Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Medienwissenschaft

Abstract:

How am I a cinema and media scholar? How do I combine classical cinema studies with media aesthetics and media archaeology in the doctoral dissertation Stillmoving?

I will in this talk present and further discuss my dissertation Stillmoving (2021), in particular the chapter "Stillmoving: A kind of image beneath still and moving: Still Einstellung in digital imagenesis (the MPEG compression codec)".

Stillmoving takes as its object of inquiry the foundational figure of style a still Einstellung (most often called a static long take). It is a contribution to cinema and media studies in general, and developing slow cinema and still moving scholarship in particular. It asks the research question "What kind of image does a still Einstellung generate?". The title Stillmoving provides the most succinct possible answer. Through figure of style theory and analysis of static long takes in slow cinema and still moving scholarship, the still Einstellung of water reflections and rock shadows, Louis Lumière and Quai de l'Archevêché (Lumière operator, 1896), André Bazin's conceptualisation of "the immobility of the sequence shot" in the kitchen scene in The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942), James Benning and Stemple Pass (2012) and the digital MPEG compression codec, Stillmoving argues that a still Einstellung causes stillmoving imagenesis, a both/neither first kind of image generation in a thirding or firsting of stillmoving/still/ moving imagenesis. As truly something else, while (like moving imagenesis) moving the moving as moving, a still Einstellung calms the unmoving as continuing, or: it stills the still as still.

This talk in particular describes and discusses the subface of digital MPEG compression, demonstrating a binary beneath of infrastructural imagenesis. In order to describe the increased (compared to film and video) processuality of digital imagenesis, it explores similarities between the technical thinking inherent in the MPEG compression codec's bidirectional predictive (B-frame), intra (I-frame), and predictive (P-frame) frames, and tangential thoughts found in the time philosophy and phenomenology of Saint Augustine and Edmund Husserl, developing their triads the present of things past/retention, the present of things present/primal impression, and the present of things to come/protention within the framework of Michel Serres' understanding of nonlinear time as percolation.

Bitte beachten! Trotz bundesweiter Lockerungen bitten wir darum, während der Präsenzveranstaltungen selbstständig eine Maske zu tragen und die 3G-Regeln einzuhalten.

Wir bitten um eine kurze Rückmeldung, damit wir die ungefähre Anzahl an Teilnehmenden einschätzen können.

Zusätzlich bieten wir auch eine Teilnahme via Zoom an. Bitte wählen Sie sich dafür ab 17:50 Uhr ein. Den Link erhalten Sie auf Nachfrage von Raphael Tostlebe.