The Evolution of Film: Rethinking Film Studies, and: The Virtual Life of Film (review)

It is with trepidation and excitement in equal measure that one approaches the contemporary status of cinema. What today seems certain is that cinema is no longer merely one thing – a thing that happens at specifically designed theatres – but rather is a thing that happens in and permeates a multitude of zones. There are still cinemas, yes, but more often than not these cinemas will be found in multiplexes in shopping malls and not as palaces on the High Street. And today there are also home theatres, computer screens, portable DVD players, mobile phones, all of them platforms for the delivery of something that may or may not be ‘cinema’. All of which leads to the question of the digital: more than anything else, it seems, the rise of digital technologies signals a definitive end to that thing which used to be called cinema. What Janet Harbord’s The Evolution of Film and D. N. Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film aim to do is to re-think the status of cinema from the perspective of cinema’s past, present and future. This requires reconceptualising how to theorise cinema and film per se, for if the object that is cinema has changed so radically in recent times, then it stands to reason that a new set of theoretical tools is required to understand that transformation.

To meet this demand, Harbord unleashes an array of novel terms in an attempt to convey just what it is that contemporary forms of cinema have the capacity to do. Most of these terms are adapted from various sectors of contemporary continental theory, so that, for example, inspiration is gained from Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books (1983–85) as a way of undoing commonplace assumptions about film and re-inventing terms and modes of thought that are adequate for our present-day engagements with film. A number of key terms are enlisted – supplement (Derrida), affect (Deleuze, Massumi), contingency (Doane via Kracauer), assemblage (Deleuze, Benjamin), intensity (Deleuze) – as ways of theorising the assorted contemporary states of cinema. These terms are useful to varying degrees and in varying ways, and they will be of interest to many film scholars working in the area of theory, for they certainly are different from many of the well-worn film-theoretical appellations (gaze, interpellation, suture, identification, and so on).

For the purposes of this review I want to focus closely on one of Harbord’s arguments. She points out that Hollywood films have recently been obsessed with the past, especially with Hollywood’s own past and with the pastness of other media forms. Harbord reels off the names of a vast number of remakes and film adaptations of television shows from a bygone era – King Kong, Planet of the Apes, Charlie’s Angels, Mission Impossible, The Addams Family, The Flintstones, and so on – which all add up to what she calls an unfolding of ‘the past in the present’: ‘a paradigm in which the past resonates in the present in the form of remakes, adaptations and cross-media appropriations’ (43). There are two main observations which result from this: that Hollywood’s recent obsession with remakes is a way of shoring up Hollywood’s own history and importance – in other words, by way of remakes, Hollywood re-asserts its own distinctiveness, but also its own abilities to absorb, re-inflect and reinvent its own history in its own interests and image; and that recent Hollywood cinema has reasserted the importance of narrative – against those prophets of contemporary cinema who have hailed the decline of narrative coherence, Harbord responds with a persuasive counter-argument that Hollywood’s narrative continuities help audiences to navigate their ways around the disjointed anti-narratives of contemporary multimedia. That is to say, amid the seas of pods, screens and matrices, Hollywood cinema offers a safe haven of narrative, a little dose...