Increasingly, whirring film projectors, diaphanous filmstrips and cinema's apparently obsolete materials more generally have become prominent features of contemporary art. This article explores the widespread pursuit of cinematic obsolescence in contemporary gallery installations, and considers its relation to our current phase of media and technological change. Seen in the context of the much-vaunted transition to the digital age, this artistic phenomenon of engagement with cinema's materiality and historicity may seem an act of nostalgia, or even of mourning, for cinema itself. Even as nostalgic gestures, however, the most sophisticated of these cinematic installations, such as those by Rodney Graham and Atom Egoyan analysed at length here, are a way of thinking cinema, of (re) interrogating its very idea and the possibility of its future. Furthermore, and somewhat paradoxically, for all their courting of obsolescence -in fact, by very virtue of this process -these artistic practices configure not the death of cinema but its continuation.In Transmitting Culture (1997), Régis Debray outlines his conception of the difference between art and technology; or, more specifically, between the afterlife of the artwork and the machine once these objects enter their respective museums:
This chapter explores the relation between sound and image in Antonioni’s films of the 1960s. It considers how the ostensibly quieter films of the 1960s – in which dialogue becomes sparser and from which extra-diegetic musical soundtrack is all but eliminated – have crucial affinity with contemporaneous transformations in music itself, where the diffusion of new mass media technologies such as audiotape and television, acted as powerful catalysts for experimentation with noise and attention to soundscape. In particular, I trace here a connection with the experimental practices of John Cage, musique concrète, and composers including Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono associated with RAI Studio di fonologia musicale.
This chapter considers Antonioni’s thematisation of photography in and beyond Blow-Up (1966), in the context of the postwar proliferation of media images and image culture. It argues that if photography and what Vilém Flusser more broadly terms ‘technical images’ affect Antonioni’s cinema, his cinema in turn also demonstrates a commitment to reflect on such proliferation, and engage film, as itself a medium of technical images, in a self-critique of the role of the image in mass media culture.
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