Abstract

Film Studies has long consisted in the interpretation of a specific object (the technological medium of film) that is consumed in a specific location (the cinema or film theatre) without always fully appreciating its historical contingency. The film medium and the film theatre in their classical embodiments are the assumed coordinates of cinema. One line of argument suggests that focusing on the particular aesthetic qualities of filmic over digital embodiments of cinema is based on the privileging of one contingent object, and that this obscures the cultures and forms of experience that have built up around cinema as a medium and an art form. This focus is often offered as a means of privileging previously dominant modes of cinema over other technical and aesthetic possibilities of present and future iterations of cinema. ...