Ends of Cinema

2020
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Richard Grusin and Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, Editors

Leading film and media scholars discuss multiple “ends” in the history of cinema

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.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.

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.

Richard Grusin is director of the Center for 21st Century Studies and distinguished professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He is editor of The Nonhuman Turn, Anthropocene Feminism, and After Extinction, all published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece is associate professor of English and film studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and author of The Optical Vacuum: Spectatorship and Modernized American Theater Architecture.

Contents

Introduction

Richard Grusin and Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece

1. Scale and the Body in Cinema and Beyond

Mary Ann Doane

2. A Counter-Genealogy of the Movie Screen; or, Film’s Expansion Seen from the Past

Francesco Casetti

3. Cinema, Nature, and Endangerment

Jennifer Lynn Peterson

4. When Celluloid Looks Back to You

Mark Paul Meyer

5. What Remains, What Returns: Garbage, Ghosts, and Two Ends of Cinema

James Leo Cahill

6. Shot in Black and White: The Racialized History of Cinema Violence

Caetlin Benson-Allott

7. Pieces of a Dream: Film Blackness and Black Death

Michael Gillespie

8. The Resilience of the Word Cinema and the Persistence of the Media

André Gaudreault

9. & Mediation: Television’s Partial Visions

Amy Villarejo

Conclusion. At the Ends of the Ends of Cinema: A Dialogue

Richard Grusin and Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Index