Videographic Cinema: An Archaeology of Electronic Images and Imaginaries

Description

In 1957, A Face in the Crowd incorporated live video images to warn about the future of broadcast TV. In 2015, Kung Fury was infused with analogue noise to evoke the nostalgic feeling of watching an old VHS tape. Between the two films, numerous ones would incorporate video images to imagine the implications of video practices. Drawing on media archaeology, Videographic Cinema shows how such images and imaginaries have emerged, changed and remained over time according to their shifting technical, historical and institutional conditions. Rediscovering forgotten films like Anti-Clock (1979) and reassessing ones like Lost Highway (1997), Jonathan Rozenkrantz charts neglected chapters of video history, including self-confrontation techniques in psychiatry, their complex relation with surveillance, and the invention/discovery of the "videographic psyche" by artists, therapists and filmmakers. Spanning six decades, Videographic Cinema discovers an epistemic shift from prospective imaginaries of surveillance and control conditioned on video as a medium for live transmission, to retrospective ones concerned with videotape as a recording memory. It ends by considering videographic filmmaking itself as a form of archaeology in the age of analogue obsolescence.

Jonathan Rozenkrantz is a lecturer in the Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden, while also working as a writer for the Swedish Film Institute.

This take on expanded video offers a compelling scholarly approach to the other of cinema - or more accurately, as Rozenkrantz demonstrates: we need to pay attention to the media archaeological ties and remediations that define the materiality of moving images. Videographic Cinema maps those material aesthetics, but also the second-order echoes of the medium. Rozenkrantz skilfully maps how cinema, video, and TV have contaminated each other; this mingle defines their dynamic transformations. A joy to read. * Jussi Parikka, author of What is Media Archaeology? (2012) and Digital Contagions (2007) * In traditional media history, video enters the scene in the late 1970s with commercial home video. Jonathan Rozenkrantz' highly original study proposes an alternative history of the cinema vis-a-vis its bastard rival-video. With an eclectic mix of films which burst apart the tired canon and a refreshingly unorthodox grasp of theory, Videographic Cinema formulates a different view of media as epistemologically unstable entities. This brilliant study will be valuable to many fields such as media archaeology, post-cinema, intermediality, media philosophy, and film studies. * Malte Hagener, Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of Marburg, Germany * Videographic Cinema is a deeply inventive, multi-layered probe into the lifeblood of a specific set of analogue video images from the 1950s to the mid-2010s. Rather than read these images in terms of their media affects (what do we see and how do we experience what appears on the screen?), Jonathan Rozenkrantz insteads shows us what it means to read them in terms of their media conditions (what are the unique affordances, techniques, and even larger institutional contexts that produce these images?). This book shows us, with remarkable clarity, that the obscolesence of video provides us with an opportunity to see that it has always been, as Rozenkrantz deftly puts it, "inherently heterogeneous, historically shifting, and epistemically unstable". * Lori Emerson, Associate Professor and Director of the Media Archaeology Lab, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA * In this wonderfully eye-opening book, Jonathan Rozenkrantz seizes on the video image in cinema not just as a set of recurring narrative and visual tropes, but as a way of conceptualizing the medium of video itself. He combines sharp analysis of videographic films with theoretical insight into these two intersecting media. And he brings together some familiar and some more obscure films in a way that will both help us both to see videographic film classics in a new light, and to set an agenda for new discoveries. * Michael Z. Newman, Professor in the Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA. *