Thomas Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema

Abstract

Although there has always been a historical component to media studies, scholars within this discipline have often been far more inclined than those within film studies to neglect such considerations, striving instead to keep in touch with a seemingly endless succession of new devices, formats and platforms. It is in this context that ‘media archaeology’, a rather vague, albeit evocative, descriptor encompassing a range of disparate theoretical positions, has come to seem a vital tactical intervention, forcefully reintroducing the question (or problem) of history into a field of research that is still largely beholden to the hegemony of presence. Not so much a methodology in its own right as it is a stance or orientation, media archaeology has in the past few years nevertheless proved a fruitful means for challenging the norms and conventions of media scholarship. And yet, although it draws heavily upon particular strands of film theory, with a few exceptions cinema does not play an especially prominent role within such archaeologies, which tend to focus on prehistories of digitality at the expense of more familiar audiovisual media. One reason for this, postulates Thomas Elsaesser, is that ‘cinema has become invisible as a medium because it has become so ubiquitous, meaning that its specific imaginary [...] has become the default value of what is real – to us’ (p. 19). This simultaneous presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, of contemporary cinema provides the overarching premise for Film History as Media Archaeology, an engaging, insightful and exactingly detailed collection of reflections on film history and film philosophy.