David Norman Rodowick: The Virtual Life of Film (2007)

As almost (or, truly, virtually) every aspect of making and viewing movies is replaced by digital technologies, even the notion of “watching a film” is fast becoming an anachronism. With the likely disappearance of celluloid film stock as a medium, and the emergence of new media competing for an audience, what will happen to cinema–and to cinema studies? In the first of two books exploring this question, D. N. Rodowick considers the fate of film and its role in the aesthetics and culture of moviemaking and viewing in the twenty-first century.

Here Rodowick proposes and examines three different critical responses to the disappearance of film in relation to other time-based media, and to the study of contemporary visual culture. Film, he suggests, occupies a special place in the genealogy of the arts of the virtual: while film disappears, cinema persists–at least in the narrative forms imagined by Hollywood since 1915. Rodowick also observes that most so-called “new media” are fashioned upon a cinematic metaphor. His book helps us see how digital technologies are serving, like television and video before them, to perpetuate the cinematic as the mature audiovisual culture of the twentieth century–and, at the same time, how they are preparing the emergence of a new audiovisual culture whose broad outlines we are only just beginning to distinguish.

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2007
ISBN 0674026683, 9780674026681
193 pages

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Mary Strong, Laena Wilder (eds.): Viewpoints: Visual Anthropologists at Work (2009)

“Early in its history, anthropology was a visual as well as verbal discipline. But as time passed, visually oriented professionals became a minority among their colleagues, and most anthropologists used written words rather than audiovisual modes as their professional means of communication. Today, however, contemporary electronic and interactive media once more place visual anthropologists and anthropologically oriented artists within the mainstream. Digital media, small-sized and easy-to-use equipment, and the Internet, with its interactive and public forum websites, democratize roles once relegated to highly trained professionals alone. However, having access to a good set of tools does not guarantee accurate and reliable work. Visual anthropology involves much more than media alone.

This book presents visual anthropology as a work-in-progress, open to the myriad innovations that the new audiovisual communications technologies bring to the field. It is intended to aid in contextualizing, explaining, and humanizing the storehouse of visual knowledge that university students and general readers now encounter, and to help inform them about how these new media tools can be used for intellectually and socially beneficial purposes.

Concentrating on documentary photography and ethnographic film, as well as lesser-known areas of study and presentation including dance, painting, architecture, archaeology, and primate research, the book’s fifteen contributors feature populations living on all of the world’s continents as well as within the United States. The final chapter gives readers practical advice about how to use the most current digital and interactive technologies to present research findings.”

Text Editor: Mary Strong
Visual Editor: Laena Wilder
Publisher University of Texas Press, 2009
ISBN 0292706715, 9780292706712
384 pages

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Hollis Frampton: Circles of Confusion. Film/Photography/Video Texts 1968-1981 (1983)

Hollis Frampton is most well known as an independent filmmaker, but has been lecturing and writing about photography, film and video for a long time and in many places and publications. Circles of Confusion assembles eleven articles from exhibition catalogs and from October and Artforum. What Frampton does as a critic is much like what he does as a filmmaker, which is to strip the creative process down to its basic elements, then arrange and display the components..

Framptont’s role in this is critic-as-conjurer . He prestidigitates ideas and illusions from everywhere–history, psychology, philosophy, literature, even archaeology, whatever might apply. However much he may circle, though, he always comes back to basic ontological questions. What is photography? Film? Video? What are the properties that make them unique? What has film to do with narrative? Photography with space and time? Beyond a king these questions Frampton also conjectures about the possible ways of asking them and the likelihood of getting an answer. He also plays the role of critic-as-authoritative-voice, but by exposing the jagged mechanisms of thought makes the reader much more than a participant in the process than is usually the case.

Foreword by Annette Michelson
Publisher Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983
ISBN 0898220203, 9780898220209
200 pages

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