PIAZZA DUOMO
On December 19, 2007, an enormous screen was installed in Milan’s Piazza Duomo, billed as the “largest media façade in Europe.” Across its surface appeared without interruption advertisements, live events, film clips, documentaries, and cinematic images. The installation of this mega-screen responded to a specific pragmatic need: It concealed the construction work taking place in the Museo del Novecento (Museum of the Twentieth Century), housed in one of the buildings facing the square. Its presence, however, created a sort of competition with other realities situated in the same locality—a conflict at once spatial and symbolic.
First of all, the screen’s large surface contrasted with the façade of the building that lends its name to the piazza, the Duomo of Milan. It constituted a strong, new focal point to the right of the famous cathedral, so much so that the set of steps that leads up to the church—the starting point of a small ascesis for the faithful—was effectively transformed into bleachers on which the mega-screen’s spectators could sit and watch what was projected on the screen, turning their backs to the house of God.
The screen also contrasted with the Palazzo Reale, long the seat of municipal government, and still one of the city’s major symbols. In fact, the mega-screen blocked one of the thoroughfares leading to this building, in addition to offering a form of entertainment that constitutes the opposite of the cultured gaze that the Palazzo Reale demands, having become in recent years the site of large art exhibitions.
The screen also contrasted with the equestrian statue of Vittorio Emanuele II, the king who oversaw the unification of Italy, and therefore a national symbol. Located in the center of the piazza, the statue suddenly seemed shoved to the margins, having lost its previous pride of place. Furthermore, the small groups of people that often gathered near its base to discuss politics were now often displaced by the crowds that gathered to watch the screen.
There was also a contrast with the famous Galleria that opens to the left of the piazza. The mega-screen makes a perfect companion piece to the gallery, a major emblem of nineteenth-century capitalism; unlike the latter’s rows of display windows, however, the screen did not exhibit goods to contemplate, touch, and acquire, but rather only images—free images—of worlds to which we do not have immediate access.
Finally there was a contrast, less pronounced but relevant nonetheless, with the small display screens of the mobile devices that many passers-by carry and use as they cross the piazza to take a picture, send a message, or make a call. The mega-screen’s vast expanse towered above them, completely overshadowing them.
A new presence, a new organization of space, a new hierarchy of symbols—the mega-screen redesigned the geography of the piazza: It created a new center of gravity, shifted points of stasis and passage, and altered relations between preexisting elements. However, it also affected the meanings that characterize the space: It introduced a new protagonist, the Great Image in Movement. It made of this larger-than-life figure an emblem of the world as Spectacle, and it inevitably competed with old symbols—God, the City, the Nation, the Market, Art, and the Personal Sphere of the passer-by.1
The mega-screen was dismantled in autumn 2010 upon completion of the construction on the Museo del Novecento. Its demise seemingly restored the old equilibrium to the Piazza del Duomo, but the memory of the conflict somehow remains inscribed in the place.2
What can we learn from this small example? First of all, that space counts. A well-known argument states that media increasingly ignore a sense of place. Television made us feel as if we were in two places at once—at home and wherever the events occurred.3 Now, mobile devices allow us to be in contact with everyone—and everything—from everywhere. In reality, if we approach this on the level of experience, we see that the “where” continues to be important. Experience is always grounded in a physical context, in addition to being embodied in a subject and embedded in a culture. It takes place, and it shapes a place. This is true of the screen: Every screen occupies a space and also gives life to a visual environment.
Second, space is also a site of contrapositions. The new visual environments to which a screen gives life are almost never peaceful: old functions attempt to hang on and new functions fight to establish themselves. Even spaces that seem totally dedicated to vision (from my living room with its home theater to Times Square with its media façades) are always shot through with tensions.
Third, in these new spaces cinema no longer represents a fixed presence as it did inside the darkened theater. It is no longer something that “is there”; it is, if anything, something that “intervenes,” “complements,” or even “intrudes.” Cinema’s approach toward the spectator has profoundly transformed the filmic experience. If the traditional theater was a place that we entered in order to experience a world different from our everyday world—leaving a “here” in order to take ourselves to an “elsewhere”—then in these new environments of vision, cinema brings an “elsewhere” to our “here,” by reaching us where we already are. This spells the end of the heterotopic nature of the traditional movie theater: The new places of vision are characterized by a hypertopia, that is to say, by the fact that an “other” world is made available to us, responds to our summons, and comes to us—as I said, it fills our “here” with all possible “elsewheres.”
But maybe cinema has always been the site of this centripetal movement. Spectators sitting in the theater in front of the screen felt projected into the heart of the action and at the same time experienced the touch of images and sounds. Cinema carried its spectators elsewhere, but also restituted that which the movie camera had captured. So, even though cinema is a heterotopic art par excellence, it has also constantly been tempted by hypertopia. Today, it may perhaps rediscover this more secret vocation in the process of relocation.
We should keep in mind that the space we inhabit is a constructed space: It is the result of a series of physical and mental actions that we apply to it, in order to render it into our environment. From Henri Lefebvre4 to Arjun Appadurai,5 via Michel de Certeau,6 numerous scholars have shed light on the complex of practices capable of transforming a place, considered as simple container, into a space, a living environment.7 There are direct interventions (such as constructing a house, redesigning a landscape, and transforming the configuration of architectonic elements), processes of appropriation (such as walking through a city to get to know it or narrating it to explain how it is lived), and rites of foundation (for example, giving a name to a place, passing regulations, or opening public areas). From this point of view, it is not inappropriate to think of the screen as a presence that produces space. The screen does not simply occupy a place; rather, it constitutes space. This is especially true for the new environments that it affects: here, its role is openly active, on at least three levels.
First, the presence of the screen “defines” or “redefines” its context: What was at first a space of transit like a street, or a space of anticipation like a waiting room, or an exhibition space like a store window, now become a space for the enjoyment of images and sounds. The environment opens itself up to a new function; it acquires a new meaning. This function and meaning can seemingly emerge from nothing; for example, from a screen erected on a beach, which transforms the shoreline into a temporary outdoor cinema. But this function and meaning can also overlap with a preceding situation, perhaps without erasing it altogether: An example might be the projection of a film in an art gallery or in an airplane, which gives new connotations to these spaces without changing the intimate natures of the gallery or the mode of transport. In either case, the presence of a screen leads to a “determination” and “qualification” of the place in which it is inserted. In short, it gives it an identity.
Second, the presence of a screen “rearticulates” the space: It brings out certain focal points, emphasizes some elements at the expense of others, and establishes new borders. The configuration of the environment changes, and a new layout is defined. Let’s take for example a television set in a waiting room: It literally generates a new center of gravity (coincident with its placement) and a possible spatial hierarchy (corresponding to the seats that offer better views with respect to obstructed ones). We could call what comes into play here a “cartographic” operation. In short, what emerges is a map of the place.
Third, the presence of a screen introduces a series of “rules of behavior.” If for no other reason than to be able to see “well,” observers are drawn to perform certain acts, which lead to the assumption of a certain mental attitude, a certain physical posture, a certain ideological position, and so forth. Let’s take for instance the installation of a home theater in a domestic living room. It brings out a cinephilic attitude, marked by the demand for a more concentrated form of attention, the abandonment of collateral activities, and the desire to obtain the best possible quality of vision from the device The place assumes a certain workability.
It is through these steps—an identity, a map, and a workability—that a screen intervenes in a place, and it is as a result of these steps that a screen turns a place into a space of vision. These three steps directly involve a semantic dimension (definition of a place), a syntactic dimension (articulation of a place), and a pragmatic dimension (activation of a place). In this light we could say, a bit metaphorically, that the screen dictates its language to what surrounds it. To put it another way, we might say that a screen functions as a spatial enunciator, in the sense that it appropriates the space in which it finds itself, recategorizes it from its own point of view, and invests it in its own direct or indirect action.8
In any case, the screen creates a space of vision. A space links up to an eye and an ear and is transformed from a mere container into an environment to be lived.
THE CINEMA AND ITS ENVIRONMENTS
How does cinema enter these new spaces? Which environments does it encounter? What situations does it create?
First of all, the presence of cinema is characterized by a certain ambiguity. If on the one hand cinema pushes these new spaces toward its customary domain, on the other hand it creates situations that are more difficult to decrypt and whose cinematicity is deeply questioned.
Let’s consider the new environment’s mimicry of the traditional darkened movie theater. There is no doubt that a space of vision becomes a cinematic space the more it draws upon a tradition. Nevertheless, this connection can have various meanings. For example, the home theater—characterized by a large-format screen, high-definition sound, seating arranged toward the screen, and adjustable lighting—is reminiscent of a public projection space. Although it is located within a private house or apartment, and consequently not open to strangers, it can function as a substitute for the movie theater. As Ben Singer9 and Barbara Klinger10 remind us, since its very beginning, cinema has always considered itself capable of operating within the domestic setting. Likewise, ever since the second half of the nineteenth century, the home has been conceived of as a place open to hosting communication and entertainment technology. In this coming together, an essential role has been played by technologies like the Edison Home Projecting Kinetoscope, introduced in 1912 (and whose career Ben Singer has exhaustively retraced), and moreover by the Pathé Baby, a 9.5-mm film projector, launched in 1922 with great success. Digital technologies—the plasma screen, the DVD, Dolby, and so on—simply reinforce the intersection that had already taken place.
In the case of cinematic relocation within exposition spaces, imitation of the darkened movie theater can produce a more blurred effect. Maeve Connolly has examined installations that replicate the traditional cinematic environment.11 There is, for instance, 12 Angry Films (2010) by Jesse Jones, which reconstructs a drive-in theater in a derelict area near the port of Dublin, in which spectators sit in their cars to watch a program of socially conscious films. Auto Kino (2010) is another replica of a drive-in, this time in Berlin, which offers projections of films by Fritz Lang, Douglas Sirk, and others. Tobias Purtih’s Venetian, Atmospheric (2007) is an ideal reconstruction of the atmospheric theaters of the 1920s and 1930s that offers a program of avant-garde movies; and Sunset Cinema (2007) by Apolonija Šušteršič and Bik van der Pol is a true art theater constructed in the middle of a town square in Luxembourg that shows films after sunset. So, “although these projects clearly draw upon images, memories and experiences of cinema as a cultural form with a long history, they do not necessarily constitute a nostalgic evocation of a lost and idealised sociality.”12 On the contrary, these projects profoundly question the types of social ties that cinema has managed to create. They emphasize certain ones, such as proximity to strangers; they explore contrasts between public and private dimensions or between the intimate and the collective; they attempt to align this sociality with the rhythms and routes of urban life; and, finally, they rethink and refound the sense of “being together” that cinema has primarily shaped.
These examples tell us that mimicry can be useful for restoring a cinematic space, but it can also have a more subtle function, in which memory opens up to a future, and yet discontinuities with the past are not hidden by the revival of a tradition.
Second, the presence of cinema in new environments is often characterized by a certain bifurcation. In some cases it raises certain traits, in other cases traits that are the opposite.
Let’s consider, for example, the scale of the screen. There are screens that we can literally hold in our hands, like those of computer tablets or smartphones, and there are screens that occupy a significant portion of an available space, like media façades. In the former case, the represented world assumes a modest weight and allows observers the possibility of mastering what they have in front of their eyes; in the latter case, the representation assumes maximum dimensions, imposing itself on the surrounding environment and practically annihilating the observer. This difference in scale brings us back to the origins of cinema, and in particular to the evolution from the little figures of the Phenakistoscope and the Kinetoscope to the life-size (or even larger) images of Edison’s Vitascope and the Lumières’ Cinématographe. As Mary Ann Doane reminds us, “the viewer, who could dominate, manipulate the optical toy or kinetoscope, controlling the speed and timing of its production of movement, became dominated, overwhelmed and dispossessed in relation to an image that seemed to be liberated from the obligation of dimension.”13 Moreover, the later innovation of the close-up, in which small details assume gigantic dimensions, introduced an air of menace and bewilderment.
In reality, outside of cinema, the entire iconographic culture of the nineteenth century was based on the opposing poles of the minuscule and the gigantic. Erkki Huhtamo14 explains how this conflict became particularly evident at midcentury with the diffusion of photographic business cards (which included a miniature portrait) as opposed to the large-scale billboards posted on the walls of cities (which greatly amplified proportions), and with spectators’ domestication of the landscape thanks to portable viewers as opposed to their feeling lost in the great circular panoramas.
The present-day diffusion of screens favors this process of “Gulliverization,” as Huhtamo terms it15: we increasingly confront someone or something that is far larger or smaller than we are. In essence, we come up against elves one moment and cyclopes the next. Consequently, two divergent situations emerge. On the one hand, small screens and miniature figures give rise to a space of control, in which we glance at the news that arrives to us, recuperate the data we need, and enter into contact with others (within a more private dimension, from which even those people situated most closely to us tend to be excluded). On the other hand, mega-screens and gigantic figures give rise to a space of spectacle, in which we enjoy the grandiosity of that which is larger than life (and we enjoy it collectively: a mega-screen is available to a plurality of spectators, who can participate simultaneously in the same event). Cinema-cinema would seem to pertain to the second case, but let us not forget that it has always nurtured inclinations aimed at keeping the world under control16: The Lumières’ La sortie des usines (1895) offers both the spectacle of an efficient factory and the gaze of a surveillance camera.
Third, the presence of cinema in new environments often creates resonances. Despite the degree to which a screen assigns new functions, a new articulation, and a new practicability to a place, the environment always conserves a memory of what it was, and what in some cases it continues to be. My living room can become a small movie theater, but it also continues to be a domestic space. A kind of echo continues to resonate, creating curious superimpositions.
Let’s stick with the home theater. The eruption of cinema into the domestic environment, which is always ready to return to the foreground, brings with it a kind of “aestheticization” of the home. Technological devices are put on display, not only as a boastful sign of status, but also because of the fascination inspired by their design as objects. They are often chosen to match other domestic technologies, so as to create a uniform style. Sometimes this aestheticization also involves other elements: Barbara Klinger observes that audiovisual magazines suggest that users coordinate food choices with the kind of film they plan to watch in their home theaters, in order to create a so-called integrated experience. “The result is a unified vision of the ‘good life’ that perpetuates existing images of class while also continuing to characterize refined class sensibilities as the most desirable.”17
On the other extreme there is a “domestication” of movie theaters. In fact, in order to achieve a maximum level of comfort, theaters now often utilize seats that amount to easy chairs: by giving more room to spectators, they make them feel more at home.18
Forms of superimposition also exist in public spaces. Watching a film on an airplane brings with it a strong “privatization” of a collective space: passengers immerse themselves in vision, seek refuge within their seats, and flee from the very idea of traveling (I am, by the way, writing these lines in an airport between flights). Conversely, a media façade implies a “monumentalization” of public space: The screen functions as a large totem pole, which inscribes a territory as if it were a landmark, rather than offering a window on the world to curious spectators. Whoever passes in front of these screens is often more attracted by the installation itself than by what is being shown on the screen. Times Square is a perfect example of such an attitude.
Ambiguity, bifurcation, resonances: As cinema enters new spaces of vision, it unfolds resistances and negotiations. In particular, it creates environments that are defined by a logic of “both/and”: multiple spaces, which give rise to many different possibilities at the same time; but also unstable spaces, which lean sometimes toward one pole, sometimes toward the other. Cinema is not a closed presence: it brings with itself tensions and compromises, in a dynamic and open play.
NEW SPECTATORSHIPS
This cinematic space criss-crossed by a plurality of accents inevitably gives rise to new forms of spectatorship. What emerge are attitudes and behaviors that are more complex, less structured, and more casual than those of the past.
The mega-screens of urban environments offer a good example. They usually feature sports and commercials, but also show film clips, trailers, documentaries, video clips, and so forth. These are materials that generate a certain amount of interest, but they do not always succeed in attracting stable attention. Many people who find themselves crossing these urban spaces continue unhindered along their routes, limiting themselves to launching at most a glance at what is appearing on the screen. Consequently, these passers-by only rarely constitute an audience in the classic sense of the term; what forms instead is what I would like to call a semi-audience, halfway between the casual aggregate formed by passers-by and the potential community of spectators.19
Conversely, there is undoubtedly a general tendency toward widening the scope of forms of individual consumption. When I watch something on my tablet, laptop, or smartphone, I do not necessarily share it with anyone else: I “privatize” my vision, including my filmic vision. Nevertheless, it is also true that we can find groups of people, sharing the same space and watching the same thing, each on his or her own portable device; and someone, shifting toward a neighbor, perhaps glances at the screen in the neighbor’s hand.20 This form of vision is not completely private: there is the spark of a public dimension, without it fully catching. We are within a semi-private regime.
When I watch a DVD at home I can concentrate on my vision, but I can also break it off, reorganize it, or finish it later. This is a much different kind of temporality with respect to the mode of consumption typical of the movie theater: in effect, I free myself from the duration forced upon me by the film.21 However as Laura Mulvey reminds us, a film remains a film, even on DVD; indeed, the possibility of viewing it in pieces, slowed down, in reverse, and of postponing the completion of my vision, allows me to notice aspects that were always there, but which a typical gaze would not have revealed.22 As in the case of Sigmund Freud’s concept of “deferred action,” it is only in retrospect that I discover the explanation for certain things. This means that the DVD did not completely abolish the continuity of vision; if anything, it complicated it through fragmentation and delay. We could describe the regime that consequently arises as semi-continuous.
Let’s return to small-scale screens. They grant spectators a freedom of mobility during viewing. Such a condition can also seem to contradict the classic model of filmic vision, in which an immobile audience sits in front of moving images. However, Boris Groys has noted a real incongruence in this model: The active life that moving images celebrate on the screen is denied to spectators, who are fixed in their seats.23 From this point of view, mobile vision can also be conceived of as a way out of this incongruence: Spectators, thanks to the tablet and smartphone, regain an active dimension, and realign themselves with what they are watching. They are able truly to experience the world in transformation, rather than being limited to contemplating it. In essence, spectators can really become those flaneurs that cinema has always asked them to become,24 but had kept them from becoming. In this way, mobile vision is not in fact cinematic, as it overturns the tradition, but it is cinematic in substance, as it satisfies a long unfulfilled promise. We can call, therefore, this mobile vision semi-cinematic: it changes a habit, but reaffirms a vocation.
HETEROGENEITY AND CONTINGENCE
Let’s pause for a moment. We have just encountered forms of spectatorship modified by a semi- (semi-public, semi-private, semi-continuous, semi-cinematic), and before that we had encountered environments of vision characterized by a but also (mimetic but also critical, dedicated to spectacle but also to surveillance, endowed with an identity but also permeated by the identities of others). Outside of the darkened movie theater, cinema moves on very complicated terrain. So what does such a situation imply?
If it is true that a screen tends to construct a space of vision, this space is not necessarily exclusive or permanent. In the past, there was always and only cinema in the movie theater. The emigration of the screen out of the theater does not guarantee the same result: The multiplication of screens and their coexistence with other elements lead cinema to become a presence that is at once both noticeable and more uncertain and vague.
Better put: The new spaces of vision are not, nor can they any longer be, dedicated spaces. They open themselves to cinema, but only from time to time, and never completely. It depends on the circumstances, for it is they that determine the level of an environment’s cinematicity. And it depends on the moment’s equilibria, for it is they that decide if cinema can cohabit with other elements. When I sit in my living room in front of my home theater, it is the familiar context that helps me to become a spectator (or hinders me from becoming a spectator). When I cross a city square and glance momentarily at a mega-screen, it is my list of errands, in addition to my curiosity, that dictates if my gaze will really capture what is appearing on that surface. While traveling, it is the discomfort of the situation that keeps me tied to my tablet. A screen contributes to the construction of points of vision, but my eyes do not necessarily always find reward or satisfaction in these points.
This contingent dimension may seem to be a condemnation. In relocating, cinema expands its field of action, but also seems to enter onto a terrain not its own. It gains space, but loses its environment.25 However, this dimension opens up an interesting scenario. When cinema’s presence can no longer be taken for granted it becomes something we run into, something we stumble upon. The intensity of the surprise can be greater in a public space, such as a bar for example, into which we enter not knowing what we will find, while it may be less intense in a private space such as our living room, in which we sit down and choose what to watch. But even in the latter case, cinema is an element that intervenes, forcing the situation, and imposing itself on other possible presences. From this point of view, after having been an institution, cinema increasingly presents itself—or returns to being, as it was at its origin—an occurrence.26 Cinema takes place, it happens; therefore, it is a reality that we encounter. Better yet, it is a reality that comes out to meet us.
Victor Burgin, in a passionate and sensitive analysis of what cinema has become today, underlines its constant attempt to meet us. “The experience of film was once localized in space and time, in the finite unreeling of a narrative in a particular theatre on a particular day. But with time a film became no longer simply something to be ‘visited’ in the way one might attend a live theatrical performance or visit a painting in a museum.”27 On the contrary, film now is something that reaches us, in many ways and in many circumstances, also through fragments, memories, recollections. “A ‘film’ may be encountered trough posters, ‘blurbs,’ and other advertisements, such as trailers and television clips; it may be encountered through newspaper reviews, reference works, synopses and theoretical articles (with their ‘film-strip’ assemblages of still images); through production photographs, frame enlargements, memorabilia, and so on.”28 Films urge us to be taken in—at the point that they risk to take on a sort of phantasmic identity.29
So, in the public and private spaces into which cinema has relocated, it is as if it presents itself to its spectators, approaches them up close, and attempts to reach out to them; in essence, it is as if cinema surprises them and consigns itself to them, into their hands and eyes. Spectators no longer go to the cinema; if anything, they find it along the way.
A brief glance back at the classic cinematic situation can help us to clarify this reversal of course.
GOING TO THE MOVIES
Erich Feldmann’s “Thoughts on the Film Spectator’s Situation,”30 written in 1956, offers an accurate and intelligent description of what it means to go to the movies and can be fruitfully compared to texts such as Antonello Gerbi’s “Initiation to the Delights of Cinema” from thirty years earlier and Roland Barthes’ “Leaving the Movie Theater,” written nineteen years later.31
Feldmann posits that the classic filmic experience consists of three phrases. The first phase involves spectators buying a ticket and directing themselves toward the theater.32 This phase has more to do with the filmgoer as consumer than as a true spectator: It is constituted by a financial transaction in exchange for the satisfaction of a desire (or a need). Nevertheless, this monetary operation is closely tied to the wish to leave daily life in order to gain access to a new space: a specialized space, dedicated to spectacle, and different from those of the outside world. In this sense, the ticket purchase functions as the crossing of a threshold.
The second phase involves the spectators entering the theater and selecting a place to sit. The choice of a seat is not insignificant: Spectators can accommodate themselves next to others, maintaining personal contact, and thus emphasizing the fact that in this phase they are more accurately members of an audience than film spectators; or they can choose to isolate themselves, thus predisposing themselves to vision, even if “the world around [them] remains real and alive, until their attention is distracted and captured by the film.”33 In both cases, this is an intermediate stage: Spectators are no longer in the same condition as they were before entering the theater; their tie to the outside has weakened. They have already entered into the space in which the film projection will take place, but their eyes are not yet focused on the screen.
The third phase begins as the lights go down and the projection begins. A sharp break with everyday reality sets in, together with a reorientation of attention: “With the darkening of the theater, [spectators] lose visual contact with the real world that surrounds them, they concentrate on sensible impressions, and dispose themselves to experiencing that which acts on them.”34 It is at this point that spectators truly become spectators: when they dedicate themselves fully to the film.35 As a result of their availability, they adhere closely to what is being represented: The world on the screen is taken as real and is lived by spectators as if they were part of it. As the film continues this situation is consolidated: “as the film advances, which is nothing more than a succession of images in movement, the illusion of an objective event and of subjective participation is born.”36 Spectators “enter” into the represented reality.
This entrance into the represented world on the screen is never realized completely. Feldmann concludes his essay by saying that the filmic narrative presents a series of vicissitudes in which it is impossible to intervene. “The stronger the images offered by the film, the more intensely spectators imagine that the dramatic action of the film must be accepted as a predetermined destiny and that the situations must be left to play themselves out.”37No matter how strongly spectators project themselves into and identify themselves with the fictional universe of the film, there remains a subtle barrier that keeps them separated from it.38 Spectators, sitting in the theater, ultimately always stay attached to the real world.
Feldmann offers an accurate portrait of the cinematic experience. He brings it back to a path that leads us to abandon the everyday, to enter into a room furnished with a screen, and to attempt to penetrate into the universe that is born on that screen. Going to the movies means above all leaving a customary territory and confronting an “other” world. In this sense, we experience a heterotopia, which is to say, the existence of a particular place, which, although located “here,” opens up on an “elsewhere.”
FROM HETEROTOPIA TO HYPERTOPIA
The notion of heterotopia was advanced by Michel Foucault in a 1967 conference, though it was only published in 1984.39 The term refers to the existence of spaces that put the world we inhabit into communication with situations that exceed everyday reality, such as sickness, death, dreams, unusual sites, and so on. Examples of heterotopia are places such as hospitals, cemeteries, trains, gardens, hotel rooms, mental institutions, prisons, and theaters. In each of these sites, an “other” dimension presents itself within our world—it remains separate, but is also made accessible. So, while utopias represent an “elsewhere” that lacks a “where,” heterotopias represent a concrete space that allows us to arrive at an “elsewhere” by setting out from a “here.”
All cultures have elaborated heterotopias, even though in different ways and with different functions.40 And all heterotopias are characterized by a recurring structure.
For example, “heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable.”41 These are spaces marked by a series of thresholds that we are called to challenge and cross.
Additionally, “The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.”42 It therefore has a variegated design, made up of diverse pieces in coexistence. Theaters and gardens (and, according to Foucault, also the cinema, which incorporates a theater, a flat screen, and a seemingly three-dimensional narrated world) exemplify this heterogeneous composition.
Heterotopias are also spaces that suspend in some way the flow of everyday time: “The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time.”43 Cemeteries, which both confirm the end of life and establish a quasi-eternity, constitute good examples of what Foucault calls heterochrony.
Finally, heterotopias serve a double function. “Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory [. . .]”—Foucault mentions brothels—“Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.”44 This second case describes not heterotopias of illusion, but rather heterotopias of compensation, of which colonies—especially the ones established by Jesuits in Paraguay during the eighteenth century—represent a prime example.
These are the principal traits of the heterotopia. They make it a true counter-site “in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”45 The classic movie theater fits in easily among these heterotopias. Its triple threshold—economic, physical, and symbolic—its drawing together of different spaces—social and representational—its ability to suspend quotidian time and reemit it in an alternative flow, and its dual nature as both outer limit and mirror of society, all correspond perfectly to the characteristics described by Foucault. Indeed, he mentions cinema in his list, even if it is only cursorily.
But can we say the same of the new environments into which cinema has relocated? Do they too constitute heterotopias? For example, it is worth noting that in these sites of vision, the presence of a threshold is sharply diminished. Urban spaces, such as a town square, remain perfectly passable, while personal spaces, such as the one I construct by holding my tablet, exhibit the fragile borders of an existential bubble. Furthermore, their internal composition is variable more than variegated. Like my living room, which transforms into a small movie theater and back again in a flash, these sites of vision change structure each time they are used. These sites cause different temporalities to flow in parallel, rather than bringing them into confrontation. Along a street, in front of a screen, some people stop to take a break and some hurry by without pause: both ways of organizing one’s time coexist without intersecting. Finally, these sites of vision are not true counter-sites. They insert themselves seamlessly into the geography of our everyday world, taking part in it fully, rather than reconquering and twist it.
The consequence of this is a reversal of the previous situation. New environments of vision no longer constitute destinations, but rather places that one happens upon along the way. Similarly, representations on the screen no longer constitute worlds toward which we reach out, but rather worlds that appear before us, offer themselves to our gaze, and place themselves at our disposal. In short, in these new environments, there is no longer the opening of a “here” toward an “elsewhere,” but rather an “elsewhere” that arrives “here” and dissolves itself in it.
I call this new spatial structure hypertopia, in order to underline the fact that rather than taking off toward an “other” place, there are many “other” places that land here, to the point of saturating my world. Relocated cinema leaves the terrain of the heterotopia and adopts this new spatial structure: It no longer asks me to go to it; it comes to me, reaching me wherever I am.
The most evident counterpart to the transformation from heterotopia to hypertopia can be found in the development of the word access. Traditionally, to access means “to approach or enter (a place).”46 The word therefore implies movement, the crossing of a threshold, entrance into a new space and the sharing of it with whoever was already occupying it. In the field of media, Jurgen Habermas uses access to indicate the possibility of social subjects entering into the arena of collective debate, and therefore participating in the public sphere,47 while Stuart Hall uses access to indicate the way in which the use of the media also brings with it an adherence to the rules shared by a community.48 Entrance into a movie theater represents a form of access: Spectators arrive at a site, enter it, and become part of an audience.
The computer and the Web have transformed the meaning of the word: to access has become synonymous with to obtain and to retrieve (as in computer data or a file).49 The central element becomes the possibility of consulting a series of sites—my mailbox, a social network, a home page, or a discussion form, for example. With a click of the mouse or a tap of the finger, I can put myself in contact with a myriad of other points. I do not, however, move from the place in which I find myself; rather, the information comes to me.
There is no doubt that when I navigate the Internet, I do put myself in motion in some ideal way. Lev Manovich has exhumed two classic metaphors that describe cybernauts: on the one hand they are Baudelaire’s flaneurs, ready to enter indifferently into a series of situations; on the other hand they are the explorers of the great novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain, ready to set out beyond charted territory, in search of a new world.50 In particular, video games are constructed on the idea of a progressive advancement from one environment to another, via a series of thresholds: “Doom and Myst present the user with a space to be traversed, to be mapped out by moving through it.”51 However, this movement is of course metaphorical: In reality, the space designed by programmers does not have the characteristics of an organic site, in which objects are structurally incorporated. Rather, it consists of a collection of elements to be grasped one by one: “Virtual spaces are most often not true spaces but collections of separate objects.”52 As Manovich himself emphasizes, “The space of the Web, in principle, cannot be thought of as a coherent totality: it is, rather, a collection of numerous files, hyperlinked but without any overall perspective to unite them.”53 In short, “there is no space in cyberspace.”54
Furthermore, cybernauts do not aim to find a new world to inhabit, as was the case with classic cinema spectators, whose dream it was to immerse themselves in the coherent, compact universe represented on the screen. Instead, cybernauts aspire simply to acquire. It is no coincidence that the activity by which they are most often measured is downloading: a term that refers to a transport that has already arrived at its destination, and to a destination that coincides with the “here” in which navigators find themselves together with their computers, wherever that may be. It is not a matter of reaching a certain place; rather, it is now a question of how to make oneself reachable. And it is no longer a matter of entering and taking part in a territory or a community; rather, it is now a question of how to collect and accumulate data. The meaning of access has truly changed.
Returning to cinema, there is no doubt that it incarnates a traditional idea of access: Spectators enter a place—the theater—from which they can face toward a world ready to welcome them. However, the context in which cinema now operates, and in particular the fact that its presence increasingly conforms to contingency, make cinema appear more disposed to reach out to us than to ask us to move toward it.
The act of watching a downloaded film on a computer illustrates this change in direction. Spectators do not move from their seats: They explore their possibilities online, activate a link, and have their selection arrive on their screens. Urban screens propose a similar situation. When I cross a city square and my eye happens upon a display showing a film trailer, a documentary, or anything connected in some way with the world of cinema, that thing seems simply to appear before me: It captures my attention and reaches me. Ultimately, I find myself in the same situation as when I play a DVD from my small collection at home: That DVD is already here with me, it has already reached me. Therefore, spectators no longer approach the cinema: The cinema approaches them, when it is not already with them.
“PANTHERS AND PUMAS LEAP OUT OF THE SCREEN”
This situation is further strengthened when we consider the new modes of filmic representation. I am thinking in particular of the reemergence of 3-D. Three-dimensionality offers a representation that literally extends itself toward us, as if it wanted to invade our space. Sergei Eisenstein already understood this in the 1940s: In an essay on early experiments in stereoscopy, he noted that the image “pours out of the screen into the auditorium.” The effect, he added, is that “panthers and pumas leap out of the screen into the arms of the spectators.”55 The diegetic universe attempts to reach us.
Such an extension of objects toward us changes the meaning of the entire dispositive. As Philip Sander has underlined, perspectival vision, to which classical cinema owed much, offered an illusory immersion into the depicted world. In particular, it constructed an implicit observer, who overlapped with and concealed the real beholder, and who was swallowed by the representation itself. Three-dimensionality reverses such a situation. First of all, 3-D calls for a concrete observer, able to re-create a stereoscopic image. Second, 3-D emphasizes the existence of the theater: “Because objects project off the screen, the space in front of the screen is no longer arbitrary.”56 Hence, there is a peculiar relationship with the spectator: “When an object extends off the delineated space of the screen and into the theatre, the object attains a real presence and is in an actual relationship with the apex of the vision, which, instead of being an arbitrary point, is now the actual viewer’s eyes.”57 The subtle “delineation between the necessarily structured space of the image and the variable space of the viewer”58 is broken. The world on the screen not only leans toward spectators but also literally fills the environment surrounding them.
The trailer for the original The House of Wax (André De Toth, 1953) promised the audience that “every astounding scene in the story comes as close as the person next to you.” The trailer for The Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954) announced that “up from the depth of the mighty Amazon comes the Creature.” In Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), we are brought to Pandora, but once we have arrived there, Na’vi join us.
The recent adoption of stereoscopy by a dispositive such as television also emphasizes this direction. It is no coincidence that a 2012 television commercial for 3-D Blu-ray Discs proclaims: “3-D brings the action to you!” Another commercial for DirectTV further clarifies the concept: “You’ve experienced it at the theater—a picture so realistic and immersive that you feel like you can touch the people and objects you’re watching. DirectTV now brings the 3-D experience to your living room.”59 Of course, this may also result in a deeper participation to the story. But what matters is that the world on the screen is now capable of erupting into my own home.
In short, we no longer move for film; it is now something we acquire, we meet by chance, or we pick out from a range of available products; it is something that offers up a world ready to extend itself everywhere. Cinema, too, is becoming a hypertopic art.
THE ROOTS OF HYPERTOPIA
Does this forward extension of cinema and of the world it represents constitute a true innovation for film? And, more importantly, is this movement of “elsewhere” toward “here” only a recent phenomenon? The latter question inevitably leads us to “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and thus to the 1930s. At the end of his essay, Walter Benjamin contrasts concentration, to which the work of art that is still tied to aura invites us, and distraction, which characterizes the behavior of the masses: “A person who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it: he enters into the work, just as, according to legend, a Chinese painter entered his completed painting while beholding it. By contrast, the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves. Their waves lap around it; they encompass it with their tide.”60 Therefore, there are two directions of movement: that which leads subjects to immerse themselves in the work of art, and that which leads the work of art to extend out of itself and to deliver itself into the hands of the subjects. The more the sense of a “cult” tied to a work is diminished in favor of its vocation of exposing itself to the gaze, the more the first direction—the immersive direction—cedes the field to the second, which we, together with Benjamin, can call percussive.61 The world of art’s self-consignment into the hands of consumers satisfies the desire of the masses to take possession of things, to make them their own62; and at the same time it exists in perfect syntony with a mode of perception dominated by shock (external events seem to assail the subject), by tactility (things increasingly become objects of use), and by challenge (subjects are constantly put to the test, subjected to a training that trains them for the times they live in).
Let’s return to cinema, to which Benjamin makes constant reference in his essay. The idea that film reaches out to spectators, beyond merely calling out to them, emerges quite early. In 1907, Giovanni Papini described the great success that this new art form was enjoying: “These theaters with their invasive lighting, their grandiose triple-color posters updated every day, the raucous arias ringing out from their phonographs, the weary announcements by red-uniformed boys, are now invading the main streets, closing down the cafés, opening up to replace the halls of well-known restaurants or billiard rooms, they join forces with bars, with a sweep of their arc lamps they have the effrontery to shine their beams into the mysterious old piazzas, and are even threatening to expel the live theaters, just as the tramways have replaced public carriages, newspapers have replaced books, and bars have taken the place of our cafés.”63 In Papini’s words, cinema appears as a reality that is occupying the city and is impossible to avoid. In short, cinema comes out to meet its spectators, to the point of imposing itself on them, in order to be included in their world. There is something utterly new that is taking root in the “here.”
The idea of invasion applies to the theater but also to the represented world. Some twenty years after Papini, at a time when cinema was already widely institutionalized, another Italian scholar, Antonello Gerbi, extolled the virtues of going to the cinema. His description, as I have suggested, can be placed alongside that of Eric Feldmann and constitutes a perfect portrait of a journey toward an “elsewhere.” However, at a certain point, Gerbi opens up a completely different scenario: He imagines what would happen if the projectionist pointed his lens toward the audience: “The nighttime-reveling phantasms would come down from the screen and would attach themselves, deformed, contorted, grimacing, to the bodies of the spectators, to the bare walls, to the skin of the ladies, to the backs of the chairs, to people’s heads, to their collars, to the newspapers.”64 For Gerbi, the idea that the characters of the screen could invade the theater “is not a joke. It is a frightening possibility.” It corresponds to the hypothesis that these characters, liberated from the story in which they are forced to live, could visit us at any moment: “If you were to find them close to you, so thin and silent, one night while you’re returning home, there would be quite a bit to be afraid of.”65
This idea that cinema not only abducts us and spirits us far away, but also that it looms toward us, invading the space in which we find ourselves, can be found in a pair of Italian short stories, written in the same period as Gerbi’s text. Camillio Mariani dell’Anguillara (who a few years later will be one of the writers of Scipione l’Africano) recounts in “A Cinematic Adventure” the experience of a spectator watching a group of riders on horseback approach him on the screen, when, suddenly, they spill out of the screen and into the theater, racing along the cone of light produced by the projector.66 The spectator is forced to follow the riders on an adventure that turns out to be nothing like the one originally advertised by the film he had gone to see. Massimo Bontempelli, a much more solid writer than Mariani dell’Anguillara, narrates in “My Public Death”67 the story of an actor forced to relive the film in which he appears in perfect simultaneity with every projection. No matter how far he is from the movie theater, the film literally reaches him and overcomes him. The only solution is to acquire every copy of the film and destroy them all.
These examples are somewhat extreme68; however, the idea that cinema not only welcomes spectators but also imposes itself on them and invades their space is quite common in its early days—in fact, it constitutes a constant motif. As Tom Gunning has brought to light, early cinema was essentially a “cinema of attractions,” that is to say, “a cinema that displays its visibility, willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator.”69 Its objective is to offer provocations on a perceptive and cognitive level, more than to narrate a story with which spectators can identify. Similarly, it is engaged in constructing a direct addressee for its images, more than an invisible participant in its events. From this view point, the “cinema of attractions” manifests a logic that is not distant from that of a hypertopia: Its images do not invite spectators to enter into another world, but rather surprise them, overwhelm them with a constant excess, inundate their senses and minds. Spectators are not called upon to go elsewhere; rather, they are engulfed by stimuli wherever they already find themselves.
This little flashback in search of the roots of hypertopia helps us to understand something: If it is true that the attempt to reach the user or spectator is a typical gesture of the current moment, it is also true that it has been with us for a while. Perhaps it no longer expresses the values that Benjamin recognized in it—shock is now disconnected from the necessity of training, and appropriation no longer has a collective dimension—however, the direction of the movement is the same. Indeed, we may say that the gesture has fully matured: In a now-globalized world, it allows us to think of the space we inhabit as a “here” where all possible “elsewheres” throng, and thus offers a (perhaps illusory) center to an otherwise scattered subject.
Cinema occupies an interesting position in this plot. There is no doubt that in its classic moment, cinema constituted an excellent example of heterotopia: I repeat, the cinematic experience was in large part an experience of a place in which one looked out upon an “elsewhere.” Nevertheless, especially at its origin, it also explored the opposite model. In addition to the possibility of living in an “other” world, it also prompted us to seize it and make it ours. In addition to soliciting every mechanism of self-projection and identification, it also provoked us and assaulted us with its images. It is precisely this twofold story that allows cinema to claim a precedent (hypertopia is not unknown to it), and also to bring to light certain aspects of its current condition that might otherwise be lost.
In particular, cinema reminds us that the tension between “here” and “elsewhere” persists. Consequently, if “here” is nowadays filled up with “elsewheres,” it does not mean that “here” becomes a self-sufficient and a self-evident space. It is not merely what it contains, including what I can download because I need it. On the contrary, it is a space capable of bringing into dialogue different planes of reality and capable of conserving an element of openness to the possible. On the one hand, the throng of “elsewheres” transforms the “here” into a sort of prism in which various components of the world we inhabit can come face to face and interact. My living room, the train car I’m traveling in, the town square I am crossing—each one with its respective screens becomes an unstable but eminently representative concentrate of the whole reality that surrounds me. On the other hand, the “elsewheres” that arrive “here” continue to construct protrusions with respect to the place in which I find myself; they bring with them a difference that is not easily assimilated. Consequently, the screen in front of me, even though it gives me all I can get, also marks a horizon that challenges and provokes me.
In other words, hypertopia does not necessarily make an absolute of the “here.” On the contrary, thanks to a sense of articulation and alterity that it brings with it, it can emphasize how this “here” is a space ready to open itself, to transform itself, to renew itself—no matter how full it already is. Wherever I am, I am able to summon up the world, but the world that arrives before me presents itself in all its complexity, tensions, and potentialities. “Here” can explode, in a certain sense—and in exploding, it can call me to task, appealing to my responsibility.
Cinema is still with us to guarantee this dimension of multiplicity and openness. Precisely in its present status as an occurrence—something that happens to me, rather than an institution that can be taken for granted—it again offers me a taste of surprise, curiosity, and transformation. And in doing so it reveals in depth just how mutable and unpredictable the space in which I find myself is. Cinema renders my “here” dense and promising, even outside the theater. This is the fruit of the double bind—heterotopia and hypertopia—that cinema embodies.
In Non-Indifferent Nature, Sergei Eisenstein thinks back to Battleship Potemkin, made twenty years earlier. He reveals that for the first projection of the film, he had had in mind a spectacular finale: At the moment when the ship is heading toward freedom, after having left Odessa and passing the fleet that was waiting to block her, the screen in the theater would rip open, and the sailors of the Potemkin—the actual, flesh-and-bone survivors of the revolt—would spill into the theater . . . a stupendous idea.70 The sailors would return not only because the October Revolution brought with it freedom, but because it is right to have here and now the object of one’s desire. Spectators are not forced to project themselves elsewhere: the elsewhere—the Potemkin, Odessa, the revolt—can come to them. Concretely. Pure hypertopia.
There is a price to pay, however. The sailors that enter into the theater also spell the end of cinema: The screen would be destroyed, the projection would stop—with the arrival of reality there is no need of images. Cinema ceases to function as usual: It renounces its traditional framework and moves on to another regime of representation—it becomes performance, installation, maybe life as such.
To have everything here, where we are; and to no longer have cinema, but rather something else. Eisenstein has granted us a great lesson. He brings to light a double paradox. First of all, the sailors that enter the theater constitute a kind of living challenge to the possibility of summoning an “elsewhere” “here,” but at the same time they prove that when this does happen, the “where” in which we find ourselves often changes nature: it explodes, opens up, transforms. Second, the sailors shed light on the ability of a heterotopic art, such as cinema, to also activate the opposite procedure, delivering to spectators what is beyond their horizon—and moreover actually, in real life—but it also reminds us that this gesture can lead to deep and potentially fatal self-redefinition. In a fully developed Internet culture like the one in which we now all live, it is useful, perhaps necessary, to remember Eisenstein: He makes that click of the mouse or tap of a finger with which we download all the world’s information just a little more problematic.
