Category: Books

Julia Leyda and I were interviewed about the new translation of (selected essays from) our edited collection Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film. The interview, in Turkish, is now up at Gazete Duvar. For those of you who don’t speak Turkish (like me), here’s the original English:

You assert that “rather than positing a clear break with the past, the term post-cinema asks us more forcefully than the notion of ‘new media’ for example, to think about the relation (rather than mere distinction) between older and newer media regimes”. With the prefix ‘post’, you’re not indicating the death of cinema or an era that is after the cinematic but you talk about the space where the cinematic meets the digital, the computational. Could you please expand more on your understanding of the term ‘post-cinema’?

Julia Leyda: The digital is an important aspect of post-cinema, absolutely. Yet I also still see a film like Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) as post-cinematic, in that it was seen primarily via bootleg VHS tapes for several decades before appearing on video sharing sites like YouTube. The cable and satellite TV boom and the almost total saturation of home video technology in the late 20th century also fed into what we now call post-cinema, in the decentering of the viewing space and the proliferation of the “poor image” even before the digital copies that Hito Steyerl describes so eloquently. 

Shane Denson: Yes, I agree completely. The prefix post- isn’t supposed to mark a simple before and after. We think the digital marks a clear difference from celluloid-based cinema, but it’s one that builds on transformations connected with television, analog video, and early computational technologies, among others. Steve Shaviro somewhere remarks that it’s less about the newness of post-cinema, and more about the fact that these changes, which have been building for over fifty years, finally reached a critical mass in the twenty-first century, and that it no longer makes sense to pretend that the media regime we live in is adequately described by theories of the cinema—which is not to say that cinema-centric approaches are suddenly rendered useless, but they have to be resituated in a broader context, which we call post-cinema.

Reading your introduction, I also noticed that my meeting with cinema was indeed post-cinematic. In my childhood, I watched many films not at the theaters but in my house from the DVDs, connected to the tv screen. So I guess for a long time now, we are in the ‘post-cinematic’ age, with or without recognising it. Maybe the term just helped us to assign meaning, enabled us to discuss our experience?

JL: Precisely. The post in our usage of post-cinema is not meant to be stand for a hard break, but a gradual shift in which old and new technologies and social practices exist at the same time. In this sense, the dominant, emergent, and residual cultural forms overlap, much as earlier media theorists like Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall observed.

SD: And we don’t really know where things are going, either. Post-cinema is very much in flux, as the rise of streaming services and their recent proliferation (and some demises) attest. The pandemic really shook things up, of course, bringing new moving-image platforms into our lives and, at least temporarily, displacing traditional cinematic screenings (which haven’t actually been very “traditional” for quite some time). I think this was a good reminder that media are always in transition, and post-cinema doesn’t describe a fixed state but precisely this flux and transitionality that marks moving-image media technologies and cultures alike.

I would like to echo a question asked by Steven Shaviro in his blog ‘The Pinocchio Theory’. He says “what is the role or position of cinema when it is no longer what Fredric Jameson calls a ‘cultural dominant,’ when it has been ‘surpassed’ by digital and computer-based media? So what’s the position of cinema in the 21st century?

SD: I think this depends on what aspects of the cinema we are emphasizing—whether we are thinking primarily of screening venues, industries, experiences, or images, for example. The industries that produced “cinema” aren’t gone, and many of them are more powerful than ever. But their consolidation into global multimedia conglomerates has also transformed them, so that they are more closely bound up with the data and financial sectors. And the latter, where the dominant power resides, have very little to do with images—but everything to do with our experience.

JL: One position the cinema has come to occupy in 2020-21 during the pandemic is a place of nostalgia. As the aesthetics of “films” were already more tailored to the home screen where they will likely be viewed on a streaming service, the sudden shutdown of collective exhibition venues has exacerbated my awareness of the limitations of my living room screening options. I have sympathized with many of my cinephile colleagues and friends experiencing grief over the loss of the moviegoing experience at this time, although my own tendencies in recent years had already leaned more toward home viewing. 

You brought many different (and sometimes contradicting) authors together in this volume. Is this because the term ‘post-cinema’ itself includes various and sometimes contradicting meanings in itself?

JL: Absolutely. We felt it was very important to balance the book with contributions from the many approaches within film and media studies: philosophy, history, technology, as well as feminist, cultural studies, and environmental approaches. In particular, we tried to avoid producing a volume that would replicate what Racquel Gates and Michael Gillespie remind us about in their manifesto: the historic dominance of white men in film theory, in terms of practitioners and of objects of research, that still endures.

SD: Exactly. Again, the one thing we wanted to avoid is the impression that post-cinema is a single, fixed thing. It remains in flux, as the shifting site of negotiations between experience and culture, on the one hand, and changing environments and infrastructures. And questions of power and perspective are central to any attempt to account for these changes.

If you were to write and edit the book today, which discussions would you include/exclude in your edition?

JL: We definitely would need to discuss this! To name a couple of new developments I would want to include, there has been a lot more interesting work in eco-media studies, and I would also be very interested in including chapters that look at trans aesthetics and affects as interventions in the way we produce, perceive, and consume film and television. And of course the pandemic, as an abrupt change in social practices around cinema, television, and mobile video.

SD: I totally agree. Of course, the technological and industrial contexts have continued to change over the past couple of years, even before the pandemic. And who knows what the world will look like in a year or two? Even more importantly, our political realities have shifted in the past five years, with fascist and quasi-fascist movements on the rise around the world, but also major uprisings, such as took place in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, caught on a smartphone and circulated around the world. 

What particular messages would you like to give your readers living in Turkey who are enthusiastically waiting to read your book in their native language?

JL/SD: Welcome to the book and please enjoy it! We are so delighted to share it!