The research project
From its beginning as an “invention without a future” (Lumière), the moving image has become the most prominent mode of visual expression of the 20th century and the most important image industry in human history. Today, moving images can be found everywhere: in the cinema, on television, the Internet, cell phones, MP3 players, billboards, portable DVD players and computers. Their uses and genres keep multiplying: fiction, documentary, art, video games, news broadcasts, entertainment, music videos, medical imaging, surveillance, cartoons and advertisements.
Expertise in the area of moving image study was born out of a response to cinema's increasing influence in the public sphere from around 1915, just as the medium was experiencing important mutations wrought by its growing institutionalization. It has now developed into a full-fledged academic field of study in university and college departments. Since the 1960's especially, there has been an ever growing interest in the academic study of moving images in North America and Europe. To this day, however, there has been little work done to survey the emergence, proliferation and consolidation of this specific discipline (or interdiscipline) from historical and epistemological perspectives. The ARTHEMIS project seeks to fill this gap by investigating the institutionalization and development of film and moving images studies and the forms of knowledge that it produces. Our object of study is not the cinema per se but the discourses and practices that surround it, and in particular those discourses and practices that have served as conditions of possibility for learned or academic considerations of film. We pay particular attention to the contexts of North America and Europe, where the cinema was first born and where the first important institutions devoted to moving image expertise were developed (universities, the Cinémathèque française, the British Film Institute (BFI), the National Film Theater (NFT), ciné-clubs, film societies, film journals, etc...).
The ARTHEMIS project investigates the study of film and moving images by looking at three of its most important possibility conditions:
