Toward an Archaeology of the Cinema/ Technology Relation: From Mechanization to “Digital Cinema”

Abstract

Benoît Turquety"The Last Machine?": The Digital Age and the 1930sConsidering the historiography of the cinema from the outsidethat is, re-establishing it within the context of the social sciences of the timestrange coincidences emerge.As is well known, the history of the cinematic medium has established itself from the very beginning as a technological history. The reasons for this fact are numerous and complex: from patents and their economicor patrioticimplications, to the pedagogy of the mechanisms of the illusion to the curious. In any case, all the historical essays on moving pictures published between 1895 and around 1925 conceive their task as the description of the evolution of the machines, and the historical-ideological determination of the important innovations. The history of the medium began to be conceived differently when it began to be perceived as an art form, a transformation that can already be sensed in Terry Ramsaye's book of 1926, and is completed in Paul Rotha's 1930 volume and Bardèche and Brasillach's 1935 history of film. 2 But in fact, during that time, the history of technology as a discipline was not yet founded. Its project was constructed precisely during these early 1930s. So there seems to be an odd historical delay or missed beat between the evolutions of the history of cinema and of the history of technology, the first being technologically oriented before the second emerged, and then turning away from the machines. A strange coincidence.Actually, the 1930s emerges as a crucial moment regarding the general presence of technology in culture. It was a time when technology entered the sciences as a major theme, in nearly all disciplines. So how come historians of cinema lost interest in technology precisely at the moment when technology caught the attention of other historians, philosophers, scientists, etc.?These coincidences raise a number of questions, and particularly that of the existence and nature of a link, in the 1920s and 1930s culture and sciences, be-