Post-cinema : cinema in the Post-art Era

Abstract

For some time now, in newspapers and books, a series of words keep ap- pearing that begin with the prefix “post-.” As for these new words, the key to understanding seems to be a semantics of ambiguity. Post does not indicate something absolutely different but something in-between: postcapital- ism would be a new phase of capitalism; postmodernism, a new figure of modernism; and post-history, history again. In all these cases, to the same question – does “post-” mean a clear break or the more or less identifiable result of an evolution? – the same answer arises: “post-” is a “problematic prefix” that “debates over postmodernism and postmodernity taught us to treat not as a marker of definitive beginnings and ends, but as indicative of a more subtle shift or transformation in the realm of culturally dominant aesthetic and experiential forms” (Denson and Leyda 2016, 6). This astute remark can be found in Shane Denson and Julia Leyda’s introduction to Post-cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, a high-quality collection of texts published in 2016. In addition to the editors, the contribu- tors include Lev Manovich, Steven Shaviro, Vivian Sobchack and Francesco Casetti. Considering this title and ours, it is obvious that the two projects look very similar. Apart from our call for new contributors and the fact that most of the texts in this volume are newly published or translated into American English (in Denson and Leyda’s book all the texts are republished in a more or less revised form), we can clarify the different points or nuances that specify our approach of the hypothetical notion of post-cinema.