Instytut Historii Sztuki <Posen> [Hrsg.]: Artium Quaestiones (31.2020)

Cinematic Art (History) and Mieke Bal's Thinking in Film 9
interest, and serve as convenient starting points for critical debate.9 Generally
speaking, visual culture studies as an academic support for the analysis of the
broadly defined domain of images, have embraced a number of fields, previ-
ously regarded as distinct, such as history of art or film studies, shifting their
focus to broader, cultural and social aspects of their objects - which them-
selves often belonged to more than one domain anyway (for instance, video
art, art films etc.) - and have become a shared, interdisciplinary area of inter-
est. That, in turn, has called for increased diversity of the shared methods and
theoretical perspectives used by the disciplinary actors involved.
One of the results of this complicated debate that is of particular inter-
est in this article is the acknowledgment that so-called new technologies, in-
cluding the not-so-new medium of film, not only affected the ways art was
produced, but also the ways it was received and interpreted. Even though, as
noted by Warnke, it concerned not only cinema but all branches of the new
audiovisual media technologies, I will focus here on film, understood broadly
as the mobile and temporal image (or cinema as an institutional mode of re-
ception and distribution). Film and the numerous theoretical issues it entails,
including the medium, apparatus, ideological critique, models of spectator-
ship, aspects of mobility and temporality offer a way to rethink art history, its
epistemology, methods and theoretical paths to follow. This opportunity was
(and still is) also regarded as a threat, depending on the position one takes.
It was not only necessitated by the new object of contemporary art - works
of art that employed the medium of film (analog, video, digital, interactive,
internet-based), or more generally a moving image, but also the effects of the
scopic regime produced by the dynamics of such images, the technologies that
propelled them and the resulting discourses. As a result, as Margaret Diko-
vitskaya wrote about the position of art history in the wake of these shifts,
visual culture studies "... has not replaced art history or aesthetics but has
supplemented and problematized them both by making it possible to grasp
some of the axioms and ideological presuppositions underlying the past and
current methodology of art history"10 One of the important aspects of film
(studies) penetrating into the scope of art history (and other fields, for that
matter) was the special attention given to the psychological, cultural and ideo-
logical effects the moving image had on its viewers, both as individuals and as
collective communities. Furthermore, the temporally complex, crystalline -

9 For a useful overview of different cultural turns see: D. Bachmann-Medick, Cultural
Turns. New Orientations in the Study of Culture, trans. A. Blauhut, Berlin-Boston 2016.
10 M. Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture. The Study of the Visual after Cultural Turn, Cam-
bridge 2006, p. 72.