What remains of the cinema as “the eye of the twentieth century,” at a moment in which the old century has ended and a new millennium begun? What remains of a gaze that once sought to rearticulate and reconstruct the tensions of its age—setting itself as its witness and guide—now that the age seems to have succumbed to the triumph of new industrial models, social forms, and conceptual configurations? What remains of the splendid challenge that the cinema posed to late modernity, in an age that is so fond of calling itself postmodern?
We are, in fact, facing a profound transformation within the context in which the cinema operates. Limiting ourselves to the topics we have touched on here, we have only to think of how globalization redraws the tensions between fragment and totality. This contrast is reduced to a blurred mixture of local and global. Since we live both “here” and “anywhere,” what we face is a “glocalism.” Think of how a new self-consciousness refigures the tension between subject and object. In the explosion of points of view and voices, what emerges is no longer a common meaning that nevertheless attaches us to things, but a simple collection of lived moments. The miniaturization of technologies changes the relationships between man and machine. The human body, more than extending itself through a series of devices, absorbs them directly into itself; the notion of prosthesis gives way to that of hybridization, and the man-machine no longer seems shocking. We might think also about the creation of how new forms of passion—all extremely physical—redraw the contrast between excitement and meaning. What emerges is a “feeling” which operates beyond a full understanding. And, finally, we have a cancellation of both geographical and mental limits, making us not only witnesses implicated in the world’s performance but also accomplices in every respect to what happens, and thus active combatants.
The cinema no longer manages all the conflicting stances that it used to control so well (or at least not in the same way). It can no longer effect the same mediations. These are instead entrusted to other media. Television, for example, works best as a mediation of geopolitical space, giving us simultaneously a sense of extreme localization and the awareness of a world scene. The Internet, in addition, creates networks of contact in which the relationship between the self and the other is best balanced, and from which new forms of collectivity can be born. The cellular phone, in contrast, seems the medium most driven to integrate an element of technology in the human body, rivaling only internal medical prostheses such as the pacemaker. The palm device, finally, delivers readily available memory and constantly developing action.
The task of negotiating between the different drives of the age touches other media—supposing that it is still a question of negotiation. The present time is apparently far from any process that allows opposites to be summoned and, through a series of internal redefinitions, synthesis to be reached. The emblem of the epoch is the slippery morphing image, more than actual comparison and reciprocal influence. In other words, it is no longer a time of productive and revelatory compromises, as in the modern age (and, less than ever, of models that are mirrored in antimodels, such as in the classical). We are in a liquid age, to recall a perhaps overused expression of Bauman’s.1
Losing its capacity for negotiation, the cinema loses its role as guide to scopic exercise, too (again, supposing that vision is still a sense that matters, and that hearing and touch do not reign supreme). Film no longer dictates a discipline of the eye. Cinema no more does that—if anything, the job falls to others (specifically, the computer or television). Moreover, cinema does not want to do that. What emerges in films is rather violent wonder, the desire to astonish and displace, the exploration of unexpected paths, and obscenity without redemption.
I refer here to the cinema, but perhaps I am speaking of an object that is no longer the same thing I have handled in the preceding pages. The time and scene have changed, and with them, the cinema has as well. Indeed, and to such a degree that it is no longer the same, but something else entirely. A Cinema 2.0, if you will.
The transformation derives from three important challenges. The first concerns the presence of new modes of producing filmic images without passing through the photographic device. I am clearly speaking of the digital image:2 it not only permits the realization of extraordinary special effects, and thus the presentation of realities that do not exist in nature, but it also allows filmmakers to do without any preexisting reality, even that of a model. We see on the screen things that have not necessarily passed before a camera, but are born from mathematical algorithms. What we follow are no longer traces but inventions. This means that the cinema ceases to be a tributary of the actual world. Before, film needed reality to create even possible worlds, while now it is not held accountable to the real world at all. The filmic image therefore no longer bears witness to anything: it stops being an index and becomes a simulacrum.3
The second challenge regards the emergence of new ways of consuming films without going to the movie theater. The spectator gains access to cinematic products in many new ways: on videocassette or DVD, by cable or satellite, through free access, pay-per-view or on-demand, on the computer screen, by CD-ROM, on the Internet, or the cellphone. The movie theater has changed as well. From the multiplex to IMAX, it no longer has the features it once did and, if anything, it often represents an extension of other general situations such as the mall or the theme park. In this widespread transformation, not only do the old rituals of going to the cinema die out but also the very idea of a collective performance, able to address a concrete group of people intent on the same purpose. The cinema is consumed more and more individually, or in small groups. It is consumed in an ever more personal way, though—at least ideally—the activity still connects us to others. In other words, the public—i.e., a crowd gathered in a space—progressively gives way to an audience—as with television, radio, newspapers, and albums or compact disks.
The third challenge, which situates the first two, is tied to the advent of a new media landscape, thanks to the explosion of ITC, or Information and Communication Technology. What we are facing is the general adoption of a digital signal (as opposed to an analog one) and the expansion of networks, from the telephone to wireless systems. The effect of such a changeover is twofold. In the first place, a series of media previously operating in isolation can connect in a systematic and intensive way, since they share the same signal and there is a network to put them in touch. In the second place, media products can model themselves directly on their consumer, responding to his or her needs, in a sort of direct conversation. What then emerges are the successful features of multimediality and interactivity. The cinema is trying to adapt itself within this picture: it dialogues with other media, both carrying on its action and giving to them motives to be developed (the intersection with comics or video-games is, in this sense, pertinent). The cinema enlarges the scope of its own offering, putting alongside films an ample array of related merchandise; it continues its life on the Net, becoming the object of discussion and, often, cult status in forums and blogs (when it is not borne directly from the Net itself, as in the case of some products destined for a “peer to peer” circulation, in which an author offers his or her own works via the Internet to many single spectators, in an almost interpersonal exchange). To a great degree, film certainly continues to be a typical format (an hour and a half of fiction) and an object to be consumed (something that is attended, not with which one dialogues), but the referential territory becomes wider, more varied, more flexible, and with it, the objects that are part of it are also increasingly changing.
We have, thus, a digital image, no longer a tributary of the real. We have an audience, gathered together to consume in only a virtual way. In addition we have an exchange with other media that widens the field of action but dilutes its identity as well. This is what the cinema has become—or rather, what the Cinema 2.0 has become. Its presence is still relevant, though sandwiched between the interstices of the great media territories. Film becomes more and more a reference for writers and essayists; cinema is taught in universities; prémieres gain large coverage in many newspapers. We continue to speak—and speak a lot—of the cinema. Even its role is still relevant. Its images often possess a sort of “high definition,” compared with the quality of the depictions offered by other media. This allows these images to assure the communicative field’s aesthetic dimension, a hundred years after they made the communicative emerge in the vast field of aesthetics. Similarly, these images are still able to fine-tune strongly meaningful emblems, particularly when it is a question of giving an account of the instability the old realities encounter. I am thinking especially of the representations of the human body and its now uncertain limits, in sagas from Alien on—a representation that deals more with a de-figuration than the refiguration it had previously concerned.4 Finally, filmic images are still the bearers of narrative, where other media are inclined to entertainment with a narration that is implicit (such as in television reality shows), or only a posteriori (as in videogames), or folded into information (the Net). Lying hidden at the cinema, there is a pressing residual need for stories. For this, the Cinema 2.0 continues to be an influential presence, despite the profound transformations it has encountered. Moreover, it is able to carry on a history that began over one hundred years ago, giving it new and sometimes problematic depths.5 There are at least a couple of aspects of Cinema 1.0 that, thanks to Cinema 2.0, now become clearer. It is on these points that I would like to conclude.
The first concerns foresight. The many-sidedness of the current cinema—caught between new forms of production and consumption—permits us also to see how the old cinema was less unified than described here. Though it has worked primarily in a dimension of negotiating—well attested to by its oxymoronic gaze—there has been no lack of opposing paths characterized by radicalness, search without mediations, seemingly impossible proposals. The Cinema 1.0 was also a restless field of utopia and discontent. But it is precisely these aspects, which in the past might have seemed slightly eccentric, that today reveal their productivity within the new media landscape. These scandalous presences anticipated a panorama such as the one in which we are immersed, made of differences without remains. This need to leave the logic of compromise behind anticipated a more fluid and shapeless time such as the one in which we now live. If I have insisted on a cinema that negotiates—arguing that its identity can be located in this function—this does not mean that there was not another cinema (and another modernity) for which we need to account, today more than ever, as it is today that we are seeing its aftereffects.6
The second feature relates instead to cinema’s legacy. If there is something that the cinema did do along the path of the twentieth century, it was to revisit the universe in which we are immersed, as much in its realities as its possibilities, and to transform these into spectacle. This spectacle of the world in one way gave us back reality, thanks to a photographic image that established itself as its trace. In another way, it has systematically imposed a representation—concrete, yes, but only a representation nonetheless—over reality. It is not difficult to gather in this gesture, carried out with a hitherto untested radicalness, the echo of a dual need that has undoubtedly marked the twentieth century: on the one hand, the need to preserve the sense of the real, threatened by the advance of new ways of life, the horrors of history, the loss of social memory, the difficulties of reconstructing the levels of existence; on the other, though preserving the sense of the real, the predilection for subtly participating in its decline. The cinema seemed to respond to this dual need. And while it assured us that the world continued to be in some way present on the screen, through signs born as its trace, it also clarified that, in some respects, the world was no longer there. Thanks to these signs, the cinema seemed to leave the last word to the world, almost as if things could narrate themselves; at the same time, it narrated the world, leaving room for it only through signs. We were thus able to have an idea of keeping the real within our hands, even becoming its master, while it nonetheless mutated in its deepest features. Rudolf Arnheim offers a beautiful synthesis of this maneuver when he writes: “Up to a certain degree [film] gives the impression of real life…. On the other hand, it partakes strongly of the nature of a painting…. It is always at one and the same time a flat postcard and the scene of a living action.”7 Arnheim adds: “film gives simultaneously the effect of an actual happening and of a picture.”8 Hugo Münsterberg sees other implications: “The massive outer world has lost its weight; it has been freed from space, time, and causality, and it has been clothed in the forms of our own consciousness. The mind has triumphed over matter, and the pictures roll on with the ease of musical tones. It is a superb enjoyment which no other art can furnish us.”9 Thanks to film, we continue to deal with the real. In dealing with it, however, we let it become something else. In this way, of course, it became more our own; yet, in changing, it slipped through our fingers.
In this respect, the cinema went beyond its role of being a device through which vision regulated its own internal contradictions, new categories of thought emerged, and a true “direction of the eye” took place. The cinema, more radically still, was the instrument through which we preserved a relationship with the world and, at the same time, we reflected on its loss. In other words, the cinema is what sought to retain the real at the moment in which it left the horizon of our experience, and that contemporaneously inserted itself in the most general feeling of loss, which the century labeled as “loss of experience” or an “experience of loss.” The cinema was a machine that, exploring the world, preserved it and made it available (I have insisted on its function as explorer and witness), but also a machine that has revealed how the world is becoming ever more indistinct (incomplete, as we see from the fragment; evasive, as we see from the point of view; unrecognizable, as we see from the shock). In other words, a device that offered us images so that they might perpetuate the presence of the real; yet one that, reducing the world to its images, also revealed how it was by then a tender or cruel illusion.
The Italian essayist Giovanni Papini concludes a 1907 article dedicated to the cinema in this way:
Contemplating those ephemeral and brilliant images of ourselves, we feel almost as gods contemplating their own creations, made in their image and likeness. Involuntarily, it occurs to us that there is someone who watches us as we watch the small figures of the cinema and before whom we—who feel concrete, real, eternal—would not be but colored images, running swiftly toward death to create pleasure for his eyes. Couldn’t the universe be, with few changes of program, a grandiose cinematographic performance made for the enjoyment of a crowd of powerful unknowns? And how we discover, thanks to photography, the imperfection of certain movements, the ridiculousness of some mechanical gestures, the grotesque vanity of human grimaces, so that those divine spectators will smile at us while we become restless on this small earth, running around furiously in every sense restless, stupefied, avid, comical, until our part ends and we are lowered one by one into the silent obscurity of death.10
How better to recount the cinema’s capacity to return the world to us, as well as to take it away in reducing it to a spectacle? How better to express the sense of possession and loss that pursue one another and overlap, in an oxymoron that lies at the foundation of all the others that we have examined one by one? How better to evoke the pleasure of filling one’s eyes, together with the sorrow before this race to the death of things? Yet what comes to light in those ephemeral and luminous images on the screen is precisely the splendor and the farewell, the exaltation and the mourning. In other words, the seizing hold and the vanishing, the conquest and the loss, in a game that is realized before our eyes and in which we ourselves are bound—a sumptuous game reserved, all in all, for the last gods.
Yes, the cinema was precisely and primarily this game of conquest and loss. And in this game, it offered itself as a lesson for its century, the twentieth century: as its eye.