Cinema as a Transformative Agency Within Art and its Reflections

The multiple effects of cinema, which, after its inception, were not immediately comprehended in theory, including aesthetics, resulted in a blurring of boundaries between different arts and between diverse disciplines in the humanities. However, what seemed as a need for a comprehensive interpretation of the phenomena of moving images in art and society in the modernist period had an effect on the onset of transdisciplinary cultural studies in the second half of the 20th century. These new disciplines populated the epistemological space of the humanities. In a lively interaction between theory and artistic practice, the so-called experimental film, which throughout the rule of cinema(tograph) provided interrogative stances concerning the sense of seeing, found its afterlife first in video art and later on in digital video installations. In our time, cinema has ceased to be a privileged place of moving images. Increasingly, we move back and forth from aesthetics to ontology and back again. However, post-cinema is securing the “afterlife” of film in certain cinematic forms such as the phenomenon of the so-called slow cinema, which grows at the junction of philosophy and film.

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Cinema as a Transformative Agency Within Art and its Reflections