2. Relics/Icons

ALFREDO

The movie theater is already completely full, and a small crowd is pushing and shoving to gain entrance from outside. In the projection booth, Alfredo is working, as usual, with the assistance—or better, in the company—of his young companion, Totò. The projectionist strikes upon an idea: Using mirrors, he intercepts the beam of light coming from the projector that is destined for the screen, and directs it toward the façade of a building in the piazza opposite the theater, so that those who cannot fit inside can watch it too. This is how the film comes to life on the exterior wall of a large building, and the waiting crowd, spellbound, is now able to watch it. One of the building’s residents protests, but then he too is captured by the spectacle. A habitué of the piazza tries to sell tickets with the excuse that this place belongs to him, but he is roundly dismissed. Everyone is fascinated by the new magic. Suddenly, however, a fire breaks out in the projection booth. The flames quickly spread to the reels of film, the posters hanging on the walls, and the furniture. Alfredo battles to put out the fire but is overcome by the flames and drops to the ground. Totò returns to the projection booth and drags the projectionist down the stairs all the way to the piazza, where, in the meantime, the crowd has dispersed. The fire continues to burn unabated, with no one able to put it out. The movie theater is destroyed, and when it is rebuilt, a few years later, it will not be the same. Alfredo, whose face was struck by the flames, loses his sight.

Many readers will have recognized this scene—one of the most famous sequences in Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, Italy, 1988). In a film overflowing with symbols, this excerpt offers at least three major metaphors. The first concerns cinema’s desire to leave its traditional location—to emerge from the movie theater—in order to find new environments in which to bring its images and sounds alive. This is an age-old desire. Antonello Gerbi, in a remarkable article of 1926, imagines a radical experiment. He notes: “A projection made without a screen, onto an empty space, where will it end up? It will appear to vanish into the air; it will dissolve into a vague luminous nebulosity.”1 Nevertheless, adds Gerbi, “nothing gets lost in the universe”²: film characters, although out of their element, and in the form of ghosts, will continue to exist among us.³

The second metaphor, in contrast, concerns the risk of death cinema runs in leaving the movie theater. The beam of light is diverted from its natural destination, the screen, and that is why a fire sends the building up in smoke (the one and only temple in which the cult of viewing should be celebrated) and permanently blinds Alfredo (the officiant of this rite). It is therefore dangerous to look for new spaces, for this might release forces that no magician, no matter how expert, can control.

Finally, the third metaphor is one that foreshadows a potential revival of cinema. Totò, in rescuing the man who is his putative father from the fire and dragging him toward the piazza, is, in a way, reminiscent of Aeneas carrying Anchises on his shoulders, out of the burning Troy toward new shores. He is someone who saves (it is no coincidence that—although the short form of his name is Totò—his full name is Salvatore Di Vita, literally, “Savior of Life”) and at the same time someone who guarantees a future (nor is it a coincidence that he will become a famous director). The cinema will continue to live. After the fire, the New Cinema Paradiso will be constructed on the site of the Cinema Paradiso, albeit with a new design. And, moreover, cinema will find new ways to develop: Totò will go to Rome (to Rome, from Troy . . .), and from the mid-1960s onward we can imagine that he will be confronted with new kinds of films, new supports, and especially new venues—he will even contribute to them, as many “engaged” directors did at the time.

A little more than twenty years after Giuseppe Tornatore’s film was made, and a little more than sixty years after the event related by the film, cinema’s exit from its temple has been achieved. As Robert C. Allen recaps, we already deal with “an entire generation [which] has grown up with their earliest, most formative and most common experience of movies occurring in places that Hollywood dismissively referred to as ‘non-theatrical’ exhibition sites: bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens, automobiles.”4 The theater screen has moved toward a great many other screens, starting with those belonging to the four media that now dominate the landscape: the plasma or LCD television, the computer or tablet, the mobile phone, and the LED media façade. As a consequence, cinema is everywhere, even if dressed up in other clothes or mixing with other realities. It invades all aspects of our daily life and fills in its interstices.

So, which paths does this gigantic relocation of cinema follow? What casualties does it take with it? And to what extent does it represent the continuation of a history?

CINEMA OUTSIDE OF THE DARKENED THEATER

Let us began with some statistical data. First of all, it is important to take account of the fact that movie theaters still exist and that their number is increasing. In 2012, the number of screens worldwide grew by 5 percent, thanks mostly to a double-digit increase in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, bringing the total number of theaters to 130,000. It bears noting, meanwhile, that two thirds of these screens are digital. In the same year, box office grosses grew 6 percent, reaching $34.7 billion. While Europe saw a slight decline (1 percent), there were substantial increases in countries such as the United States, Brazil, Russia, and, most of all, China (36 percent). In any case, the tendency toward increasing box office returns appears to be a constant over the past few years.5 Still in 2012, admissions “were up in Australia (0.9%), China (13.4%), Germany (4.2%), Russia (5.8%) and the USA (4.0%) but decreased in France (−5.7%), Italy (−9.9%) and Spain (−7.3%).”⁶ Over the long term, the number of tickets sold, after having undergone a progressive decline during World War II that reached its low point in the 1970s and 1980s, has increased on the whole and today seems to remain at a constant level, oscillations and stagnations aside.⁷

Cinema is, however, also widely consumed outside of theaters. To get an idea of the scale of this tendency, we can refer to market research concerning the choices of American spectators during the first three months of 2012: Compared to the 44 percent who had watched a film in the theater, 59 percent had watched one on a purchased DVD or Blu-ray Disc, 58 percent on television, 36 percent recorded one on DVR or saw it with TiVo, 21 percent rented one from a kiosk, 20 percent watched one through free video on demand via cable or satellite, 19 percent through an on-demand subscription, and 13 percent through pay-to-view on-demand.⁸ Spectators thus choose from a number of places in which they can view a film: it is no longer linked to one place alone and is most definitely not linked only to the movie theater.

In this context, the showing of films on television appears to be an area of major growth. The Statistical Yearbook 2013, prepared by the British Film Institute, offers an interesting cross section of this sector in the United Kingdom, which is the third or fourth largest market in the world. According to the yearbook “there were just under 3.9 billion viewings of feature film across all television formats (except pay-per-view) in 2012—over 22 times the number of film admissions.” As for the number of broadcasted films, “there were 7,409 unique film titles on television in 2012, including 1,914 on terrestrial channels, 1,386 on Pay TV film channels, 4,109 on other channels”—a number that must be compared with the 647 films that were released for a week or more in theaters in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland.⁹

As for the other modes of viewing, we should note, returning to the United States, that in the first half of 2012, “rentals of physical DVDs and Blu-ray discs (BDs) from kiosks, brick-and-mortar retailers, and Netflix Movies by Mail accounted for 62 percent of movie rental orders; digital movie rentals—including subscription streaming, pay TV VOD, and Internet VOD—accounted for the other 38 percent.” Anyway, “rentals of physical discs, while dominant, are becoming less so; in fact, year-over-year disc rentals from all sources declined by 17 percent, as digital movie rentals increased by 5 percent.”10 In other words, streaming is the form of access to a movie that is increasing the most. Working in favor of video on demand is the fact that it is “available on a range of platforms including connected television, cable/satellite/Internet protocol television (IPTV), digital terrestrial television (DTT), mobile and online.”¹¹ These devices free up viewing from the need for personal presence in a specific place and make it possible literally anywhere (or at least anywhere with an Internet connection). The transformation that began with DVD, which allowed mobile viewing thanks to portable players, thus comes to completion.

We should also recall that when it comes to streaming video, cinema can be pirated as well. According to the Web site torrentfreak.com, the most pirated films of 2012 were Project X, with 8,720,000 downloads, Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol (8,500,000), The Dark Knight Rises (8,230,000), The Avengers (8,110,000), Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (7,850,000), 21 Jump Street (7,590,000), The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (7,420,000), The Dictator (7,330,000), Ice Age: Continental Drift (6,960,000), and The Twilight Saga Breaking Dawn Part 1 (6,740,000).¹² There does not seem to be any direct correlation between a film’s success at the box office and number of downloads; rather, these seem to be parallel areas.¹³ In any case, this area of consumption has seen substantial growth.

THE TWO PATHS OF RELOCATION

Keeping this landscape in mind, let’s try to cast a more phenomenological look at cinema’s shift beyond its old confines. Relocation seems to follow two main paths. At the center of the first path is the object: the film. Unable to re-create all the elements of the traditional theater experience, we secure the what, independently of the how. A good example occurs when I switch on my portable DVD player on a train. I could have passed the time in some other way: by reading the newspaper, telephoning someone, or chatting with the people next to me. I have decided instead to watch a title I missed a few months before and which I have rented in a kiosk. So I now take the disk, insert it in the machine, put on my headphones, and start watching. I might also have been able to locate this title on the Internet, in which case I would have had to power up my laptop or iPad, get connected, and download the file. In this case, which as we have seen is becoming more and more common, I would have had access to the film without necessarily passing through a physical support, such as the one offered by the DVD. This means that on the Internet I am accessing images more directly, while with the DVD I need to have the object on hand in order to access the images. But putting aside this difference, important as it may be, in both cases I start with the what that I am seeing. It is because the object exists that I can experience it. And so I concentrate on what appears on the screen, I try to grasp the thread of the story, and I immerse myself in the world presented. In this way, in addition to being a traveler, I become a spectator—a bit like being at that movie theater that I did not manage to get to during the film’s initial release.

Yet there is no auditorium: The film being screened exists, but the environment associated with the screening does not.14 The place where I now find myself seems quite unlike the movie theater: With its noises, activities, and comings and goings, it seems to interfere with my attempt at being a spectator. Therefore, I must modify the environment in order to be able to watch a film. The acts I can perform are minimal, but useful: I stretch out on my seat, I draw closer to the screen so that it takes up a large part of my visual field, I raise the sound on my headphones so it is louder than the background noise, I minimize what is going on around me. The effect is the creation of a space all my own, in which there is only room for the film I am watching, and in which the flow of the external world seems suspended. However, it is an imaginary space: an existential bubble in which I take refuge because I choose to, not a ready-made physical place in which I take my seat, as is the case with the theater. If it is true, then, that even on the train I can find the opportunity to isolate myself from my surroundings and to concentrate on the images and sounds, it is also true that this happens because I coerce the situation and personalize it. Naturally, this personal construct proves to be fragile and temporary: all that is needed is for the conductor to ask me for my ticket, or the people next to me to raise their voices, or the train simply to arrive at my station for my bubble to dissolve. The experience, dependent on the film object and no longer supported by the environment, all of a sudden fades away: I am no longer able to feel that I am a spectator; I am once again just a traveler. I remove the disk from the DVD player, or I disconnect from my laptop or iPad. I also stop watching the film.

The second path is exactly the opposite. The cinema experience is reactivated far from its canonical locations, not so much because of the availability of an object as because of the existence of a suitable environment. Such is the case with my home theater, for example.15 Here what matters is the fact of being in front of a wide screen, enjoying the images and sounds in the best way possible, surrounded by walls that shut out the outside, and being able to lower the lights and relax in a chair with food or drink at hand. Or rather, what matters is that these conditions have been given to me in real terms and that I do not have to reconstruct them through my imagination. Thanks to them I actually attain, without any effort, that isolation from the outside and that concentration on the images and sounds that make me feel like I do at the movie theater. Therefore, it is how I see, rather than what I see, that triggers the experience. It is the modality, rather than the object, that turns me into a film spectator.

It is no coincidence, then, that what I am watching can also change without altering the register of my experience. Let us suppose that from a film filled with special effects (it was to watch this type of film that I bought my home theater), I have now moved on to watching an episode of a television series or a match of my favorite team that is under way. Both objects, albeit to different degrees, are foreign to the cinematic world. And yet, if I watch them on my home theater, the environmental features that I mentioned earlier can lend a cinematic quality to them. The vastness of the screen, the soft lighting, and the suspension of what surrounds me see to it that I view the episode not as one usually watches a television program (in a distracted and discontinuous way) but as one watches a film (with concentration and attention).16 But even the soccer match takes on features peculiar to the cinematic product—after all, is it not a spectacular representation of the world, with a large number of actors and extras, halfway between reality and fantasy, with a story that unfolds and suspense that keeps it going? So then, while the first journey of relocation returns an object to me and at the same time requires me to do something to the environment, here I find an environment for myself, and I can reshape the object. Naturally, my work of adapting the object to the situation does not always hold up. If, for example, my enthusiasm for my team is reawakened and, instead of staying relaxed in my chair, I begin to behave like I would in a stadium, the cinematic dimensions of the experience begin to fade; dependent only on environmental aspects, it begins to subside. I am now on my feet, waving my scarf and singing my team’s anthem; I have stopped being a film spectator and am now happy just being a fan.

DELIVERY, SETTING

So it seems that two paths have opened up before us. Cinema is relocated, making what I want to watch available somewhere else or re-creating somewhere else the best conditions for watching. In the first case, I am engaged with a film object that is presented to me wherever I find myself now; in the second, I am engaged with a viewing environment that is reproduced where it is possible to do so. On the one hand, a conveyance occurs, a delivery; on the other, a reorganization of the space, a setting.

Each of these two paths has a history behind it. The processes for delivery began in the 1960s, when television first offered us the opportunity to watch films on the small screen, thanks to some popular programs, the first and the most famous of which was NBC Saturday Night at the Movies in the United States.17 This broadcast was self-serving on the part of television, directed more toward augmenting its number of viewers than increasing cinema-going. The format, furthermore, was not always ideal: The presentation of the film was interrupted by commercials, it was squeezed into a set time slot, with cuts made to the film if necessary, and often it was spread over two weekly programs, with the film sometimes divided in half. Nevertheless, this was also the first step in the migration of cinema to a new medium. This migration intensified in the mid-1970s with the advent of cable television and its specialized channels. The first company in operation was HBO, and it is no coincidence that its most valuable pay-television programming was sports and cinema. HBO was followed in 1976 by Showtime and in 1977 by Ted Turner’s superstation WTCG-TV (later WTBS); in 1983, the former merged with The Movie Channel, while the latter bought the rights to the MGM library in 1986 and to a substantial portion of the RKO library in 1987. HBO, in turn, created Cinemax in 1980, a channel dedicated entirely to cinema, which also promoted new productions. At this point, film had found a home on the television screen. In the same year that cable television and satellite entered forcefully onto the scene, another delivery tool attained widespread public success: 1975 was also the year of the VCR, with its two standards in competition with each other, namely JVC’s VHS and Sony’s Betamax. The VCR originated as a device to tape-record television transmissions so they could be saved for future viewing, but it quickly proved its worth as a tool for reproducing prerecorded works¹⁸: This led to a widespread trade in films on videocassette, which could be purchased or rented from specialized shops and then taken home to watch whenever one wanted. It also provided viewers with the option to select particular scenes, to speed up or slow down the tape, to reverse, or to advance frame by frame. So once again, cinema had to strike a bargain and pay the price: The VCR forced it to get rid of the strict temporality that is imposed by the movie theater, where spectators are obliged to follow a film’s continuity and progression.¹⁹ In exchange, the VCR offered it further circulation opportunities. This trajectory was completed by the introduction of DVD in the 1990s and then, most importantly, by the possibility of downloading a movie from the Internet in the first decade of the new millennium. As Chuck Tryon has extensively analyzed,²⁰ viewing will acquire further and more complex features, but films—now readable on a disk or accessible from the Internet at any moment and in any place on mobile devices like tablets and smartphones—will become increasingly accessible.

The arrangement of environments that recall the cinema also has a history behind it. For example, beginning in the 1960s, museums—especially museums of natural history—started with increasing frequency to use screens with moving images in place of traditional display cabinets or dioramas. They did this because they wanted to modernize the forms of presentation of the objects (a need that had already emerged at the turn of the twentieth century).21 In doing so, however, they drew frequent accusations of abandoning science for the sake of spectacle, or pedagogy for the sake of entertainment.²² Retailers followed a similar route: Shops and department stores presented film clips with the merchandise they were selling on in-store monitors; in this way they made the objects more desirable, but also further increased the customers’ enjoyment of the mise-en-scène tied to commerce. However, as the end of the twentieth century drew near, it was the city itself that was increasingly transforming into an exhibition space: large billboards gave up their places to gigantic moving images; road signage often adopted an animated form; transit stations, waiting rooms, and streets filled up with screens; and walls became media façades (a transformation of the future depicted in Blade Runner [Ridley Scott, USA, 1982]). Finally, in this same period, an analogous transformation was invading the home: not only was there an increase in the number of appliances that liberated people from their domestic chores, but also, more importantly, there was a domestication of communication and entertainment tools: stereos, fax machines, printers, video-game consoles, video displays measuring more than thirty inches, and, finally, the home theater, in a sense the ultimate point of culmination for these gadgets. The home had become a smart house, and in this smart house, more and more weight was given to the consumption of spectacle.

This retrospective glance reveals how the operations of both delivery and setting have accompanied the cinema for a good part of its recent life: film was widely accessible for a long time, and suitable spaces for viewing outside the theater were available. However, it was not until the new millennium that the two paths at the core of cinema’s relocation broadened and became more visible. This occurred and was made possible through the introduction of two types of media.

On the one hand, we have a series of devices aimed specifically at transporting content: there is no longer just the DVD player, desktop, or laptop, but also the notebook, tablet, and smartphone. Thanks to them, consumers have access to texts, images, and sounds of any type, anywhere, and at any moment. This means these media are extremely flexible, ready to adapt to the demands of the user, whoever that may be. Moreover, they are relatively neutral, capable of hosting material without shaping it into their own parameters. Finally, they are interchangeable, meaning they can also be used in place of other devices. In this respect, they leave behind even the recent past, when the consumer had to adapt to the tools (the film spectator submitted to the screening requirements), media and their contents were intertwined (every text in the newspaper became a news item), and every medium possessed intrinsic worth (radio and television were not only two appliances but, in a sense, two different worlds as well). Faced with a dramatic increase in material and situations, these media aim to deliver what is most needed, in the most direct and, at the same time, most focused method possible. What they lead to, then, is a “personalized media delivery system”23 thanks to which we can basically have access to everything in every situation.

On the other hand, we have a series of devices that work according to an opposite movement. More than just being transporters of content, they set up environments that the consumer can enter. I am thinking here of video games, which draw me into an imaginary universe, but also of augmented reality, which redesigns the real-world territory I am traversing. In both cases, a world that I can immerse myself in and interact with takes shape. These are true experiential environments, in the sense that they offer an environment and literally let us experience it. The system that animates them is not too distant from that of theme parks, in which the visitor plunges into a new reality; the simulation here reaches its apex with Nintendo Wii, for example, which transforms my room into a tennis court one moment and into a boxing ring the next.

These two types of media, media delivery and media environment, occasionally overlap. Microsoft Office, installed on my computer, provides me both with the opportunity to retrieve material from the archives of the Internet and from my folders, and with the possibility of entering a virtual space that is modeled on my everyday work space. However, these two types of media also reveal two different systems, which have at their center, respectively, the content and the environment: In one case, everything revolves around the texts, images, and sounds that I want to get hold of; in the other, everything depends on a context straight out of the real world that I want to access. The expansion of media makes use of either one system or the other, with distinct strategies and effects. The relocation of cinema today operates in the same way. It is also following two paths—in fact, it clearly distinguishes between them. It offers me either an object to view, leaving to me the task of imaginatively completing the environment in which I see it, or a viewing environment, allowing me the option of selecting the object.

THE SCHISM OF THE EXPERIENCE OF CINEMA

This double choice allows cinema to capture a larger territory. It can make films go anywhere and at the same time re-create elsewhere the typical way of enjoying them. The relocation of cinema can proceed in all directions. There is, however, a counterpart to this expansion, and it is not insignificant. Transformations of this sort are not the only things toward which the cinema experience is inevitably heading: On the television screen, on the DVD player, in the home theater, on the computer or on tablets, we are losing the linearity and progressiveness of viewing, we are erasing the boundaries between film and other types of products, and we are losing the pleasure of associating a film with its habitual location. This is something more radical: With relocation, a traditionally unitary experience has been split in two. The cinema has long been both something to watch and a way of watching something. It has been a body of films and an apparatus (projector, screen, theater). The fact that, one moment, we are directed at the object, leaving the environment incomplete, and, the next, we are directed at the environment, leaving the object undefined, introduces a profound breach between the what and the how. Cinema becomes either the film object or a modality of watching films. Two things—no longer just one.

It is quite true that there has been tension in the past between the object and the modality of the cinema experience. In the 1920s, when the luxurious and elaborately decorated movie palaces were flourishing and the atmospheric theaters—with vast skies painted on their ceilings and landscapes often depicted on the walls—became fashionable,24 it was the viewing site rather than the film being screened that was exalted. It is an environment that tells us, first of all, what the cinema is: the ability of the world to turn itself into a spectacle. Siegfried Kracauer, in a 1927 essay devoted to Berlin’s large movie theaters, brings to light the meaning of this spectacle: Through the theaters’ architecture and furnishings, we understand that the more a representation of the world communicates an idea of superficiality and externality, the more truthful it is, as superficiality and externality are characteristic of the new ways of living.²⁵

By contrast, when between October 28 and December 30, 1934, Iris Barry presented a film series entitled The Motion Picture, 1914–1934, at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and, to an even greater degree, when she repeated and extended the program about a year later at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York,26 what was highlighted was the object of the filmic experience.²⁷ Iris Barry was aware of the importance of the modality of a film’s presentation, so much so that in the first run of the program at the MoMA, in introducing The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots, she mentioned that the film had originally been intended for the Kinetoscope and was only later projected on the screen. But for her the cinema was above all a collection of works that gained their intrinsic value from the way in which they were shot, narrated, and performed. This value is established independently of the manner and the place in which the works are enjoyed; hence her decision to present simple fragments²⁸ and, more significantly, to present film in an improper setting such as an art museum. In fact, in this seemingly unsuitable space, the artistic completeness of the films was made to stand out even more.

Even in its classical period, then, cinema was identified one moment with a modality of viewing (which seems to exalt the superficiality of the world become spectacle) and the next with an object of viewing (which often appears, instead, as endowed with an intrinsic depth): two distinct poles. And yet, we can’t imagine that one could exist without the other. It is no coincidence that critics in the interwar period often slipped from one aspect to the other. Louis Delluc, who carried out a methodical battle for quality films at the turn of the 1920s in France, also provided us with detailed analyses of the various Parisian movie theaters, each with its own characteristics and its own audience.²⁹ And Robert Desnos, who was among the finest critics of the 1920s, did not refrain from describing what happened to him while he was watching a film as part of an audience.³⁰

Relocation splits this unity. Today, the identification of the cinema with either something to watch or a viewing experience bound above all to the environment is starting to become exclusive. At the top of former Blockbuster’s home page,³¹ a window alternates information about the films currently showing in theaters, information about the availability of films to rent, and information about the modality of buying films “on demand”; lower down on the same page we have four horizontal bands with rows of posters, devoted respectively to “DVD Spotlights,” the films still screening in theaters, the “New Releases,” and finally the films soon to be released (“Coming Soon”). All the titles offered can be rented or purchased as DVDs or Blu-ray Discs, but they can also be downloaded from the Internet for a fee. Here, cinema is reduced to an archive of works that we can access—it does not matter how and where we then watch them.

On the opposing front, on the home page of a California company that specializes in the installation of home theaters, Elite Home Theater Architects,32 a caption reads, “We duplicate the exhilaration of attending a live concert and of going to the movies, in the comfort of your home.” In the pages that follow, we are shown various models of the home theaters that are available, with very generic references to the films that can be screened there. Here, cinema is a viewing modality, indifferent to what we then actually choose to watch.

The home page of Family Leisure,³³ a chain of stores that sells “pool tables, tanning beds, spas, above ground pools, patio furniture, game tables, gas grills, fireplaces, bars, games, poker tables, and more,” goes even further: We see a carefully arranged row of lounge chairs, with all the comforts of cinema seating, but almost without the screen (barely visible, an object evidently not for sale), and with a tagline that reads, “Stay Home for the Movies.” Here, the films have literally disappeared, and the cinema has become nothing more than a place in which to be comfortable.

There is no lack of occasions in which the two fronts—delivery and setting—draw close to one another. For example, the opening image on the Netflix home page³⁴ shows a family at home in front of a screen, while the copy advertises the immediacy and ease of gaining possession of the films you want to see: “Streaming instantly over the Internet to your computer & TV,” and “Watch as often as you want, anytime you want.” On the face of it we have both an environment and a product, but of course the films can be downloaded wherever and whenever we want, and therefore that domestic space fitted out like a theater is only one of the possible environments in which the viewing can occur. I would add that the representation offered by Netflix also signals a nostalgia for a traditional form of consumption, to which we may be able to return; however, it is now one among many, and not necessarily the only one.

So now there is the sense of a rift: The cinema is either an object35 or it is a modality. The consequence is undoubtedly serious: The cinematic experience is heading toward an unavoidable bifurcation. It will be either a filmic experience, if it leads to the what, or a cinematographic experience, if it leads to the how. Two types of encounter; two modes of doing; two forms of gratifying desires. Roland Barthes had already forecast this rift in one of his finest essays: “Whenever I hear the word cinema, I can’t help thinking hall, rather than film.”³⁶ Barthes may have been breaking up a word in order to isolate the two meanings, yet he was also choosing one of the two to the detriment of the other. His love went to the auditorium, inside of which he could literally “décoller” (take off), rather than to the film on the screen, to which he had to “s’encoller” (glue himself).

Barthes was anticipating the moment at which the cinema would be facing two paths. As for us, we are already in divided territory. To be precise: the filmic or the cinematographic.

OTHER SCHISMS

This is not the only rift that cleaves the cinema when it is relocated elsewhere. Take cinema’s migration on one hand toward the small screens of portable devices, which generally function as media-delivery systems, and on the other, toward the large IMAX screen, which functions above all as an environment. Haidee Wasson, in an excellent comparative analysis of films intended for the two types of screen and their modes of consumption, has shown how “little Web films enact the logic of the private, of the domestic, of the possession”; conversely, “the gigantic functions as a container, offering its grand vision only to capture us in its labyrinthine tracks.”³⁷ In one case, then, an experience centered on intimacy emerges, while in the other we find one focused on spectacularity. Wasson describes the precedents of both forms of experience; I would add that cinema has traditionally held them together, whereas now it divides them.³⁸

Often, bifurcations occur within the context of a single situation. Let us consider urban screens, for example, both the large-format ones mounted in the public squares of many cities and the more moderately sized ones found in shops, transit stations, and along roads. Their presence offers passers-by a dual choice. On the one hand, they can stop to look at what the screens are displaying and, seduced by the images—especially if they are large scale—try to immerse themselves in them. In order to do this, they not only have to bring their own journey to a halt, but they must also isolate themselves from the surrounding environment, let themselves enter into what they see, and abandon their activities for a moment. In short, they can stop being passers-by and try to be spectators. On the other hand, they can continue along their way, just casting a glance at the screens in the same way we look around us to monitor the environment in which we move. In this case, they will not immerse themselves in the images; they will instead give them a cursory glance focused simultaneously on many spots. They will not be spectators, but accidental observers. Now, the presence of these two opposing choices has the effect of bringing to a halt the coexistence of two forms of attention that the cinema knew how to hold together: In the theater, I could let myself fall into an attentive gaze, and at the same time I could relax to the point of distraction. By contrast, the passer-by is at a crossroads and when faced with the screen must choose between two opposing forms of experience.

Let us now consider domestic screens. The home theater demands not only concentration from us—after all, this is what we ask it to do—but also a series of acts that help us to connect with what we are watching. We have set aside the time devoted to our viewing, we try to take a break from our commitments, we enter the room, we lower the lights, and we let ourselves relax into the chair: in short, we follow the steps of a little ritual. The screen of the television in the kitchen works differently: We watch it while we do our domestic tasks, while we eat, or while we converse with the rest of the family. It does not demand a ritual from us; it leaves us to our everyday lives. The consequence is a rift in what the cinema was holding together. In the theater, rituality and everyday life are intertwined; at home, the two aspects are separated and presented as opposing experiential poles.

I am moving forward too quickly, but I want to give an idea of how these bifurcations proceed. So let us also consider mobile screens, meaning my smartphone or my tablet. I use them to access a series of images, of texts, of sounds; at the center of my relationship with them lies a process of appropriation. But these screens are also instruments of control, both active and passive. I use them to follow events around me, to stay in contact with other people, to take photographs, or to find out where I am: in short, to monitor the surrounding world. And by using them, I myself am held under surveillance: someone can track me, or rather, someone is tracking me. The consequence, again, is a schism between what the cinema was holding together. While the cinema gave me the sensation of being able both to explore the world and appropriate the world, now I must choose: either to navigate toward the discovery of new territories or to pay careful attention to my own, trying to not lose sight of it (and perhaps trying to be lost to sight myself).

FRAGMENTS AND SUBSTITUTES

This series of schisms signals a profound transformation in the cinematic experience. Much more than the loss of a place (that is, the theater) or of a support (that is, the film) or of a community (that is, the audience), it is the profound disarticulation of a viewing regime that seems to threaten the continuation of cinema’s journey. Cinema Paradiso expresses it well: After the fire destroys the town’s cinema and Alfredo has lost his sight, nothing will ever be the same again. A new hall will be built, new projectionists will do the work, new films will be screened, but that conjunction of collective interest and personal involvement, that ritual dimension that spread out into daily life, that desire to be surprised associated with a kind of social control exercised in this case by the priest (who excises scenes of kissing from the films), all these aspects will no longer be able to embed themselves in each other so as to form a seemingly contradictory, but in reality very solid whole. The cinema will become a composite object, the singular sides of which will at times refract very different realities.

Does this mean that cinema, in being relocated, is somehow heading toward its death? Cinema Paradiso also hints at a continuity. Totò, now a famous film director, returns to the village of his childhood for Alfredo’s funeral years later. The villagers recognize him: not only was he a minor hero in the past, he is now a prominent figure. At the end of the funeral he receives a package that Alfredo had kept for him. Inside are the film clips that the priest had wanted expurgated because the scenes, in his opinion, were too risqué, but that the projectionist had religiously preserved. At home, Totò watches the clips; they bring him back to his past, and moreover rekindle his passion for filmic images and his desire to be a filmmaker. So, cinema is still a crucial presence. It is a legacy—the film clips. And it is a vocation—the need to deal with images that represent reality and feed the imagination. There will always be films to watch, and films that bind us to cinema. There will always be someone ready to offer us a special gaze on the world, a gaze that has been peculiar to cinema.

This leads us back once again to the two paths of relocation. Let’s examine their mechanisms further and try to understand how, while, on the one hand, they break the cinema in two almost to the point of killing it, on the other, they actually ensure its survival.

In the processes based on delivery, the film that I am watching appears as a sort of fragment of the cinema. The film is a component of a much larger whole, indeed, an essential component. On the one hand, it is what I go to see when I go to a movie theater, where I also find other stimuli: an audience, an atmosphere, high-quality image reproduction. On the other hand, it is one work among the many that an industry has produced through the years, and hence a single component of film history. I gain a cinema experience because I gain the experience of one of its little pieces—a little piece of what it regularly offers to its spectators, as well as a little piece of what it has been and is. This means that in this case, relocation functions in a certain sense through metonymy: It offers me a part that stands for the whole, or a part that puts me in contact with the whole (pars pro toto).

Naturally, this operation will acquire much more value the better the part provided to me can bring the whole with it. More specifically, my cinema experience (even though limited to the film—so, more correctly, my filmic experience) will be more intense and complete the more that the film I am watching, for example, on my DVD player, makes me re-experience the pleasures I felt watching it in the theater, or makes me understand the story better, or explains to me through the bonus material the role that the film has played in the history of cinema, or carries with it the success it attained at the box office, or tells me about the current trends in production. This is why a film on DVD benefits from having had a life on the theatrical circuit (and not only for mere advertising reasons): It is thus a fragment that knows better how to testify and can better report to me on the whole to which it belongs.

In the processes based on a setting, what is offered to me instead is a substitute for what is found in cinema. In fact, these processes aim to create environments of viewing that resemble as closely as possible those of the movie theater, even though they are not movie theaters. My home theater allows me to lower the lights, to concentrate on the film, and to enjoy high-quality images. While on the one hand, it’s true that I remain at home, on the other hand, I can experience this house as a movie theater. This means that in the case of the setting, we are not dealing with a part that puts me in contact with the whole (as with delivery), but rather with a situation into which certain elements belonging to another situation are transferred. Consequently, the underlying logic is no longer that of metonymy, but rather that of metaphor: With setting we literally attribute the modalities of cinematic vision to a new environment, and we expect to enjoy in it possibilities that seemingly do not belong to it. We call theater that which is not a theater, but which could be.

Naturally, the more convincing the transfer process appears, the more efficacious it will be. An extreme example would be the home theaters built by the architect Theo Kalomirakis, who draws on the large movie palaces of the 1920s and 1930s: we can recognize the design—or at least many of the details—of Hollywood’s Chinese Theatre, Los Angeles’ Pantages Theater, New York’s Radio City Music Hall, and some large cinemas of San Francisco and Brooklyn.39 The resemblance is aimed not simply at creating an imitation of the past, but literally at reviving the atmosphere and spirit of those temples of the cinema—creating the conditions for a perfect spectatorial experience, as the architect himself stresses again and again.⁴⁰ This is an experience centered above all on the environment and viewing conditions, rather than on the object being viewed (and, in this sense, it is fundamentally a cinematic rather than a filmic experience). But to the extent that it imitates the experience of going to the classical cinema, it will seem quite full and satisfying.

CINEMA AS RELIC, CINEMA AS ICON

Fragment and copy, metonymy and metaphor. These are not only two different strategies through which to relocate the filmic experience, but also two different modes of referencing the cinema, of recalling its essential traits, and thus of guaranteeing to the relocated experience its own completeness—we could also say: its own authenticity. Let us then take a step further in this direction in our analysis.

In the processes of delivery, I retrieve the canonical cinematic experience because I hold in my hands something that has been, or is, a part of it. The film I watch on my DVD player is a fragment of a larger corpus (produced films) and of a larger situation (the experience of the movie theater). It can also be considered a mere residue with respect to that corpus and situation: in essence it is all that remains of them. However, even as a mere residue, this film is capable of putting me back in contact with cinema: in watching it, I reconnect with the history and the modalities of cinematic presentation. In this sense, the film that I watch functions as a relic: It is like a piece of the body of a saint or an object that belonged to one or that was near one, which, thanks to this ownership or proximity, prolongs the living existence of the saint. Relics can also multiply: An object that touches a relic becomes a relic in turn. This causes an open metonymic chain to form: What has been near the saint, even if not immediately, puts me in contact with the saint. What is important in this chain is that even a fragment—mere remains—can reestablish the fullness of a presence, even while mourning a loss.

The clips of Cinema Paradiso that Alfredo preserved with care in order to leave to Totò, who now looks at them with nostalgia for a time gone by, function precisely like relics: They are fragments belonging to an entity that has now been dispersed, but nevertheless they are able to make cinema present—they are able to convey its sanctity, if you will, and to inform with this sanctity the work that Totò is performing. At the same level as these film clips, all the films that pass through media delivery function like relics: They are fragments of the holy body of cinema to which I can draw near, even if I find myself far from its temple.

In the case of setting processes, the viewing environment brings me back to the canonical cinematic experience through a resemblance as opposed to through contact. The home theater is a copy of the movie theater, and it works precisely because it shares many traits with its model. Therefore, we are dealing with a thing that stands for something else, but which in substituting it, recuperates its essence. In this light, setting processes follow the logic of the icon rather than that of the relic. An icon is a representation that possesses an intrinsic likeness with what is represented. In seventh-century Byzantine thought, such a likeness was conceived as a participation: the icon owned the same nature as its prototype; the latter emanated its essence on the copy, and in this way it kept living in it. Even when after the Second Council of Nicaea (A.D. 787) a non-essentialist approach emerged, and the idea of participation was replaced by the idea of relation, the icon continued to reference its model in a full and direct manner. The representation was considered an impression of the represented: the subject literally molded its depiction. Therefore, an intrinsic link between copy and prototype continued to exist, not because they shared the same substance, but because they shared the same form.41 Beyond these two positions, the idea that the icon concretely reactivates the presence of its model has remained. It brings this presence fully among us—even though in doing so, the icon marks an actual absence.⁴²

The processes of preparing a viewing environment seem to follow this same path. It is not only a question of nostalgia for a certain way of watching a film; rather, it is also a matter of recognizing a model and giving it the possibility of being transferred into a copy. Let’s think of the extreme accuracy with which many home theaters are set up to look like a film theater: This suggests a desire for the “spirit” of the latter to emanate into the former, as the prototype does with the icon. In this sense, cinematic relocation—even when it affects only one aspect, such as the viewing environment—attempts to give us the fullness of an experience. I would add that in Cinema Paradiso, it is Totò himself who becomes an icon: he reincarnates the roles, passions, and dreams of a pure cinephile and at the same time tries to reincarnate the great story of the cinema in the work he does.

THE AUTHENTICITY OF RELOCATED CINEMA

Of course, the idea of juxtaposing relocated cinema with a relic one moment and an icon the next may seem risky. It helps us to understand, however, upon what relocated cinema’s sense of authenticity is based. This is confirmed by two other aspects tightly linked to the theme we have been discussing, which lead in the same direction.

First of all, to speak of relics and icons helps us to recall that the cinema has often been considered a cult object. In the first decades of twentieth century, theory often invested cinema with a religious valence. It is sufficient to remember this passage of the famous “manifesto” on the cinema as the sixth art by Ricciotto Canudo: “When [cinematographic theater] becomes truly aesthetic, complemented with a worthy musical score played by a good orchestra, even if only representing life, real life, momentarily fixed by the photographic lens, we shall be able to feel then our first sacred emotion, we shall have a glimpse of the spirits, moving towards a vision of the temple, where Theater and Museum will once more be restored for a new religious communion of the spectacle and Aesthetics.”43 In this same vein we find writers like Vachel Lindsay, who speaks of the director as a prophet, or Antonello Gerbi, who speaks of the screen as an altarpiece.⁴⁴ After World War II, this cult gave way in France to a full-blown cinephilia, marked by an almost maniacal attention to films and ways of viewing them and characterized by a “pantheon” of films that rise to the level of sacred texts and rigorous spectatorial behaviors.⁴⁵

Today, we are witnessing a return of cinephilia, as though the transformations of cinema led on one hand to a greater admiration for what is at risk of vanishing, and on the other a greater openness to what is being imposed. In 2011, the Web site mubi.com launched a large project entitled “New Cinephilia,” curated by Damon Smith and Kate Taylor. The project consisted of a collection of classic texts on the theme, a series of essays on new forms of cinephilia, a forum, and a day-long symposium at the 2011 Edinburgh International Film Festival.⁴⁶ Nico Baumbach, speaking on this topic, observed that “Cinephilia today might mean one of two things: a response to scarcity or a response to abundance.”⁴⁷ In the first case it would be “a way of loving a disappearing object—celluloid film (whether 16, 35, or 70mm) projected in large dark theaters—and therefore takes the form of nostalgia for the conditions that produced the first great wave of cinephilia (which could be extended to roughly a quarter century from the late Forties up through the early Seventies), the period of the economic boom, the self-conscious discovery of the American cinema as an art, and the emerging waves of postwar European cinema from Italian neorealism up to New Hollywood.” In the second case, meanwhile, cinephilia is “a response to the sense of a new kind of digital utopia either emergent or already at our fingertips, in which virtually everything is virtually available—an inclusive cinephilia that incorporates everything and everyone.” I find Baumbach’s analysis perfect: I would only add that in the first case, cinephilia develops as a cult of relics, and in the second as a cult of icons. As far as relics are considered, we might think for example of the enthusiasm surrounding the projection of restored films (remains, we might say, that one tries to bring back to life), but also the increasingly common collections of film memorabilia. In the case of icons, we might think about how the new objects of veneration, including video games, are seen as the reflection of certain traditional cinematic qualities, such as intensity of perception, the possibility of immersion, and so forth. The new cinephilia has a cult dimension as well, then: treating its own objects of veneration as “sacred remains” or as “true copies,” it gives them a dimension of absolute authenticity.

The second path that icons and relics allow us to take originates with one of the greatest film theorists. Writing about the photographic image and its intrinsic rapport with reality, André Bazin used arguments not dissimilar to the ones we have mentioned here. On one hand, the image preserves the presence of the world thanks to the existential contact that it had with reality: “Photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of its transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction.”⁴⁸ Not by chance, the footnote that is added to this sentence directly refers to relics.⁴⁹ On the other hand, the photographic image offers us reality anew, bringing it to new life in itself, thanks to a process of resemblance: “The existence of the photographed object participates in the existence of the model like a finger print.”⁵⁰ In either situation, reality is “extended” in the image, and the latter allows the former to represent itself integrally. It is such a process that gives to the photographic image its authenticity.

These two openings, toward cinephilia and the theory of the photographic image, deserve longer discussion. I will, however, break off my analysis here. To conceive of relocated cinema as relic or icon is not simply a whim. Rather, it is a way to bring together a series of ideas that have been raised concerning cinema (its cult dimension, the nature of the photographic image) and have raised questions concerning its authenticity. Now, at a moment when cinema seems to be losing itself, it is essential to pose the same question once again. The relic and the icon, with their underlying logics, offer a response. It is either the contact with what cinema has been or the emanation or the molding of cinema on its replica that makes our experience to continue to be a cinematic one. We do not have only a fragment or an imitation: we have the permanence of what has been. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored (here I am paraphrasing Bazin), this experience is not only the memory of a model: “it is the model.”51

In 1915, Vachel Lindsay in his seminal book The Art of the Moving Picture devoted great attention to the movies as a new form of hieroglyph—and moreover as a way to retrieve the “primeval force” of things, as older forms of civilization were able to do. To him, cinema was Egyptian. Today, relocation transforms cinema into a relic of a “holy body” and an icon of the “prototype.” Are movies, then, to become Byzantine?