Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr'actes in History (Amsterdam University Press - Film Culture in Transition)

357 Pages·1999·13.94 MB·English

by  Siegfried Zielinski

Audiovisions
Fnm Culture in Transition
Thomas Elsaesser: Gencral Editor
Double Trouble
Chiem van Houweninge on Writing and Filming
Thomas Elsaesser, Robert Kievit and Jan Simons (eds.)
Writing for the Medium: Television in Transition
Thomas Elsaesser, Jan Simons and Lurette Bronk (eds.)
Between Stage and Screen
Ingmar Bergman Directs
Egil Tornqvist
The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind
Warren Buckland (cd.)
Film and the First World War
Karel Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp (eds.)
A Second Life
German Cinema's First Decades
Thomas Elsaesser (ed.)
Fassbinder's Germany
History Idcntity Subject
Thomas Elsaesser
Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable?
The Screen Arts in the Digital Age
Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann (eds.>
Audiovisions
Cinema and Television as Entr'Actes in History
Siegfried Zielinski
Translated by Gloria Custance
Amsterdam University Press
Amsterdam University Press wish to acknowledge the generosity of Inter
nationes and Rowohlt Verlag for making this translation possible.
Original title: Audiovisionen. Kino und Fernsehcn als Zwischenspiele in der
Geschichte (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1989, (2) 1994)
Cover illustration: Based on a hand-coloured image by Georges Melies,
'Reve d'une nuit d'ete', from: Maurice Bessy and Lo Duca, Georges Melii~s­
'Mages' et 'Mes mhnoires' par Melies, Paris, 1945, Exemplaire no. 2833
Cover design: Korpershoek Ontwerpen, Amsterdam
Lay-out: JAPES, Amsterdam
ISBN 90 5356 )03 2 (hardcover)
ISBN 90 5356 313 x (paperback)
© Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 1999
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved
above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the written
permission of both the copyright owner and the author of this book.
Contents
Preface to the English Edition 7
Orientation "
At the End of the History of Cinema and Television
Prolegomena to a History of Audiovisian
1. Vanishing Point - Cinema 25
The Founding Years of Audinvisian
2. Between the Wars 105
Between the Dispositifs
3. Vanishing Point Television? 183
On the Permeation of Familial Privateness bt} Televisuality
4. No Longer Cinema, No Longer Television 219
The Beginning of a New Historical and Cultural Form of
the Audiovisual Discourse
Conclusion 273
Good Machines, Bad Machines
For Living Heterogeneity in the Arts of Picture and Sound
- Against Psychopathia Medialis
Notes 305
Bibliography 319
Acknowledgements 347
Index 349

Preface to the English Edition
I began writing the German original of Audiovisions in October 1988 and
finished in January 1989.10 1994, a second edition appeared, but only a few
typographical errors were corrected. When an English translation of the
book was projected, I was very tempted to use the opportunity to rewrite
the text completely. However, there were two good reasons for not doing
so. After looking at it again closely, I realised that it was a lively reflection of
the situation in which it had been written - the period of radical change that
the media had been caught up in on the threshold to the 19905. It was a qual
ity that I wanted very much to preserve. In the intervening years, fragments
of the German original have been translated into several languages and I
have been urged many times by English-speaking colleagues to make the
entire book available for international discussion. This is the other reason
why I decided to leave the Orientation and the four major historical chap
ters in their original form; only a very few facets that I consider to be indis
pensable have been added.
Completely new, however, is the concluding chapter. For the decade that
is now drawing to a close, I wanted to discuss some of the themes and texts
pertaining to the reality of the audiovisual media with which I have en
gaged in the years since Audiovisions was written; shifts in the structure of
the media themselves as well as in the way in which I think about them. In
the 1990s, the sated and seemingly equilibrated centres of political and cul
tural geography, despite their inner contradictions, were stirred up by
forces from their periphery and plunged into perturbation. The dismantling
of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, terrible wars over the re-distribution
of newly emerged sovereignties and dependencies, particularly in the Bal
kans, the fall of the Wall in East Berlin, and a new attempt by the USA - this
time in Iraq - to consolidate its international influence with military aggres
sion, all deeply shook real world conditions. In such a momentously exis
tential context, it is indeed a marginal point, but these events did in fact
silence the heated discourses which would have stylised the increasingly
busy traffic of signs into a reality that dominated everything (moreover,
with their fashionable and catchy phrases, they were partly responSible for
cynically consigning many young academics from cultural studies to unem
ployment).
New tensions arose between local interests, which demanded their
rights, and global interests, which were pushing towards universalisation.
The media space where this was fought out became known under the
buzz-word of 'the Net'. These machines with their programmes from Sili
con GraphiCS, Microsoft, Macintosh, or Compaq, proliferated rapidly, their
8 Aud10viswns
density increased apace, and soon reached the four corners of the Earth.
They became the focus of the desires and activities of the most disparate so
dal groupings: the Telecom-companies, by then almost completely priva
tised, finance and mercantile capital, scientists, artists, hackers, newly
formed social action groups between East and West, intelligence agencies,
which had to redefine their fields of operation to some extent, and - natu
rally - the military, who had originally commissioned the research that led
to the development of the Internet.
The trend toward clustering media activities in a new centre and master
medium, which was declared the paradigm of the fin de siecle, was accom
panied by a simultaneous process of fanning out, in which the structure of
the various audiovisual media were all caught up. The cinema, as the space
of intimacy in public, was again attractive and received renewed attention.
Not least due to Hollywood's digital production technologies, which al
lowed their users more independence, the national European production
factories of film experienced a veritable boom. Television attempted to
re-define itself between the poles of audiovisual department store and digi
tal service industry. A broad variety of canned media, from the common
video cassette and CD-ROM to the digital videodisc, vied with each other
for the consumers' favour, who seemed to have ever greater difficulties cop
ing with the allocation and use of their media time budgets.
During this period, the focus of my own work as a media historian and
theoretician, as a collector and analyst of media curiosa and normalities,
shifted considerably. What I had begun at the Technical University of Berlin
during the 1980s, namely to facilitate, in parallel to a critique of established
production, also a different kind of audiovisual praxis, became a greater
priority - at first in Austria, then in Germany again at the Academy of Arts
in Berlin, and since 1993, especially at the new Academy for Media Arts in
Cologne. The more the entire complex of the media became the focus of so
ciety's attention and was at the mercy of economic and political/cultural
power-brokers, the more imperative it became to set something against this
in one's own teaching and research activities, or at least to attempt to do so.
One part of this response is the ongoing experiment to bring art, science,
and technology into a relationship, alongside and meshing with each other,
in order to challenge the rigid encapsulation of self-righteous specialists
and counter the trend toward levelling and uniformity. Art, with and
through media, is conceived of here as a possibility for realising
heterologous processes and events, which can develop alongSide the major
institutions while engaging with them. The other part, pertaining to my
,
Preface to the English Ed<tion
interest in history, is a shift from analysing hegemonial relations and condi
tions to the archaeology or, rather, to anarchaeology* of audiovision. Analo
gous to the interest in creating new possibilities for future production, here
my goal is to make accessible intellectually those great and multifarious
riches of a history of technical hearing and seeing that may be able to escape
monopolisation by the predominant media discourse. But enough - that
will be the next book.
I should like to thank Gloria Custance for her excellent translation and all
her work; Amsterdam University Press and Thomas Elsaesser for making
this English edition possible, and Rowohlt Verlag, particularly Burghard
Konig, for their generosity, also in connection with this project.
Siegfried Zielinski, June 1998
,
See Zielinski 1997 (3) and hup:llwww.ctheory.comlgal.l1-mediaarchaeology.html
(translated by G. Custance).