Electric shadows reloaded: the post-digital animateur, shadow play and handmade cinema

Convener: University of Oxford China Centre

Speaker: Professor Paola Voci

In the work of an increasingly visible number of solo producers (i.e., the postdigital animateurs), the moving image is more intimately connected to the human creator/manipulator/performer, rather than the technological medium (be it the kinoeye, the film strip, or the digital software). Reframing their animations within the broader temporal and spatial context of handmade cinema, I explore a longstanding, but largely unscrutinised, connection between cinema and the performative apparatus of the shadow play to sketch a parallax story – rather than a parallel history – of manipulated and evocative moving images that are not contained in the institution of cinema and do not submit themselves to the supremacy of the index. 

Paola Voci is Associate Professor at the University of Otago. She is the author of China On Video and co-editor of Screening China's Soft Power. Her research focuses on theories and archaeologies of cinema, documentary, animation, and other video practices in China.