Dr. Strange Media; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Film Theory Author(s): D. N.

Rodowick Reviewed work(s): Source: PMLA, Vol. 116, No. 5 (Oct., 2001), pp. 1396-1404 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463543 . Accessed: 14/01/2013 13:04
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded on Mon, 14 Jan 2013 13:04:46 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

PMLA

the

changing

profession

Dr.Strange Media; or, to Stop HowI Learned andLove Worrying Film Theory
D. N. RODOWICK

Futureworld IMAGINETHATYOU ARE A YOUNG SOCIOLOGIST WORKING AROUND 1907. ON YOUR DAILY RIDETO THEUNIVERSITY, YOU witnessan explosionof nickelodeonsalongthe trolleyroute.They seem to operatecontinuously, day andnight,andit is rarenot to see a queueoutside their doors. Because your childrenspend an extravagantamountof time and money unsupervisedwithin their walls and exhibit an extraordinary and sometimes incomprehensible fascination with the characterspresentedthereandthe people who play them,perhapsyou have gone inside to see a photoplayor two. How can you comprehend,despite the breadth anddepthof yourknowledge,thatan entirelynew mediumandan importantindustryarebeing createdthat,in many respects,will come to define the visualcultureof the twentiethcentury? This is how I respondwhen friends and colleagues ask me why my critical attentionhas turnedso strongly to "new media" and computermediatedcommunicationsin recent years. My hypotheticalsocial theorist may have been fortunateenough to have participated in early studies of cinemaor radioas mass culturalphenomena.In retirement, this imaginary scholar may have taken an interest in the emergence of television. But the questionremains:How would it have been possible to imaginein 1907 what cinema would become in the fifty years that followed? Or to imagine in 1947 what television would become in just ten or fifteen years? As the twentiethcenturyunfolded, technological, economic, and culturalchanges took place on the scale of a lifetime. This was already incomprehensibly fast from the perspective of the nineteenth or eighteenthcentury.Now, at the edge of the twenty-first century,these changes takeplace in less thana generation. The rapid emergence of new media as an industry and perhapsan art raises a more perilous question for cinema studies. The twentieth centurywas unquestionablythe centuryof cinema, but is cinema's time over?And if so, what is to become of its barelymaturedfield of scholarship, cinema studies?
?
2001 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF

D. N. RODOWICK is professor and chair of film studies at King'sCollege London. Founder of the FilmStudies Program at Yale University,until 2000 he also taught in FilmStudies and Visual and CulturalStudies at the University of Rochester. His most recent books include Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (Duke UP, 1997) and Reading the Figafterthe New Media ural;or, Philosophy (DukeUP,2001).

1396

AMERICA

This content downloaded on Mon, 14 Jan 2013 13:04:46 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

i I6.5

D. N. Rodowick

1397

Despite my interestin new technologies and new media, I have never given up-and indeed still insist on-my identity as a film theorist, much to the confusion of my family and the amusementof taxi driversthe world over. Now this position could be considered marginal, for film theory has fallen on hardtimes, even in the field of cinema studies. In the 1970s and early 1980s, cinema studies was often identified entirely with film theory, especially its FrancoBritish incarnation represented by the journal Screen,which importedfrom Francethe work of Christian Metz, Roland Barthes, and others. More recently,researchin film historyhas dominated the field, and with just cause. In addition, questionsfilm theoryraisedin the heady days of political modernismconcerning representation, ideology, subjectivity,and so forthhave evolved in the more sociological direction of cultural studies and media theory. Thus, through the 1980s and 1990s one of the recurrentdebates in the Society for Cinema Studies was how to represent the field's growing interest in television and electronicmedia.Was cinema studies disappearing, and was film becoming less central? This was a hardpill to swallow for the prevideo cinephile generation, of which I am a cardcarrying member. Not only do many feel that film theoryis much less centralto the identityof the field, the disappearance in cinema studies of "film"as a clearly defined aesthetic object anchoringouryoung disciplinealso causes anxiety. So what becomes of cinema studies if film should disappear? Perhapsthis is a questionthat film can answer. only theory The Incredible Shrinking Medium In May 1999, near the end my tenure on the PMLAEditorial Board, I took advantage of a bachelor weekend in New York to make the roundsof the new summermovies. Releasedearlier that spring, The Matrix was dominatingthe screens. Settling in to watch previews at a large downtowncineplex, I noted thatnearlyeverybig summerfilm seemed to follow thatpicture'slead.

This was the summerof digital paranoia,a trend thatbegan with Dark Citythe year before. Films like TheMatrix, Thirteenth Floor, and eXistenZ each played with the idea that a digitally created simulation could invisibly and seamlessly replace the solid, messy "analog" world of our everydaylife. Technologyeffectivelybecamenature,wholly replacing our complex and chaotic world-too "smelly," accordingto the lead Agent in The Matrix-with a simulation where social control was nearly complete. The digital versus the analog was the heartof narrativeconflict in these films, as if cinemawere fightingfor its aesthetic existence. As I took in previews for The Mummyand Star Wars:ThePhantomMenace, it was clear to me that at the level of representational technologies the digital had already supplanted the analog. Feature films composed images, such as entirely of computer-generated orA ToyStory(1995) Bug's Life (1998), were not of a futureworldbut ratherthe world harbingers of cinematic media as experienced today.Computer-generated images are no longer restricted to isolated special effects; they constitute in many sequencesthe whole of the mise-en-scene to the point where even majorcharactersare, in whole or in part,computer-generated. This conflict,of course, is entirelydisingenuous. The staging of the digital as simulation functionsin the same way as the narrative dream or fantasy in the classic Hollywood musical. By opposing the imaginaryand the real as two differentnarrative in the same registersrepresented film, Hollywood narrative,even in its most outlandish form, asserts all the more stridently its statusas "reality." This is a classic case of Freudian Verneinung.When this strategy occurs as a narrativerepresentationof technology, it is always a contest between competing versions of the realthatdissemblethe fact thateach is imaginary.Narrativeconflict with the digital reasserts the aestheticvalue of analogimages as somehow morerealthandigitalsimulations,not only at the cinema but also in computer gaming and other forms. The Matrix is a marvelous example of

P*

, r_ 3"

Icc~

3 w

5 IE.
QRE "0

0 t"r ?~: ys a

This content downloaded on Mon, 14 Jan 2013 13:04:46 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

I398

Dr.Strange Media; or, How I Learnedto Stop Worryingand Love FilmTheory

PPMLA

r= 0

L. C.

tt

C M3

how Hollywood has always respondedto the apinto pearanceof new technologies. Incorporated the film at the level of its technologyof representation and in the narrativestructure,the new arrival is simultaneouslydemonizedand deified, a strategy that lends itself well to marketing and spectacle. In terms of market differentiation, computer-generated imagerycodes itself as contemporary, spectacular, and future-oriented, a sign of the new to bolstersagging audiencenumbers. At the same time, the photographic basis of cinema is coded as real, the locus of a truthful and of the authenticaesthetic exrepresentation of cinema. perience Photographybecomes the sign of the vanishingreferent,which is a way of camouflagingits own imaginarystatus.So, in the canny conclusion of The Matrix, we enjoy both the apotheosis of Nero, the digital superhero, and the preservation of the last humancity, Zion, which functions as the site of the "real,"hidden away at the earth'score as a distantutopia. This allegorical conflict between the digital and the analog also provides a new opportunity for forging an opposition between technology andart.Perhapsthe oldest criticismin the history of film theoryis thatfilm and photography could not be artbecause they were technology: an automatic inscriptionof images without the intervention of a humanhand. Throughthe narrative inscriptionof technology as the antithesisof art, in which a representation of the photographic process becomes the signifier, cinema reclaims for itself the groundsof humanisticexpression. This claim is not new, either.It was alreadypresent in silent cinema and today is newly narrativized to revitalize an old concept. Yet something is changing as the digital graduallyreplaces the analog, and to an old-school cinephile the process looks like nothing less than a terrifyingremake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The successive stages of the history of this substitution mightbe describedthus: In the 1980s digital image processingand synthesisbecome increasinglyprevalentin television advertisingand music video

production.StevenJobs's Pixar and George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic quickly as the most innovativeproducers develop of digital imaging for motion pictures. * By the early 1990s Avid digital nonlinear editing systems are rapidlyreplacingthe mechanicalSteenbeckand Moviola tables as the industryediting standard. * In 1989 JamesCameron'sTheAbyss the first produces"thepseudopod," in convincingdigitally animatedcharacter a live-actionfilm. The experimentis raised to a new level in 1991 with the T-1000 a character in Terminator 2 that Terminator, morphscontinuallybetweenhumanactors and computer-generated images. * In 1993 JurassicParkmakes prevalentand popularthe generationof photographically believablesynthesizedimages. * In 1995 Pixarreleases the firstfully syntheticfeaturefilm, ToyStory. * Beginning in 1998, digital video cameras are increasinglyused for fiction films, those of the Dogma movement, particularly such as Festen (1998), and more recently Mike Figgis's TimeCode (2000). * In New Yorkand Los Angeles in Juneand July 1999, successful test screeningsof StarWars: PhantomMenace take place using fully electronicand digital from 35 mm projectionindistinguishable celluloid projection. * In June2000 digitalprojectionand distribution come togetherwhen Twentieth Century-FoxandCisco Systemscollaborate in transmitting a featurefilm, Titan A.E., over the Interet andthenprojectingit digitally in an Atlantamovie theater. In the course of a short decade, the long privilege of the analog image and the technology of analog image production have been almost completely replaced by digital simulations and digital processes.The next five to ten years may witness the near disappearance of celluloid film stock as a recording,distribution, and exhibition medium. The celluloid strip,with its reassuring physical passage of visible images; the noisy and cumbersome cranking of the mechanical

This content downloaded on Mon, 14 Jan 2013 13:04:46 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

i i 6.

D. N. Rodowick

1399

film projector and of the Steenbeck editing table; and the imposing bulk of the film canister are all disappearing one by one into a virtual space, along with the images they so beautifully recordedand presented. What is left, then, of cinema as it is replaced, part by part, by digitization? Does cinema studies have a future in the twenty-first century? This is a problem I take personally since as I write this essay I am, for the thirdtime in my careerof nineteenyears, eithercreatingor remodeling a film studies program.As I rethink yet again a possible curriculumfor undergraduate and postgraduate students,I find myself cona new fronting disturbing question:Is this the end of film andthereforethe end of cinema studies? The Old and the New Periods of intense technological change are always fascinating for film theory, because the films themselves tend to stage its primaryquestion: What is cinema? The emergent digital era poses this questionin a new and interestingway because for the first time in the history of film theorythe photographic process is challengedas the ontological basis of cinematic representation. If the discipline of film studies is anchored to a specific materialobject, the arrivalof digital technologies as a dominantaesthetic and social force poses a conundrum.For 150 years the materialbasis of photographyand then cinema has been defined by a process of mechanically recordingimages throughthe registrationof reflected light on a photosensitive chemical surface. Moreover,most of the key debates on the natureof photographicand cinrepresentational ematic media-and whetherand how they could be definedas an art-were deducedfrom the basic photographicand cinematographic process. As digitalprocessesdisplaceanalogicalones more and more,what is the potentialimportfor a photographicontology of film? Unlike analogical representations, whose basis is a transformation of substanceisomorphicwith an originating image, virtual representations derive all their

powers from their basis in numericalmanipulation. TimothyBinckley clarifiesmatterswhen he reminds us that numbers,and the kinds of symbolizationthey allow,arethe first"virtual reality" (93). The analogical arts are fundamentallyarts of intaglio, or worked matter-light literally sculptsmicroscopichills andvalleys in raw film, whose variabledensityproducesa visible image. Photography's principal powersarethose of analand the ogy indexicality; image has spatial and that reinforce temporal powers photography's designative function with an existential claim. Even film's imaginary worlds-say, the moonscapes of 2001: A Space Odyssey-are founded by these powers. Computer-generated imagery, is wholly createdfrom algorithmic alternatively, functions. Whereas analog media record traces of events, as Binckley puts it, digital media produce tokensof numbers: the constructive tools of Euclidiangeometryarereplacedby the computational tools of Cartesiangeometry.Analogy exists in digital technology as a function of spatial recognition,of course,but has loosed its anchors from substanceand indexicality. The difference is not simply thatvisuality has been given a new mobility,where any pixel in the electronicimage can be moved or its value changed at will. Because the digital arts are without substance and therefore not easily identified as objects, no medium-specificontology can fix them in place. Digital productionrendersall expressions identical since they are all reducible to the same basis. The basis of all such"reprecomputational sentation" is virtuality: mathematical abstractions thatrenderall signs equivalent,regardless of theiroutputmedium. But here a first objection can be raised. Is film in its most literal sense synonymous with cinema?2 To say thatfilm is disappearing means that celluloid is only photochemical startingto vanish as the medium for registering, distributing, and presenting images. As celluloid, with its satisfying substantialityand visibility available to the naked eye, yields to a virtual and electronicrealm,is cinema itself disappearing?

3"

5*
_.

This content downloaded on Mon, 14 Jan 2013 13:04:46 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

1400

Dr.Strange Media; or, How I Learnedto Stop Worryingand Love FilmTheory

PMLA

0
A

IL 0 1. -t
tt c I)

One simple response is to argue that digital cameras, or even "virtual"cameras creating wholly synthesizedspaces on computers,arestill basedon the same opticalgeometryas traditional camerasandrely on the samehistoricallyandculturally evolved mathematics of depth and light renderingdescendedfromperspectiva legittima. Although digital processes have producedmany fascinatingstylistic innovations,thereis a strong sense in which what counts intuitively as an image for Westerncultureshas changedlittle in several centuries.There is much to be learnedfrom the fact that"photographic" realismremainsthe Grail of Holy digital imaging-a certaincultural sense of the cinematicand an unreflectivenotion of realismare still in many ways the touchstones for valuingthe aestheticinnovations of the digital. Of course, absentfromthe process of digitalrepresentationis what thinkerslike AndreBazin or RolandBarthesheld fundamental to the ontology of the photographic its indexical force as a image: literal spatialandtemporalmolding of the origiin a physicalmaterial. natingevent,preserved There is a deeper and more philosophical way of discussingthe questionof virtualityin relation to film. A consistent lesson from the history of film theory is that there has neverbeen a general consensus concerningthe answerto the question, What is cinema? For this reason the evolving thoughton cinemain the twentiethcentury has persisted in a continual identity crisis. Despite its rangeand complexity,the entireclassical period of film aestheticscan be understood as a genealogy of conflictingdebatesthatsought to ground filmic ontology in a single mediumspecific concept or technique:the photogenie of Louis Delluc and Jean Epstein; the close-up, as defendedby Bela Balazs; the rhythmiccinegraphie dear to French Impressionist filmmakers; montage, as debated during the golden age of Soviet film; mechanical reproducibilityand the decline of auraas describedby WalterBenjamin; Siegfried Kracauer's photographicaffinities;the long take and composition in depthendorsedby Bazin; and so forth.

Never has a field so thoroughlydebated, in such contradictoryand interestingways, the nature of its ontological groundingas has cinema studiesin its historicaleffortsto definefilm as art andthus to legitimateitself as a new field of aesthetic analysis.The perceivednecessity of defining the artistic possibilities of a medium by proving its unique ontological grounding in an aestheticfirstprinciplederivesfrom a long tradition in the historyof philosophy.This perspective produceda sort of aesthetic inferioritycomplex in film theory and film studies where, if all the claims abovewere true,cinemacould only be defined as a mongrel medium that would never evolve in an aesthetically pure form. Hence the greatparadoxof classicalfilm theory:intuitively, film seemed to have a material specificity with claims to self-identity; nonetheless, this specificity was notoriouslydifficultto pin down.There was something aboutthe spatialityand the temporality of the medium that eluded, indeed conof value andconceptsof founded,the hierarchies judgmentpresupposed by aestheticphilosophy. Therefore, the difficulty of placing film as an object grounding an area of study does not begin with the virtualizationof the image. One might say that the entire history of the medium, and of the criticalthoughtthathas accompanied it, has returnedincessantly to film's uncertain status.Whataccountsfor this flux at the heartof film studies,which has always seemed less a discipline than a constantly shifting terrain for thinkingabouttime-basedspatialmedia?All disciplines evolve and change. But film studies, I argue-and I think this is a positive thing-has nevercongealedinto a disciplinein the same way as English literatureor arthistory.Even today it is far more common to find universityfilm studies in a wide varietyof interdisciplinary contexts than in fully fledged departments dedicatedto it (see, e.g., Andrew).There are economic and political reasons for this, but I find the possible philosophicalexplanationsmoreinteresting. Why is film so difficultto place as an object of aesthetic investigation? Perhaps because it

This content downloaded on Mon, 14 Jan 2013 13:04:46 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

i i 6

D. N. Rodowick

I401

was the first medium to challenge fundamentally the concepts on which the idea of the aesthetic was founded. Up until the emergence of cinema, most of the fine arts remained readily classifiable and rankableaccordingto Gotthold Lessing's 1766 distinction between the arts of succession or time and those of simultaneityor space. As I have arguedin Reading the Figural (esp. ch. 1), this distinctionbecame the basis for defining an aesthetic ontology that anchoredindividual arts in self-identical media and forms. Among the "new"media, the emergenceof cinema, now over a hundred years old, unsettled this philosophical schema even if not successfully displacing it. In the minds of most people, cinema remains a visual medium. And more often than not cinema still defends its aesthetic value by aligning itself with the othervisual arts and by asserting its self-identity as an imagemaking medium. Yet the great paradox of cinema, with respect to the conceptual categories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics, is that it is both a temporal and a spatial medium.The heterogeneityof cinematicexpression-which combines moving photographic images, sounds, and music as well as speech and writing-has inspired equally cinema's defenders and detractors.The suspicion, or anxiety, that cinema could not be defined as Art derivedfrom its hybridnatureas an art of space and an artof time. Some of the most compelling contributions of classical film theoryrecognized and valued this: Erwin Panofsky's definition of cinema as an art that dynamizes space and spatializes time, Sergei Eisenstein's discussion of the filmic fourth dimension, and Bazin's defense of an ontology of the image as a unique spatialrecordof duration.Gilles Deleuze's concepts of the movement image and the time image are the most recent and most complex incarnationsof this idea. Film, it would seem, is an uncertainobject. This instabilitymakes it rivetingfor some and a cultural scandal for others. The solid ontological anchoring of film as a worked substance is

only difficultly grasped, yielding an art that leans, more than any other,on an experience of the imaginary. On this basis the virtuality of film takes on yet a new sense, elegantly described by Metz's characterization of the filmic signifier as the "imaginarysignifier,"a sensory modality that is also a psychic structuring.Instead of seeking a haptic object or a stable, selfidentical form, the film viewer, according to Metz, is always in pursuit of an absent, indeed an absenting, object. Psychologically, the spectator ineluctably chases a double absence: the hallucinatoryprojectionof an absentreferentin space as well as the slipping away of images in time. The inherent virtuality of the image is a fundamental condition of cinema viewing in which the ontological insecurity of film as an aesthetic object is posed as a spatialuncertainty and a temporalinstability. Here cinematic specificity becomes the location of a variableconstant,the instantiationof a certainform of desirethatis at once semiological, psychological, technological, and cultural. the twentiethcentury,film's technoThroughout logical processes of productionhave innovated forms have evolved conconstantly,its narrative and its methods of distribution andextinuously, hibition have varied widely. But a certainmode of psychological investment has persisted-a modalityof desire. At the heartof cinematic experience lies a twofold virtuality defined by a vertiginousspatializationof time and temporalization of space as well as by a peculiarperceptual and psychological instability wherein the spectatorpursuesa doubly absentobject.Consequentlyfilm studies can claim no ontological security as a discipline. In fact, the ontological ungroundednessof film from the standpointof aesthetic philosophy offers an importantobject lesson for every discipline that seeks a stable frameor substance.A discipline's specificity,no matterhow mobile, derives from and is legitimatedby the wealth of its concepts.Institutional cinema studieshas recentlyneglected to its peril the importance of theory and of the history of

P#"

13 3 I=J 11

e:~
VE
;A w

This content downloaded on Mon, 14 Jan 2013 13:04:46 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

1402

Dr.Strange Media; or, How I Learnedto Stop Worryingand Love FilmTheory

PMLA

ev ci

Vo

.7
0 L. w t?,

*J

theory:the invention,critique,and reassessment of the fundamental concepts that underlie the kinds of questions we ask-whether historical, sociological, or aesthetic-and the answersthose questions allow. I want to conclude by makinga plea not only for the continuingrelevanceof film studies but also for the special significance of film theoryin the electronicanddigitalera. As I assertedin the beginning of this essay, in periods of intense economic and cultural competition from other media cinema incorporates an image of its rival the better to remake the narrative and social image of its aesthetic identity and to differentiateitself economically. At the same time, the marketing of the new is also the reassertion of something already well established: the preservationand enhancement of the formal and psychological structuresthat have informed the pleasures of cinema-viewing throughoutits history.Film history helps us cut throughthe dissemblancesof digital paranoiato understandhow theatricalcinema has entereda phase of technological innovation and accommodation where, ratherthan fading away, it is renewingand renovatingitself. However,I also wantto emphasizethe emergence in the new media of possibilites thatchallenge us to rethink the basic concepts of film theory.An example is the nonlinear(thoughnot necessarily nonteleological) narrativestructure of multiuserandsimulationgaming,whose interactive and collective nature also mobilizes the spectator'svision and desire in novel ways. Not only does online gaming requirereconceptualization of the spectator's placement, but multiuserdomains,whereuserscollectively createand modify the space of the game or narrative,also ask us to rethinknotions of authorship.Interactive mediapromotea form of participatory spectatorshiprelativelyunknownin othertime-based spatial media. Web cams inauguratenew forms of self-presentation and modalities of pleasurable looking. A certainconcept of representation is also changing profoundly. As I have already argued,in digitalimagingthe criterionof realism remainsa curiousconstanteven while the indexi-

cal image is replacedby a computational simulation thatenables innovationsin creativeactivity. Finally,the variousmediathatderivetheirpower from distributed fundamencomputingrepresent new and social organizations technological tally of the time and space of spectatorship, in its singularandcollective forms. It would be foolish to believe thatwe areencounteringany of the digital artsin theirmature forms.Partof the excitementof the criticalstudy of digital cultureis recognizing that we are witnessing the birth of a medium or media whose future is as difficultly imagined as cinema was for my sociologist at the nickelodeon. Digital on- and offline continue artsand communication to change so rapidlythatthey have overtakenthe capacityof academicdisciplines to comprehend them. However,unlike my young sociologist at the nickelodeon, we are not bereft of criticalresourcesfor comprehending the broadoutlines of these new media. For to the extent that they share common lines of descent with the history of film, there is nearly a centuryof international film theory and historical inquiry to serve as a criticalresourcefor theirevaluation. Here the old (cinematic) and the new (electronicand digital)media findthemselvesin a curious genealogicalmelangewhose chronologyis by no means simple or self-evident. As film disof the digappearsin the successive substitutions ital for the analog, cinema persists as a narrative form and a psychological experience-a certain modality of imbricatingvisuality, signification, and desire. While computer-generated imagery longs to be photographic,many forms of interactive media long to be cinematic. Nonetheless, watching a movie on broadcast television or video, much less the Internet,is arguablynot a cinematicexperience.At the sametime, although therehave been mutationsin the formsof spectanarrative architecture of torship,the fundamental filmpersists,and,despitecompetitionfromvideo andthe Internet, theatrical film viewing shows no signs of vanishing. While the unity or homogeneity of the cinematic spectatorial experience peaked long ago, in 1946, and since has frag-

This content downloaded on Mon, 14 Jan 2013 13:04:46 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

i i6.5

D. N. Rodowick

I403

mented and branchedoff into other distribution streams, it still remains the baseline for understandingandevaluatingotherspatialtime-based media.For this reasonneithertelevisionnor digital studieshas emergedwith a coherenceseparate from a grounding in film studies, and therefore critically understanding the evolution of film narrative andnew variationsin cinematicspectatorial experience still relies on the core concepts of film theory.To understand criticallywhatteleand interactive vision, video, digital media are becoming means defining their significanttechnological and aesthetic differences and yet understandingthatthey descend with photography andfilm from similargenealogicalroots. I agree with Anne Friedberg that cinema studies finds itself in a transitional moment wherein screens become display and delivery formats whose form and dimensions are variable (theatricalfilm, television, computer),film is relegated to various storage media (celluloid, half-inch tape, DVD, video servers, etc.), and spectators become "users"manipulatinginterfaces as simple as a remote control or as complex as data gloves and head-mounteddisplays. Moreover,the convergenceof media thatoccurs in digital technologies encourages us to widen cinema's genealogy to include the telephone, radio, television, and computers in a broader audiovisual regime (Friedberg 440). Equally interesting in Friedberg's observations is the continuity of certain concepts-screen, film, spectator-that alreadyhave a long andcomplex history.The best critical work on digital culture recirculates and renovates key concepts and problems of film theory: how movement and temporalityaffect emergingforms of image; the shifting status of photographicrealism as a cultural construct; how questions of signification are transformed by the narrativeorganizationof time-based spatial media; and the relation of technology to art,not only in the productionand dissemination of images but also in the technological delimitationand organizationof the spatiality and temporalityof spectatorialexperience and desire. Thus, as I argue in Reading the Fig-

ural, the history of cinema and the concepts of film theory are the most productivecontexts for defining the audiovisuality of our past and current centuries.At the same time, the new media challenge film studies and film theory to reinvent themselves, to reassess and constructanew their concepts. Reasserting and renewing the province of cinema studies also means defining and redefiningwhatfilm signifies. Hence the apparentparadoxof assertingthe continuationand renewalof cinema studies in the face of the disappearanceof what most self-evidently defines it-celluloid as a means of registering and projecting indexical, analogicalimages. Screen, film, and spectator; image, moveand the problem ment, and time; representation of realism, or the relation of image to referent; signification and narrative;technology and art: the form and vocabulary in which these topics are posed have changedcontinuouslyin the history of film theory as a series of conflictual debates. Yet the basic set of conceptshas remained constant.Moreover,the real and reremarkably markableaccomplishment of cinema studies, I believe, is to have forged more than any other relateddiscipline the methodologicaland philosophical bases for addressing the most urgent and interestingquestions, aestheticand cultural, of modernity and visual culture. Suddenly, the concerns of not just a hundredyears of cinema but also nearly a hundred years of film theory become the starting point for comprehending what is entirely new in the emergence of interactive digital media and computer-mediated communications and what endures as the core cinema. experienceof narrative-representational The academic and culturalstatusof university cinema studies still suffersfrom the time lag between the emergence of film and cinema and the advent of their serious academic study. Nearly twenty-fiveyears elapsed afterthe arrival of cinema as a mass, popular medium and a major American industrybefore the first largescale sociological inquiry about it-the Payne Fund Studies-took place. The academic and educational response to radio and television as

=1

e%,
7

r.. I=~ 11 0
Ok

This content downloaded on Mon, 14 Jan 2013 13:04:46 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

I404

Dr.Strange Media; or, How I Learnedto Stop Worryingand Love FilmTheory

PMLA

._

0 ._

u
J:

new communication technologieswas somewhat quickerbut can still be measuredin decades. As describedin my opening example, a whole new industry and art emerged in the early twentieth century without a philosophical or sociological context thatallowed its social impactand consequences to be imagined.Despite its richnessand complexity,the history of film theory in the first half of the twentieth centurywas largely a matter of playing catch-up. Fortunately, the new digital cultureis not emergingin a similartheoretical vacuum. For the same history positions us to bettercomprehendthe complex genealogy defining the technological and aesthetic possibilities of computer-generatedimagery as well as its commercialand popularexploitation.Film theory and the history of film thus become the most productive conceptual horizons against which we can assess what is new, and yet very old, in the new media. Film theory is our best hope for understanding critically how digital technologies, like television and video before them, are perpetuatingthe cinematic as the mature audiovisualcultureof the twentiethcentury and how at the same time they are preparingthe emergence of a new audiovisual culture whose outlines we are only beginningto distinguish.

NOTES
For an interesting historical and aesthetic survey of these issues, see AndrewDarley's VisualDigital Culture. 2 This refers to GilbertCohen-Seat's importantdistinction of "filmic"from"cinematic" facts in Essai sur les principes d'une philosophie du cinema.The complex implications of this distinction are explored by Christian Metz in Language and Cinema,esp. chs. 1 and 2.

WORKS CITED
Andrew,Dudley. "The 'ThreeAges' of Cinema Studies and the Age to Come."PMLA115 (2000): 341-51. Binckley, Timothy. "RefiguringCulture."Future Visions: New Technologiesof the Screen.Ed. Philip Haywardand TanaWollen.London:BritishFilm Inst., 1993. 92-122. Cohen-Seat, Gilbert.Essai sur les principes d'une philosophie du cinema. Paris:PUF, 1958. Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture:Surface, Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London: Routledge, 2000. Friedberg, Anne. "The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change."ReinventingFilm Studies. Ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams. London: Arnold, 2000. 438-52. Metz, Christian.The ImaginarySignifier.Trans.Celia Britton et al. Bloomington:IndianaUP, 1982. . Languageand Cinema.Trans.Donna JeanUmikerSebeok. The Hague:Mouton, 1974. Rodowick, D. N. Reading the Figural; or, Philosophy after the New Media. Durham:Duke UP, 2001.

This content downloaded on Mon, 14 Jan 2013 13:04:46 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions