The First Time as Farce: Digital Animation and the Repetition of Cinema

Abstract

New media seem to demand a theory of historical repetition. Discussions of new media have begun, with greater insistence in recent years, to refer to the emergence of cinema, to evoke a time when cinema was new media. This is particularly true of discussions of new media concerned with digital cinema, digital animation and video games. Sometimes commentators simply stress the incredible novelty of these new media, and offer more or less detailed descriptions and characterizations of them—in opposition to “old media” such as books or films. Usually, however, it is not enough to sing the newness of new media. For the insistence on newness in opposition to old media inevitably confronts a historical problem. After all, old media were once new. And sometimes old media are renewed—vinyl records can make a comeback, with a different take on their materiality, to be manipulated in specific ways, paused, scratched, skipped. Think of Christian Marclay in the mid 1980s, sanding, cracking, breaking, and repairing records to find new sounds. Thus, even when one wishes merely to enumerate or characterize what is new about new media, one runs into the problem of historical repetition—the problem of the “old new” and the “new new”—not to mention that of the renewed old and the obsolescent new.