Abstract

This paper positions Francesco Cassetti's 2015 book, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come, within post-cinema studies. I define post-cinema studies as a set of scholarly approaches and discourses since the 1990s that have responded to the post-cinematic conditions: conditions in which the boundaries of normative have been dismantled and dynamically redrawn as its constitutive components, such as celluloid, lens-based imagery, single screen, projection, and the fixity of spectators, are changed by digital technologies and non-theatrical experiential platforms. Summarizing the tendencies of post-cinema studies as four keywords (material and form, platform, history, and philosophy), I argue that The Lumière Galaxy, based on its emphases on platform and history, demands us to consider the post-cinematic condition as a dual movement of cinema's persistence and change. On the one hand, Cassetti diagnoses the post-cinema conditions as a situation in which traditional cinematic experience, and the place and apparatus that constitute it, are undergoing unprecedented changes. On the other hand, he nevertheless stresses that such a shift provides an opportunity for rediscovery, reconstruction, and reinvention of the traditional cinema experience in other places and devices. In so doing, he challenges the so-called ‘death of cinema’ discourse, as well as its epistemological basis that posits the term post-cinema as marking a fundamental, periodizing break from cinema. In order to closely examine Cassetti's argument, this paper elucidates the seven keywords suggested by The Lumière Galaxy: relocation, relic/icon, assemblage, expansion, hypertopia, display, and performance. This leads to underline Cassetti's contribution to post-cinema studies.