Demark - Hanhardt on Cinema at Reframe

John Hanhardt has a new blog over at Reframe, called Demark. Not unlike me, he'll be an infrequent contributor, but one with some in-depth thoughts on the cinema and it's transition to online - how we interact with the moving image and how things can newly be juxtaposed. Here's an excerpt from his latest post -

The history of world cinema is an open archive on the internet. It is a wonderful chance to explore and learn and experience some of the greatest works of the human imagination. In searching through the history of the moving image it is important to break out of the categories that characterize and promote the moving image. Film festivals and museums create categories, theatrical film, installation art, avant-garde film, video art, new media, that separate and do not acknowledge the connections between different moving image practices. The internet and the virtual archive of moving images are an open text of viewing opportunities that make it possible to link and disrupt the categories and conventions for viewing the moving image. It can become a means to engage the global scale and deep history of the moving image.

I love the moving image, whether it's movies, independent narratives and documentaries, avant-garde film, video art, animation, television shows, telenovelas, videogames, favorite YouTube pieces, installation art: all the genres and styles that make up the world of moving images are an open resource to be experienced. It is clear that the history of Twentieth Century art is going to be rewritten through the moving image. As we become a media culture the traditional institutions and practices of history writing, preservation, and museum exhibition are going to try and deny this large scale change. A true politics of reinvention has to begin by revisiting the moving image’s history and current practices to see the ways the whole experience of the text and its construction have challenged traditional categories of analysis. So I want to transcend these categories and begin to explore what we remember from a film, an installation, a television show. I remember films through ways that they push categories, transcend their story, and discover a moment that I never forget. Just like we remember plays for particular characters or scenes, paintings for a particular insight into a character or expressive brush stroke, the impression of the graphic pencil in a drawing, a sculpture seen from a particular point of view, a line in a poem, an uncanny moment in a videogames where the unexpected happens with a logic all its own, etc.

More here. And look in early January for a complete overhaul of the way Reframe works!