The End of Cinema – A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age

A recording of a Greenaway VJing performance can be found on YouTube in a video entitled Peter Greenaway @ STRP Festival 2006.

Chuck Tryon, “What the Fuck Are You Doing in the Dark?,” The Chutry Experiment (blog), July 15, 2007.

Aurélien Ferenczi describes Greenaway as the “king of provocation,” which may also explain this lack of precision . . . See Aurélien Ferenczi, “Peter Greenaway constate la mort du cinéma,” Télérama, October 12, 2007.

In an interview published in The Getty Iris (“The Online Magazine of the Getty”), he was asked if it was by chance that he gave the date September 31, 1983 and he replied, in a manner more poetic than scientific (the opposite would have been astonishing!): “Yes, it is. (Sort of.) 1983 is the beginning of the digital revolution, and autumn is the time of changes.” Steve Saldivar, “Six Questions for Peter Greenaway,” The Getty Iris: The Online Magazine of Getty, February 17, 2011.

Remote controls with electrical cords began to be marketed in the early 1950s and it would appear that the first cordless remotes were marketed in 1955 or 1956.

Bellour, La querelle des dispositifs, back cover.

Aumont, Que reste-t-il du cinéma?, 82.

This is the case even though Greenaway, in 2011, did a true somersault by attempting to establish a connection between the remote control and the digital revolution: “1983 is the beginning of the digital revolution”; this can hardly be defended, unless one agrees with the principle “everything is a part of everything else, and vice versa”! See the interview with Greenaway in The Getty Iris quoted in note 47.

Jean-Louis Baudry, “Cinéma: Effets idéologiques produits par l’appareil de base,” Cinéthique 7–8 (1970): 1–8, translated by Alan Williams as “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” in Apparatus, ed. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1980), 25–37; “Le dispositif: Approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité,” Communications 23 (1975): 56–72, translated by Jean Andrews and Bertrand Augst as “The Apparatus” in Apparatus, 41–62; and L’Effet cinéma (1978). We are well aware that the “base apparatus,” in Baudry’s view and according to his logic, is not limited to the moving picture camera alone and is ultimately about something completely different from cinema’s mere technological hardware. Baudry makes this clear in a footnote (p. 59) to the article “Le dispositif” (a note that was not translated in the English version of the text) when he states: “Thus the base apparatus includes the film stock, the camera, the film development, the editing in a technical sense, etc., in addition to the projection apparatus. The base apparatus is far from the camera alone, to which others have wished (one wonders why, for what bad purpose) I should limit it.”