Life and Death, 24 Frames a Second: An Interdisciplinary History of Cinema

Catalog description

According to some early reactions, the film strip gave spectators access to new ways of seeing the intricacies of life and participating in the emerging modern world, as new modern subjects. For others, as feminist film critic Laura Mulvey understands it, cinema is "death, 24x a Second:" an "uncanny" way of capturing and freezing the past. This course explores the long history of understanding moving images – from the cinema to our present glut of digital moving images and "live" streams – as a set of objects and practices that alter the way thinkers understand concepts of *life *and *death*. To do so, we will study philosophy, psychology, social theory, aesthetic theory, and film theory. What were the scientists and technicians behind the first moving image technologies trying to understand about life? How did contemporary thinkers in disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and political economy react to the rise of cinema as international mass media? How does the cinematic image serve as a kind of memory? What happens when, especially in the digital age, the origin of the photographic image is no longer bound to a moment in time, and moving images move much faster than 24 frames a second? Starting from the proto-cinematic scientific works of Muybridge and Marey, we will see how the moving image shapes thought into the 21st century, ending on theories of digital media, and perhaps the end of cinema as an artform.