CINE503, Hay. "Current Directions in the Historiography of Cinema and Technologies of Visualization." T 2-4:50

While there is a history of the historiography of cinema, this seminar is mostly concerned with recent issues and directions in the historiography of cinema and of modern technologies of visualization. The seminar also is interested in forms of historical analysis that are not directly about cinema and image-technology but that are impacting (serving as templates for) how the history of cinema and technologies of visualization is conducted. For instance, recent histories of cultural economies, governmentalities, medicine, anthropology, sport, warfare, surveillance, cybernetics, criminology, education, pornography, (post-)colonialism, globalization, the production of space (i.e., histories of architecture or cities), transportation, and even refrigeration all are shaping how historians are rethinking cinema and/or technologies of visualization.

The seminar will review current historical approaches that conceive of cinema as an institution, a body of representational/signifying practices, a assemblage of technologies, an apparatus of power and control, a product to be consumed, and a cultural form–approaches that, in short, understand cinema as a relatively discrete and distinctive set of practices. In these times, however, it has become difficult to discern the specific features, technologies, and uses of something called “cinema”. More than ever, cinema is conjoined to, and even difficult to separate from, various screen media, audio/video communication, recording technologies–a broad regime of visualization. And more than ever, watching “movies” can occur almost anywhere. Therefore, to what exactly does “cinema” refer any longer, and about what exactly is one writing or analyzing when one writes a history of cinema? Now, more than even ten years ago, one might ask whether cinema has (or ever has had) its own history? Is it fair to think about the history of cinema purely or primarily as a history of the “moving image,” screens, visual recording through cameras, or particular sites of exhibition such as the movie theater? What conditions (in pedagogy, academic research, and publishing) now make it necessary, challenging, or impractical to study and write about the history of cinema, TV, or any medium–or to analyze broader categories such as “technologies of visualization”? By posing questions such as these, this seminar seeks to emphasize the disciplinarity and the inter-disciplines of current directions in the historical studies of cinema and technologies of visualization.