Ends of Cinema

Richard Grusin, Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781452965055
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

At the dawn of the digital era in the final decades of the twentieth century, film and media studies scholars grappled with the prospective end of what was deemed cinema: analog celluloid production, darkened public movie theaters, festival culture. The notion of the “end of cinema” had already been broached repeatedly over the course of the twentieth century—from the introduction of sound and color to the advent of television and video—and in Ends of Cinema, contributors reinvigorate this debate to contemplate the ends, as well as directions and new beginnings, of cinema in the twenty-first century.

In this volume, scholars at the forefront of film and media studies interrogate multiple potential “ends” of cinema: its goals and spaces, its relationship to postcinema, its racial dynamics and environmental implications, and its theoretical and historical conclusions. Moving beyond the predictable question of digital versus analog, the scholars gathered here rely on critical theory and historical research to consider cinema alongside its media companions: television, the gallery space, digital media, and theatrical environments. Ends of Cinema underscores the shared project of film and media studies to open up what seems closed off, and to continually reinvent approaches that seem unresponsive. 

Contributors: Caetlin Benson-Allott, Georgetown U; James Leo Cahill, U of Toronto; Francesco Casetti, Yale U; Mary Ann Doane, U of California Berkeley; André Gaudreault, U de Montréal; Michael Boyce Gillespie, City College of New York; Mark Paul Meyer, EYE Filmmuseum; Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Woodbury U, Los Angeles; Amy Villarejo, Cornell U.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Center for 21st Century Studies Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Scale and the Body in Cinema and Beyond
• Chapter 2. A Countergenealogy of the Movie Screen; or, Film’s Expansion Seen from the Past
• Chapter 3. Cinema, Nature, and Endangerment
• Chapter 4. When Celluloid Looks Back to You
• Color Plates
• Chapter 5. What Remains, What Returns: Garbage, Ghosts, and Two Ends of Cinema
• Chapter 6. Shot in Black and White: The Racialized History of Cinema Violence
• Chapter 7. Pieces of a Dream: Film Blackness and Black Death
• Chapter 8. The Resilience of the Word Cinema and the Persistence of the Media
• Chapter 9. & Mediation: Television’s Partial Visions
• Conclusion. At the End of the Ends of Cinema: A Dialogue
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Index