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

Mike Figgis’ film Timecode (2000) recounts ninety-three minutes in the life of a group of people living in Los Angeles. The duration of the movie and of the events it relates coincide: The story is captured in one long take without intervals or cuts. Most surprising is the possibility of following more than one situation simultaneously: The film was shot with four different digital cameras, and all four takes are presented simultaneously, on one screen divided into four sections. Sometimes the plotlines of the various characters intersect with one another more or less haphazardly, and when this happens the camera that has been following one of the characters may shift to another character and follow him or her instead. At other points, the plotlines converge, and we retrospectively discover the correlations. More often, however, the events proceed in parallel, without intersecting, but also without excluding the possibility of eventually crossing paths. We watch the stories on the four adjacent sections of the split screen, jumping from one to another, attempting to establish connections, selecting what seems to be the center point, at the mercy of the flow of images.

This is not the first time that cinema has experimented with the split screen.1 However, there is something new in Figgis’ film: something quite different from the traditional desire to enlarge visible space or to juxtapose contemporaneous events that take place in separate spaces. His screen, divided into four, evokes the new kinds of screens that already constituted a familiar presence at the beginning of this millennium. It reminds us of the mosaic structure of the television screen, inside of which many conduits of communication coexist.² It also suggests the computer screen, with all the available applications in view, or monitors placed one next to the other, displaying images from surveillance cameras in the security centers of office buildings and malls. It also reminds us of the conglomeration of screens in the great media façades of many cities, such as New York’s Times Square. Through these references, Timecode suggests that the movie screen no longer stands by itself; on the contrary, because of outside influences, its very nature is changing. We can no longer observe it as we did before, nor can we expect it to offer us the same kind of images as it used to.

I shall attempt here to think about how the proliferation of screens has led to a general transformation of their nature. They are no longer surfaces on which reality is relived, so to speak. Rather, they have become transit hubs for the images that circulate in our social space. They serve to capture these images, to make them momentarily available for somebody somewhere—perhaps even in order to rework them—before they embark again on their journey. Therefore, screens function as the junctions of a complex circuit, characterized both by a continuous flow and by localized processes of configuration or reconfiguration of circulating images.

This transformation of the screen is in fact the symptom of a more general media transformation. The advent of the network and of digital technology has led us out of an era in which media operated as instruments for exploring the world and for facilitating dialogue between people; that is, as instruments of mediation vis-à-vis reality and other people. Media have now become devices for the “interception” of information that saturates social and virtual spaces: They have become “lightning rods,” if you will, onto which the electricity in the air is discharged. In this context, cinema has also found itself questioning its own identity, discovering perhaps a new destiny, but also a deep continuity between past and present.

What exactly was the screen? The term has an intriguing history: In the fourteenth century, the Italian word schermo denoted something that protected against outside agents, and that therefore presented an obstacle to direct sight.3 Along these same lines, the term also indicated someone who serves to mask the interests of another person, as in the Dantean formulation donna schermo, or “screen woman.”⁴ The English term screen also referred to a protective surface in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially against fire or air.⁵ However, screen (or skren) also indicated smaller devices used to hide oneself from others’ glances, such as fans or partitions of a mostly decorative nature.⁶ At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the term began to enter into the sphere of entertainment: In the phantasmagoria, screen, schermo, and écran designated the semi-transparent surface onto the back of which a series of images was projected, so that the screen now served to open our gaze onto something hidden. This association with the instruments of spectacle was strengthened with the introduction of the shadow play (which the West had already imported from the East in the seventeenth century), and moreover with the magic lantern show, in which the projection is cast from in front of the screen rather than from behind it. Contemporaneously, the term screen, at least in English, acquired yet another aspect: During the Victorian age, it referred to those surfaces on which figures and cut-outs were pasted, forming both a private collection of images and a small public exposition.⁷ It is from this rich background that the term arrives, in various languages, at the turn of the twentieth century, to indicate all the surfaces, and especially the white curtain onto which filmic images are projected,⁸ finding its most widespread meaning in its connection to the cinema.

The route traveled by this word is instructive.⁹ It demonstrates a slippage of meaning: from a surface that covers and protects, to one that allows us to glimpse images projected from behind, to one that gathers representations of new worlds, to one that can contain figures that reflect our personality. The major metaphors used by classical film theories for the cinematic screen encapsulate this entire history.

The first metaphor is that of the window: The screen is a breach in the barrier that keeps us separated from reality, thanks to which we reestablish contact with the world. The obstacle between us and the outside is represented primarily by the walls of the movie theater; however, the most powerful impediments are the cultural filters that do not allow us to look directly at reality. Among these filters are our habits and prejudices, as Jean Epstein underlined in 1921,10 and the massive presence of the writing and the press, which make man readable but not visible, as Béla Balázs states in 1924.¹¹ Therefore, the screen should be understood as a laceration that allows us to see reality directly, again and anew. The metaphor emerges quite soon in film debates: It appears, for example, in an Italian text of 1908 by Tullio Panteo.¹² However, it will find particularly fertile ground later, in the realist theories of cinema¹³: in fact, these theories are all characterized by a desire to reactivate a direct gaze on things and by the knowledge that in order to do so, one must overcome resistance, obstacles, and impediments. In this light, cinema literally offers to the world the possibility of a redemption.¹⁴

The second major metaphor is that of the frame: The screen is a surface within which appear figures capable of depicting the, or at least a, world. Here we are no longer dealing with a direct gaze on things, but rather with a representation of them. This leads to the emergence of new aspects; in particular, the content of the image, rather than a simple datum, becomes a construct at the root of which is a work of mise-en-scène. Nevertheless, a representation does not cease to speak to us about reality; every time an understanding of the laws of nature is applied to a representation (something that true artists always do eventually), it also ends up revealing to us the dynamics and composition of reality. This explains why the metaphor was utilized most of all by formalist theorists of cinema. We find it in the early debates (for example, in Victor O. Freeburg, not by chance in connection with his strong attention toward pictorial composition).¹⁵ But we encounter this metaphor quite regularly in tandem with the awareness that the filmic image is based on a visual configuration, and that such a configuration is capable of fully restoring to us the sense of the world in which we live.¹⁶

The third major metaphor is that of the mirror: The screen is a device that restores to us a reflection of the world, including a reflection of ourselves. The mirror metaphor, too, had already emerged in earlier cinematic theories: a good example is Giovanni Papini’s essay of 1907.17 However, it will find its most fully developed elaboration in the psychoanalytic approach, which asserts that spectators may identify with the film’s protagonists and with the gaze (of the director? of the camera? of a transcendental subject? of the gaze as such?) that captures them on the set. A film’s spectators see a world to which they yield themselves, but they also see a point of view on this world with which they associate themselves. In this sense, they see themselves seeing. I should add that the mirror reunites what the two preceding metaphors held apart: The former underlined the possibility of perceiving things directly, while the latter highlighted the necessity of passing through their representation. This third metaphor posits a reflection that allows us to see things as they are, and ultimately offers up only an image of them¹⁸—an image, I repeat, which also references directly the observer.

These three major metaphors are not the only ones that film criticism and theory use to talk about the screen.¹⁹ Although less frequently, it is also seen as a door, through which one enters and exits, as illustrated in the last sequence of René Clair’s Entr’Acte (1924). It is also associated with skin, as suggested by Jean Epstein’s famous phrase concerning the close-up: “I look, I sniff at things, I touch.”²⁰ (In 1966, the marvelous opening sequence of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona would confirm this image.) But the screen can also be considered simply as a support, as Elie Faure attests to when he speaks of it as a mere environmental element.²¹ The three metaphors of the window, the frame, and the mirror, however, aside from being the most widespread, bring us most closely to the heart of the problem. They all identify the screen as the place in which reality offers itself to spectators—in all its immediacy, consistency, and availability. At the cinema, we have access to the world; through its cinematic representation, we may sense its structure and its possibilities, and thanks to the process of identification, we can make the world ours.

It should not be surprising then that the first theories of cinema often speak of an “epiphany”: On the screen, reality reveals itself in all its density to eyes ready to witness it. Antonello Gerbi writes: “Submerged by the sounds, we are ready to receive the new Epiphany. Are we buried in the deep or hovering among the stars? I don’t know: certainly we are very close to the heart of the cinema.”22 These references to epiphany sometimes lead early film theories to adopt a sort of religious inflection, in which the screen is assigned an even greater role as a component of a rite. To quote Gerbi again, “This piece of crude canvas [. . .] is reborn as an altarpiece for the liturgies of the new times.”²³ These suggestions do not foreclose a more secular approach: The three metaphors mentioned above also allow us to glimpse an idea of the cinema as medium. If it is true, as Marshall McLuhan suggests, that media form the nervous system of a society,²⁴ the movie screen is essentially a terminus from which we gather data from outside (window), as well as an organ with which we re-elaborate data (frame), and a device for self-regulation and self-recognition (mirror). The cinema owes much, if not everything, to the screen.

The television screen differs from the movie screen: It is small rather than large; it is made from glass as opposed to canvas; it is fluorescent rather than reflective; and the world it hosts is live rather than recorded. However, in its early years, this screen recalled the same major metaphors mentioned above: It was a window, even if the walls it faced were those of the home instead of a public space; it was a frame, even if its components were arranged differently; and it was a mirror, even though it was more reflective of a society than of an individual.²⁵ In its initial stages, notwithstanding its increasing role in the media landscape, television apparently did not alter a well-consolidated system of concepts.²⁶

Nevertheless, there arose a new metaphor that came to join the others, and which in some ways signaled a new direction. Television, it was often said, was like a hearth in front of which the family gathers. This metaphor not only emphasizes the continuity of consolidated habits (today we would say the processes of domestication of a medium); it also indicates that this screen brings the outside world into the domestic space—radiating it like firelight, and endowing it with the continuity of a warmth that permeates the home. Indeed, the epiphany becomes the everyday: it persists within reach, so to speak. This radical availability of the world, and its transformation into a flow of images onto which viewers can continually graft themselves, would eventually come to be a decisive characteristic of new screens.

A greater sense of novelty comes on the scene in the 1960s with the appearance of multiscreen installations. One type of installation consists of the simultaneous projection of a film onto multiple surfaces. The New York World’s Fair of 1964–1965 provided more than one example of this: There was, for example, Charles and Ray Eames’ spectacle, which involved fourteen projectors and nine different screens.27 This structure was then immediately reinterpreted in an experimental key by Andy Warhol, in particular in his Chelsea Girls (1966), in which the arrangement and synchronization of at least two screens was much freer.²⁸ Another form of installation—the video wall—was created by stacking up a series of video devices. The video wall, too, took its first steps in the 1960s, offering spectators greater immersion in its images. Nam June Paik provided an almost immediate artistic reinterpretation of it with his TV Cello (1964), a series of television sets stacked on top of one another in the form of a cello.

With the introduction of the multiscreen installation, the traditional screen seemed to signal openly that it felt constrained within its traditional confines. The time had come for it to grow, to multiply, to spread out, and this moment arrived in the 1980s and 1990s. It was precisely during these years that a series of extensions became common and, moreover, the screen began to constitute an essential part of new media, following a trajectory that would continue into the next decades. Among the expansions, we find the connection of the television set to the VCR and to the video-game console²⁹; or the amalgamation of a video screen and the telephone provided by the French Minitel.³⁰ Examples of new screens are the computer³¹ and the cell phone,³² which in these years became an increasing presence in daily life. In the same vein, the introduction of the portable DVD player allowed for the personal consumption of videos outside the walls of the domestic space.³³ Electronic organizers began to replace paper diaries.³⁴ Tablets started developing along a path that would lead to incredibly successful products such as the Kindle and iPad.³⁵ Finally, media façades started taking their place as a characteristic feature of many urban spaces, before acquiring the capability, as they now have, of interacting with passers-by. Indeed, all media have become media screens.

This screen explosion—which is still affecting us today—has led us to a true turning point. We find ourselves surrounded by unprecedented technological innovations: surfaces made of liquid crystals, of plasma, and of LEDs, as flexible as a piece of paper, interconnected, reacting to my touch and my voice, and so forth. This turning point, however, represents a conceptual transformation as much as it does a technological fact: it is the very idea of a screen that is changing, as Lev Manovich has already suggested.36 There are three aspects that I consider crucial. First, the great diffusion of screens allows media content to multiply the occasions and the ways in which it may present itself (a book may be read also on a Kindle or on a tablet; on a computer, we can have different editions of the same book on the same surface; we can add images or edit it in a different form; we can keep a copy with our notes, and so forth). Second, the fact that these screens are often connected allows for a sort of “bouncing” of the content from one point to another—a rebound that shares this content on a large scale, but that also ultimately transforms it (the book I am reading, and the notes I am writing, can be read also by someone else at a distance, who can add further notes). Finally, and more radically, the ubiquity of these screens makes possible the living or reliving of media experience in new environments and on new devices (we can feel like readers, even if we do not have a bundle of paper in our hands). In short, this screen explosion has resulted in a diffusion of content on many platforms (spreadability), an interconnection of reception points (networking), and a reactivation of experiences in many situations (relocation).

This new situation, which seems to have now arrived at a maturation point, has literally led the screen to assume a new nature. Embedded into new media, the screen no longer exclusively represents the site of an epiphany of the real; rather, it tends to appear as a surface across which the images circulate as they travel through social space. The information that surrounds us condenses on the screen, lingers for a moment, interacts with the surrounding environment, and then takes off for other points in a kind of continual movement.

The first term is undoubtedly monitor: The screen increasingly serves to inspect the world around us, to analyze and verify it—in essence, to keep it under control. The window that once restored our contact with the world has become a peephole through which to scrutinize reality, on the likely chance that it may be hiding something dangerous.

Such a situation takes us inevitably back to Bentham’s Panopticon, which Foucault discussed in Discipline and Punish.37 While the Panopticon was designed so that only one individual was required in order to keep an eye on the entire building, in the case of security cameras everything is observed, but there are no longer any observers. Put another way, no one is looking, as the end goal is not to watch (or to make known that one is being watched), but simply to gather data to be mined in case the need arises. This is symptomatic of the passage from a disciplinary society to a society of control,³⁸ like the one in which we now live. And yet it is still noteworthy that the security monitor implies a gaze, but not necessary a viewer.³⁹

This same contradiction may be found in an even more paradoxical form in the other example of the screen as monitor: the GPS. The Global Positioning System is also an instrument used to keep territory under observation, in order to avoid possible inconveniences and in order to take advantage of possible opportunities. We use it to stay on track and to arrive quickly at our destination, to avoid running out of gas and to locate the nearest service station, to avoid dying of hunger and to find a decent restaurant in the vicinity. The GPS may seem to represent the return of the observer; after all, its small screen is always in front of the driver’s eyes. However, the gaze elicited by the GPS differs significantly from the one traditionally linked to a screen. It is an intermittent gaze, activated only—and most often—in moments of need. It is also a gaze with multiple focal points, aimed both at the maps supplied by the kit and at the surrounding reality, which continues to be visible through the windshield and windows of the vehicle (these actual windows do still exist!). In short, it is a gaze that is largely independent from the device. In this light, GPS confirms the fact that although monitors are in constant need of new information, they do not always require an eye to scrutinize and observe them.

The second term that defines contemporary screens—replacing the metaphor of the frame, which nowadays exhibits clear limitations—is bulletin board, or even blackboard.40 In fact, on the screens that surround us, we encounter less and less frequently representations capable of restoring the texture of the world, and more and more frequently figures that function as promemoria, as signposts, and, above all, as instructions for behavior.

Let us consider screens found in waiting rooms, in stations, and in modes of public transport. Various messages pass across these surfaces: film and video clips, advertisements, tourism documentaries, and so on. Their objective is not to offer an external reality or to alleviate the sense of oppression brought on by the closed environment in which we find ourselves confined. Rather, these communications are intended to help us pass the time and to prepare us for future actions: They inform us of the approach of a train (to the station), of whose turn it is (in the waiting room), of the weather at a destination (in an airport), of the beauty of tourist destinations (in a ticket office), or of exercises to do in order to avoid discomfort (on an airplane). More than fragments of the world, these are instructions for behavior.

The same may be said for the videos in shops and malls, which display the goods for sale on the counters and shelves. Again, what is important is not what these videos depict: The merchandise is right next to them, in plain sight. What really counts is the information that accompanies the depiction of the merchandise: We see how it is used, how much it costs, where it comes from, why it is convenient, and which lifestyle it matches. It is according to this information—often evocative and emotional—that we adjust our behavior, deciding whether to purchase or not purchase the merchandise. The presence of these videos acts as a sort of veil over reality: We have ceased to look at things via their representation, and now we look instead at a set of directives aimed at us.

Even in places where we might expect a contrast, such as many homepages of institutional Web sites, images function in a similar manner. I am thinking, for example, of school or university homepages. These describe academic life with a profusion of attractive images: They reveal a whole world to the eyes of the reader. However, these illustrations act as bridges to boxes or links that offer detailed information aimed toward the various users of the site: students, professors, families, or administrators. A possible life experience is transformed into a series of announcements.

This does not mean that such a flow does not constitute “a” reality: it will not be, however, a mere physical reality in the empirical sense, but rather an overlapping of actual facts, possible actions, comments, and values. Let’s take what is called today “augmented reality”: When I point my cell phone in front of me, I see on the screen a piece of urban landscape made up of actual buildings, supplemented by indications that help me to move within the city, as well as information on edifices belonging to the past that have since disappeared, and projects for future constructions. I see a city, and a “true” city, that nevertheless is not just a reflection of an empirically existing entity, but rather a complex made up of many different types of data.

In the social networks typical of Web 2.0, such as Tumblr, this condition returns in an even more radical way. Thanks to the presence of a feed reader, the page is loaded with content lifted from elsewhere, until it forms a kind of newspaper that contains content that the user reads or is interested in. The posts of other bloggers appear on the user’s dashboard, and she may sometimes—though not always—add comments or corrections. This results in an enormous accumulation of citations, references, and sources, with a relative paucity of the user’s own interventions. The user’s personality continues to manifest itself within this accumulation, but this manifestation comes about as a result of the links to which she connects herself, much more so than as the result of what she says directly. Precisely because of this, her voice is ultimately nothing more than a montage of others’ voices—almost as if to radicalize the fundamentally hybrid and composite nature of our discourse, highlighted by Bakhtin eighty years ago.41

Even when this voice is made direct, the situation is not much altered. Twitter and Facebook (which includes, not by chance, a page called a “wall”) represent interesting examples. There is more space here for an exchange of opinions; however, any personal intervention is restricted to a few possibilities (in Facebook: “like,” “comment,” and “share”). Furthermore, this intervention is limited in space and therefore often devoid of much meaning (it is difficult to imagine that a click on the “like button” can really reveal a personality). The user’s intervention depends on the material that is continually posted on her wall (a confirmation of the fact that one’s own discourse is always an echo of the discourse of others). Finally, it reflects thoughts and opinions that are strictly dependent on the subject touched upon in a discussion: Once the subject changes, nothing hinders the emergence of other orientations, except a kind of loyalty to the objects that are “collected” and that lead each “friend” obsessively to offer what is expected of him or her.

These social networks are therefore typified by a kind of self-presentation that is based on a mosaic of material, often borrowed from others, and linked closely to contingency—or simply guided by obsession. The same mosaic may also be reassembled in order to represent other personalities (perhaps of the same individual: there is no shortage of people who live a plurality of virtual lives under different nicknames). If it evolves, it may follow a course of personal transformation (“today I am not who I was yesterday”). But often, at least it seems to me, it simply follows the progression of circumstances (“I am who I am depending on the day”). These characteristics highlight the limits of these self-presentations: Their value lies in how they are displayed, not in what they say, and while they have value for an individual, it is neither exclusive nor permanent. In light of this, we could say that in the very moment in which the social network participant presents a self-portrait, he opens the door to his own dissolution. In reality, what is lost is the traditional process of projection-identification, as described by psychologists and, for film, by Edgar Morin42: social network participants no longer find completed stories in which to recognize themselves. Rather, they live in the midst of a continual flow of data, available to them for every eventuality; they collect the material that is more meaningful and akin to them; they edit this material in a composite whole; and they make of their lives a combination.

The concept of a display may help to render an idea of this new entity better.43 The display shows, but only in the sense that it places at our disposition or makes accessible. It exhibits, but does not uncover; it offers, but does not commit. In other words, a display does not involve its images in the dialectic between visible and invisible (like a window used to do), between surfaces and structure (like a frame), or between appropriation and dispossession (like a mirror). The display simply “makes present” images. It places them in front of us, in case we may want to make use of them. It hands them to us, if you will.

The display is fully realized in the form of the touch screen. Here the eye is connected to the fingers, and it is they that signal if the observer is paying attention and, if so, what kind. Touch solicits the arrival of images, but even more so, it guides their flow: it associates them, it downloads them, and it often deletes them. It enlarges them, moves them around, and stacks them. While it is the eye that supervises the operations, it is the hand that guides them. It is the hand that calls to the images and seizes them.⁴⁴

We are beyond the old situation in which spectators were immersed in a world that surprised them and held their attention from the screen. Now, spectators surprise and grab hold of the images that scurry before them: images that are not necessarily capable of restituting an empirical reality; rather, they are oriented toward supplying data and information. They are not even addressed directly to anyone in particular: It is their flow, more than their capture, that defines them. Finally, they are tied more closely to the hand than to the eye: It is only when they are “touched” that they find their place and define their value. The display screen makes these images present. It is here that they exit the flow and come to a halt. It is here that they become simultaneously available and practicable. We literally extract them from the screen, according to a logic that mixes push and pull.45

In short, we cannot look out of a display screen, nor can we fill our eyes with it, nor can we lean out of it. Instead, we ask something of it, as at an information window. We work on it, as at a table. We wait by it, as at a bus stop. And we find ourselves in front of something that stays with us for just as long as is necessary.

Naturally, not all the screens that surround us enter fully under the rubric of the display screen. There are still moments in which the reality around us is represented to an interested and engaged observer. This may happen on the very same devices that normally seem to negate the possibility of an epiphany. Google Earth, though it offers me maps and not territories, can lead me to rediscover the pleasure of taking a walk; Photoshop, though it offers me an image of how I would like to be, may obligate me to face myself again; a video game, though it gives me the opportunity to abandon the world, may also give me the scripts and the characters to construct another one. Computers, cell phones, or tablets are still widely used for diffusing documents and investigations, for fostering public discussions, and for constructing effective communities.⁴⁶ Indeed, there is still room for direct testimony that reconnects us to an exploration and to a dialogue.

Although the contemporary media landscape is multifaceted, current tendencies are moving toward the display: a surface on which we find—when we find it—a reality that goes beyond empirical data, from the moment in which samples, information, and elements of possibility are mixed together; and a surface on which a gaze is trained—when there is one—that goes beyond the traditional poles of contemplation and analysis, from the moment in which it is accompanied by the manipulation of that which is being observed.

The epoch of the window, the frame, and the mirror is largely coming to an end.

This transformation of the screen is symptomatic of a larger transformation, which involves media in their totality. Media have long been conceived of as means of mediation between us and the world and between us and others: They serve to supply information and share it among subjects. In this sense they appeared as instruments of transmission and dialogue. This kind of idea prevails in models such as that proposed by Harold Lasswell in the 1940s,47 but it persists in the subtext of Marshall McLuhan’s reformulations of the 1960s⁴⁸ and Raymond Williams’s of the 1970s,⁴⁹ in which the emphasis is placed, respectively, on media’s abilities to extend our senses and on their abilities to elaborate cultural models. We have now entered into a new dimension. Let us take for example GPS or Wii, or even tablets and smartphones: These are primarily devices that serve to access information and services. Thanks to them we “recuperate” a series of data—perhaps without meaning to, but anytime and anywhere. Put another way, we “intercept” elements that are present in social (and virtual) space, and we utilize them in the situation in which we find ourselves, whatever it may be, only to store them away. In essence, we capture, modify, and release.

This characteristic is recognizable in all contemporary media. They invite us to “capture” something that is “available,” and which is made available again after we have used it, perhaps transformed by our intervention. We are no longer in the sphere of a proper communicative exchange; there are no hand-offs or confrontations, transitions, or transactions. There is a circulation of information in which we must immerse ourselves; media are the essential components of this circulation. They function as nexuses of interconnected circuits. They store data so that we may avail ourselves of them. They permit us to modify the situation in which we find ourselves, and they help us to construct new situations with data. They allow us to adapt what we find. And finally, they relaunch these same data, after they have been used and adapted, within these various circuits. In short, media are places in which information in unremitting movement is downloaded and then uploaded to continue on its trajectory.

Such an orientation may be confirmed in the growing success of applications such as feed readers: These are programs aimed both at supplying users with a continual stream of fresh data and at aggregating these data among themselves. Another confirmation may be found in practices such as Web harvesting: research in the forest of data that arrive or that may arrive, in order to comb through them, keep them in view, and eventually stow them away. In both cases, the objective is to acquire, assemble, and archive the information that is circulating—in order to then make it available to whoever might be connected.

I do not know if we may call this “communication” precisely. I repeat: We are no longer primarily dealing with messages addressed to specific individuals or encounters between people. Of course, there still exists the space for announcements and dialogues; but above all, there is an enormous mass of data that circulates through the air, so to speak, and that occasionally halts and then takes off again.50 Media are the instruments of a slackening of speed—as well as of an acceleration—of this perpetual motion. Thanks to them, we may “block” something here in front of us, to then “relaunch” it—which is to say, we download it and then upload it. In so doing, we place ourselves at a transit point, rendering our experience that of an ephemeral place.

The same goes—and above all—for visual media. Contrary to a long tradition of “realism,” the image is no longer engendered by facts; rather, it is born of an amalgamation of elements that are concretized according to the circumstances. And even when the image is the product of a live recording, it remains part of an information flow that makes it available for new combinations and new circumstances. The image is an aggregate of provisory data and an entity in continual movement, responsive to momentary needs, ongoing discourses, and up-to-the-minute rhetoric. It is not important from whence the image comes, but rather that it circulates and that it can pause somewhere to then take off again.

Vilém Flusser has offered an effective portrait of this situation: Written ahead of its time, and in a somewhat prophetic tone, it is proving to be consistent with what is currently happening. He begins with the observation that the reality that surrounds us has crumbled into fragments: “The world in which [people] find themselves can no longer be counted and explained: it has disintegrated into particles—photons, quanta, electromagnetic particles. [. . .] Even their own consciousness, their thought, desires, values, have disintegrated into particles, into bits of information, a mass that can be calculated.”51 This state does not impede us from forming an image of the world; however, this image can no longer be based on a depiction capable of tracing the contours of things (an Imagination in German). Rather, it must emerge from a calculated montage of fragments, from an envision (an Einbildungskraft, in German). “The whirling particles around us and in us must be gathered onto surfaces; they must be envisioned.”⁵² This is what constitutes media: They block the whirlwind of data and they recompose them into new figures. They accomplish this mechanically, following preprogrammed automatisms, from which it is difficult to depart. And they do so blindly, offering up various combinations, some of which are completely unpredictable. This is another reason why the images they supply (which Flusser calls technical images, to distinguish them from traditional ones)⁵³ no longer constitute evidence strictly speaking. Nevertheless, that which media present to us continues to concern reality: It is not, however, an already formed world, but rather it is a world in formation. And it does not contain exclusively factual elements, rather it also—and above all—contains elements of possibility.⁵⁴ In light of this, technical images, although they cannot be considered either true or false,⁵⁵ bring us closer to things. They allow us to emerge from the abstraction into which the world is flung; they return to us some meaning; they lend themselves to some project.⁵⁶ They continue to speak to us, but from inside a continual and unstable wandering.

I would add that the effectiveness of these images depends on how and where they appear. Above all, the situation is decisive—a situation that the images find and simultaneously shape. It is one thing if images materialize on my computer, only for me, in an interstice of my daily life; it is quite another if they are displayed on a public screen in front of a crowd gathered for an event. Similarly, it is one thing if images reference distant events, which I follow, perhaps even with great concentration, but disinterestedly; it is quite another if they refer to my surroundings, in which I can, or perhaps must, intervene. And finally, it is one thing if images remain trapped in a schema or formula on a screen, while it is quite another if theirs is simply a temporary stopover open to ulterior developments. I am thinking, for instance, of the images of the Arab Spring: It makes quite a bit of difference whether they reappeared on the screens of Times Square for the benefit of curious passers-by or on the smartphones of the crowd gathered in Tahrir Square. In essence, if it is true that the destiny of these images is to be permanently in transit, it is also of essential importance when and where they land. Their force, meaning, and even their political value are determined in great part by their location.57

We no longer find ourselves faced with an exchange, but a circulation; no longer in front of a merely factual reality, but a reality born of a recombination of information packets. We are dealing with a whirlwind of data, which occasionally pauses only to reconstitute itself and set off again; but also with presences that manifest themselves here before us, and therefore can still communicate to us about the world. This is precisely the media landscape that we must now confront—and the display screen is its perfect emblem.

Cinema undoubtedly represents a point of resistance with respect to the process that I have attempted to describe in the preceding pages, for at least three good reasons. First of all, cinema is still largely the prisoner of a tradition that sees it as the closest art to reality. Cinema continues to be, both in the collective imaginary and in the intentions of its authors, a trace of the world: Its images, even when they serve to narrate fiction, continue to possess a strong documentary value. Second, cinema still carries with it the dream of an organic unity. The stories that it offers are aimed at constructing structured worlds that are dense and coherent: for as much as a film makes space for randomness, what it shows us always reveals a strong consistency. Third, cinema is still based on a system of distribution. Films are spread along pre-established routes and arrive at predetermined points. It is true that it is becoming increasingly easy to find films everywhere—and recuperate them through legal and illegal practices—but there is not yet a “whirlwind” of images, as has happened online for other types of products.

The weight of a tradition of realism, the strength of narration, and the directionality of distribution: Cinema seems to channel images and conduct them—toward a reference, toward a text, toward a well-established addressee—in an era inclined to leave the circulation of data open. However, this characteristic does not confine cinema to the margins of the great media transformation currently under way. On the contrary, it proves useful by demonstrating some contradictions in the contemporary panorama.

First, even if we do not trust images as we did in the past, there still exists a need for truth. It emerges from many small, personal artifacts posted on YouTube, whether they be the documentation of a childish prank or the cell-phone camera footage of some historical event. The same need has inspired such strange Web sites as photoshopdisasters.com, motivated by the desire to point out the distortions perpetrated by Photoshop users, mostly in advertisements. The persistent success of movies inspired by “true stories” (ever more opposed to the trend toward fantasy), and the increasing role played now by the documentary (in its different forms, by a Werner Herzog, a Michael Moore, or an Errol Morris), bears witness to how film directly touches upon one of the most problematic contrasts in contemporary media.

Second, even if there is an increasing presence of “short forms,” from clips to advertisements, the need for stories is still vital. We see evidence of this in the flourishing genre of neo-epics in the mold of Tolkien and Marvel superheroes, in which the vicissitudes of the characters wind along seemingly infinite paths. And we also see it in video games, both those fantastical in nature (the parameters of which are basically “realistic”) and those inspired by history (in which a past verdict may be reversed, as long as the new narration remains consistent). Cinema, with its strong and everlasting vocation for storytelling, serves as a testament to the resistance against the death of the great narratives.⁵⁸

Third, even if circuits are always open, there still exists the need for an actual, concrete reception. This need is evidenced in the desire to feel involved in what one watches that emerges from some particularly politically engaged areas of social networks, or from the systematic count of viewers and their comments that accompany the videos posted on YouTube, or from the conversion of virtual contacts into actual encounters, often stubbornly hoped for and celebrated on Facebook. Cinema, again, through the request of strong attention to images, and through the presence of specific venues where it can be enjoyed, attests to the need for effective experiences.

Here, cinema drops its claim to “channeling” images; instead, it limits itself to “localizing” them, supplying them with some modalities of stylistic or narrative reorganization, and especially with a place in which to offer them to someone’s gaze. In other words, it gives the images a definite—but not definitive—“how” and “where”: a “how” and “where” that delineate the situation within which the images can operate, while also allowing them to conserve all their mobility and potential. Localization does exactly this: It arrests circulating images for a moment; it makes them converse with a context that they, in pausing, create around themselves; and it gives them meaning through this conversation, without, however, eradicating other possibilities for meaning.