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Double structure

Summary: A recurring analytical figure in cinema-of-marbles. The "double structure" names the way film as a medium, and the cinema-museum and film-archive as institutions, are organized through pairs of conflicting/complementary terms — analog/digital, material/immaterial, white cube/black box, present/past — without resolving them. Crisis, in the dissertation, is read as the outcome of these doubled tensions, not as their breakdown.

Sources: cinema-of-marbles-draft-2025-12-30.md, recurring throughout but introduced explicitly in section 2.1.0 ("Spectral Strata") and 2.1.2 ("Opening sequence").

Last updated: 2026-05-24.

Origin

The phrasing draws on Deleuze's account of the event as having a "double structure" — the present moment of actualization on one hand, and the past-and-future of the event "considered in itself" on the other. Thomas Elsaesser's discussion of cinema events as "centrifugal, multilayered, and heterogeneous in their consistency and materiality" feeds in.

Examples in the dissertation

  • The white cube and the black box. The gallery and the cinema, "two distinct, if not antagonistic visual arrangements and spatiotemporal dispositifs," sit together in the thessaloniki-cinema-museum (and in any museum-of-cinema).
  • The two projectors. The Zeiss Ikon and the "Athina" projector at the Thessaloniki Cinema Museum entrance — silent monument and information-riddled document, foreign and national — are read as a literal double-structure on the doorstep.
  • Analog and digital. The full dissertation is structured around the refusal to treat these as a clean rupture. Where most archival discourse treats the digital as freeing the analog, Mademli treats them as a doubled pair where each enables the other's marmarization.
  • Idomeni in two media. spectres-are-haunting-europe is structured as a doubled film: the first 67 minutes shot on digital long-takes, the final 13 minutes on 16mm hand-held black-and-white. The shift is not a contrast but a doubling.
  • Vlihi's projector. The 35mm projector in the theatre plaquet for vlihi is covered by a white cube to muffle the noise — "this hybrid enclave embodying both the white cube and the black box."

Why it matters

The double-structure figure underwrites the dissertation's resistance to binary readings of Greek film heritage. By treating doubled terms as held in tension rather than resolved, Mademli can describe how a single archive or institution can be simultaneously national and transnational, peripheral and central, fixed and mobile.

  • marmarization — what happens when one pole of a double structure freezes.
  • boundary-archive — the boundary archive lives in the double structure without collapsing it.
  • viewser — a double-structured subject (viewer + user).
  • Mangle of practice (Pickering) — a process for working with doubled human/non-human agencies.