The Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and its Ten Problems

Kino-Agora #1

by André Gaudreault, Philippe Marion

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.

52 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2012

About the author

André Gaudreault is a professor in the Département d’histoire de l’art et d’études cinématographiques at the Université de Montréal, where he is director of GRAFICS (Groupe de recherche sur l’avènement et la formation des institutions cinématographique et scénique). His books include studies of narratology in film (From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema, 2009) and film history (American Cinema, 1890-1909, ed., 2009; Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema, 2011; The Blackwell Companion to Early Cinema, co-ed., 2012). He is also the director of the bilingual scholarly journal Cinémas.

Reviews

[Steen Ledet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and insightful book on the digital shift with no real dogmatic approaches. Refreshing.