The Memory of Cinema
The Memory of Cinema
This chapter discusses the complex and varied fascination of contemporary art with the history of theatrical cinema, or what the author calls the memory of cinema. The memory of cinema in current moving image and installation art is producing a new kind of time-image (Deleuze) whose challenge to previous conceptions of medium produces a “naming crisis” in what counts as still or moving images. Here the memory of cinema, and the disappearance of a certain experience of cinema, demand from viewers a new imagination of what movement, time, and history might mean. The author also offers new definitions of the virtual and the virtual image. Examples of the memory of cinema in contemporary art are offered through close analysis of two exemplary works. Christoph Girardet and Mattias Müller’s Meteor (2011) is read through Walter Benjamin’s concept of the Schriftbild and non-sensuous similarity. Ken Jacobs’s Capitalism: Child Labor (2006) is read as an example of paracinema whose reflexive examination of history, time, and the archive produces a new kind of critical time-image.
Keywords: Christoph Girardet, Matthias Müller, Ken Jacobs, contemporary art, digital or virtual images, indexicality, medium, moving image, photography, time-image
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