Post-Cinematic Perspectives

The proliferation of video installations, computer games, and mind game films in contemporary media cultures has thrown the question of perspective in the moving image into stark relief. These artifacts articulate conditions of post-cinematic media and apparatuses while rearticulating a dissolution and deconstruction of perspective instigated by earlier experiments in the moving image such as the phantom ride films of early cinema, Eisenstein’s work with montage, and the Expanded Cinema of the 1970s.

Whereas in geometry perspective is thought of as an invariant that projects three-dimensional objects onto a two-dimensional surface, in film perspective acquires a dynamism that regenerates through shifting optics, movement, and montage. Films are perspectival insofar as they show something as something; they always show how something is seen from a particular perspective and representational schema. Any film represents in a determined way, according to a particular affective stance or outlook. This transpires through a framing of shots that is multiplied and managed via montage. The cinematic shot is thus not just a technical device; it also involves an attitude towards the world.

The extension and dissolution of film in terms of its mediality as well as its exhibition spaces promotes a rearticulation of perspective. Multi-perspectival video installations comprised of manifold screens complicate the problem of perspective through new forms of space, new modalities of narration, and the mobility of the spectator-observer.

The international and transdiciplinary conference Post-Cinematic Perspectives aims at discussing these changes of optical and narrative perspective in post-cinematic media and apparatuses. The conference invites art historical, philosophical, film and media theoretical contributions on the dissolution of perspective in post-cinema as well as the changed status of the spectator-observer.