FIRST EDITION

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.

The crises that cinema has undergone in its genealogy demonstrate the implicit hybridisation shaping any medium’s identity. A medium’s seemingly singular identity is never more than an evolving federation of media from a range of cultural series that have historically crystallised and been vouchsafed in a relatively consensual manner by an institution. Seen in this light, we might almost say that media are always hypermedia that are unaware of the fact. To carry out the dynamic genealogy we are outlining here, it is particularly important to undertake an applied mirror image study: if we wish to understand the evolution of cinema’s identity we must first attempt to understand the hybridisation phenomena at work at both ends. The first end was the turn of the twentieth century, that intermedial mash-up, that veritable broth of media culture around the birth of kinematography, to which corresponds, at the other end, today’s intermedial mash-up of what we call the kinematic in the polyphony of contemporary hypermedia.

— André Gaudreault & Philippe Marion