Conclusion

Abstract

Since the 1980s, various humanistic disciplines have experienced crises in which basic critical assumptions, prevailing methods, and even the objects of study themselves have been called into question. The study of film seems to be taking its turn as we write, with by-now-familiar responses to these challenges. Some scholars have sought deeper historical context, examining how the field itself came into being and developed.¹ Others have insisted on the crisis as material, one quickened by the turn from celluloid to digital form.² Others have called for a renewed attention to theory.³ These investigations are all important and, even in a perceived crisis, signs of health. But we might well recall that such historicism, contextualizing, and theoretical speculation do not preclude more practical measures in criticism, which, at least within the humanities, perform a role analogous to that of experiment in the sciences. Self-conscious science, that is, the history of science, has long been aware of the complicated and essential relations among theory, experiment, and a third activity, measurement, in the pursuit of discovery.⁴ Science moves by instrumentation as well as by theory and experiment. Digital form has, at least briefly, provided us with new critical instruments for the study of film.