The digital turn, networked media, and the ‘post-cinematographic era’ do not only question what film is, but what film was. The international conference takes film history as its object for a systematic, transnational, and intercultural study of the mechanisms and methods of what has been termed ‘film history’. It intends to uncover and mine the complex and contested processes involved in making film and cinema an object of historiography. Contributions from leading scholars in the field of film history and media archaeology examine the institutional, cultural, and social grounds for waves and cycles of certain histories and for the decline of others, and provide new insight into the fabrication of film history and the discourses on its theories and methods in the past. In doing so, the conference wishes to contribute to a better understanding and critical reconsideration of film history today.

[Program]