The New Film History, Sight & Sound

Popularity of topics in 80s that weren’t popular before: sound, color, Technologies got into the main
agenda of film historians.
Architecture of movie theaters
Cinema as interdisciplinary
İn 80s the idea of the end of cinema, in relation to television, were questioned.
Preservation of the film

How did The New Film History distinguish from the previous history writing?
Not only a history of filmmakers, actors, producers… Cinema as a more complex configuration. Pre-
mindset to media archeology (mid 90s).

Film History as Media Archeology, Thomas Elsaesser

Concentration of early cinema, a way to demonstrate that it was way more complex, experimental than
thought.
Cinema has migrated as spaces, how cinema has moved to the art gallery, or the museum. How does it
change how it is perceived, what it means in the broader sense?
Balance between organic progression and …
Main characteristic of media archeoloy:
 No linear approach, no teleogical meaning (something that exists today does not mean it will
exist tomorrow)
 Things in terms of configuration than causality
 Dynamic interplay between past, present & future
 Taking distance from the canon and staying far from the ethiquette like primitive cinema
 Reconsidering, reevaluating the machine, every kind of audovisiual devices to be engaged with.
Paying attention to these materials as an object to study.
 Accidents, correlation, chance instead of predictability and progress
 Paying attention to dead, long forgotten media objects. Resurrecting things that have already
been there but neglected.
 Interest in waste, garbage, ruins, remains, neglected and forgotten things, irrelevant or
completely obvious things. (ex. Telephone’s relation to cinema. Telephone is now taken for
granted.)
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 Parallel histories
 Rescuing objects and narratives attached to them.
It is not a method or a mindset, it is an approach. It tries to welcome any kind of methods.

Pre-cinematic devices, pro-cinematic toys (ex. Zoetrope): movement

History of cinema as a battlefield.

‘Excavating’ forgotten media-cultural phenomena that have been left outside the canonized narratives
(discourse produced) about media culture and history.

From What is cinema – Bazin

To When is cinema
And then
To Where is cinema
Where in a sense, we can see ruins, ruptures blabla of what cinematic entails?
(Film history is between when and where)

Foucault - Refusal of linearity, causality, and teleological reading of history

Is it a supplement for film history? What does it bring to the table?

From – camera stylo

To – camera truelle (need this in order to excavate)
p.25 quote ‘The activity of recovering…’: not just about the past but what does it mean for the future?
Otherness/alterity of the past: not completely known, explored

Vivian SOBCHACK, 2011

• A certain tendency: materialist (concrete), antinarrative, antirepresentationalism, and how the absent can
have a certain presence in the present.

• « the metalevel grounding of media archeology in all its diversity is located in a desire for, and belief in,
the possibility of historical presence. » (p. 327)  presence effect
« presence effect » (an overlooked media artifact that is then both familiar and strange). (ex.
Phantasmagoria as an example of that presence)

• The thingness of things (double stressing the materiality)  touching, operating, and performing the
object of study. The very materiality of the material object itself.
-> Narrated (and not narrativized!) acts of discovery and description that open up our senses as well as
our intellect to the world.
-> the 'thing' (the object, the machine: ex. Zoetrope, iphone etc.) is not subjected or instrumentalized.

• « In its historical materialism, its antihermeneutic bent, its insistence on media variety, specificity and
difference, and its primary grounding in the possibility of the
'presence' of the past in the present, media archeology's employment seems to me particularly Romantic.
» (p. 328). (summarizing the characteristics of media archeology)
Romantic//A nostalgic gesture of resurrecting something

• Media archeology is not a totalizing theory, but an undisciplined discipline. (welcomes diversity) It
potentially challenges the epistemic norms and established values of the disciplined disciplines of history,
film and media studies, and cultural studies. (Deconstructing what the canonical cinema has been doing)

Question on canvas in relation to cinema history.

Think about an object Baronian’s suitcase in the lecture, or the falcon in Sobchack.
Is there an object that enables us to open up a specific history of cinema?
Thinking of cinema and material culture.

29.11.2023
the relation between film and archive:
1. filmmaker as an archivist
2. use of archival images in films
3. professional archivists

 There is no (cultural/collective) memory without images/cinema.

p89 // Ararat does not recycle any archival images. Instead, the images we see become an archive. They ‘recycle’ history in a
new, more ‘visible’ light, which offers the possibility of envisioning the scars of the Catastrophe.

Derrida – Archive

Deconstructing the Archive:

- as a static place/concept
- as a transparent reflection of the past
- as a documentary absolute value
- or as reliable objective source

Derrida wants to offer a new conceptual status to archive.

Deconstruction for Derrida is to review and reinterpret texts, a spesific engagement to
read texts.

Deconstruction

- <Il n’y a pas de hors-texte. There is nothing outside text.>

There is no context that could be the only way to understand a text.  not limiting the
possibilities of understanding a text

- The postal

Every sign, language, word, … circulate like a postcard. It can be read & interpreted by
everyone; it can end up anywhere. The world we live in is like a huge post office for him.
There is no such a thing like once and for all truth for Derrida.

Understanding archive and psychoanalysis…

Psychoanalysis: archival science – remembering and forgetting – memory

French title: Mal d’Archive. The need for archive / desire or passion for archive / … evil /

1. Archives are open and incomplete.

There is nothing outside the archive.

« This archive is not simply a mass of facts, of true facts, to be gathered and delivered
and made available. They are interpreted facts. » (2002, p. 50,).

Archives are not static, their materiality changes overtime.

To read an archive is to interpret an archive.
……….
4. The user brings a supplement to the archive.

« There is no archive without the signature of the archivists. » (2002, p.64)

5. Remembering and forgetting are not oppositional.

«The work of the archivist is not simply a work of memory. It's awork of mourning. »
(2002, p.54)

Forgetting in a sense of mourning and healing.

6. The archive is always bound the destruction.

«The death drive is not simply at work in killing, in producing death, but in trying to
save, in a certain way, the memory. » (2002, p.68)

Potential destruction of archive.

The moment we archive something, it is automatically lost/dead.

7. Power

The archive is « not simply a recording of the past, but also something which is shaped
by a certain power, a selective power, and shaped by the future, by the future anterior. »
(2002, p.40)

8. The archive opens out of the future

The way we understand the future is predictable…?

How the archives inevitably make us responsible subjects?

« And this future-oriented structure of the archive is precisely what confronts us with a
responsibility, an ethical and political responsibility. » (2002, p.46)