‘The Sprawl of Entropy’ – Cinema, waste, and obsolescence in the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract

The following discussion broaches the relation between cinema and waste not so much by addressing examples of cinema about waste, but by presenting cinema itself as a kind of waste. Such an approach is in part prompted by current debates about the obsolescence of cinema, be this obsolescence considered in strictly material terms – i.e. the imminent end of the film-based technology from which the medium derived its traditional definition – or from the (differently material) perspective of cinema as a socio-cultural practice, a mode of producing, circulating, and consuming moving images largely for and in the cinema theatre.