At long last, Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film is now available in a print edition! The 1000-page volume, originally published in open-access formats (HTML and PDF) in 2016, can now be purchased in a four-volume paperback format.
In accordance with the original Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND), the paperbacks are sold at cost; the purchase price covers only the printing. As a result, they are quite affordable (around $8.00 each).
The book as a whole asks: If cinema and television, as the dominant media of the 20th century, shaped and reflected our cultural sensibilities, how do new digital media in the 21st century help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility? In this collection, editors Shane Denson and Julia Leyda have gathered a range of essays that approach this question by way of a critical engagement with the notion of “post-cinema.” The contributions take as their critical starting-points concepts such as David Bordwell’s “intensified continuity” or Steven Shaviro’s “post-cinematic affect” and “post-continuity.” They expand and build upon the ideas of these and a range of other thinkers, with the goal of coming to terms with an apparently new media ecology that requires us to search for a fresh critical vocabulary. By examining the experiential, technological, political, historical, and ecological aspects of the transition from a cinematic to a post-cinematic media regime, the chapters explore key questions in breaking this new ground, seeking and articulating both continuities and disjunctures between film’s first and second centuries. Questions of aesthetics and form overlap with investigations of changing technological and industrial practices, contemporary formations of capital, and cultural concerns such as identity and social inequalities. The impact of digitization on taken-for-granted conventions is also in play: intermediality, new forms of distribution both licit and illicit, academic and critical reliance on genres and discrete media formats – all of these come under scrutiny as paradigms shift in the post-cinematic era.
Volume I comprises the Introduction and Parts 1 & 2, “Parameters for Post-Cinema” and “Experiences of Post-Cinema”:
Volume II comprises Parts 3 and 4: “Techniques and Technologies of Post-Cinema” and “Politics of Post-Cinema”:
Volume III comprises Parts 5 and 6: “Archaeologies of Post-Cinema” and “Ecologies of Post-Cinema”:
Finally, Volume IV comprises the conversations and roundtables contained in Part 7: “Dialogues on Post-Cinema”:
Please note: Due to factors outside of my control, the book launch event for Post-Cinematic Bodies, originally scheduled for this Thursday June 29, has been postponed to next Monday, July 3 at 7pm.
I am happy to announce that I will be in conversation with Mark B. N. Hansen!
Please also note the change of venue, to the Kurfürstenstraße location of Hopscotch Reading Room!
On Thursday, June 29, Hopscotch Reading Room (Gerichtstraße 43 in the Wedding district of Berlin) will be hosting a book launch event for my new book Post-Cinematic Bodies — which will be out both in print and open-access digital formats from meson press. There will be paperbacks available for purchase at the launch, and they’ll be more widely available soon afterwards. If you’re in town, come out around 7pm for a short reading, discussion, and drinks!
My book Post-Cinematic Bodies, coming soon from meson press, now has a great set of endorsements (blurbs) from three scholars that I greatly respect and admire: Rizvana Bradley, Francesco Casetti, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht — a group of scholars that reflects the interdisciplinary conversation I hope to provoke across film and media studies, literary theory/philosophical aesthetics, and the study of gender and race in contemporary art and visual culture.
We have long been feeling how the type of embodied identification suggested by the Hollywood classics was in a process of dissolution. Thanks to a sophisticated mediation between the phenomenology of perception and theories of digital media, Shane Denson provides us with concepts and a first understanding of this transition and its far-reaching existential consequences.
—Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University
What if digital media changed not only traditional forms of communication, but also our very bodies, because of the way they address us? In this brilliant study, Shane Denson suggests that, from a phenomenological perspective, our bodies are always at the forefront of our mediation with the world; digital media involve our sensorium in an unprecedented way and this commitment represents their true “revolution.” A myriad of examples, including screens in gyms aimed at enhancing our exercises, are proof of this. Philosophically dense, analytically sharp, this book unearths what lies beneath our digital experiences.
—Francesco Casetti, Yale University
Refusing both the perfunctory valorization of the body as site of resistive potentiality and the diametric reflex to dismiss theories of embodiment as exercises in the foreclosure of criticality, Shane Denson advances a rigorous theory of mediated corporeality within the metabolic life of post-cinema, with profound implications for the politics of (counter-)capture across microtemporalities and planetary scales.
—Rizvana Bradley, University of California, Berkeley
Coming soon from meson press, in the Configurations of Film book series!
Post-Cinematic Bodies
How is human embodiment transformed in an age of algorithms? How do post-cinematic media technologies such as AI, VR, and robotics target and re-shape our bodies? Post-Cinematic Bodies grapples with these questions by attending both to mundane devices—such as smartphones, networked exercise machines, and smart watches and other wearables equipped with heartrate sensors—as well as to new media artworks that rework such equipment to reveal to us the ways that our fleshly existences are increasingly up for grabs. Through an equally philosophical and interpretive analysis, the book aims to develop a new aesthetics of embodied experience that is attuned to a new age of predictive technology and metabolic capitalism.
Julia Leyda and I were interviewed about the new translation of (selected essays from) our edited collection Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film. The interview, in Turkish, is now up at Gazete Duvar. For those of you who don’t speak Turkish (like me), here’s the original English:
You assert that “rather than positing a clear break with the past, the term post-cinema asks us more forcefully than the notion of ‘new media’ for example, to think about the relation (rather than mere distinction) between older and newer media regimes”. With the prefix ‘post’, you’re not indicating the death of cinema or an era that is after the cinematic but you talk about the space where the cinematic meets the digital, the computational. Could you please expand more on your understanding of the term ‘post-cinema’?
Julia Leyda: The digital is an important aspect of post-cinema, absolutely. Yet I also still see a film like Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) as post-cinematic, in that it was seen primarily via bootleg VHS tapes for several decades before appearing on video sharing sites like YouTube. The cable and satellite TV boom and the almost total saturation of home video technology in the late 20th century also fed into what we now call post-cinema, in the decentering of the viewing space and the proliferation of the “poor image” even before the digital copies that Hito Steyerl describes so eloquently.
Shane Denson: Yes, I agree completely. The prefix post- isn’t supposed to mark a simple before and after. We think the digital marks a clear difference from celluloid-based cinema, but it’s one that builds on transformations connected with television, analog video, and early computational technologies, among others. Steve Shaviro somewhere remarks that it’s less about the newness of post-cinema, and more about the fact that these changes, which have been building for over fifty years, finally reached a critical mass in the twenty-first century, and that it no longer makes sense to pretend that the media regime we live in is adequately described by theories of the cinema—which is not to say that cinema-centric approaches are suddenly rendered useless, but they have to be resituated in a broader context, which we call post-cinema.
Reading your introduction, I also noticed that my meeting with cinema was indeed post-cinematic. In my childhood, I watched many films not at the theaters but in my house from the DVDs, connected to the tv screen. So I guess for a long time now, we are in the ‘post-cinematic’ age, with or without recognising it. Maybe the term just helped us to assign meaning, enabled us to discuss our experience?
JL: Precisely. The post in our usage of post-cinema is not meant to be stand for a hard break, but a gradual shift in which old and new technologies and social practices exist at the same time. In this sense, the dominant, emergent, and residual cultural forms overlap, much as earlier media theorists like Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall observed.
SD: And we don’t really know where things are going, either. Post-cinema is very much in flux, as the rise of streaming services and their recent proliferation (and some demises) attest. The pandemic really shook things up, of course, bringing new moving-image platforms into our lives and, at least temporarily, displacing traditional cinematic screenings (which haven’t actually been very “traditional” for quite some time). I think this was a good reminder that media are always in transition, and post-cinema doesn’t describe a fixed state but precisely this flux and transitionality that marks moving-image media technologies and cultures alike.
I would like to echo a question asked by Steven Shaviro in his blog ‘The Pinocchio Theory’. He says “what is the role or position of cinema when it is no longer what Fredric Jameson calls a ‘cultural dominant,’ when it has been ‘surpassed’ by digital and computer-based media? So what’s the position of cinema in the 21st century?
SD: I think this depends on what aspects of the cinema we are emphasizing—whether we are thinking primarily of screening venues, industries, experiences, or images, for example. The industries that produced “cinema” aren’t gone, and many of them are more powerful than ever. But their consolidation into global multimedia conglomerates has also transformed them, so that they are more closely bound up with the data and financial sectors. And the latter, where the dominant power resides, have very little to do with images—but everything to do with our experience.
JL: One position the cinema has come to occupy in 2020-21 during the pandemic is a place of nostalgia. As the aesthetics of “films” were already more tailored to the home screen where they will likely be viewed on a streaming service, the sudden shutdown of collective exhibition venues has exacerbated my awareness of the limitations of my living room screening options. I have sympathized with many of my cinephile colleagues and friends experiencing grief over the loss of the moviegoing experience at this time, although my own tendencies in recent years had already leaned more toward home viewing.
You brought many different (and sometimes contradicting) authors together in this volume. Is this because the term ‘post-cinema’ itself includes various and sometimes contradicting meanings in itself?
JL: Absolutely. We felt it was very important to balance the book with contributions from the many approaches within film and media studies: philosophy, history, technology, as well as feminist, cultural studies, and environmental approaches. In particular, we tried to avoid producing a volume that would replicate what Racquel Gates and Michael Gillespie remind us about in their manifesto: the historic dominance of white men in film theory, in terms of practitioners and of objects of research, that still endures.
SD: Exactly. Again, the one thing we wanted to avoid is the impression that post-cinema is a single, fixed thing. It remains in flux, as the shifting site of negotiations between experience and culture, on the one hand, and changing environments and infrastructures. And questions of power and perspective are central to any attempt to account for these changes.
If you were to write and edit the book today, which discussions would you include/exclude in your edition?
JL: We definitely would need to discuss this! To name a couple of new developments I would want to include, there has been a lot more interesting work in eco-media studies, and I would also be very interested in including chapters that look at trans aesthetics and affects as interventions in the way we produce, perceive, and consume film and television. And of course the pandemic, as an abrupt change in social practices around cinema, television, and mobile video.
SD: I totally agree. Of course, the technological and industrial contexts have continued to change over the past couple of years, even before the pandemic. And who knows what the world will look like in a year or two? Even more importantly, our political realities have shifted in the past five years, with fascist and quasi-fascist movements on the rise around the world, but also major uprisings, such as took place in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, caught on a smartphone and circulated around the world.
What particular messages would you like to give your readers living in Turkey who are enthusiastically waiting to read your book in their native language?
JL/SD: Welcome to the book and please enjoy it! We are so delighted to share it!
Under the title Post-Sinema – 21. Yüzyıl Sinemasının Kuramsallaştırılması, select essays from the open-access collection Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Filmhave now been translated into Turkish and published by NotaBene Yayınları.
Here is the table of contents:
The book can be purchased directly from the publisher, here.
Today I presented a short paper on “Post-Cinematic Animation” as part of a roundtable discussion at the Society for Animation Studies. The roundtable, on “Expanded Animation,” was organized by Deborah Levitt and Phillip Thurtle, and also included Heather Warren-Crow, Misha Mihailova, and Thomas Lamarre—all of whom gave excellent papers. Here’s mine:
My recent book Discorrelated Images (Duke UP 2020) is not first and foremost intended as an intervention in the field of animation studies. Rather, it is an attempt to bring together some of the primarily aesthetic concerns of cinema studies and visual culture more generally with media philosophical and media archaeological interests in the invisible, or anaesthetic if not positively anti-aesthetic, dimensions of technical infrastructures in order to understand how, on the one hand, images have become unyoked from subjective perception and how, on the other hand, this post-phenomenological “discorrelation” opens new avenues of political control and subjectivation. In short, algorithmic images are processed in microtemporal intervals that elude the window of subjective perception; operating faster than us, they thus not only exceed perceptual objecthood but also anticipate our subjectivities; with their predictive or protentional, future-oriented operations, such images mark a significant departure from the past-based recording paradigm of a cinematic media regime, such that post-cinematic media become potent agencies or vectors that lead the way in shaping who we will be; and they do this by operating at or on the cusp between the visible and the invisible, the subjective and the pre-subjective, the aesthetic and the insensible.
But if, as I have said, this argument is not primarily framed in terms of animation studies, it necessarily implicates animation as both a thematic and a medial site of change. In a thread that runs through the book, the question of animation becomes a question precisely of the difference between cinema and post-cinema, one that resonates, in many ways, with Lev Manovich’s argument in the mid-1990s that the postindexical images of “digital cinema” are closer in spirit (and, in some respects, closer materially) to pre-cinematic technologies of animation—phenakistiscopes, thaumatropes, zoetropes, and the like—than to cinema in its classical form. Beyond formal and technical dimensions, I am interested in the philosophical implications, such as those foregrounded by Alan Cholodenko who, writing even earlier than Manovich, argued that “the idea of animation” should be approached “as a notion whose purchase would be transdisciplinary, transinstitutional, implicating the most profound, complex and challenging questions of our culture, questions in the areas of being and becoming, time, space, motion, change—indeed, life itself.” My approach to animation, as the locus of a media-historical transformation that also concerns a reconfiguration of subjectivation’s material parameters, therefore mediates between Manovich’s technical focus and Cholodenko’s philosophical one. I therefore follow Deborah Levitt in her recent probing of animation as “the dominant medium of our time”—by which she refers not to a specific technique but to a broad cultural and sociotechnical condition, which is related as much to moving-image technologies as to biomedical ones (from “novel developments in the biological sciences that open possibilities for producing living beings” to antidepressants and hormone therapy for transgender people); for Levitt, in short, ours is “the age of the animatic apparatus.”
Two other recent theoretical interventions, by Esther Leslie and Joel McKim (writing in a special issue of Animation) and Jim Hodge (in his book Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art), both suggest that animation mediates between human sense and the insensible processes of computation—a suggestion that helps ground the interrelation of concrete changes in media infrastructure and the forms of subjectivity that they subtend. For example, processes like motion smoothing, in which our so-called “smart TVs” algorithmically compute new images between visible frames and engage in a real-time generative tweening operation, or DeepFake and related AI-driven imaging processes that categorically elude perception in their black boxed operation—such acts of animation in its computationally expanded field activate what Merleau-Ponty referred to as the “inner diaphragm” between subjectivity and objectivity, which, “prior to stimuli and sensory contents, […] determines, infinitely more than they do, what our reflexes and perceptions will be able to aim at in the world, the area of our possible operations, the scope of our life.” That is, algorithmic animation is situated between embodied sensation and the circuits of computational processing, and it thus sets such a pre-subjective and likewise pre-objective membrane in motion, fundamentally recomputing what counts as an image and what our relation to it is. If this means that what Husserl called “the fundamental correlation between noesis and noema,” or the relational bond between perceptual consciousness and its intentional objects, is called into question by computational processes, then animation’s central role as mediator ensures that such discorrelation is not the end but the reinvigoration of embodied sensation—indeed, a redefinition of life itself in the contemporary world.
References:
Cholodenko, Alan. “Introduction.” In The Illusion of Life, edited by Alan Cholodenko, 9-36. Sydney: Power Publications, 1991.
Denson, Shane. Discorrelated Images. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
Hodge, James J. Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
Husserl, Edmund. The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness. Translated by James Churchill. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964.
Leslie, Esther, and Joel McKim. “Life Remade: Critical Animation in the Digital Age.” Animation 12.3 (2017): 207-213.
Levitt, Deborah. The Animatic Apparatus: Animation, Vitality, and the Futures of the Image. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2018.
Manovich, Lev. “What Is Digital Cinema?” In Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, 20-50. Falmer, UK: REFRAME Books, 2016.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Routledge, 2002.
The Fórum Internacional Cinemática III, organized by Giselle Gubernikoff, Edson Luiz Oliveira, and Daniel Perseguim of the Universidade de São Paulo, is taking place online from April 13-15, 2021. Dedicated this year to forms of documentary and “the real,” the conference will feature three plenary talks by Steven Shaviro (April 13), me (April 14), and Selmin Kara (April 15).
My talk, titled “Documenting the Post-Cinematic Real,” draws on a line of questioning about computational media and realism that I explore in the latter half of chapter 5 in Discorrelated Images:
“In its classical formulation, cinematic realism is based in the photographic ontology of film, or in the photograph’s indexical relation to the world, which allegedly grants to film its unique purchase on reality; upon this relation also hinged, for many realist filmmakers and theorists, the political promise of realism. Digital media, meanwhile, are widely credited with disrupting indexicality and instituting an alternative ontology of the image, but does that mean that realism as a potentially political power of connection with the world is dead? If we consider the extent to which reality itself is shaped and mediated through digital media today, the question begins to seem strange. As I will demonstrate with reference to a variety of moving-image texts dealing with drone warfare, online terrorism recruitment, and computationally mediated affects, post-cinematic media might in fact be credited with a newly intensified political relevance through their institution of a new, post-cinematic realism. As a result, the question of “documenting the post-cinematic real,” which any contemporary theory of documentary must raise, will necessarily take us beyond the documentary as it is traditionally understood; it will take us into spaces of the computer desktop, of online and offline subjectivities and collectives, and of post-indexical technologies and environments. How can these spaces, which resist traditional coordinates of cinematic realism, be documented?”
Here are the links to view the plenary talks:
Steve Shaviro, “The Ontology of Post-cinematic Images, and Examples from Music Videos,” April 13 (5pm Brazil, 4pm Eastern, 1pm Pacific) — https://youtu.be/7t6GEB6a-tI
The video of my Mercator Lecture for the Configurations of Film Graduiertenkolleg at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, “Post-Cinematic Bodies” (from November 23, 2020), is now online. Hope you enjoy!
