After modern cinema (Birth of electronic space #3)

The enlarged context of research the “birth of electronic space” is included concerns the nature and projective shadow of modern cinema and the particular role of ambiguity in it; ambiguity taken here as the operative dimension of thought within cinema. Serge Daney once described “modern” cinema as a “provocation without object and endless mourning”*. This mourning paradoxically became a condition to me, since I took it critically as a tradition that had pratically no followers. That why I do concentrate on the later moment of this cinema — a late modernity, contrary to what is usually done, with the obsession of origins, always imposing historical origins as fountains of adequate understanding, in the passage from classical forms which after all never ceased to happen. I’m more interested in the traces of disintegration of modern cinema itself, the paradoxes it has left behind, and its extreme and now abandoned forms. And of course, I take the “birth of electronic space” to be one.

* Serge Daney, «Post-scriptum», La rampe. Cahier critique 1970-1982, Cahiers du cinéma/Gallimard, 1983 (1996), p. 214. [to be continued]