Now in an expanded second edition.
$10 Kindle, 20% off library PDFs via Jstor.
First, Gaudreault and Marion open a can of worms. Ten cans, in fact. They identify concepts and principles that led to the formation of cinema as a culmination, extension and initiation of various “cultural series” from its several beginnings, through its repeated “deaths” and “rebirths.” Then they attempt to put the troublesome and highly problematic worms back into the cans. Along the way they engage such difficult issues of history, theory and philosophy as whether cinema has an essential nature—an anima—and whether film presentations are recordings, archives or performances that transcend their photochemical or digital traces.
In its deceptively few but idea-packed pages, The Kinematic Turn provides a concise handbook that will provoke students, teachers, film specialists and anyone else who thinks deeply about contemporary media cultures. They will become informed, intrigued, swayed, outraged and fully absorbed in these arguments.
—Donald Crafton, Author of Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation (2013)
Now available in Turkish translation from our friends at Yort and in Slovak from our friends at the Slovakian Film Institute!
The Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and its Ten Problems
Translated by Timothy Barnard
Expanded second edition.
Heralding the digital era of cinema as a return to its roots as a crossroads of other media and cultural practices, André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion challenge the prognosis that cinema is dying, arguing that cinema has always been more an ‘evolving patchwork of federated cultural series’ than a static form with a fixed identity. In a discussion ranging from early cinema, of which today’s media landscape a century later is an eerie reflection, to opera films in local movie theatres to the ‘return of cinema’s repressed’ – animation, and now performance capture – The Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and its Ten Problems lays out a roadmap for negotiating the issues that will confront cinema in the years ahead as it increasingly mingles with other media. In the process the authors coin another neologism in their extensive repertoire, the ‘kinematic’, or the shift from the medium cinema to a convergence of moving image media, one that will engender a major ‘turn’ in study of the field.
The crises that cinema has undergone in its genealogy demonstrate the implicit hybridisation shaping any medium’s identity. A medium’s seemingly singular identity is never more than an evolving federation of media from a range of cultural series that have historically crystallised and been vouchsafed in a relatively consensual manner by an institution. Seen in this light, we might almost say that media are always hypermedia that are unaware of the fact. To carry out the dynamic genealogy we are outlining here, it is particularly important to undertake an applied mirror image study: if we wish to understand the evolution of cinema’s identity we must first attempt to understand the hybridisation phenomena at work at both ends. The first end was the turn of the twentieth century, that intermedial mash-up, that veritable broth of media culture around the birth of kinematography, to which corresponds, at the other end, today’s intermedial mash-up of what we call the kinematic in the polyphony of contemporary hypermedia.
Expanded second edition, 5.5 x 7.5 in., 87 pp. Library PDF, ISBN 978-1-927852-17-0. Kindle, $10.
is a professor at the Université de Montréal, Canada Research Chair in Cinema and Media Studies and director of the TECHNÈS International Research Partnership on Cinema Technology. His publications include From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema (2009 [1988]), Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema (2011 [2008]), The End of Cinema? (with Philippe Marion, 2015 [2013]) and Le récit cinématographique (with François Jost, 1990 and 2017). His current research is focused on the advent of editing, the broadcasting of operas in movie theatres, the archaeology of technological innovations in cinema, and the impact of the digital revolution on media.
is a professor in the École de communication of the Université de Louvain and in the Facultés universitaires in Namur and Mons, Belgium. Co-founder of the Observatoire du récit médiatique (ORM) and director of the research group Analyse des médias, he specialises in comparative narratology, media narratology and visual culture. He is the author of several books, including Traces en cases, essai sur la bande dessinée et son lecteur (1993); L’année des médias (1998); and Schuiten, filiation (2009). A pianist and composer, he has participated in numerous film festivals (including the project Crazy Cinematographe) as an accompanist to silent film.
