EXPOSING THE FILM APPARATUS

Many shifts are occurring in the world of film archives. Some have to do with evolving analog and digital media and their conceptualizations, others with the renewed and increased attention for technologies and media, and their impact on viewers and culture, i.e. their influence on the historical development of the cinema and the changing relations between the ‘hardware’, the ‘software’ and the ‘wetware’ of film. Shifts are also taking place in the reflection on historical film devices for writing and understanding the history and evolution of film and the cinema. Ever more relevant are the questions about the role of the equipment in the history and development of film and the cinema today. We intend to explore the significance of media technologies as an object of conservation, restoration, presentation and research, inside and outside the film archive and the study of film. And even broader, we want to explore the relevance of a close study of the materiality of media technologies for the wider field of the Humanities, e.g. the study of history, media studies and cultural studies. One of the question is: If we focus on the equipment (and not the films) in the archive, are we still dealing with a film archive or rather with a (media-archeological) research laboratory, i.e. a place where one can experiment with the devices and their effects on the viewer’s perception, that is to say, a place where one can reconstruct how the media technologies initially affected the audiences as well as their visions of the technologies used at the time. Within the outlined framework, various pieces of equipment in the film archive (from film projectors and cameras to smartphones and digital projectors) will feature centrally in a series of about thirty-five articles that will be presented in the book - brought together with the purpose of uncovering the possibilities and productivity for studying the technological equipment for research and education in the field of film and media. Possible approaches are: (new) film history, media history, archival theory and practice, historical pragmatism, semio-pragmatism, media archeology, media psychology, reception studies, perception and emotion research, cognitive and ecological studies, film and media philosophy, and so on.