Thomas Lamarre, McGill University.

répétition

« In any event, these histories that describe and problematize the standardization of cinematic expression underwrite the sense of cinema’s closure or completion, which in turn haunts and enables discussions of new media. Manovich, for instance, takes for granted that cinema has become an integral, coherent and essentially closed and comprehensible system (a language or code or style). The question of historical repetition then arises. Is digital cinema fated to repeat cinema, to become a closed system, to bring forth The Birth of a Nation? A second glance at Marx also invites speculation that this second new media is bound for farce. Digital cinema may follow the pattern of the 18th Brumaire rather than a foundational revolution, the Bastille, Napoleon. It may not result in The Birth of a Nation. »