Augmenting cinema: the Kino-Variété (1913-14)

The Journal of Modern History, 2019

New German Critique, 2014

Focusing on the German discussion about film between 1907 and 1914, this article explores efforts to fathom film technology's ability to provide access to a spiritual dimension. Some commentators argued that film technology facilitated novel forms of creative expressivity that transcended physical reality. They pointed to “tricks,” as special effects were known throughout the silent era, and their role in visualizing subjective experiences and supernatural events as evidence of technology's triumph over its confinement to outside appearances. These “technoromantic” lines of argument conceptually amalgamated technophilia and romantic commitment to the supersensible. As this article suggests, the technoromantic outlook is a key characteristic not only of silent film cultures but of modernism more generally.

2014

This essay focuses on the trends of the digital cinema’s language — the abolition of the out-of-field and vertiginous camera movements — and how it is shaping the viewer's perception. These features emphasize a preponderance of spatial composition with its background in the seventeenth-century Dutch painting and the first films in the history of cinema. This means that spatial composition of the image is characteristic of times with great technological impact, such as the seventeenth-century in the Netherlands with its lens manufacturing industry and the nineteenth-century with all the inventions and devices related to the persistence of vision. Finally, the text alludes to the need for a pedagogy of the image in general, and of the cinema in particular that knows how to use new technologies in a more artistic and creative manner.

Table of Contents Introduction: Cinematicity and Comparative Media Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau Part 1 - Cinematicity Before Cinema 1 Dickensian ‘Dissolving Views’: The Magic Lantern, Visual Story Telling, and the Victorian Technological Imagination Joss Marsh 2 ‘Never Has One Seen Reality Enveloped in Such a Phantasmagoria’: Watching Spectacular Transformations, 1860-1889 Kristian Moen 3 Moving-Picture Media and Modernity: Taking Intermediate and Ephemeral Forms Seriously Ian Christie Part 2 - Transitions: Early Cinema and Cinematicity 4 Reading in the Age of Edison: The Cinematicity of ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’ Karin Littau 5 Time and Motion Studies: Joycean Cinematicity in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Keith B. Williams 6 Nature Caught in the Act: On the Transformation of an Idea of Art in Early Cinema Nico Baumbach Part 3 – Cinematicity in the ‘Classic’ Cinema Age 7 Cinematicity of Speech and Visibility of Literature: The Poetics of Soviet Film Scripts of the Early Sound Film Era Anke Hennig 8 Making America Global: Cinematicity and the Aerial View Jeffrey Geiger 9 Invisible Cities, Visible Cinema: Illuminating Shadows in Late Film Noir Tom Gunning Part 4 - Digital Cinematicity 10 Cinema, Video, Game: Astonishing Aesthetics and the Cinematic ‘Future’ of Computer Graphics’ Past Leon Gurevitch 11 Miniature Pleasures: On Watching Films on an iPhone Martine Beugnet 12 Kino-Eye in Reverse: Visualizing Cinema Lev Manovich

Screen, 2008

AM Journal of Art and Media Studies

In the 1960s and 1970s the Clement Greenberg’s Modernist ideology of ‘purity’ played a central role in the definition of ‘avant-garde cinema’ as a serious, major genre of film. This transfer between ‘fine art’ and ‘avant-garde film’ was articulated as ‘structural film’ by P. Adams Sitney. This heritage shapes contemporary debates over ‘postcinema’ as digital technology undermines the ontology and dispositive of historical cinema. Its discussion here is not meant to reanimate old debates, but to move past them. Article received: March 12, 2018; Article accepted: April 10, 2018; Published online: September 15, 2018; Original scholarly paperHow to cite this article: Betancourt, Michael. "‘Cinema’ as a Modernist Conception of Motion Pictures." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 16 (2018): 55−67. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i16.254

The Handbook of Visual Culture, ed. Heywood and Sandywell, 2011

2020

In the past decades, the field of cinema has undergone several transformations. The digital turn increasingly called for new forms of production, distribution, and exhibition, which imply different ways of thinking, doing, and experimenting cinema. These new forms also reduced the gap between cinema to other so-called visual arts. If cinema and visual arts were already in the process of merging, the last years forced the naturalization of thinking in similar theoretical grounds. This special issue aims to be a forum for the discussion of new practices of researching cinema, and the changes in cinema's forms of experience and production.