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

In June 2010, ARTHEMIS organized a major conference with the title “The ARTHEMIS International Conference—Moving Images Studies: History(ies), Method(s), Discipline(s).” We might say that this step has now been taken: not only was the conference not about “Film Studies,” but it addressed, instead, the history, methods and discipline of “Moving Image Studies.” The ARTHEMIS group has thus passed, surreptitiously, from the study of a phenomenon (“Moving Image Study”) to something that is beginning to take on the appearance in every respect of a discipline: “Moving Image Studies.”

Once again we can see how, and this is highly emblematic for the authors of the present volume, a group which declares itself to be devoted first and foremost to the evolution of “Film Studies” has made its focal point (as seen in the title of the conference) not, precisely, “Film Studies,” but what some people might see as a rival: “Moving Image Studies.”

Are we, with these “Moving Image Studies” appearing over the horizon, witnessing the birth and constitution of a new discipline? One might think that this is the case. More than a mere rival, this new discipline may become a substitute for “Film Studies,” whose seeming study of cinema alone, in the classical sense of the term, is beginning to be seen as too restrictive. Indeed in the present-day context we might imagine that “Moving Image Studies” may in a few years cause “Film Studies” to disappear and take its place, by phagocytising and cannibalizing it. This, moreover, is what is already taking place. Take for example the “Ph.D. in Moving Image Studies” program at Georgia State University, whose name no longer makes explicit reference to cinema.

We might imagine that those in charge of creating this program did so without inhibition or remorse, taking as their justification the recent broadening of the boundaries which not long ago separated cinema, television and what is described on the program’s website (see figure 2) as the “new media”:

The doctoral program in Moving Image Studies is an exciting, new (begun in 2001) program in the Department of Communication. It is specifically designed to provide students with the conceptual and methodological tools to study the complex and vastly expanded moving image environment of the 21st century, where the boundaries separating cinema, television, and new media are breaking down. Moving Image Studies is an outgrowth of cinema studies, television studies, new media studies, cultural studies, and critical theory. Many of our core seminars are designed to cut across media boundaries (by examining how models, paradigms, and methods are problematized and enriched as we move across specific media); while other seminars are devoted to intensive examination of problems within a specific media formation (http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwdcm/mis/4946.html).

We might also suspect that such a hasty abandonment (as early as 2001, in fact) of any reference to cinema in the Georgia State University doctoral program is not unrelated to the fact that this program is part of a communication department (and not a cinema department or cinema studies department) and that it was born by bringing together five distinct disciplines (cinema studies, television studies, new media studies, cultural studies and critical theory), among which cinema is just one element. We might hypothesize that scholars specializing in cinema studies were a minority among those in charge of designing the program. We formulate these suppositions keeping in mind the fact that the doctoral programs discussed above, even though they were conceived quite recently, were founded within film departments and by cinema specialists (this can be verified by consulting the respective websites), and that this is the reason, fully aware of what they were doing, it was decided to maintain a direct reference to cinema itself in the name of the programs being created.