Film History as Media Archaeology

The current study is the fruit of some twenty years of research and writing at the interface of film history, media theory and media archaeology by one of the acknowledged pioneers of the 'new film history' and 'media archaeology'.

Thomas Elsaesser (1943-2019) was Professor of Film and Television Studies in the Department of Art and Culture at the University of Amsterdam.

General Introduction. Media Archaeology - Foucault's Legacy I. Early Cinema 1. Film History as Media Archaeology 2. Is Nothing New: Turn-of-the-Century Epistemes in Film History 3. An Invention without a Future, After the Future: Louis Lumiere and Thomas A Edison - Double Paternity or Alternative Paradigms 4. The Cinematic Dispositi between Apparatus Theory and Artists Cinema II. The Challenge of Sound 5. Sounds Beguiling: Franz Hofer's Christmas Bells 6. Going 'Live': Body and Voice in Some Early German Sound Films 7. The Optical Wave: Walter Ruttmann in 1929 III. Archaeologies of Interactivity 8. The Cinema's Turn to Narrative: The Art of Managing Attention 9. Archaeologies of Interactivity: The 'Rube' as Symptom of Media Change 10. Tales of Epiphany and Entropy: Around the World in Eighty Clicks IV. Digital Cinema 11. Digital Cinema: Delivery Event Time 12. Digital Cinema: Convergence or Contradiction 13. Digital Cinema and the Apparatus: Archaeologies, Epistemologies, Ontologies V. New Logics of the Image 14. Stop/Motion 15. The 'Return' of 3-D: On Some of the Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the Twenty-First Century 16. Cinema Energy Entropy 17. Simulation and the Labour of Invisibility: Harun Farocki's Life Manuals VI. Media Archaeology as Symptom 18. Media Archaeology and the Poetics of Obsolescence 19. Media Archaeology as Symptom 20. Selected Bibliography.