinema of attractions to approach the question of diegesis and ponder why the cinema of attractions gave way to the narrative integration of the Classical Hollywood system that has persisted more or less as the predominant mode of filmmaking in North America (and to an extent, the entire world) from 1917 onwards.
Elsaesser wonders if there are other forms of diegesis and cinematic narrative techniques that do not seek to merely suture the spectator into the story world of the film, but instead provoke new relations that makes one re-consider their status as a subject, spectator, observer, or user.
Elsaesser believes the answer might be found in virtual reality and other interactive/immersive forms of engagement.
However, he also wonders if this attempt at relabeling the question of cinematic diegesis is too focused on the spectator or user as a single individual, while giving priority only toone of the cinema’s effects that is of ‘presence’ understood as ‘real-time.’
Therefore for Elsaesser, “It is thus the question of diegesis (as the combination of place, space, time, and subject) more than the issue of digitization that requires us to redefine the very ‘ground’ of the moving image in its multiple sites” (102 – 103).
Elsaesser believes that media archaeology takes a first step in this direction because, “it would try to identify the conditions of possibility of cinema (‘when is cinema’) alongside its ontology (‘what is cinema’)” (103).
Elsaesser then goes to discuss how film historians today should remain media archaeologists for a number of reasons.
One of those reasons is due to the split amongst film archivists in recent decades when it comes to archival policy and preservation practices.
The split is between those who are primarily interested in restoring canonical ‘masterpieces’ to be ‘rediscovered’ through tours on the festival circuit as well as at repertory theatres and those archivists who are predominantly concerned with cataloguing, interpreting, and rescuing the neglected and ephemeral pieces of their collections.
As such, film historians who employ a media archaeological approach can learn from this split amongst archivists and combine both interests in order to lessen the gaps in our knowledge.
By doing so, they weaken the binaries between past/present, canonical/‘lesser’ works, and art/industry.

Media Archaeology as Memory Art and World Making

Elsaesser begins this section by summarizing the multiple ways historians have tried to make sense of continuities and ruptures including through chronology, genealogy, opposition, and alternation.
To this, Elsaesser adds the archaeological ‘turn’ as a way, “to describe the emergence and development of cinema, not in its own terms or when competing with television, but within the technical and electronic media of the 20^th century generally” (104).
The model of media archaeology that Elsaesser proposes involves two stages: the historiographic and the ontological.
For the historiographic stage, a film history conceived as media archaeology is meant to address the incoherence of certain historical accounts of how the various media of the moving image relate to the cinema and to make the ‘revisionist’ picture of the many alternative histories and parallel genealogies pertinent to the question posed at the beginning of this chapter.
This question is restated here: “What can early cinema studies tell us about the kinds of rupture represented by the digital, and thus what does it teach us about our present multimedial, intermedial, hypermedial moment?” (Elsaesser 105).
For Elsaesser, the digital is meant to extend the archaeological approach to include the present in the discourse instead of using the present to merely give us reflections on the past based on hindsight.
Therefore, Elsaesser believes that the challenge is to find a place that is not fixed inregards to either position, but rather allows for a position that permits the coexistence of space and the overlap of time frames.
Elsaesser suggests that this place could be an enunciative one, in which the present is not seen in relation to the past or the future, but the ‘now’ of the discourse.
Elsaesser then goes on to discuss how traditional historians and archivists have remained skeptical of film as a valid method of historiography since they have been dismissive of film’s evidentiary value and weary of its power for manipulation.
Elsaesser believes that this suspicion has only increased in the post-photographic age and with the arrival of digital images.
However, Elsaesser acknowledges that the historian’s distrust can be seen as well founded from their point of view since it is evocative of the implicit struggle between two kinds of recording-systems.
These two kinds of recording-systems are the human mind and psyche and the other is the camera and sensor.
For the typical historian, the data from each is treated as raw “material or information, rather than as documents or embodied action” (Elsaesser 108).
Elsaesser believes to resolve this issue or at the very least, to focus it, media archaeology needs a second step – the ‘ontological’ one.
The ontological stage takes into the account the spectators’ presence of ‘being-in-the world’ and the function of moving images as ‘world-making.’
Elsaesser once again refers back to the question of diegesis via looking at the split between the ‘cinema of attractions’ and the ‘cinema of narrative integration.’
However, he believes such a dichotomy stands in the way, “when ‘revising’ film historiography or when determining the place of cinema in the contemporary multi-media landscape” (Elsaesser 109).
As such, Elsaesser argues for an expanded concept of diegesis that takes into account the relation between screen space and auditorium space.
He believes that such a re-thinking, “can be productive for understanding the kinds of interactions (converging or self-differentiating) between old and new media, which digitization may not have initiated, but which it certainly accelerated” (Elsaesser 109).
Thus, Elsaesser believes that in order to think about the ‘cinema as an event and experience,’ we need to find a term that accounts for the conjunctions of such variables as time, space, place, and agency as it relates to their use of diegesis. This term should also denote form and should not be exclusive to cinema.
Elsaesser notes how in The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich puts forward the term ‘interface’ as a way to discuss these same issues.
However, Elsaesser does not like to use this term and has chosen diegesis instead because Manovich looks at the cinema from the perspective of digital media, while Elsaesser comes to contemporary media practice from the study of film.
Elsaesser also prefers to currently use the term diegesis because he believes that it is relevant to his overall argument because of the term’s ontological and world-making associations.
Accordingly, Elsaesser comes to the conclusion that the successive phases of the cinema after its early years and cinema’s relation to other forms of media including television, video art, and digital platforms, “can be mapped by analyzing their different and distinct diegetic worlds, comprising the technical apparatus and mental dispositifs, but [are] also dependent on the temporal, spatial, and enunciative locators/activators that together constitute their particular ‘ontology’” (110).
Hence for Elsaesser, classical cinema and digital cinema could be mapped according to their particular processes of ‘ontologization.’
As such, “Each mode would be defined by the relation an actual spectator constructs for the images and the apparatus, and the degree to which the images are separated from/indexed for not only their material referents, but also their individual recipients” (Elsaesser 110).
Moreover, while the cinema seemed to stabilize around aligning the moving image with the spatial logic of narrative, the histories of television, video installations, and digital platforms indicate that there are other options.
One of these other options can be found in interactive technologies and virtual reality, which redefine how the user engages with diegetic space.
Thus, the move from the photographic to the post-photographic or digital mode could entail a ‘liberation’ from traditional conceptions of narrative and diegetic space.
Elsaesser then examines the present preoccupation in cinema studies and academia as a whole with memory and the archive.
For Elsaesser, the archive’s various logics of database management and the diversity of human memory suggest one kind of post-narrative ontology.
The same could be said of networks and flows, data streaming, and data knitting according to Elsaesser.
In this sense, media archaeology would be a methodology that adds the study of diegesis and ontology to film history and its genealogies.
Furthermore, media archaeology is not meant to replace its proceeding methodologies, because just like previous forms of technology when something new arrives on the scene, they do not disappear completely.
As such, media archaeology is helpful in modifying the cultural and economic context in the study of cinema and interrelated media as a whole, while also establishing new diegetic worlds and/or new media ontologies.
Elsaesser concludes by pondering if the study of cinema and its encounters with television and digital media need to not only speak to a singular past, present, and future, but to an archaeology of many possible futures and a perpetual presence of several pasts.

Questions

Do you think that media archaeology (at least as Elsaesser defines it within the confines of this paper) is a useful methodology for engaging film history? Why or why not?
How can Elsaesser’s notion of diegesis be applied when discussing virtual reality works?
Do you see elements of the cinema of attractions in other forms of media such as in virtual reality works, augmented reality works, and/or video games? If so, how can the cinema of attractions help us re-conceptualize our understanding of these mediums?
Elsaesser briefly mentions the skepticism traditional historians and archivists have towards the evidentiary value of film and as such, have disavowed of the medium’s potential to be a valid method of historiography. However, do you see film as a valid method of historiography that is the equal of traditional written discourse? Why or why not?

Tue, November 14 2017 » Future Cinema

Future Cinema