Post Cinema? Histories and Politics in the “Digital Revolution”

The rapid influx of digital technology and so-called “new media” around the new millennium has led some to suggest that Cinema—conceived of as a photochemical technology experienced publicly as a mid-twentieth century cultural phenomenon—is dead or dying. This course explores the political and historical stakes of this claim, taking an archaeological and genealogical approach to problematize notions of technological progress and periodization. Rather than seeking to “rescue” cinema, we will instead explore how “the cinematic” has been adopted and dismantled by the logics of neoliberal governmentality, and what it can still offer for modes of political resistance.