The Virtual Life of Film

Lucid and forceful, D.N. Rodowick persuasively argues for the enduring relevance of film theory in an age in which film, itself, has been enhanced, extended, and transformed by new media platforms and forms. Skeptical and dialectical, this profound and graceful meditation reconsiders the photographic ontology of cinema and concepts such as "medium," "virtuality," and "automatism"its aim not only the preservation and expansion of film studies as a humanities discipline but also a recuperation of the important philosophical questions that have been foundational for film theory. This is "must" reading for anyone interested in understanding the nature and experience of the moving image. -- Vivian Sobchack, Professor of Film, Television and Digital Media, University of California, Los Angeles Calmly, intrepidly, Rodowick dives straight into the churning waters of The Virtual Life of Film. Just as cinema anchors new media, so film theory anchors these philosophical speculations that dare to imagine the digital untethered. Neither apocalyptic nor nostalgic, Rodowick appears equipoised as he explores what's behind and in front of this brave new media world. -- Dudley Andrew, R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature, Yale University Over the years Rodowick has provided perhaps the most thorough readings and evaluations of contemporary, post-classical film theory any scholar has offered. The Virtual Life of Film offers his speculations about cinema's digital transformation. An important work, it raises vital issues...In the opening chapters Rodowick offers one of the most nuanced and complex descriptions of the photographic in cinema ever presented. -- Tom Gunning * Film Comment * There is much to stimulate, provoke and argue within a book that successfully taps into the scholarly Zeitgeist. -- Ian Christie * Times Higher Education Supplement *

D. N. Rodowick is Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.

Part I: The Virtual Life of Film 1. Futureworld 2. The Incredible Shrinking Medium 3. Back to the Future Part II: What Was Cinema? 4. Film Begets Video 5. The Death of Cinema and the Birth of Film Studies 6. A Medium in All Things 7. Automatisms and Art 8. Automatism and Photography 9. Succession and the Film Strip 10. Ways of Worldmaking 11. A World Past 12. An Ethics of Time Part III: A New Landscape (without Image) 13. An Elegy for Film 14. The New "Media" 15. Paradoxes of Perceptual Realism 16. Real Is as Real Does 17. Lost in Translation: Analogy and Index Revisited 18. Simulation, or Automatism as Algorithm 19. An Image That Is Not "One" 20. Two Futures for Electronic Images, or What Comes after Photography? 21. The Digital Event 22. Transcoded Ontologies, or "A Guess at the Riddle" 23. Old and New, or the (Virtual) Renascence of Cinema Studies Acknowledgments