Videographic Cinema: An Archaeology of Electronic Images and Imaginaries [Hardcover]

In 1957,A Face in the Crowdincorporated live video images to warn about the future of broadcast TV. In 2015,Kung Furywas 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 Cinemashows how such images and imaginaries have emerged, changed and remained over time according to their shifting technical, historical and institutional conditions.

Rediscovering forgotten films likeAnti-Clock(1979) and reassessing ones likeLost 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 Cinemadiscovers 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.

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 Cinemamaps 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 readl3¢