Configurations of Film

The term “post-cinema condition,” which was first proposed by film theorists more than a decade ago to describe the new cultural and technological order of moving images, retained an almost melancholic attachment to that which the cinema no longer was. Moving beyond such attachments, the concept of “configurations of film” aims to account for moving images in terms of their operations, forms and formats, locations and infrastructures, expanding the field of cinematic knowledges beyond the arts and the aesthetic, while retaining a focus on film as privileged site for the production of cultural meaning, for social action and for political conflict.
The series Configurations of Film presents pointed interventions in this field of debate by emerging and established international scholars associated with the DFG-funded Graduate Research Training Program (Graduiertenkolleg) Konfigurationen des Films at Goethe University Frankfurt. The contributions to the series aim to explore and expand our understanding of configurations of film in both a contemporary and historical perspective, combining film and media theory with media history to address key problems in the development of new analytical frameworks for the moving image on the move.

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8

Post-Cinematic Bodies
Denson, Shane (2023)
How is human embodiment transformed in an age of algorithms? How do post-cinematic media technologies such as AI, VR, and robotics target and re-shape our bodies? Post-Cinematic Bodies grapples with these questions by attending both to mundane devices—such as smartphones, networked exercise machines, and smart watches and other wearables equipped with heartrate sensors—as well as to new media artworks that rework such equipment to reveal to us the ways that our fleshly existences are increasingly up for grabs. Through an equally philosophical and interpretive analysis, the book aims to develop a new aesthetics of embodied experience that is attuned to a new age of predictive technology and metabolic capitalism.
Pandemic Media. Preliminary Notes Toward an Inventory
Keidl, Philipp Dominik; Melamed, Laliv; Hediger, Vinzenz; Somaini, Antonio (2020)
Highlighting media’s adaptability, malleability, and scalability under the conditions of a pandemic, the contributions to this volume track and analyze how media emerge, operate, and change in response to the global crisis and provide elements towards an understanding of the post-pandemic world to come.
Tracks from the Crypt
Mowitt, John (2019)
David Bowie’s 2015 Blackstar has been understood by critics and fans alike to have a certain valedictory status. For them, perhaps for us, it is a 39-minute and 13-second farewell. A long goodbye. My angle is different. By situating the Bowie/Renck collaboration on “Lazarus” in the context of a meditation on the question once posed by Georg Stanitzek, “Was ist Kommunikation?” I consider the CD and the video as experiments in re-configuration. More specifically, by thinking about the distinctly cinematic iteration of the question of communication (citing here Captain’s “what we have here is … failure to communicate” from Cool Hand Luke) I propose that mediated communication embodies the Ich/Es modality of dialogue disparaged by Martin Buber. What this invites us to consider is whether “Lazarus” in particular isn’t the generation of an audiovisual tombeau from which or out of which communication strains are to be heard. Is it “saying” farewell? Is it “saying” anything? By drawing on Jacques Derrida’s appropriation of the crypt in the work of Abraham and Torok, I propose that “Lazarus” manages (and the feat is neither small nor insignificant) to communicate nothing. In effect, “Lazarus” is the very sound, not of a failure to communicate, but of a “speaking” emptied of what protects it from mediation. Here, Bowie’s gnomic persona assumes a political valence not typically ascribed to it.
Who Owns the Images? The Paradox of Archives, between Commercialization, Free Circulation and Respect
Lindeperg, Sylvie; Szczepanska, Ania (2021)
Digital image archives pose a complex set of technical, legal, ethical and methodological challenges, particularly for film and media studies and adjacent fields. This volume draws a detailed map of these challenges and offers perspectives for further research and creative practice.
Tacit Cinematic Knowledge. Approaches and Practices
Boguska, Rebecca; Machado, Guilherme; Puchta, Rebecca; Reljic, Marin (2024)
Moving images are increasingly finding their way into laboratories, dentist offices, clinics, airports and gyms. In these places and institutions film and moving image technologies serve to advance knowledge, to show how things are done, to train, teach, educate, mobilize people, as well as to imagine complex social facts and visualize dynamic models and schemes through data visualizations, pattern recognition software, and in social graphs. But what these moving images do goes beyond instruction, illustration and visual education. This publication introduces the concept of tacit cinematic knowledge to designate a broad variety of epistemic environments in which knowledge is configured in and through cinematic practices, and in the interaction with moving images. The concept thus describes a challenge not only for film and media scholars, but also for social scientists, economists, data analysts and artists. Covering areas of study beyond the cinema and non-theatrical films which have recently become a focus of inquiry, the contributions analyze the operations of tacit cinematic knowledge in objects ranging from political campaigns, medical and scientific devices, corporate communications, devices for the study of animal behavior and more.
Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia
Eugène, Pierre; Ince, Kate; Siegel, Marc (2024)
French critic Serge Daney was a central figure in film, television and media criticism of the second half of the twentieth century. He died of AIDS in 1992, just as the concept of queer cinema entered international film studies and just before the start of the digital era that has transformed film culture. This collection of new essays investigates the legacy of Daney’s work alongside considerations of feminist, queer and digital cinephilia and contemporary practices of film curation.
Medium, Format, Configuration: The Displacements of Film
Turquety, Benoît (2019)
In contrast with media constructed as vast, ontologically homogeneous, non-localized systems, formats show material networks of interoperability and exclusions, inscribed in local specificities, and involving precise conditions for the circulation of images and sounds. Formats, institutionalized as standards, frame the “technical networks” defined by Gilbert Simondon, that unfold technical objects into economically and politically structured webs that cover the world. Media are always formatted and, as such, do not flow: they are displaced.
Accidental Archivism. Shaping Cinema’s Futures with Remnants of the Past
Schulte Strathaus, Stefanie; Hediger, Vinzenz (2023)
In the digital media ecology, archives are changing. Artists, curators, critics and scholars assume the role of accidental archivists. They shape cinema’s futures by salvaging precarious repositories and making them matter in new ways. In the process, the cinema’s public, a democratic body seemingly scattered about platforms and niches in a post-pandemic world, re-emerges as a political force. Accidental Archivism brings together programmatic statements and proposals to explore an artistic space between archiving and activism, a space where remnants of the past become the building blocks of new ways of making, showing, teaching and thinking cinema.

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