Compact Cinematics The Moving Image in the Age of Bit-Sized Media

Compact Cinematics challenges the dominant understanding of cinema to focus on the various compact, short, miniature, pocket-sized forms of cinematics that have existed from even before its standardization in theatrical form, and in recent years have multiplied and proliferated, taking up an increasingly important part of our everyday multimedia environment.

Short films or micro-narratives, cinematic pieces or units re-assembled into image archives and looping themes, challenge the concepts that have traditionally been used to understand cinematic experience, like linear causality, sequentiality, and closure, and call attention to complex and modular forms of cinematic expression and perception. Such forms, in turn, seem to meet the requirements of digital convergence, which has pushed the development of more compact and mobile hardware for the display and use of audiovisual content on laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Meanwhile, contemporary economies of digital content acquisition, filing, and sharing equally require the shrinking of cinematic content for it to be recorded, played, projected, distributed, and installed with ease and speed. In this process, cinematic experience is shortened and condensed as well, so as to fit the late-capitalist attention economy.

The essays in this volume ask what this changed technical, socio-economic and political situation entails for the aesthetics and experience of contemporary cinematics, and call attention to different concepts, theories and tools at our disposal to analyze these changes.

Pepita Hesselberth is Assistant Professor of Film and Literary Studies at Leiden University, The Netherlands. She is the author of Cinematic Chonotopes (Bloomsbury, 2014) and editor of a special issue on “Short Film Experience” of Empedocles (2015). Her research interests include new cinematic ontologies and disconnectivity in the digital age.

Maria Poulaki is Lecturer in Film and Digital Media Arts at University of Surrey, UK. Placing contemporary cinematics within the realm of complexity theory and neuroscience debates she has contributed to Screen, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Film-Philosophy, Cinema & Cie, Projections, and a number of edited volumes.

Introduction: Pepita Hesselberth (Leiden University, The Netherlands) & Maria Poulaki (University of Surrey, UK)
Part 1 - [Short]: Narrative, Conflict, Repetition
1. Countdown to Zero: Minimal Narratives // Tom Gunning (University of Chicago, USA)
2. On the Status of Conflict in Short Film Storytelling // Richard Raskin (Aarhus University, Denmark)
3. Lynch On the Run // Todd McGowan (University of Vermont, USA)
4. Caught between story and scene // Peter Verstraten (Leiden University, The Netherlands)
Part 2 [Condensed]: Modular Narratives and Polyphonic Archives
5. The Ethics of Repair: Re-Animating the Archive // Sean Cubitt (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)
6. Long Story Short // Natalie Bookchin (Rutgers University, USA)
7. A Taxonomy of Thresholds: Short Intro films and the Interactive Documentary // Tina Bastajian (Piet Zwart Institute, The Netherlands)
8. Fluid Archives: Curators of the Compact // Geli Mademli (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Part 3 [Compressed]: Pleasure, Productivity and Hyper-Attention
9. Spellbound by Titbits: On the Recurrence and Consumption of Images // Pasi Väliaho (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)
10. The Occasional Spectator // Francesco Casetti (Yale University, USA)
11. Fragmented Spectatorship: Connected Viewing and its Discontents // Neta Alexander (New York University, USA)
12. Visual Pleasure and GIFs // Anna McCarthy (NYU, Tisch School of the Arts, USA)
Part 4 [Miniature]: Pocket Shorts and Animations
13. An Archaeology of Mobile Film: Blink, Bluvend and Pocket Shorts // Kim Louise Walden (University of Hertfordshire, UK)
14. "Films-Poucets": Children's Little Thumb Films // Wanda Strauven (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) & Alexandra Schneider (University of Mainz, Germany)
15. The aesthetics of innocence: Norman McLaren and David O'Reilly // Janine Marchessault (York University, Canada)
16. Re-miniaturizing Animation: Flip books & Funny Animals // Yasco Horsman (Leiden University, The Netherlands)
Part 5 [Compacted]: Media Architectures and Urban Ecologies
17. Screening 'Smart Cities': Glimpsing Urban Futures in Promotional Animations // Gillian Rose (The Open University, London, UK)
18. Codified Space: Cinematic Recodings of Urban Reality // Justin Ascott (Norwich University of the Arts, UK)
19. The Short Lives of Media Architectural Pixels // Ulrik Ekman (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
20. Mobile Technology and The Polyaesthetics of the Digital Panorama // Maria Engberg (Malmö University, Sweden) & Jay David Bolter (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
Index

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