The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words For the Cinema to Come

The promoter of the Star Wars Uncut project is Casey Pugh, an audiovisual project developer who works primarily on the Web, and who won a Primetime Emmy Award for this endeavor in 2010. However, a large number of protagonists are involved in the operation of the project: the fan community, anxious to move from spectatorship to production; a cult film, which is caught up in a logic that goes beyond mere remake; and finally the presence of the Internet, which functions as the site of mobilization and dialogue, as well as a collection point for audiovisual material placed at the disposition of all. All these elements render Star Wars Uncut much more than a delightful movie; they render it a symptomatic film capable of telling us several things about the state of contemporary cinema.

First of all, Star War Uncut owes a debt to Lucas’s film, while at the same time exhibiting a creativity largely independent of its model. This is evidence of the diffuse vocation of contemporary cinema for taking up preexisting narrations in order to dress them up differently, or to illustrate previously hidden aspects, or to fill in unexplored gaps, or to uncover new ways of reading; but also to construct stories that parallel or enter into dialogue with those narrated by other media (television episodes and video games, for example).

Second, Star Wars Uncut is made by fans at home. It is accessible on the Web to whoever connects to it; however, it is also considered a full-fledged industrial product (it won an Emmy, is included on the Internet Movie Database, and is projected in mainstream movie theaters). In this sense, the film demonstrates the presence of new models of production, distribution, and consumption, which are added to, and often overlap with, traditional ones. We have moved beyond the traditional distinction between studio cinema and auteur cinema. Today there is a kind of creativity that wells up from below, associated with semiprofessional figures, new modalities of collaboration, and nonindustrial forms of circulation.

Third, Star Wars Uncut is not only a series of sequences edited in succession and running for 126 minutes: it is also a project, the explanation of which we can read on the film’s Web site; it is the continuous intervention of fans; it is an archive of fragments that could enter into the finished work; it is a dialogue between participants; and it is the epitome of product promotion. In this sense, Star Wars Uncut demonstrates how it is that a large mass of heterogeneous material is now gathered under the heading of “cinema.” The life of the film is continued in the “Making of,” in spectator comments, in parodies and re-edits, in possible new editions—in other words, in a network of products and discourses capable of coming together to form one body.

Thus far we have described a series of phenomena: a narration that takes up and rearranges other narrations, new modes of production and consumption added to the institutionalized ones, a text that aggregates within itself other texts, and images that go beyond their usual form. Star Wars Uncut carries out a curious operation: It takes what is undoubtedly a monument in cinema history, but in celebrating it, bypasses its stylistic, productive, and institutional boundaries. It does not exalt and preserve a canon; rather, it works on the expansion of film’s preexisting modalities and dimensions. Contemporary cinema often presents itself as carrying out an expansion: It appears ready to adopt new solutions, to copy what other media do, and to go beyond its typical models. In doing so, however, it also exposes itself to risks. As soon as cinema abandons the individuality of a work, the centrality of film, the homogeneity of an industry, and the uniqueness of a language, it may also lose itself in the great sea of audiovisual products—indeed, in the great sea of images and signs. To what degree does film succeed in remaining itself? What can give it, if not a full-fledged identity, then at least the vestige of one? To what extent is expansion also a form of persistence?

His starting point is the idea that an epochal shift is taking place: Humanity is entering into a new era—the Paleocybernetic Age—which is characterized by the evident deterioration of old concepts and the emergence of new forms of sensitivity.4 The most significant cause of this transformation is the fact that we live in an environment that has become profoundly mediatized: We are immersed in a network formed by television, newspapers, radio, books, illustrated magazines, computers, and the like. Cinema constitutes part of this intermedial network, which leads to its systematic confrontation with all the means of communication that operate in the context of our lives, and not only with the ones that are most similar to it. Consequentially, there is a push toward the radical renovation of cinema’s expressive instruments and, even more so, a push to expand beyond itself, to enlarge its own range of action decisively. As Youngblood explains, the tight connection that is created between cinema and the media system “carries with it the potential of finally liberating cinema from its umbilical to literature and theater” and “forces the movies to expand into ever more complex areas of language and experience.”⁵

How is this need for expansion expressed? Toward which territories and along which paths is cinema moving? Based on the experiments conducted in the 1960s by a series of filmmakers, video artists, and scientists, Youngblood points out some broad tendencies that lead cinema beyond its traditional boundaries.

The first tendency is tied to the medium as such. Cinema acquires a growing consciousness of its own means: on the one hand, it attempts to exploit better those that it already has at its disposition, aiming at new results; on the other hand, it attempts to add new ones, which expand cinema’s expressive possibilities. Youngblood writes openly about a “fusion of aesthetic sensibility and technological innovation,” offering as examples the work of Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, Jordan Belson, and others. These filmmakers work toward a synaesthetic cinema that is capable of deeply involving all our senses. Youngblood writes that this cinema, precisely because it is so rich in solutions, “is the only aesthetic language suited to the post-industrial, post-literate, man-made environment with its multidimensional simulsensory network of information sources.”⁶

The second tendency regards the emergence of a diffuse creativity. This is made possible by the presence of easily accessible technologies and by the advent of a new culture no longer tied to the idea of the masses. “For the first time in history every human now has the ability to capture, preserve, and interpret those aspects of the living present that are meaningful to him.”⁷ This leads to the presence of cinema in many moments of daily life and to its more individualized use.

The third tendency is connected to the possibility of creating feedback between the film and spectators. These spectators are not mere consumers: they are interlocutors who enrich communication as they respond to what they are watching. “If the information [. . .] reveals some previously unrecognized aspect of the viewer’s relation with the circumambient universe—or provides language with which to conceptualize old realities more effectively—the viewer re-creates that discovery along with the artist, thus feeding back into the environment the existence of more creative potential, which may in turn be used by the artist for messages of still greater eloquence or perception.”8 We live in a context that is no longer monodirectional, but rather is characterized by an uninterrupted circulation of information in all directions.

The fourth tendency is linked to the growing interconnection between cinema and other media. “To explore new dimensions of awareness requires new technological extensions. Just as the term ‘man’ is coming to mean man/plant/machine, so the definition of cinema must be expanded to include videotronics, computer science, atomic light.”⁹ This leads to a rich range of current and future marriages. One of these marriages is with theater: Cinema can become an essential component of live spectacles, to the point of engendering what Youngblood calls intermedia theater, examples of which we can find in the work of Carolee Schneeman and John Cage. Another confluence is with television. Youngblood is thinking of experiments pointing toward the aesthetic potential of magnetic tape, which make possible what he calls synaesthetic videotapes. He is also thinking of the first installations that made use of multiple video screens in order to create teledynamic environments; these installations follow the same logic as the staging of environments characterized by multiple projections and are capable of producing actual concerts of images. He is even thinking of commercial television, not for its intrinsic qualities, but for its ability to remind us that an artist is also a communicator who must know how to address an audience.

The newest and most productive convergence is with the computer: a machine that, according to Youngblood, will be able to “erase the division between what we feel and what we see” to the point of becoming “a parapsychological instrument for the direct projection of thoughts and emotion.”10 Thanks to this marriage, cinema can shift from representing phenomenal reality to directly representing human consciousness (twenty-five years later, Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days will imagine a digital dispositive, the Squid, capable of recording a person’s neural impulses and allowing another person to relive them by putting it on: this is precisely the machine conceptualized by Youngblood). There would be a number of intermediate steps before arriving at such a machine. Youngblood talks about cybernetic cinema, in which plotters design figures without the input of a designer. He also refers to computer films, in which figures come to life on a cathode screen, outside of all the traditional filmmaking processes, simply generated by a program. He describes videographic cinema, which is born of the meeting of television with its fluorescent screen and cinema with its reflective screen. Finally, he imagines holographic movies, which reach beyond the flatness of the image to recuperate figures’ three-dimensionality. At the time Youngblood writes, the forms he has in mind are all experiments, but he sees in these the most productive path toward the future of cinema. Expansion is an inevitable process: It responds to the expansion of our minds, which allows us to enter into a new era. “We are making a new world by making a new language. [. . .] Through the art and technology of the expanded cinema we shall create heaven right here on earth.”¹¹

Forty years after its publication, Youngblood’s volume shows a few wrinkles, due both to its chaotic pace and inclination toward utopic visions; however, it also maintains much of its freshness. It captures well a turning point regarding the now decisive role of media in our daily lives, it intuits the importance of nascent electronic technologies, it records the desire for the new in a decade of experimentation and research, and it suggests that cinema can conserve its identity only if it figures out how to find new paths. Cinema will either expand or risk obsolescence. The years after publication proved Youngblood right: in fact, reality became even more radical than his predictions. Cinema’s ability to move beyond its traditional boundaries would become ever more evident and would surface not only in artistic experimentation but also in mainstream production. Cinema would expand much more consistently than could have been foreseen.

It may be useful to observe some aspect of our current landscape in light of the predictions Youngblood made in 1970, not to evaluate the accuracy of his analysis, but in order to capture the sense of an evolution.¹² If cinema today adopts expressive modalities taken from video games and the Internet, if it develops its technology in order to match the effects that can be found in theme parks, or if it creeps onto television or smartphone screens, it is because forty years ago, in the Paleocybernetic Age, cinema became fully aware of being a part of an intermedial network and, at the risk of losing itself, threw itself radically into question.

The first nucleus of the current expansion recalls Youngblood’s observations about the technological implementation of the medium. In recent years, cinema has been enriched by numerous new technologies, both aural (for example, through the Dolby system) and visual (with the introduction of IMAX or the forceful return of 3-D, for example). These new technologies all aim at intensifying the level of the cinematographic experience through greater involvement of our senses. First of all, our vision is engaged more deeply through higher-definition images, better stability, and greater breadth. Simultaneously, our other senses are also engaged: not only hearing, through the creation of highly complex sound environments, but also touch, through stereoscopic images that almost allow us to grasp them. Thus, cinema is rendered no longer only, or specifically, optical; rather, it becomes a bit stereo, a bit media façade, and even a bit natural environment. We might even say that cinema approaches the theme park—the epitome of a space in which our entire body is engaged. As a result, cinema’s field of action is extended.

The second nucleus of expansion is tied to the growing presence of grassroots production. Youngblood already noted the growth of a mass creativity: Today, this creativity has assumed even larger dimensions because of the ready availability of economical technologies for shooting and editing, as well as the presence of new possibilities for circulating material. Aside and beyond the film industry, there is a “light cinema” that is increasingly widespread and relevant.13

Much of this grassroots creativity comes from fans. As Henry Jenkins documented at the end of the 1990s,¹⁴ today’s fans are not only intense consumers, but also producers. They double the object of their love through remakes made on their smartphones, or through re-editing that brings to light new perspectives (recuts), or through superimposition of images and sounds from other films (mash-ups). These are products that circulate on the Internet in abundance—thanks above all to YouTube and Vimeo—and that also achieve official recognition, to the point of being included in exhibitions and festivals or placed alongside industrial productions. The film we started with, Star Wars Uncut, is a perfect example of this type of expansion.

Chuck Tryon has commented on a large number of these products, which are based in great part on the practices of retake and remix. These range from fake trailers that promote well-known films, offering a plot completely different from the original (one of the classics is The Shining, reinterpreted in 2004 by Robert Ryang as a family film with a happy ending), or that promote nonexistent films, as if they were already in distribution (there are entire Web sites dedicated to this genre15), to compilation videos that gather together a selection of scenes from a film in order of preference, often with parodic intent. Tyron recognizes in these products a real cultural form¹⁶ and foresees in them a way for cinema to project itself into a scenario like the current one, which is strongly marked by desires for self-expression, for intervention in the processes of production, for establishing social connections, and for instantaneous access to products at the click of the mouse.

Jonathan Gray has also dedicated attention to grassroots production. His idea is that these consist substantially of paratexts; that is, texts that accompany other texts in order to offer new interpretations of them. These paratexts seem to take a polemical stance with respect to the films they reference, especially when they adopt the mode of parody. In reality, according to Gray, their objective is primarily to “intensify certain textual experiences, less working against the industry’s version of the text than cutting a personalized path through it.”¹⁷

John Caldwell has offered an extensive analysis of this bottom-up production. He insists on the fact that the grassroots practices are not in opposition, but in accord, with the film and entertainment industry. The latter increasingly absorbs suggestions and experiments of the former. Hollywood has become an industry that practices poaching, functions as an open source, and operates through a gift economy, in the same way fans do.¹⁸

This reference to industry leads us to the third nucleus of contemporary cinematic expansion, which is linked to the growing number of adaptations, remakes, sequels, prequels, reboots, and so forth. It is as if contemporary cinema were always in the process of doubling. This is nothing new: Cinema has always stolen when the opportunity presented itself—from novels, plays, photos, and countless other sources. If anything, what is new is the number and the quality of the products now coming out. On the one hand, the number of media to confront has grown: today cinema dialogues with the graphic novel, computer games, home videos, security-camera footage, and more. On the other hand, more than stealing, we should now speak in terms of partitioning: a narration begun by one medium is continued by another and advanced in parallel by yet another, reinterpreted by another, and so on.

Henry Jenkins accurately describes the strategies of what he calls transmedia storytelling: “Integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.”19A film is born of a theme park, continued in a video game, generates a certain number of consumer products (clothing, food, toys), becomes a television series, returns to being a film, gives life to a comic book or a novel, and so on. This is what happened, for example, with Pirates of the Caribbean: It is no longer a simple cinematic work with annexes and connections, but a franchise that can be purchased in various products and formats.²⁰ A transmedia story is “a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium.”²¹ We can therefore enter into such a narration by many doors and explore it in many directions: It is, as Jenkins suggests, spread out along a series of channels of distribution.²²

The fourth nucleus of cinematic expansion refers back to Youngblood’s observations concerning feedback. Today, the audience’s response has grown in influence: rather than punctuating the life of a film, it constitutes an integral part of it. I am thinking in particular of the role played by blogs, forums, and specialized Web sites: They are not merely spaces for expressions of cinephile culture, or outlets for unwitting propaganda for movies already in circulation, or places in which critics have retreated after being expelled from newspapers; these are also spaces for the accumulation of discourses that now form part of the films they discuss.

Chuck Tryon has analyzed a considerable number of examples of Internet interventions, including the discussions made during or directly after the viewing of a film in the theater or on television.23 However, in order to appreciate the functions that blogging and networked film criticism cover, it is enough to go to a Web site such as Comingsoon.net. What can we find here? First, there is a section dedicated entirely to information. Under the menu item “Movies,” we find a film database, release dates, production stills, and box office returns for the week and the weekend. Under “Trailers” we find material updated daily: behind-the-scenes clips, interviews, television commercials, trailers, and even partial sneak previews of trailers about to be released. Under “TV” we find the schedules of film offerings on television and related news. Under “DVD” there is a list of the DVDs available on the market and related news. Under the menu item “News,” there is a dense collection of daily news regarding film production and distribution. There is also a series of pages dedicated to spectators and open to their voices. Indeed, these are in some sense the true heart of the Web site. “Reviews” hosts film reviews written by visitors to the site to which other visitors can add their comments. “Most Popular” contains a series of rankings rated on the basis of user choices, in particular the “Most Craved Movies,” “Most Craved Articles,” and “Most Craved Searches.” The “Forum” gives access to a community for which users can sign up. One can even connect to the Web site and its contents through Twitter.

At least since the 1920s, films have been systematically accompanied by a series of social discourses, which draw on them, comment on them, and assess them. Christian Metz, in referring to criticism and theory, speaks of a “third machine”—a discursive machine—that exists alongside the industrial machine of production and the psychological machine of vision.²⁴ The function of this “third machine” is to make cinema an object acceptable to and accepted by society—a “good object” in all the sense of the term. Today, the discourses around cinema continue to carry out this function of “valorization” or “ratification,” but they are no more an accompaniment to films, rather something that becomes one with what it discusses. They occupy the same physical space as film, participate in its existence, and help it to develop and present itself on the social scene. They are within, not alongside, cinema. Comingsoon.net, with its ability to integrate access to films and the voices of users, is a clear example of this phenomenon.

The fifth nucleus of contemporary cinematic expansion is tied closely to the computer. Youngblood intuited how the marriage with this new dispositive would develop. In fact, the computer offers to cinema the possibility of going beyond the type of image that it has always used—the photographic image—to adopt instead a new type of signifier, the digital image. This step should not be underestimated. Cinema is not necessarily a mold of the world: It can now directly “create” reality on the basis of a logarithm.

Numerous scholars have interpreted the advent of computer-generated imagery (CGI) as a break with tradition.25 While the photographic image presupposed the effective existence of what it represents, the digital image can constitute a simple invention; therefore, film ceases to be the direct witness of something that really happened. David Rodowick takes this tack. According to Rodowick, cinematic narration continues to function as a model, even for stories offered by new media; however, the shift to digital inaugurates a new mode of representation. The image on the screen is no longer a true portrait of reality, but rather a “map” that guides our gaze. From this emerges the presence of an “interface” that acts as a filter between us and the represented world.²⁶ Lev Manovich is even more radical: The advent of the digital marks the end of cinema as a specific sphere. It returns to being what it often seemed to be: a simple region within the wide field of figurative arts. Its task among the figurative arts is to represent all of reality—internal and external—through the eyes of the artist, not to ensure a close connection with the world.²⁷ Therefore, it makes no difference what type of image cinema employs.

Nonetheless, we cannot reduce all of cinema to a pixelated landscape. As Tom Gunning emphasizes in his response to Rodowick, the indexicality of cinema—that is, its intimate connection with reality—does not rely exclusively on the photographic image: A film puts us in direct contact with the world by other means as well, including, for example, the ability to restore movement to things.²⁸ In another vein, Stephen Prince notes also that it is true that the digital image no longer functions as a direct “trace” of the real; nevertheless, the process through which we understand what it shows us as real is the same as the one set into motion by the photographic image.²⁹ This means that cinema can continue to be itself even when it uses digital images; in fact, digital images allow cinema to stay on its path, while expanding the field of possibilities and increasing the number of additional routes.

Naturally, there is also a spatial expansion. Cinema has come to occupy new environments. It has left the darkened theater and entered into the streets and houses of cities. It has emigrated, founded new colonies, and linked them back to the motherland.³⁰

This movement that leads cinema beyond its productive, narrative, media, and linguistic borders contains a paradox. On one hand it represents a great opportunity: Cinema can develop its internal potentials, can include new components, and can move toward new territories. On the other, such a movement brings dangers with it: As we have seen in the case of digital images, it can lead to a change in nature; or, as in the case of transmedia storytelling, it can mean wandering into a terrain that is not strictly one’s own. Cinema has acquired new possibilities and established new relationships, but it is no longer sure what or where it is.

From this perspective, it becomes clear why it is now difficult to use adjectives like cinematographic, filmic, or even cinematic. We face a realm so large and comprehensive that it loses any specification. What defines this domain is simply the generic presence of moving images displayed on a screen. Hence, the only adjectives we may use are kinetic and screenic: indeed, these foreground a character that, shared in common by so many different devices, from computers to smartphones, or from video games to son et lumiére spectacles, is hardly a defining one; better, they designate a quality without any real determination. Serge Daney, in describing this domain marked by indistinctness, chooses the term visual as opposed to the term image.31 Kinetic and screenic, in contrast with cinematographic and filmic, move in the same direction.

Expanded cinema now resides within this wide and indefinite horizon. What qualifies it risks not being so different from what qualifies other media. As a consequence, cinema no longer appears to be a given reality. It is something that must prove its own existence and prove that it is being itself. It must emerge from the expansive and generic territory of the kinetic and screenic and affirm its own existence. It must rise up from anonymity and demonstrate its own specificity. Cinema today finds itself having to “return” to being cinema.

There exist several recurrent practices that allow cinema to reaffirm itself as cinema. Some are defensive in nature: Cinema tries to “remain” what it is by pretending that the expansion it is moving toward does not have destructive or disorienting effects. Others are more open: A series of products “becomes” cinema after having crossed the great sea of screenic images. Some of these practices also touch upon the social life of films: They are activated the moment a series of products is presented to spectators. Others, instead, concern these products directly, the ways in which they are conceived, the forms they assume, and so forth.

Let’s begin by addressing, albeit very briefly, the social strategies. I am thinking, for example, of the numerous ceremonies at which cinema celebrates itself and, in so doing, affirms that it is still alive and is still itself. Lifetime achievement awards, film tributes in honor of celebrities, but also the red carpet more generally, all belong in this category. Festivals often associate the ceremonial with the idea of discovery: They further the notion that cinema is still alive, and one must simply know how to look for it. The statement of purpose of the Venice Film Festival in 2013 exemplifies this attitude: “The aim of the Festival is to raise awareness and promote the various aspects of international cinema in all its forms: as art, entertainment and as an industry, in a spirit of freedom and dialogue. The Festival also organizes retrospectives and tributes to major figures as a contribution towards a better understanding of the history of cinema.”32

The archive and the museum remind us that cinema continues to live among us. These promemoria are especially good at emphasizing the presence of a glorious history, as is the case with the self-presentation of the Cinématheque Française: “How was the cinema invented? What were the first movies like? How did we go from ‘magic lantern to Hollywood’? We will discover the answers to these questions together through the observation of wonderful optical instruments with strange names, outstanding costumes, film posters and unique set decoration drawings, as well as many movie extracts.”³³ However, the reference to history is often also connected to the challenges cinema finds itself facing today. This is expressed in an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences brochure announcing the creation of its own museum, with a declaration that is a perfect mélange of an evocation of tradition and an acceptance of change: “The significance of the movies has always been a constant, but the industry itself is undergoing dramatic change. Digital technologies are rapidly becoming the standard, along with new crafts and techniques. While motion pictures and visual storytelling will endure and thrive, documenting and curating the art, craft and science of the movies is now more important than ever.”³⁴ In other cases, the diffusion of cinema over a vast terrain is accepted, but this does not mean that cinema cannot be made the central region of this territory. This is how the New Zealand Film Archive presents itself: “The Film Archive is the home of New Zealand’s moving image history with over 150,000 titles spanning feature films, documentaries, short films, home movies, newsreels, TV programmes and advertisements.”³⁵

Even DVD editions function as witnesses to cinema’s continued existence, as well as proof of the extension of its borders, as exemplified by the Criterion Collection’s self-presentation: “The Criterion Collection is dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions of the highest technical quality, with supplemental features that enhance the appreciation of the art of film.”36

Finally, some Web sites that track current productions play a crucial role as well. The most well known as well as the most representative of these Web sites is undoubtedly IMDB.³⁷ It contains a database of all produced films, and it furnishes continuous updates. In addition to being an extraordinary reference, the site functions as a kind of “authority” that defines what enters into the field of cinema and what is excluded. It is interesting to note that these borders are considered flexible: While traditional cinematic productions continue to occupy center stage (the numerous rubrics dedicated to “box office,” “coming soon,” “openings,” the “100 Best Directors,” and so forth, remain within the perimeter of cinema-cinema), the list of products tends to widen and now includes television series and video games, but not YouTube postings.

Let’s first take a small step back. In the same years in which Youngblood published his contribution, Marshall McLuhan, in his influential volume Understanding Media,³⁸ advanced a distinction between hot and cold media. Hot media are those that grant their users such a great wealth of perceptual intensity that no form of completion is required, while cool media are those that propose low-definition messages, which must in some way be completed by users, on both a perceptual and an interpretive level. “Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.”³⁹

Cinema is a decidedly hot media. “Film has the power to store and convey a great deal of information.”40 This wealth of information associates it with the book. Like the book, film proceeds by a tight succession of blocks—no longer typographical characters and sentences, but frames and shots. Like the book, film nurtures spectators’ imaginations and literally manifests it before their eyes.⁴¹ Like the book, film appeals to our sense of sight; that is, the sense par excellence that lies at the center of the Westernization of the world.⁴² But in comparison with the written word, film is able to illustrate a situation or represent an event in an even richer way. It leads us immediately to the heart of the action; it lets us see things in their own environment; it offers us perfect reconstructions of the present and the past. It is capable of mobilizing additional senses, thanks to the presence of music, dialogue, and color. Films involve our entire body. Film is able to associate the mechanical reproduction of reality with the capacity to produce dreams. Essentially, “in terms of media study it is clear that the power of film to store information in accessible form is unrivaled.”⁴³ Consequently, spectators feel absorbed and almost dominated by images and sounds, to the point of falling into a kind of hypnotic trance. To open our eyes wide is also to begin to lose ourselves in what we are seeing.

Such a characterization of cinema has a long tradition behind it. McLuhan was likely not fully aware of it, but other scholars before him had thought of cinema in terms of sensory intensity, the ability to grasp the world, amazement, and abandon. Jean Epstein, in his extraordinary text “Magnification,” describes the impact of film on the spectator as follows: “A head suddenly appears on screen and drama, now face to face, seems to address me personally and swells with an extraordinary intensity. I am hypnotized.”⁴⁴ Béla Balázs reaffirms this combination of intensity and proximity: “Close-ups are a kind of naturalism. They amount to the sharp observation of detail. However, such observation contains an element of tenderness, and I should like to call it the naturalism of love.”⁴⁵ A few years earlier, Giovanni Papini had underlined the particular strength of filmic images: “These are only images—small luminous two-dimensional images—but they give the impression of reality far better than the scenery and backdrop of any of the best live theatres.”⁴⁶ And Ricciotto Canudo, in his famous manifesto, “The Birth of a Sixth Art,” pointed out that cinema “represents the whole of life in action.”⁴⁷ Cinema has always found its specificity in hotness.

One of the strategies cinema now uses in order to remain or become cinema consists in championing “high definition,” and various maneuvers are involved. It is interesting to note, for example, that cinema, in its continuous exchanges with other media, often reserves the most spectacular and aggressive content for itself. It is cinema that presents the most engaging scenes of a story that continues in a theme park or video game, leaving to the theme park the pleasure of an openly exhibited fiction and to the video game the pleasure of intervening in the narration. To this semantic dimension there can often be added a syntactic one: Cinema presents more cogent narrations. Its stories unfold at an unrelenting pace, to the point of literally taking our breath away. Cinema doesn’t give us the chance to take a break, whereas while visiting a theme park I can—or rather, I must—stop for a moment to have a Coca-Cola. Furthermore, the events narrated by a film are characterized by extreme compactness: They are not a mere list of situations, but rather they construct something that hurtles toward a conclusion. A closed text in which everything appears necessary is plainly hotter than an open range of possibilities. Finally, there is an iconographic dimension to this strategy: Cinema reserves for itself the densest images. I am thinking in particular of the successful adoption of the IMAX, the increasing diffusion of larger screens,48 and the recent reemergence of 3-D. This return of the stereoscopic image merits some consideration.

The first 3-D explosion (circa 1952–1954) was advertised and experienced in the key of high definition. Three-dimensionality promised an image endowed with an unusual perceptual intensity: Reality was apparently rendered in all of its depth, to the point that objects seemed to emerge from the screen, and the spectator had the impression of finding himself within the narrated world. In an essay written shortly before his death, Sergei Eisenstein fully seized upon this characteristic: “Stereoscopic cinema gives a complete illusion of the three-dimensional character of the represented object.”49 He added: “That which we have been accustomed to see as an image on the flat screen suddenly ‘swallows’ us into a formerly invisible distance beyond the screen, or ‘pierces’ into us, with a drive never before so powerfully experienced.”⁵⁰ This second movement in particular was crucial to Eisenstein, who considered it “the most devastating effect”⁵¹ of 3-D. In Hollywood, films such as House of Wax (André De Toth, 1953) and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954) exhibited this capacity for “piercing” a spectator to capture her better, and at the same time they positioned themselves in opposition to other media, in particular television, which is characterized by a weaker appeal to the senses, and consequently by the impossibility to create a strong sense of reality. Three-dimensionality, as Miriam Ross reminds us, was creating a vision so intense that it trespassed into the domain of touch.⁵²

The relaunch of 3-D, this time in a digital version (D3D), began with Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) and reaffirms cinema’s vocation of working with the “high definition,” but robs this propensity of its polemical function. Stereoscopic vision, in fact, continues to appear as a distinguishing trait of cinema, but also functions as a bridge toward other media. As Thomas Elsaesser has underlined, such a bridge provides cinema with links to its past, but it is also intended to work in the future.⁵³ On the one hand, the new 3-D cinema does not hide its affinities with older optic devices like the phantasmagoria or the panorama, in which the spectator did not simply face the depicted scene, but could in some way move through it, in all of its depth and expansiveness. Eisenstein, furthermore, in the essay cited above, had already observed that stereoscopic cinema is a close relative of all of the previous attempts to break the threshold between representation and observer, demonstrating this through a series of examples ranging from painting to theater.⁵⁴ On the other hand, it is no coincidence that not long after Avatar’s release, stereoscopic images began to become available in other media, first on television, then on smartphones. This technology did not have the hoped-for success, but it demonstrates how cinema is still conceived of as a trailblazer, experimenting with something that is intrinsically its own, and then passing it on to other media.

So, the rediscovery of a genealogy, and the hope of a large diffusion. It is precisely in this sense that the reemergence of 3-D is exemplary of cinema’s contemporary need to reaffirm its identity through “high definition,” but it is also indicative of the fact that while it wants to remain or become cinema, it also continues to want to maintain an open dialogue with the territory in which it operates. In essence, cinema does not want to fade into anonymity, but it also is not renouncing expansion.

Why is this happening? And in what sense does this propensity not contradict the one we highlighted above?

Let’s return once again to McLuhan. The distinction between hot and cool allows him not only to divide media into two large categories: on the one hand, the hot media (alphabetic writing, the printed book, photography, recorded music, radio, and cinema); on the other hand, cool media (the spoken word, the manuscript, the telephone, comic books, mystery novels, cool jazz, and television). McLuhan’s distinction between hot and cool also helps him to distinguish different epochs within the history of media, emphasizing transitions in particular: from the coolness of orality to the hotness of the written alphabet; from the coolness of medieval culture founded on the transcription and commentary of manuscripts to the hotness of culture transformed by the diffusion of the Gutenberg movable-type press; from the hotness of the mechanical era to the coolness of the electronic era.

The first reason that cinema migrates toward poor images is the fact that it is now functioning in a cool age. The lowering of temperature had already begun in the 1950 with the advent of television,⁵⁶ and cinema reacted with films such as Marty (Delbert Mann, 1955) and Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959), all characterized by “low definition or low-intensity visual realism, perfectly in tune with the new temper created by the cool TV image.”⁵⁷ Today, in the Internet age, the temperature has dropped even lower, and cinema, by adopting “poor images,” acts accordingly.

However, there is also a second reason: The adoption of poor images allows for the opening of a different space in which to maneuver. McLuhan foresaw that media can change their internal temperature: Along the course of their lives they can either heat up or cool down, and may even incorporate forms that are seemingly contrary to those of their origins.58 In these cases, they end up interfering with other media, to the point of extending into their sphere of action. For example, “radio changed the form of the news stories as much as it altered the film image in the talkies.”⁵⁹ This media confluence, which can lead to the collapse of one into another, has as its effect the liberation of hybrid energies. “The crossings or hybridizations of the media release great new force and energy as by fission or fusion.”⁶⁰ These hybrid energies serve to expose what is often hidden. In particular, if it is true that superstimulation leads to a state of numbness,⁶¹ then hybrid energies serve to reactivate consciousness of a situation. “The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. For the parallel between two media holds us on the frontier between forms that snap us out of the Narcissus-narcosis. The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses.”⁶²

This is a fundamental observation. The second reason that expanded cinema accepts working with poor images is that by doing so, it can recuperate consciousness of itself and of the field in which it operates. If the recourse to high definition—and in particular to 3-D—permitted cinema to give spectators the world represented in such a way that they could literally feel it at their fingertips, then this embrace of low definition—with images taken from security systems, hand-held cameras, smartphones, the Internet, and the like—serves to wake up these same spectators, to alert them, to make them reflect on what it means to represent the world today. In this sense, the merging of a hot medium and low definition allows for the launching of a “critique of the political economy of signs”; that is, the launching of a line of thought that attempts to uncover reflexively what media are and do today.

This process is brought to the fore in the work of a director like Harun Farocki. Appropriation of the most commonly circulated images translates into a reflection on the very status of the contemporary image: In films and video installations such as Eye/Machine (2003), I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts, Counter-Music (2004), and Deep Play (2009), Farocki develops a critical reflection on the immense quantity of anonymous and “operative” images that contribute to the disciplined and efficient functioning of contemporary society, by collecting and reworking material gleaned from sporting events, security and control devices, television programs, and so forth. Here, cinema becomes the privileged terrain on which to develop a greater consciousness of the landscape that surrounds us.63

We can also find elements of the “critique of the political economy of the sign” in mainstream cinema. The clearest example is that of Redacted (Brian De Palma, 2007). This film mixes multiple different types of images: those filmed by the soldier Salazar with his handycam for his video diary; those of a French director’s documentary on Samarra; those of the military camp’s surveillance cameras; those of the news broadcasts from Iraq or from local television; those of the webcam through which the soldiers communicate with their relatives; those nocturnal images filmed by the microcameras on the soldiers’ helmets; those filmed by the Iraqi insurgents and posted online.⁶⁴ In this seeming jumble of images, “poor” ones inevitably run up against “rich” ones: The latter reveal the rhetoric that lies behind them, as in the case of the French documentary, but “poor” images show their limitations as well, both when they aim to capture events on the spot (as with the film’s embedded journalist) and when they aspire to reach a professional level (as with Salazar’s video diary). Anyone who thinks that filming the reality of war is simple or that they can have a privileged point of view on this reality is destined to failure.

In other cases, self-reflexity divides films in two. I am thinking in particular of Kathryn Bigelow’s controversial Zero Dark Thirty (USA, 2012). In the last section of the film, which depicts the Navy Seals’ mission to capture Osama Bin Laden, there is a large use of pixelated and blurred images, identical to those taken by the infrared viewers or by microcameras installed on the soldiers’ helmets. This choice doubtlessly serves to satisfy the spectator’s voyeuristic urges, but it also retrospectively brings out the highly spectacular nature of the first part of the film, which uses traditional images. These “perfect” images allowed us to see things quite well, in their full appearances. The poor images of the last section of the film do not allow us to see things as well, but they have a greater ambition: They seek to depict an event from inside, in its development, and as it is experienced by somebody who takes part in it. They remind us of what Jean Epstein said about the camera’s eye: “This eye, remember, sees waves invisible to us, and the screen’s creative passion contains what no other has ever had before: its proper share of ultraviolet.” 65 This contrast between “high” and “low” images creates a break that splits the film, and perhaps all of contemporary cinema: on one hand there is the reality effect,⁶⁶ thanks to which we grasp the world in its full visibility; on the other there is the truth effect, through which we gather the world in all of its processes and intrinsic meanings. The full images provide the former, and poor images deliver the latter. Reality and truth are no longer a single thing, as they have been in cinema’s past. We need two different regimes of sensibility to describe the world.

It is a matter of fact that today the poor image tends to be taken as synonymous with authenticity, sincerity, and even truth. Many films use them precisely to suggest these values. In this vein, it is worth remembering that Georges Didi Huberman, analyzing four photographs of Auschwitz secretly taken by a prisoner, has masterfully shown how it is a certain invisibility that allows an image to speak.⁶⁷ Only if they are “images in spite of all” can they bear full witness. The presence of a contrast in temperature (hot and cool) attests to this link between invisibility and truth, but also helps us to relativize it. This truth effect can be little more than a stylistic tic, as in The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, 1999) and in the many films inspired by it.⁶⁸ Or it can be something that images deceptively imply, sometimes to justify a further action, as Farocki constantly points out about war documents. Poor images can be false, and rich ones may become true, as for example when they conserve their value as trace. What really matters is a dialectic between the two poles: This is what allows a “critique of the political economy of signs” to emerge, and thus permits the rise of a full awareness of how they function and what value they carry.

This brings us to a somewhat paradoxical conclusion. If, on the one hand, the adoption of “low definition” leads cinema far from what seems to be its primary vocation, on the other hand it allows it to remain in its chosen space. Poor images force cinema to renounce “high definition” on the level of perception, but they help it to gain “high definition” on the level of cognition. They elicit a reflection on the circulation of signs and their truth value. The senses cool down, but thought heats up. An “illusion machine” also manages to acquire an “intelligence.”

An expanded cinema that preaches dispersion; a willfully “hot” cinema that seeks adhesion; a “cooler” cinema that pursues self-consciousness. It is not the first time that cinema has been deeply split, yet now the relationship between the different parts looks more complicated and less well defined. There no longer exists an ideal point of convergence as there did during the golden age of the seventh art, when various forms of cinema tended to draw inspiration from the same model. Nor is there any longer an open conflict, like the one that began in the 1950s when Hollywood cinema, cinéma d’auteur, and the cinema of the emerging countries of the so-called Third World were proposing different models, but were all moving in a common universe. Instead, there are now three coexisting hypotheses that face each other in the attempt at remaining or becoming cinema, three coexisting hypotheses that in a certain sense defend territories that are not always permeable: put simply, the Internet (the typical space of dispersion), the blockbuster (more and more tied with the perceptual intensity), and experimentation (traditionally the cradle of self-consciousness).

Of course, there are bridges that ensure transit from one sphere to another. I am thinking, for example, of grassroots practices that recuperate intense images from successful films and re-edit them ironically, which “cools” them and adjust them to the Internet. I have already cited various examples along these lines: for instance, so-called honest trailers, which are fake advertisements for famous films that highlight their defects. Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), for example, is summed up with a series of images and commentary that pass by so fast that viewers understand nothing of what they have seen or heard, and with a list of other films with similar plots, which nullifies any claim of originality.69 The same game of subversion is played with Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012), even more ferociously.⁷⁰

On the opposing front, I am thinking of the insertion of poor images into “high definition” films destined for the commercial circuit. One of the first uses of this practice was made in The Bourne Identity (Doug Liman, 2002): The heads of the CIA at Langley attempt to locate the wayward Jason Bourne by reconstructing his presence inside the American Consulate in Zurich through security camera images. These images are captured, isolated, enlarged, and filled in, so as to render decipherable the license plate number on Bourne’s car. What we have is essentially a brief “low definition” film within a “high definition” film, in which the former furnishes a truth that the latter—perhaps being too wrapped up in sensorial engagement—cannot manage to reach.

These bridges exist, but there are also some difficult crossings. In the third episode of the Bourne series, The Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass, 2007), there is a sequence that seems similar to the one mentioned above: Through a series of surveillance cameras, the CIA attempts to follow a journalist and Bourne through Waterloo Station, where an assassin awaits to kill them. However, in this case the images are live rather than recorded, just as the gaze, rather than searching for the truth, now serves to coordinate an action—in this case, the assassination of Bourne and the journalist. This means that inside the “high definition” film there is no longer another small film, restoring to the former a greater consciousness of what an image is today. Instead, we find something that belongs more to the worlds of television (the live image) and of surveillance (the functional image). Here, cinema stops wanting to explore other ways of being, and instead seems to be attracted to what it is not.

Let’s focus again on the sensorial dimension, this time not with the help of Marshall McLuhan, but with that of the philosopher Jacques Rancière and his concept of distribution of the sensible.71 The concept defines the way in which a given society makes accessible to the senses that which is present within it; for example, the way in which a word is offered to the ear or an image to the eye. There is always something in common to all the members of a society, but it is made available in different ways: We can have a specific address or a free circulation, the transmission of information or the concealing of a secret, the creation of a hierarchy or a sense of equality. To make a word or an image accessible to the senses means to outline roles and positions, which in turn can change according the channel that is activated and the way in which it is used. The arts constitute locations par excellence in which this distribution of the sensible takes place: they define which sense must be operated, by whom, with what kind of personal implication, in which kind of framework, and so forth. However, this distribution of the sensible also influences modes of participation in social life. The modalities of citizenship and the networks of power are defined by various levels of participation: access, or lack of it, to a word or image, being a direct addressee or a mute witness, being part of a large conversation or having to keep one’s mouth and eyes shut. In this sense, politics has an aesthetic basis: The organization of the senses reveals and establishes the organization of a society.

Rancière’s suggestion is an important one: It examines regimes of sensibility, but rather than differentiating between them according to intensity, as McLuhan does, distinguishes them on the basis of the way in which they assign roles or functions, thus constructing social models. In this sense, it allows us to grasp their deeper implications.

Let’s return to cinema. From its inception, it has always exemplified an aesthetic regime characterized by an egalitarian distribution of the senses—a characteristic that Rancière attributes to modernity and that he sees emerging above all from the nineteenth-century novel like Flaubert’s, and from artistic movements like Arts and Crafts. Not by chance the first theorists presented cinema as the exemplary “democratic” art: It admits all social classes to partake in vision⁷² and offers to everyone the chance to see in the same way.⁷³ Expanded cinema goes to extremes: It opens itself to all kinds of images and media. It does not propose differences; rather, it promotes inclusivity. In this sense, it embodies the emergence of what Rancière calls the “great parataxis”: The loss of a “common term of measurement” pushes the arts not toward the search for “some term of measurement that would be peculiar to each of them, but on the contrary where any such ‘peculiarity’ collapses”—toward a “great chaotic juxtaposition, a great indifferent mélange of significations and materialities.”⁷⁴ In this vein, we can say that expanded cinema, with its openness toward what is unlike itself, also in some way “causes the image to pass into the word, the word into the brush-stoke, the brush-stoke into the vibration of light or motion.”⁷⁵ It practices both transference and accumulation.

To take a further step on the path indicated by Rancière, this attempt to host within itself new pieces of territory, accompanied by the inevitable slippage beyond its own borders, seems to me typical not only of a democratic will, but also of the processes of globalization that characterize our world. The aggregation of new modes of production, new forms of consumption and new languages, and, conversely, the ability to contaminate with its own presence new social environments, new instruments of entertainment and new forms of expression, reflect the presence of a comprehensive network that is increasingly thick and open to relationships and exchanges. In a globalized world, everything can shift from one sphere to another, everything can become accessible, can merge with another context. In this sense, expanded cinema can be understood as a symbol of a circulation of the sensible, more than of its distribution: The visible and the audible—and also, through synesthesia, the tactile—move incessantly from one sphere to another, even while running the risk of ending up in a no-man’s-land.

To return to Rancière, he notes that the “great parataxis” carries two risks within itself. On one side it draws close to the “great schizophrenic explosion where the sentence sinks into the scream,” while on the other it is almost isomorphic with “the great equality of market and language.”76 These are two risks that the expanded cinema runs as well: on one hand, that of a sensoriality that is no longer connected to meaning, and on the other, that of a dispersion that leads to a loss of identity. As we have seen, cinema reacts to these dangers through two strategies that maintain and even develop its identity: on one hand it adopts high-definition, sensorially engaging images that reconnect movies to their history; on the other it hosts poor images, endowed with a strong critical power. This return of intensity—both sensory and cognitive—has the effect of “marking” the images: It exalts their presence, underscores their documentary or ludic value, and makes them enter into tension with other signs present in social space.⁷⁷ Moreover, this return of intensity creates zones of “condensation” in opposition to zones of “rarefaction,” which allow expanded cinema to move out of the homogeneity into which it risks falling. The sensible returns to redistribute itself: Rather than circulating in a random way, images find precise destinations along with precise effects. In particular, they try to identify on one hand those who want to adhere and be absorbed in the represented world, on the other those who look for a critical consciousness that creates distance between us and the situation in which we find ourselves.

Once again, it seems to me that this twofold response echoes the processes of globalization and more precisely the efforts to escape them. Against the idea of an “indistinct society,” on the one side there is the search for a mythical “fusion” with a primordial community; on the other, there is an attempt to control the proliferation of sensory data in the name of an often instrumental reason. In its attempt to avoid the dispersion—and to remain cinema—expanded cinema seems to follow these two routes: It calls out to spectators to rejoin a community of dreamers or to reacquire a consciousness of the world in hopes of once again getting a handle on it. It does so softly, without the drama that these two responses embody in politics, but it does so effectively, making us see clearly the risks and opportunities that lie along each of the routes that it seems to follow—the routes of dispersion, of absorption, and of self-consciousness.

Here let me interrupt my thoughts on the political value of the three choices that expanded cinema brings into play. The fact that I have constructed a kind of relay between McLuhan and Rancière may give rise to perplexity, but it strikes me that both authors are extremely attentive to the way that cinema acts upon our sensory and mental faculties and equally determined to connect this action to larger dynamics, both symbolic and social. There is, paradoxically, more than an affinity between them.78 Their common voice tells us that whatever path cinema is taking, it reveals—in the way it engages our senses and our intelligence—the web of relationships in which we are situated. The expansion of cinema becomes thus clearer: In choosing either the dispersion, or the adhesion, or the consciousness, it shapes also different spaces in which cinema operates. Cinema today is the dream of an undifferentiated circulation of signs in a global world, an impulse to find new centers of gravity for believers, and an attempt to give rise to a critical awareness for self-reliant subjects. Three different options, even though strongly connected. In their mutual confrontation it is not only the destiny of images that comes in full view: it is also our own destiny, as members of a society.

Forty-three years earlier, another film, Alain Renais’ Muriel (1963), recounted the trauma of war and violence on prisoners, and it did so through its own (presumptively) internal amateur images.79 At the end of the movie, however, Bernard, the veteran of the Algerian War, throws away his 8-mm camera and burns the little studio where he had tried to make his film. This outcome is the opposite of the previous one: Muriel hosts poor images but does not manage to re-elaborate them and make them its own. We will never see the perpetrators or the victims—nor will we need to see them in order to understand the tragedy.

My impression is that in 1963, at the beginning of the process of expansion, and with a public still strongly homogeneous, cinema was still sure of itself to the point of mastering other images—images fixed on the same support, film, after all—without fear of losing its identity. In 2007, cinema in full expansion must demonstrate its strength, and reconquer its own identity, also on behalf of a public that is losing the sense of a cinematic identity. Hence the emerging of a traditional filmic image in In the Valley of Elah—the face of the son, the only time we see it in close-up, and the body of the child victim, finally identifiable. This move is in some way presumptuous.⁸⁰ The poor images depicting the war and circulating on the Internet tell us that even something that is not clearly visible is capable of disclosing the truth. Nevertheless, the desire expressed by In the Valley of Elah to give us both clear vision and consciousness, precisely through the transition of poor images into a full one, is evidence of how much cinema still wants to play a part today.