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From the outset cinema was metropolitan. Producers needed access to financing, pools of talent, specialized equipment, and laboratories that one could only find in urban centers. In certain cinema-cities (Berlin, Paris, Buenos Aires, Mumbai, Taipei, etc.) reside ambitious writers, producers, and filmmakers who were driven to outdo, or modify, or simply copy what they saw, employing their own culture’s raw material. Thus, the Jameson-Moretti law applies: local content, pertinent to each nation, was poured into forms that were adopted, with strategic alterations, from Hollywood. Where are today’s hotspots? Where does cinema seem crucial and talked about? Let’s abandon the map (where necessarily one region stands front and center), and instead let’s spin the globe. As it whirls, our eye intermittently catches glimpses of the shapes of the most sizeable nations. Today China and Nigeria stand out prominently alongside India and Russia. So dense are they with film activity that the globe is distended and wobbles out of true. Only sixty years ago China and Nigeria were places that had no place in World Cinema; they gained recognition only when a few promising art films found their way to the European festivals that served as image exchange centers. Today that promise has been fulfilled beyond, indeed against, expectations. Recapitulating Hollywood in its heyday Nollywood and China (Beijing/Shanghai/Qingdao) have become thoroughly corporate and market-savvy, turning out standardized and predictable products. If fresh images are to renew World Cinema, it will hardly be from the urban image-centers. On our globalized globe, novelty should be sought on the periphery of these former peripheral nations. And indeed, exciting new work has been bubbling beyond the dense cultural centers of these nations. Independent art films and documentaries have emerged from dark corners of both places thanks to the network of festivals around the globe, but increasingly and paradoxically thanks to the rival medium of the internet, with its networks of informal distribution and what used to be called “word of mouth.”

Post-cinema designates a new way of making films. It is time to ask whether this novelty is complete or relative and to evaluate to what extent it represents a unitary or diversified current. The book proposes to integrate the post-cinema question within the post-art question in order to study the new ways of making filmic images. The issue will be considered at three levels: the impression of post-art on "regular" films; the "relocation" (Casetti) of the same films that can be seen using devices of all kinds in conditions more or less removed from the dispositif of the theater; the integration of cinema into contemporary art in all kinds of forms of creation and exhibition, parallel to the integration of contemporary art in "regular" cinema.

Stuart Liebman: I want to take up several issues in Malcolm's introduction in order to amplify, and perhaps to qualify, some of his remarks. He rightly notes that we are presently living through a period of scholarly engagement with early film theory. Malcolm implies that the current interest is somehow larger and more extensive than it used to be, and there is some truth in that. In addition to those texts he mentions, one must cite Richard Taylor's massive efforts to reclaim through retranslation vast amounts of Eisenstein's writings, including a great deal of new material. He has also done the same for many of Pudovkin's texts. Taylor's efforts built on his joint project with Ian Christie to substantially expand the texts available by lesser-known Soviet figures in their excellent anthology The Film Factory, published in 1988, the same year that Abel's anthology on French cinema was released.

Tradução: Moema FrancaMoema Franca é doutora em Études du Monde Lusophone, pela Universidade de Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle (2016), onde também concluiu o mestrado em Langues, Lettres, Arts, Societés Contemporaines (2005-2007). Possui mestrado em Comunicação e Culturas Contemporâneas pela UFBA (2004). É autora de Bem Aqui, em Lugar Nenhum (7Letras, 2013), livro de contos finalista do Prêmio Jabuti 2014.e-mail: moema.franca@gmail.com Este artigo foi extraído de um ensaio de Dudley Andrew entitulado “The roots of the Nomadic: Gilles Deleuze and the Cinema of West Africa”, editado por Gregory Flaxman no livro The Brain is the screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press, 2000, p. 228-243).Seguindo as pistas abertas por Gilles Deleuze, para quem o cinema da metade do século XX abriu perspectivas inéditas ligadas às formas de oralidade e nomadismo, o presente artigo propõe-se a tecer uma análise do cinema do oeste da África, perseguindo o desenho traçado por um conjunto de filmes em que se alternam a afirmação de uma identidade original e o movimento de uma identidade constantemente em reconstrução e trânsito, forças contraditórias que se expressam pelas figuras do enraziamento - o Baobá - e do nomandismo - os ventos do Sahel.

This interview took place at the offices of Cahiers du cinema, Paris, February 29, 2008 Dudley Andrew: I am writing a book that traces something I call "The Cahiers Line" from Roger Leenhardt through Bazin past the New Wave to Serge Daney and now on to you. I understand that Cahiers du cinema in all its periods had several directions, but I'm concerned to find out if Cahiers du cinema today feels a pressure from the past as it chooses what films to discuss, who will write about them and what subjects it will adopt. Here's a hint: what have been your thoughts about certain kinds of new media, cinema of animation, cinema of entertainment media, new kinds of spectacle, and new entertainment regimes? These are very important cultural phenomena and Cahiers du cinema should address them, I presume, but it seems that these appear to stand to the side of the "Line" that I take to be the backbone of the journal all these years. How do you take up these issues? From what stance do you approach them? Emmauel Burdeau: The question of working on the Cahiers has almost always been a question of inheritance. How does one work on a review that has known a Golden Age which no one will ever surpass-the '50s and the New Wave? That is not to be repeated. How to continue in a not so unfaithful way, that is the first step. The only step in a way. Both the first and the next step: both trying and failing to continue the Golden Age and the eras after, the eras just before you. It's of course a question of deciding on what an interpretation of Cahiers was-at the beginning or just yesterday-and therefore of what it must be today. So what is Cahiers? Is there indeed a kind of continuity? Perhaps there is, even if only a fictional one. Serge Daney-editor from 1974 to 1981, the master, obviously, some even call him a genius-has an idea that can summarize a part of what constitutes the continuity of Cahiers from '51 to today, above and beyond all the changes. It is in an interview that he did with the great Bill Krohn at the end of the '70s when Cahiers Week was being organized in New York. This interview was first published in . . . Thousand Eyes, I believe, and then, a couple of years ago, as an introduction for the first volume for POL, La Maison cinema et le monde. Daney says that in his opinion, throughout all its eras Cahiers was always interested in a type of cinema: the cinema that is haunted by the written. Haunted as though by a ghost. In French: HANTE PAR L'ECRIT, in capital letters. Among other things, it is a good way to suggest that the singularity of Cahiers du cinema, what radically distinguishes it from Positif, for instance, is not the "mise-en-scene." It is rather the role of writing (ecriture). There is something in cinema that calls upon a very particular kind of critical writing that has little to do with literature or literary criticism or musical criticism. Film criticism is the way to answer and to understand that call. It is an echo of that call. In other words, the page "translates" the screen. Daney added that Cahiers had always defended filmmaker-writers such as Duras, Cocteau, Guitry, Pagnol. Besides, the New Wave was also a movement of somewhat failed writers, or so they pretended to call themselves. But all the filmmakers of the New Wave were in their own way great writers: Rohmer, Godard, and then Demy, Eustache . . . (by the way, that can explain why it is that often one might find the texts from Cahiers difficult to read). Insofar as concerns Cahiers, writing might be just as important as cinema. That is not to say that we consider ourselves writers, in the sense of genuine literary authors. Next there is another aspect that you evoked, the question of new media: Internet, video games, and so on. There again one can give a schematic answer. In February's issue, we placed on the cover Brian De Palma's film REDACTED, which is a film that seems to have been made through the Internet. …

1. Film: Living Object, Field of Research, Discipline Decades ago, when the galaxy of film was gradually swirling into existence and becoming visible within the university, it wasn’t at all clear that academic oversight was pertinent or wholesome. From the perspective of the academy, movies could have the effect of devaluing the humanities, while from that of cinephiles the university might very well tamper with the organic rapport of audiences with movies, stunting or unnaturally twisting the development of both. Such a debate over the very propriety of its study seems primordial enough to distinguish film from English or any other longstanding field. You may believe the decision to have long since been rendered in favor of the academy; after all, the article you are reading was commissioned by Critical Inquiry for this issue devoted to the state of the disciplines. But suspend judgment, if you can, and imagine there to be a force in cinema still capable of tossing scholars from the saddle while they try to rein films into disciplinary paddocks. This contest involving a once youthful subject and a set of self-confident methodologies is chronicled and celebrated in a fine new anthology, Inventing Film Studies.1 Its final three essays stage a quiet debate that neatly exemplifies distinct perspectives on film (by any other name). D. N. Rodowick concludes the book on a sanguine note when he declares that the eclipse of film by new media both in the entertainment world and in the minds of the coming cohort of scholars need not trouble us. For historically the interest in films quickly led to film theory and that impressive array of concepts has grown strong enough to

Challenging today’s ascendant digital aesthetic, this essay retraces one powerful line of French theory which treats film as an art which “discovers” significance rather than “constructs” meaning. Champions of today’s technology find that the digital at last permits complete control over image construction and therefore over “cinema effects.” Opposed to this aesthetic which targets the audience, the French aesthetic stemming from Roger Leenhardt and André Bazin concerns itself with the world the filmmaker engages. An interplay of presence and absence, as well as of human agency in the non-human environment, characterizes the French aesthetic at each phase of the filmic process: recording, composing and projecting. This article focuses on the central phase, composing, and on the terminological shift from “image” to “shot” picked up after Bazin by the Nouvelle Vague and passed forward to our own day through Serge Daney. In short, there is a Cahiers du cinéma line of thought, applied to questions of editing, which emphasizes the filtering implied in shots and the ellipses implied in their order. Conventional editors, on the other hand, manipulate or juxtapose images (using processes known as “compositing” today). The Cahiers line of thought developed in symbiosis with neo-realism and with a spate of post-war essay films of the “caméra-stylo” sort (Resnais, Franju) wherein editing works to cut away and filter out the inessential so that a mysterious or abstract subject can be felt as beginning to appear. Rivette, Rohmer and Godard have passed this line of thought on to a later generation represented by Philippe Garrel and a still later one for which Arnaud Desplechin stands as a good example., Dans le contexte de l’avènement de la nouvelle esthétique du numérique, le présent article retourne à cet important principe de la théorie française voulant que le cinéma en tant qu’art permette de « découvrir » une signification plutôt que de « construire » du sens. Les tenants des nouvelles technologies considèrent que le numérique permet enfin une maîtrise parfaite de la construction de l’image, et conséquemment des « effets de cinéma ». À l’opposé de cette esthétique centrée sur le spectateur, l’esthétique française définie par Roger Leenhardt et André Bazin se préoccupe plutôt de l’univers dans lequel le cinéaste est engagé. Une telle esthétique se fonde d’abord et avant tout sur le jeu qui, à chacune des étapes de la production cinématographique (captation, composition et projection), s’articule entre présence et absence, entre facteur humain et environnement non humain. Le présent article insiste sur l’étape centrale, la composition, et sur le passage de la notion d’« image » à celle de « plan », selon la terminologie reprise de Bazin par les cinéastes de la Nouvelle Vague et relayée jusqu’à nos jours par Serge Daney. Il existerait ainsi, sur le montage, une ligne de pensée nettement identifiable aux Cahiers du cinéma, qui met l’accent sur le filtrage produit par la prise de vues et sur les ellipses produites par l’agencement des plans. Ce que les monteurs traditionnels manipuleraient et juxtaposeraient de leur côté, ce serait simplement des images (en utilisant des procédés comme le « compositing »). La ligne de pensée des Cahiers s’est développée en symbiose avec les productions néoréalistes et la myriade de films d’après-guerre répondant aux principes de la « caméra-stylo » (Resnais, Franju), dans lesquels le montage visait à éliminer l’accessoire, de manière à permettre l’émergence d’un sujet mystérieux ou abstrait. Rivette, Rohmer et Godard transmettront cette ligne de pensée à la génération qui a suivi avec, par exemple, un Philippe Garrel ou, plus récemment encore, un Arnaud Desplechin.

The october 1999 job list prepared by the society for cinema studies has just appeared: fifty-one teaching positions involving film. What does it mean that only ten of these are situated in designated film programs, while thirty-six are hosted by departments of literature, primarily English? It means, among other things, that departments of literature are redefining and deregulating themselves. They may have cautiously welcomed film for a half century but hardly at this scale: fifty-one open positions suggest hundreds of positions permanently in place and thousands of students studying this subject each year. The confidence the humanities shows in this field is shared by most of my students, who are younger than cinema studies and must sense it to be, if not august, at least well established, rather as English seemed when I majored in it and assumed it to be as old as England. However, any census of course catalogs reveals cinema's uncertain location and function from campus to campus, posing questions of general expectations and standards—indeed, putting in question the definition of cinema studies. Evidently universities want to offer film. Bravo! But in what manner and for what purpose? What “qualifies” the hundreds of applicants applying for these fifty-one positions? Where did they gain their expertise or self-confidence?

Jean Mitry ushered in a whole new era of film theory with his immense two-volume treatise, Esthetique et psychologie du cinema (1963-65). It is ironic that contemporary film theory should have its start in this man who was himself the contemporary and associate of figures like Jean Epstein, Abel Gance, and Jean Renoir. Indeed Mitry's first film book was a study of the actor Emil Jannings, who was at that time (1928) in mid-career. Mitry lived and labored in that golden age of silent cinema so beloved of Arnheim, Balazs, and countless others. Somehow his critical mind has conquered what must be a nearly irresistible pull toward nostalgia and a film theory based on the supremacy of those wonderful films of the twenties, for he has written a remarkably modern theory. Three aspects of Mitry's life have contributed to his critical distance. First, he began by actually working on films during the French avantgarde era. Even after the fall of this movement he has stayed close to film production, editing such films as Astruc's prize-winning short La Rideau Cramoisie (1953), filming and editing his own prize-winners in Pacific 231 (1949) and Images pour Debussy (1952). These all have something of the "experimental" about them and forced him at the very outset to bring to bear on his own work some sophisticated ideas about editing, music, the status of the image, and adaptation. The closeness of Mitry's film theory to film making practice arises from these kinds of working experiences. Only Eisenstein exceeds him in time and energy spent in editing rooms. The second aspect of Mitry's life and personality which suits him so perfectly to his task is his penchant for history. Even during his years in the French avant-garde he was busily collecting data and notes which might be of use to him later on. His files, already sizeable in the 1930's, were immeasurably augmented when he, along with Henry Langlois and Georges Franju, founded the Cinematheque francaise in 1938. Of course this has since become the greatest storehouse of films and film data in the world. During the war Mitry devised the notion of writing a truly scientific history of the cinema, a history which would document the art and which would pose the most important questions raised by it. In the past decade he has at last begun publishing this Histoire du cinema, now four volumes long and yet to reach Citizen Kane. Anyone thumbing through the 900 pages of his theory books will instantly recognize the historian behind the theorist, for countless precise examples seep out of every page. This attitude toward