Technology and film scholarship : experience, study, theory

Abstract

Ever since the digital revolution radically blurred the boundaries between media, cinema – in any case, cinema as it had been known – is, according to some, in the midst of dying. In a recently published book (which I co-authored with Philippe Marion), entitled, incidentally, The End of the Cinema? (note the question mark),1 we studied the effects of the most recent technological innovations on cinema and on the crisis that the medium faces in the digital age. We tried to show that though the medium itself is far from expiring, there is still something of cinema that is actually dying – even if only a certain ‘idée du cinema’, to use the French title of Dudley Andrew’s recent book (2014).2 While the digital turn produced a previously unprecedented convergence of media, this movement was concomitant with the production of a large number of divergences – between what cinema was (or rather, ‘the idea’ we had of what cinema was) before the transition to digital technology and what cinema is becoming. Within the international community of film researchers, this digital turn has fueled many debates, which have logically led to the return of film technology as an integral element of film theory, film aesthetics, archiving and restoration, and discourse about film industry and film epistemology. What had once been at the margins of film studies, a distinct, circumscribed area of film history for aficionados, collectors and some notable researchers (such as Barry Salt, Paul Spehr and Deac Rossell, for example), has become a central hub of theoretical questioning. The impact of this confluence of media convergences and divergences thus initiated a new stage in the history of film studies. To give only two personal examples (relevant to this book), in the last six years I co-organized (with Martin Lefebvre) one of the largest film conferences ever on the effect of technological innovations on film theory and film historiography (The Impact of Technological Innovations on the Historiography and Theory of Cinema, or simply, IMPACT, in 2011 in Montreal); I also participated in the launch of an inter-university partnership, TECHNÈS (between Université de Lausanne, Université Rennes 2 and Université de Montréal, and other film institutions),3 with the aim of producing a new digital encyclopedia of film technology, from its origins to the present day