Editorial: Celluloid Memories and the Digital “Present”

Abstract

As the twentieth century identified with celluloid came to a close, digital culture proliferated all around with several new techo-material objects. The expansion of the Internet and the widespread circulation of cell phones, iPods, iPads, DVDs, and computer screens have evoked a flurry of questions, debates, and philosophical reflections. A latent anxiety and sense of loss, on one hand, and a desire to think about the place of artistic practice, on the other, tends to frame the responses to digital transformation. In his The Virtual Life of Film, David Rodowick suggests that a changed concept of materiality remains the key distinction between the analog and the digital. As a hybrid, mongrel, and multi-stage form, film has never had the ontological stability of the other arts and this has always been its unique quality. For Rodowick, film shares with the digital its status as an immaterial and ontologically ungrounded form. Cinema has an enduring power and to insist on medium specificity prevents us from recognizing this connection. Cinema Studies as a discipline has always been anchored to the material object but as the digital domain expands, one needs to pose the question—is cinema over or just celluloid? (Rodowick, 2007). Ann Friedberg describes a changed context in which screens appear everywhere making the cinematic a dispersed and multimedia form of experience that is at once perceptual and sensory. Digital platforms, new forms of storage, new ways of surfing the Internet to view films have changed the notion of the classic film spectator. New debates on embodiment, sensory regimes, spectators as users and producers of media have come to the fore. Digital proliferation requires that we move toward a genealogy of film that includes the radio, telephone, computer, and television as elements of an expansive audiovisual regime (Friedberg, 2000, 2009). Yet, despite all these changes the “obsolete” or the “archaic” continues to erupt to both animate and haunt the contemporary. It is this layering and ordering of different temporal formations that makes the exercise of encountering the digital present a complicated process. Media scholar Jussi Parikka argues that in the reigning fascination for the “newness” of new media, the past has also emerged as an equally compelling force, demonstrated in all kinds of media practices involving cinema, artworks, television, the Internet, and radio (Parikka, 2012). This technological entanglement between the present and the past requires a mode of investigation in which contemporary media culture has to be viewed as a sedimented and layered form, a fold of time and materiality. The preferred term here is Media Archeology by way of a method to help understand contemporary culture through the insights of past media practices. Media archeology “rummages textual, visual and auditory archives as well as collections of artifacts emphasizing both the discursive and material manifestations of culture” (Huhtamo and Parikka, 2011, p. 5). The journey from celluloid to digital media offers a critical site for an investigation of the complex ways in which memory, digital culture, and cinematic nostalgia have Editorial