Tacit Cinematic Knowledge

In the fall of 2008 Malte Hagener aptly summed up decades of Film (and Media) studies tradition, arguing that its agenda had progressively shifted from an ontological question (‘what is cinema?’) to an historical one (‘when is cinema?’), and finally landed on a matter of location (‘where is cinema?’). Seventeen years later, his interpretive proposal holds even more true than it did back then, perhaps also in ways that the author himself could not foresee at the time. Indeed, while discussing the phenomenon of ‘rilocation’, the last question was posed with reference to the sudden economic, material, and textual instability of what had been recognised as ‘cinema’ since the early twentieth century before finding itself undermined by the new and pervasive forms of the moving image that were flourishing outside the traditional sites of film production and consumption. In what Hagener called the ‘age of media immanence’, cinema, repeatedly presumed dead, appeared instead ‘more present than ever, even if it is dispersed and flexible, modular and ephemeral, as popular culture or as high art’. 

Other scholars, before and after him, continued to explore and analyse cinematic manifestations in a present when the medium appeared to lose its centrality. Publications in the book series Configurations of Film, launched in 2019 to collect the outputs of the DFG-funded Research Training Programme ‘Konfigurationen des Films’ at Goethe University in Frankfurt, have gathered some of the freshest and most original scholarship in this area. Generally dissatisfied with the notion of ‘post-cinema condition’ that had been long central in the early 2000s academic debate before turning to be – as stated in the series foreword – ‘an almost melancholy attachment to what cinema no longer was’, the series editors propose to move beyond it and to shift the focus to how cinema (and audiovisual media in general) continually reconfigures itself on infrastructural, locational, operational, and formal bases.

The collection Tacit Cinematic Knowledge: Approaches and Practices (Meson Press, 2024) –  co-edited by Rebecca Boguska, Marin Relijc, Rebecca Puchta, and Guilherme Machado – is one of two volumes released by the series in 2024. It gathers the contributions first presented as papers during the Histories of Tacit Cinematic Knowledge conference, organised by the Research Training Program of Goethe University on 24-26 September 2020 – notably, one of the first European scholarly events in the field of film and media studies to move entirely online after the severe limitations on international mobility posed by the outbreak of the Covid pandemic. In the spirit of the book series, it aims to offer the academic community another ‘operative term that allows for an engagement with cinema as a fluid dispositif of aesthetic and epistemic configurations’ (p. 12). Rather than asking ‘where is cinema?’, the central question moves here to an epistemic dimension, translating into ‘where is the Cinematic?’ – or, to put it more precisely, ‘where (and how) does the Cinematic silently contribute to (in)form our knowledge and understanding of the world?’ As repeatedly recalled in the volume, the notion of ‘tacit knowledge’ is borrowed from Michael Polanyi’s work, The Tacit Dimension. As opposed to articulated, ‘tacit knowledge’ is unverbalised, uncoded, and based on an overall reconsideration of human knowledge ‘starting from the fact that we know more than we can say’. When related to the context of film and media studies, this implicitness can be translated into something behind contemporary production of moving images that remains ‘invisible’ to view (e.g., the operationality of algorithmic visual culture), or into something inherently cinematic that nevertheless remains ‘unspoken’ for happening outside the boundaries of properly defined cinematic knowledge. 

As an operative term, ‘tacit cinematic knowledge’ presents some self-evident points of strength, especially when compared with the other notions that have articulated the research agenda in the recent past. Unlike the already mentioned ‘post-cinema’ and ‘post-media’, for instance, it does not necessarily mark a before and an after, therefore avoiding confining its applications to a single point along the continuum of media history. On the other hand, it necessarily requires to be located within a specific socio-historical context or within a specific configuration of the cinematic dispositif. In the words of the editors: ‘tacit cinematic knowledge is thus potentially related to all kinds of cultural practices, historical periods, visual and sonic dispositifs, human as well as non-human knowledge […] and is directly or indirectly bound to the explicit universe of cinema’ (p. 21). When seen in this light, the proposed term encourages explorations in all possible directions, enhancing a diachronic approach to a heterogeneous variety of potential topics. The list of subjects covered in the collection ranges from historical cinephile practices such as scrapbooking to present practices adopted by grassroots online communities; from the image-processing techniques employed by astronomical science to the ultrasonographic imaging as operated in maternity hospitals. The list goes all the way down to some cultural practices that, at first glance, we would not even remotely associate with cinema: what could possibly be ‘cinematic’ about the professional training of the French national railway company’s employees, taken as a primary example by Guilherme Machado (pp. 127-146)? And what about the guided tours of Hanover’s Large Wave Flume that constitute the focus of Rebekka Boguska’s contribution (pp. 107-126)?

To deal with this variety of otherwise scattered themes and approaches, the structure of the book gradually moves from theoretically grounded essays to more object-oriented ones. In particular, the introductory texts by Benoît Turquety (pp. 31-46) and Henning Schmidgen (pp. 47-72) re-visit and enrich the starting notion of tacit cinematic knowledge by establishing points of contact respectively with the epistemology of technique (resonating with the work of Bachelard, Canguilhem, and Simondon) and with the idea of the ‘cinema of minorities/minor cinema’ as theorised by Deleuze and Guattari. As for the essays concerned with more specific case studies, one can notice how the adjective ‘cinematic’ gets freely re-assessed from time to time and grounded in always diverse material concretions of the moving image, or in different practical/aesthetical/technical components of the audio-visual dispositive. This interpretative flexibility is, of course, consequential to the deliberate openness of the notion of tacit cinematic knowledge itself, which proves here to be a good fit for multiple areas of interest. What seems instead taken for granted – or at least is not adequately explained throughout the book – are the different types of knowledge encompassed by the same notion and implicitly (one may say ‘tacitly’) considered by the individual contributions.

The book’s cover image, Sequential Sequencing, taken at the Laboratory for Biomechanics of Movement at ETH Zurich while demonstrating the use of a moving fluoroscope (p. 10), seems to hint primarily at the sites of production of scientific knowledge and at the contemporary use of cinema techniques that date back to the dawn of moving image technologies. A complete reading of the volume, however, reveals that a much more nuanced concept of knowledge is at stake. If I may suggest a further layer of interpretation – which is not present in the text – I would propose the following distinction, which could also serve as an alternative organising principle for the reader: some essays in the collection address a tacit agency of cinematic techniques underlying the formation of ‘epistemic (or scientific) knowledge’, such as the image processing techniques that make astral phenomena visible examined in Jelena Rakin’s essay (pp. 183-202). Others focus instead on how the representational, narrative, and even formal features rooted in the cinematic dispositif shape our ‘common knowledge’: the iterative representations of the polygraph as a ‘lie-detecting machine’ perpetuated by the fiction films examined by Bettina Paul and Larissa Fisher (pp. 147-164) inflect what we (believe we) know about the delicate processes of constructing legal truth, just as the live-streaming of the migration pattern of mooses showed by a program on Swedish public television can shape our awareness of wildlife, as demonstrated in Veena Hariharan’s essay (pp. 73-88). Finally, it is a sort of ‘procedural knowledge’ always derived from cinematic forms and apparatuses that silently informs the practices of the Italian cinephile and scrapbooker Walter Faglioni, reconstructed by Andrea Mariani (pp. 203-222), and that employees in contemporary work organisations are inadvertently trained to – as argued in the already mentioned contribution by Machado. 

Of course, the distinction is not meant to be strict: as shown in Claire Salles’ essay (pp. 165-182), the ultrasound visualisation technique, apparently intended for medical purposes (i.e. production of epistemic knowledge) can also have a decisive impact on our common knowledge and can even become instrumentalised by political actors to orient public opinion. Similarly, the aesthetic codes and practices that we have implicitly assimilated as spectators and movie-goers and that are currently part of our common knowledge can easily be turned into procedural tools, as happened with the grassroots practices by which Malayalam cinema enthusiasts disseminate their content online, demonstrated in the contribution by R. Haritha (pp. 223-241); or, how voters for Donald Trump supported his presidential campaign by staging him as an action hero in user-generated film trailers, as detailed in the contribution by Vinzenz Hediger and Felix M. Simon (pp. 241-264). 

By offering such an articulate overview of the forms of knowledge tacitly influenced by cinematic techniques and apparatuses, the book makes a strong point to further investigate media immanence from a different angle. The contributors cooperate in offering new reasons to keep asking ourselves ‘where is cinema?’, and to endure our search even beyond the ubiquitous presence of screen devices and audiovisual content. The aforementioned variety of subjects and contexts faced by the authors do nothing but prove that the ‘dispersed and flexible, modular and ephemeral’ character that Hagener ascribed to cinema-outside-of/after-Cinema still stands, even when understood as an epistemic construct. More specifically, it demonstrates that ‘tacit cinematic knowledge’ is by no means an operative term confined to a specific research trend, but rather a field traversed by multiple tensions and, hopefully, a keyword to open new research avenues.

Simone Dotto (University of Udine)

References

Hagener, M. ‘Where Is Cinema (Today)? The Cinema in the Age of Media Immanence’, Cinéma&Cie, 8, 11, 2008: 15-22.

Polanyi, M. The tacit dimension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009 (orig. in 1962): https://meson.press/series-page/configurations-of-film/ (accessed on 23 December 2024).