Thesis Supervisor:  Antonia Majaca

Thesis: Toward Cinematic Sympoiesis: From Early Cinema to Transmedia Film

July 2020

Abstract

The thesis outlines a process-oriented feminist onto-epistemology of film I am referring to as cinematic sympoiesis. I attempt to read cinema alongside cybernetics as transmedia storytelling and consider filmmaking as a critical epistemic practice. Cinematic sympoiesis takes into account the difference that the digital makes to filmmaking but does not treat film exclusively as a technoscience structured by computation.

I discuss moving image practices that are capable of figuring collective subjectivities and the complexity of systems that structure knowledge production. The notion of cinematic sympoiesis allows me to think montage as an epistemic device within the non-linear open-ended cinematic assemblage. Within the assemblage, authorship becomes plurivocal and narratives gain partial autonomy.

Author: Konstantin Mitrokhov