Expanded Cinema Revis(it)ed
Chapter 2 addresses a third wave of expanded cinema, running from the mid-1990s to the present. Though in dialogue with art world developments, particularly the prevalence of moving images in that world, this wave again rose out of the theory and practice of avant-garde cinema. Hence, it reflects that film culture’s skepticism about digital technology, media convergence, and the “death” of cinema. Chapter 2 considers two major factors in the resurgence of expanded cinema. The first is the spread of digital technology and the implications of this for filmmaking and the theorization of cinema’s ontology. In the wake of “new media’s” ascendency in the “digital age,” experimental filmmakers and critics took up a renewed investigation of the nature of cinema and the role that specific physical media (e.g., celluloid film) play in our conception it. Prominent theorists of new media have argued against such specificity positions, employing concepts like “remediation” and “media convergence,” which speak to a merging of media and art forms quite contrary to the broadly modernist notions of avant-garde filmmakers—including those who produced expanded cinema during its “second wave.” The second major factor for expanded cinema’s new life is the microcinema, a form of film exhibition specific to experimental cinema that appeared across the United States, Canada, and Europe beginning the mid-1990s. Microcinemas are characterized by a highly participatory social environment, wherein film screenings blend into other kinds of social activity. Microcinemas are thus models for expanded cinema, each showcasing cinema’s adaptability to varying spaces and formal heterogeneity.