The Morph-Image: Four Forms of Post-Cinema

Post-cinema has expanded the forms of cinema and audiovisual culture in general with the introduction of new image and media technologies. No longer contingent on profilmic reality or continuity editing, post-cinema allows for a new image of time beyond that of indirect and direct images of time, q.v. Gilles Deleuze’s work on cinema. This article investigates how post-cinema thinks about contemporary audiovisual culture through new forms, arguing that the new media machines of post-cinema produce other thoughts than articulated in Jean Epstein’s The Intelligence of a Machine. Three forms are detailed—animacies, capture and flows—showing how digital workflows revise earlier versions of cinema, producing new insights into how our world is organized, suggesting that post-cinematic media are accelerated soundimages that induce new sensations of life and control. The fourth form, plastic temporalities, challenges classic cinematic time as reaching beyond continuity through contiguity, suggesting instead that time has become increasingly flexible to adapt to a new spatiotemporal organization. In other words, time has become a resource and a technique of control.