ANNA, NANA, NICOLE
Anna and Nicole make arrangements to meet each other at the movies. Unexpectedly, they end up at different theaters: Anna to watch Vivre sa vie (1962) by Jean Luc Godard, and Nicole to watch The Adjuster (1991) by Atom Egoyan. Anna contacts Nicole with an SMS from her mobile phone, and Nicole receives the text and responds. In the Godard film that Anna is watching, the protagonist, Nana, has just entered a cinema where Carl Dreyer’s La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) is being shown. Another spectator sits next to Nana, more interested in her than in the movie. At the same moment, in the film that Nicole is watching, the protagonist, Hera, is in a film theater and is approached by a man. Nana continues to watch La passion de Jeanne d’Arc: A monk played by Antonin Artaud aggressively interrogates Jeanne, who replies; Nana is moved to tears. Anna, instead, who sees these same images within Godard’s film, is struck by the beauty of Artaud: She records the scene with the camera on her mobile phone and sends it to Nicole, who then finds herself following a second film, in addition to the one she paid to see. As the word mort is pronounced in the film that Nicole is watching on her mobile, the scene of a great bonfire from The Adjuster flashes across the screen.
Artaud Double Bill,1 by Atom Egoyan, is a film that in three minutes creates a neat construction of interlinking elements. There are two present-day spectators, Anna and Nicole, who are sitting in two separate theaters but who participate in each other’s film-going experience. They watch two films, Vivre sa vie and The Adjuster, which belong to two different phases of cinema history, but which both make reference to what is happening in front of a screen. The clip of La passion de Jeanne d’Arc included in Vivre sa vie is seen by two spectators at different times, Nana in the 1960s and Anna in the early 2000s, with different reactions. In the films that Anna and Nicole watch separately, there are events, such as the sexual aggression or the bonfire, which transit from one to the other. Moreover, we see a mobile phone screen that extends the cinematic screen by capturing and transmitting it. And there are the words, in the text message, which describe what the two friends are watching.2 These interlinking elements—underlined by a set of explicitly related names, Anna, Nana, Jeanne, each one echoing the other as in an anagram or in a portmanteau word3—create a sensation of dizziness: The world seems to vacillate, and we risk becoming lost in it. But from the series of situations that reflect each other reciprocally, there emerge some precise indications of what it might mean to see a film in a movie theater nowadays.
TO WATCH A FILM
Let us follow the triangle composed of Anna, Nana, and Nicole, attentive to the divergences that seem to establish themselves between Anna and Nana, spectators of the same film though on different levels and in different epochs, and to the convergences that seem to occur between Anna and Nicole, spectators of different films, but anxious to establish common ground.
The first trait that strikes us is that if Nana, in Godard’s film, watches Dreyer’s film only, Anna, in Egoyan’s film, finds herself in front of a more complex object. She sees Godard’s film, and inside of that, Dreyer’s: She is the spectator of a double set of images. She sees La passion de Jeanne d’Arc by Dreyer, but she also sees Nana who is watching the same images: She is the spectator of an act of vision. Furthermore, she sees something in Godard’s film—Nana approached by another spectator—which also takes place in the film being watched by her friend, and is perhaps experienced by her friend, as well: She is the spectator of a story that has an ulterior development. Finally, Anna watches a movie and simultaneously sends and reads messages on her mobile phone: She is spectator as well as writer and reader. Nicole, her alter ego, finds herself in an analogous position: She too sees her film and the clip of Dreyer’s that Anna sends to her; she too sees things seen by others and things that complete others (the bonfire that overlaps Jeanne’s death sentence); and she too sees, writes, and reads.
The fact is that Nana, on the one hand, and Anna and Nicole, on the other, measure themselves by two different objects. The word film does not mean the same thing to them. For Nana, it is a single and well-defined work: it is this film, and not another, to be enjoyed directly and on its own. For Anna and Nicole, instead, film is a discourse that hosts other discourses, that collaborates with other discourses, and that generates other discourses. It is this film, but it could also be a different one, which is to be encountered, perhaps thanks to someone else’s mediation. It is a series of images that pushes one to write a text message reflecting what one is watching. It is also a set of events that is taken up again or is completed in other films, or perhaps, in life. And it is a catalog of generic situations (the orgy, the bonfire) easily made into a completely personal album of images (in Anna’s case the close-up of Artaud). In essence, if Nana, the traditional spectator, still confronts a text, then the two modern spectators confront a hypertext4 with its various components, its links and its expansions. Better still, what Anna and Nicole face is a network of social discourses, which aligns and embeds different occurrences, genres, regimes, and within which the film, in the strict sense of the word, can play a relevant but certainly not exclusive role.5
The second trait involves not the object of the spectator’s vision but its modality. Nana directs her interest completely toward the film she is seeing: She is all eyes. Anna, instead, displays a multiple attitude: She follows the film, but in the meantime she concerns herself with finding out where her friend ended up; she writes what she feels as she watches Vivre sa vie; she isolates a detail of the film; she captures it on her mobile phone; she displays her passion for the cinema, and so on. In essence, while Nana centralizes her sight, Anna decentralizes it.
This decentralization has something in common with the distracted perception that Benjamin attributes to the cinema, and which, after Benjamin, was attributed to television.6 Here we are at the opposite extreme from that contemplation that the old work of art seemed to demand, and we are closer to a more casual, less involved engagement, which contemporary media ask us to develop. In this sense, using the respective terms of John Ellis and Stanley Cavell, we can say that Anna and Nicole do not reserve for the cinema a gaze in the strict sense, but rather glances7; and they do not commit themselves to a viewing, but rather to a kind of monitoring.8 In doing so, however, the two women do not withhold their attention; rather, they direct it toward a plurality of objects and practices. They follow the story but they abandon some of the details; they pay attention to the film but also to their mobile phones; they react to the images but also to what is around them. Therefore, truth be told, they are not distracted, they simply multiply their centers of attention; they pass from one source to another; and they modulate their gazes. Put simply, they activate a multitasking form of attention.9 In doing so, they stop short of re-sacralizing the film in front of them (which is what Nana does, rousing herself to contemplate that world that opens up before her eyes). They look at it just as they would look at any one of many objects they come across in their lifeworld, something to pick up now and put down later.
As for the third trait, Nana not only concentrates on the film she is watching but also immerses herself in it. Through an explicit play of identifications and projections, the protagonist of Vivre sa vie penetrates the story recounted by Dreyer to the point of feeling a part of it. The consequence of this is catharsis. We see it in the tears that streak down her face as she reads the intertitle mort: Nana sees her own destiny in that of Joan of Arc; she cries for herself as she cries for la pucelle. Anna, instead, remains on the surface of what she sees: She grasps the details that interest her, isolating the rest, and she sends them to her friend. Far from immersing herself in the film, she slides over it, wave after wave, engaging in a sort of surfing.10 Any kind of catharsis is therefore avoided: Anna neither identifies with nor projects herself onto Jeanne or Nana; she remains herself, distant and distinct from the characters in front of her.11 If anything, she experiences an aesthetic realization: She is struck by the beauty of Antonin Artaud. However, this is an epidermic reaction, in the sense that it causes a sensation, not meaning. Therefore, it keeps at a distance a true identification with what is shown. In essence, Anna watches, but what she sees does not pertain to her.
In this regard, following Roland Barthes, we can say that Anna is a spectator who does not succeed in gluing herself to the screen.12 She does not enter into the diegetic world of the film; at most, she crosses it. She does not take part in the story; at most she takes a part of it. The circumstances do not help her: Her friend’s absence is weighing on her mind, and the need to contact her is distracting. This concern also alienates Anna from the environment. The urgency to call the friend detaches her both from what happens on the screen and from what happens in front of it: The life in the movie theater does not appeal to her. To continue using Barthes’ terms, Anna neither “glues” herself to the represented world nor “takes off” from it in order to add the charm of the theater to the charm of the movie: She remains unstuck from both. The consequence is a loss of the rituality of vision: The latter is now occasional, provisional, and irregular. To watch a film becomes an adventure without a firm foundation.
The fourth trait concerns the movie theater. Nana seeks a kind of refuge in the cinema: She enters it in order to isolate herself from the external world, to escape from her daily routine. In doing so, she falls into a trap: By watching Dreyer’s film, she discovers that she too is destined to die. However, this illumination is allowed her exactly because she momentarily distanced herself from her universe: only a completely other character, such as Jeanne, can make her understand what awaits her. Anna, on the other hand, entered the theater in order to spend some time with her friend: Cinema is not an alternative to, but a continuation of, her daily world. Therefore, when she realizes that her friend has not joined her, she immediately puts herself in contact with Nicole: Precisely because the movie theater is a prolongation of the outside world, it is also a locale from which one can get in touch with others. It is not surprising, then, that what appears on the screen can migrate elsewhere: In fact, the close-up of Artaud, captured by Anna, ends up on Nicole’s mobile phone; the sexual aggression alluded to in Vivre sa vie also takes place in The Adjuster; and the fire to which Jeanne is condemned spreads in the film seen by Nicole. However, none of these correspondences turns out to be decisive. While Jeanne’s death sentence reveals to Nana the meaning of her life, these echoes appear to Anna and Nicole as mere cues to consider. They are splinters of an imaginary at everyone’s disposal, linked to one another by a chain that is more random than mysterious.
In other words, Nana’s movie theater is a site marked by a separation from the universe we live in; in it we encounter a reality that clearly lies beyond the usual one. This reality, however, reveals itself to be an ideal version of the one we are living in. It is thus a fenced-in space, offering a catwalk toward another world, from which we can draw resources for our world. The theater of Anna and Nicole, meanwhile, plays out differently: It lacks a true fence, being a space that belongs to the everyday world; even though there are openings to universes different from the one we live in, we are never called upon to cross any true thresholds beyond which we could discover ourselves; the elements with which we confront ourselves represent possible events, not interpretations of our condition; and finally these elements are accessible to many other spectators, no matter the film they are watching. In essence, Nana’s theater circumscribes an audience that rediscovers on the screen the essence of its own life, thanks to a representation that seems far-removed from reality. Anna’s and Nicole’s theater holds together a dispersed audience, more similar to a television audience or to the participants in a social network—an audience that engages with images that do not necessarily function as revelations, but which can be accessed even at a distance, and whose significance may be gathered at any point along the network of spectators.
Let me summarize these initial findings. If we focus on Nana on the one hand, and on Anna and Nicole on the other, we discover two different ideas of film-going—and two different idea of cinema. What was a text gives way to a hypertext or to a network of social discourses; a centralized gaze switches to a decentralized glance; the possibility of immersing oneself in the story is replaced by the necessity of remaining on the surface; a closed space that circumscribes a public becomes a more open space, which functions like a junction of an ideal network; the representation of a world fully other, which, however, speaks to the real world, is supplanted by the representation of a possible world, which can locate its realization anywhere. Artaud Double Bill, triangulating Nana, Anna, and Nicole, reminds us what it was to watch a film in the past, and what it has become in the present. So what full lesson can we draw from the portrait offered to us by Egoyan?
FROM ATTENDANCE TO PERFORMANCE
Looking at what is happening in cinema—and to cinema—it is clear that we have reached the end of a model that has been dominant for a long time: the model that conceived of the spectator as attending a film. To attend means to place ourselves in front of something that does not necessarily depend on us, but of which we find ourselves to be the witnesses. What is important is to be present at an event, and to open our eyes to it, both in order to be able to accept it, as with a gift, and to be able to acquire it, as with a conquest.13 Today, this model is no longer very relevant. Watching a film increasingly involves a series of preparatory acts, actions of maintenance, and choices between different alternatives or parallel movements. Spectators can—and often must—intervene upon the object of their vision, the environment in which they move, and even their very selves, as if it they had the responsibility to manage or even to direct the situation.
Let us consider the case of a screening in a movie theater: Spectators still pay for a ticket, sit down, and wait for the film, but increasingly they must also find the venue, book a seat, sometimes go to a neighboring town, and be on time—in addition to all that Anna had to do. Moreover, let us consider the use of new devices like the home theater, the laptop, the DVD player, the tablet, and even the smartphone: Each device implies a set of specific actions, like tuning into to a particular channel, buying a DVD, subscribing to premium channels, grabbing some apps, downloading a movie from the Internet, and so forth. On these new devices, spectators may also modulate the times and places of viewing; in particular, on a DVD player, a movie may be watched in its entirety, but also in fragments, either delaying its conclusion or jumping to the main scenes. If in the former case one can abandon herself to a sort of passive viewing, in the latter one continually has to manipulate the device, regulating the flow of the film in accordance with what she wishes to see. Spectators can also fulfill different goals: A film can serve to satisfy a desire for spectacle, but it can also simply kill time during a trip or capture the curiosity of a Web surfer. Especially in the latter cases, viewing is deeply affected by what happens around the viewer, and it can take different paths according to the circumstances. Lastly, a film can be an object of vision, but also a collectible, a cult object,14 or something to be manipulated or exchanged through file-sharing programs. Each of these cases mobilizes further kinds of actions.
The presence of options where once there was standard practice, the necessity of establishing the rules of the game where once they were implicit, the strong connection with one’s own world where once there was a separation, the widening of perspective where once the field was bounded—these are all elements that testify to how much the framework has changed.15 If traditional spectators once modeled themselves on films, spectators now model films, or remodel them onto themselves, thanks to a combination of precise practices that affect the object, the modalities, and the conditions of vision. The effect is that the spectators become the active protagonists of the game, even if they continue to be its pawns. They are no longer asked to be present at a projection with eyes wide open, just reacting to the film or to the environment; instead, they must act to make their own viewing possible. Attendance has ceded the field to performance.16
PRACTICES OF VISION
Among the current practices involved in watching a film, some might seem traditional if they were not also angled in a new direction; some others are quite new, even if sometimes they bring us back to early cinema and pre-cinema.
For example, we continue to engage in a cognitive doing, which allows us to interpret what we see; this interpretation, however, no longer follows the film step by step, but takes its own independent paths. In particular, especially when spectators watch an episode of a franchise, they try to reconstruct a “map” of the main characters, to move at ease on the field of the game. In this case, they adopt a sort of “explorative” attitude. Inversely, especially when watching a DVD, spectators look ahead, mentally storing up elements for future film viewing. In this case, the attitude is “selective.” In both situations, more than following a movie step by step, spectators “test” what they find in front of them in order to best orient themselves. This interpretation in the form of a test can also affect the viewing environment or situation: The spectator often asks himself how and why to watch a certain film, and the response informs his subsequent action.
The same goes for the emotional doing. Films have always touched their spectators.17 Today, however, affective components connected to the watching of a film seem to acquire an abnormal weight. Cinema is characterized by a greater “force of attraction” than other media; we expect it to strongly engage its spectator. The growing use of special effects, as well as the increasingly frequent construction of parallel worlds offered by superhero films or epics like The Lord of the Rings, seem to meet this demand. When a film is then enjoyed on another device, it often seems to absorb some of the emotions associated with that device as well: the pleasure of liveness particular to television or the pleasure of navigation particular to the Web.
In other cases, performance broadens the range of action of traditional practices, rather than transforming them. Take for example relational doing: The spectator has always been a social being who interacts with other spectators. Today, especially outside of the cinema, when he is seemingly alone, the spectator pushes his relation action further: a group with whom his own experience can be shared is constructed, through a system of contacts that accompany or follow viewing, whether over the telephone or through Twitter messages.18
However, the performance also and most importantly involves new levels of doing. For example, there is a technological doing, where access to the film is not direct, as it is in a movie theater, but instead mediated by a device that the spectator must activate (such is the case with home theater, DVD player, tablet, or computer) or by a channel or an app thanks to which the spectator chooses what to watch and how to watch it (VOD, Hulu, Netflix, MySky, and so on). In either case, a specific competence is required in order to complete a series of operations on the device. I will not describe these technological practices here, which include subscribing to a contract, buying an app, setting up a device, coordinating different devices, moving from a device to another to watch the same movie, and even manipulating the parameters of an image: It suffices to look at a blog like AskJack hosted by the newspaper the Guardian (www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack) or google “how to watch a movie on my iPad/on airplane/on my DVD player,” and so forth, to have an idea of how rich and complex this field is.19 I would simply note that the modern spectator is required far less to have a cinematic competence than a media competence.
We might also note an expressive doing: While the experience of watching certain cult films, such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Star Wars, has often been accompanied by dressing in costume, today self-display is also celebrated via a spectator’s blog post or a message on a social network, in which one recounts one’s personal reactions to what one is seeing or has seen.20
There is a textual doing, determined by the fact that spectators increasingly enjoy the possibility of manipulating a film, not only in the sense of adjusting it to one’s own vision (as when one maintains or changes the video format of a display, choosing to watch a film in high or low definition, for example), but also in the sense of deliberate intervention21 (as happens with the re-edited and dubbed film clips that populate YouTube; and yet it is worth remembering that the practice of versioning was usual during the classical age of cinema).22
Finally, performance implies a new sensory doing. In addition to sight and hearing, we increasingly find ourselves involving our other senses,23 especially touch: In order to watch a movie on a DVD player or a computer, one must intervene with one’s own hand. The action of the hands is particularly interesting. To schematize things a bit, we could say that we have a first moment, that of the VCR or DVD player, in which the spectator is required to push buttons that allow him to begin his viewing or to modify its flow through leaps backwards and forwards, pauses, slowing down, and so forth. On the computer these buttons become a keyboard, which is even more integrated with the screen. The computer is constructed to align hand and eye: I command with the first, and verify the success of my action with the second. The mouse adds another step to this integration: The paths of the cursor on the screen, which I follow with my eye, are just like the ones that I trace on my desk, moving the device with my hand. The touch screen represents a further step forward, incorporating the keyboard into the screen: I directly touch the surface from which what I want to see emerges. I no longer even need the mouse: My finger directly creates the paths of the cursor, and thereby serves as a substitute for it. The final step is one in which I can directly manipulate the shapes on the screen without any sort of keyboard whatsoever; I touch them, and they generate information, as in augmented reality. The world that was once offered up to my eyes is now offered to my hands as well. Tactility, which cinema evoked,24 and which in some sense brings us back to pre-cinema, when spectators needed to rotate the praxinoscope or flip through the pages of a flip book in order to have a moving image, here finds its full realization.
PERFORMER AND BRICOLEUR
The presence of this wide spectrum of practices makes the spectator a true performer: someone who constructs his own viewing conditions, bringing himself to bear directly upon them. The traditional model of attendance already implied an active spectator. As Richard C. Allen reminds us, “We tend to talk of films being ‘screened’ as if the only thing going on in a movie theatre were light being bounced off a reflective surface. Obviously, at a number of levels there is much more going on during a film viewing situation than that.”25 The new model of performance implies something more: an activity aimed at building the very possibility of the experience of cinema. This experience is no longer linked to a prearranged “machine”; rather, it emerges in a range of very different contexts, which call for intervention to be put in working order. It is the spectator who carries out this intervention, through a series of actions that are now entrusted to him. He must create the experience that he wants to have.
In this intervention, beyond mobilizing his own competencies, the spectator must also take account of the resources available to him. Where can he find the film that he wants to see? Does he have free time or does he need to use the intervals between one activity and another? What devices can he use? How can they be implemented? How can he bring his viewing activity into agreement with other imperatives that he must fulfill? While it was sufficient for the traditional spectator to go into a cinema to find everything he needed, now he literally has to put together the pieces of different components for his viewing. In this sense, he is not only a performer, but also a bricoleur: someone who constructs what he needs by taking advantage of a series of opportunities and materials, combining them together and finding the best arrangement.
The reference to bricolage was used (and criticized) in media theory during the 1980s,26 and later, in the first decade of the new millennium, it was replaced by concepts such as Pro-Am or “produsage.”27 To go back to the bricoleur could look like an out-fashioned move. And yet if we look at the practices of many present-day spectators, we cannot avoid recalling Lévi-Strauss’s pages on this topic. “The ‘bricoleur’ is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks: but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of the raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project.”28 The bricoleur does not wait to have everything that he needs; rather, he takes his resources from whatever situation he finds himself in. In this sense he is still, we might say, an “occasional” subject. But he is also a creative one: “He has to turn back to an already existent set made up of tools and materials, to consider or reconsider what it contains and, finally and above all, to engage in a sort of dialogue with it, and, before choosing between them, to index the possible answers which the whole set can offer to his problem.”29 The bricoleur does not have ready-made solutions; he invents them in the moment. Finally, his actions are a direct sign of his personality: “The bricoleur also, and indeed principally, derives his poetry from the fact that he does not confine himself to accomplishment and execution: he speaks not only with things, but also through the medium of the things; giving an account of his personality and life by the choices he makes between the limited possibilities.”30
The new spectator is equally occasional, creative, and personal. He too puts together the pieces that a situation offers to him, looks to identify a solution based on what is available to him, and at the same time develops a behavior that he can consider his own. He is Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur (and sometimes, when he more openly defies the customary rules, a bit like de Certeau’s poacher).31
Of course, very often the liberty and creativity of the contemporary spectators are more apparent than real. The industry is perfectly willing to furnish them in the easiest way possible with the resources they need, just as it is prepared to standardize even the most experimental paths that they take. Furthermore, their action often reveals itself as a simple function of a “do-it-yourself” type of marketing: The products they acquire already foresee their doings. Finally, alongside the activism of the few stands a mass of spectators who still like to watch films in the most simple and relaxed way possible. The bricoleur, then, is at times only the avant-garde of mass consumption. The fact remains, though, that the contemporary spectator is one who systematically “makes do” with what he has. And it is with him that we now must reckon.
In this brief description of the new spectator, we have inevitably slid away from the movie theater and into other spaces, encountering other devices and surpassing the very confines of vision. To see a film is no longer a localized activity, and it is no longer just a scopic activity. It is a doing that leaps beyond the presence of a big screen and which goes beyond the mere opening of one’s eyes.32 It is interesting to note how the most innovative aspects of the new spectatorship seem to arise from practices developed outside the theater and outside the strict confines of vision and are instead closer to the new screens that dominate the media landscape: digital television, computer, tablet, mobile phone, and media façade.
Let us take, for example, the act of exploration, which responds more to a need for orientation than a need for comprehension. There is no doubt that it arises from contact with the multichannel television that we browse with our remote control, searching for what we want. Let us also consider the act of storing, which leads us to put in reserve particularly interesting portions of films. Its origin is undoubtedly to be found in certain fan practices: Thanks to image-capturing devices, such as the video recorder, fans can construct and exchange highly personalized image albums.33 Let us also consider emotional doing, which revolves around a strong intensification of feeling. Its background may be found in the presence of an enormous quantity of stimuli both in the world of media and in the urban environment. These are stimuli that ask us to refine our tuning, and yet also force us into a kind of isolation from the world, with the effect in both cases of definitively forcing us out of the traditional dimension of the sublime.
As for the ability to choose what one wants to see, this takes us back, for example, to the public’s growing capacity to move strategically online, in search of more salient content and information, while the diffusion of mobile platforms, which allow for watching anywhere and anytime, strengthens the public’s ability to liberate itself from the obligations imposed by programming.34 The act of manipulation, which allows spectators to intervene in the means of their own vision, is born from the use of devices like the home theater, which require continuous regulation and maintenance. Relational doing, which involves spectators’ construction of their own groups, is born instead from the progressive growth of social networks. These social networks also feed into the act of expression, which leads to the construction and exposition of oneself: It is on YouTube that social subjects have experienced in depth the pleasure of the self-narration and the possibility of marketing themselves. Finally, textual doing is undoubtedly nourished by the possibility of capturing what one sees and relocating it to one’s own computer thanks to low-cost applications.
In essence, today’s filmic spectators find their gym and their school outside of the movie theater. It is far from the cinema and its canonical spaces that these new spectators now seem to be formed
THE SPECTATOR: NO LONGER EXISTING AND STILL EXISTING
Even so, we are still dealing with a filmic spectator. His focus continues to be the cinema, or at least what he still experiences as cinema. Laura Mulvey has devoted a fine analysis to forms of viewing linked to DVD and video, which allow us to view the film in order and as a whole, but also accelerated, in slow motion, forwards and backwards, or on pause. This is a delicate issue: Jacques Aumont claims, with some reason, that one of the characters that define the experience of cinema is an uninterrupted and completed vision. Film is something to be watched in its succession and in its integrity.35 Mulvey provides another answer: Her analysis highlights how the spectator tends to take on new profiles, while still remaining indebted to the classical model. As for the new profiles, Mulvey identifies two emerging types. The first is that of a “possessive spectator,” who through the slowing, halting, and reorganization of the film’s flow has the illusion of dominating the film he is watching: “As the film is delayed and thus fragmented from linear narrative into favourite moments or scenes, the spectator is able to hold on to, to possess, the previously elusive image.”36 The second type is one that Mulvey, following Bellour, calls the “pensive spectator.”37 In this case, the disturbance of the film’s flow provokes a kind of self-reflexive movement, which allows the spectator to understand better the nature of the film and the way that it brings together the camera’s gaze, that of the characters, and that of the film’s addressee: “This pause for the spectator, usually ‘hurried’ by the movement both of film and narrative, opens a space for consciousness of the still frame within the moving image.”38 Mulvey notes how these two types represent a break with traditional viewing: narration tends to disappear, single frames take on an autonomous life, and the body of the star takes on an unusual density. Even so, the new sorts of fascination offered by film have their roots in older ones: We continue to deal with voyeurism, fetishism, a will to dominate, and so forth. In fact, the new modalities of spectatorial experience seem first and foremost to aid the film in making its meanings emerge: “By slowing down, freezing or repeating images, key moments and meanings become visible that could not have been perceived when hidden under the narrative flow and the movement of the film.”39 Furthermore, these images bring to light the mechanisms through which cinema has always functioned, and albeit in a somewhat perverse way, reveal its nature. In this sense, the new spectator is not “against” cinema, but rather prolongs its history: “Out of a pause or delay in normal cinematic time, the body of narrative film can find new modes of spectatorship.”40
It is quite clear that the oscillation between no longer being and still being a film spectator largely depends on cinema’s intermingling with other media. As we have seen, the new spectator faces a large set of options: Differently from the past, when the institution of cinema largely predetermined contents, modes, and spaces of a vision, the new spectator can choose the device and the modality through which she watches a film, taking advantage of different possibilities, and often working on them (her viewing—which is something that involves much more than a visual activity—depends on her). In this sense, the new spectator is primarily a media user, capable of distractedly moving between different devices and prepared to defy their normal functioning in search of new possibilities for action. I would add that, like the media user, the new cinematic spectator can have the illusion of a total freedom of action—even though the reality of media is one of always preregulated action, to which anomalous behaviors quickly become supplemental options, like those filters in Photoshop that allow one to make “ugly” or faulty images. Yet despite the extent to which the new spectator is indebted to the media user (Tara McPherson has illustrated several new “ways of being” that come about on the Web),41 she continues to be a film spectator. What happens is not only that the object of her experiences remains a film, even though sometimes in a new format; instead, the principal elements driving her experience are largely borrowed from traditional ones. Despite its being transformed and mixed with other demands, we still find the pleasure of encountering reality, of following a story, of giving concreteness to our fantasy, and of being able to transform an individual experience into a collective one.
Anna is a media user: not only because she distractedly uses her telephone, but also because of the environment that she, like all of us, operates in. But she is also a film spectator, however different from Nana. She has all of the same competencies and emotions. And, what’s more, she still goes to the cinema.
RELOCATION AND RE-RELOCATION
Let us pause for a moment over this aspect of Artaud Double Bill, which we seem to have set aside. Atom Egoyan gives us two modern-day spectators who watch a film in a seemingly anomalous way, bring behaviors more closely related to those generated by other media to their viewing, but nonetheless watch the film in a movie theater. What Artaud Double Bill celebrates, then, is not only the affirmation of new ways of enjoying movies, but also a kind of return to the motherland.
If it is true that cinema is no more exclusively identified with the darkened theater, theaters still exist, and even flourish. The new practices of vision, whose birthplace is to be found in other environments and in proximity to other media, are quick to flow into the traditional home of the movies, and consequently contaminate and reconfigure the traditional forms of the filmic experience.
Just imagine the groups of spectators that meet up at the cinema after an intense exchange of e-mails or telephone calls, worthy of a social network; or the vibrating of numerous mobile phones in silent mode during the movie, maintaining contact with the outside world; or the increasingly frequent distribution upon entering the theater of reviews and commentaries, almost as part of an effort to create a multimedia product. Or consider the continuation of the movie in the form of post-film discussions, as one appends one’s commentary on a blog; or the purchase of a DVD of a movie that one has just seen, to be watched repeatedly at home. The extra-filmic and extra-theatrical practices that are emerging are ready to be reinserted within the context of the theater, thus renewing the traits of the filmic experience. Consequently, watching a film becomes a performance even within the temple of attendance.
I will use the term re-relocation for this return to the motherland of a cinema that has already migrated to new environments and to new devices, and now takes a step back. In leaving the movie theater, cinema gave film experience the chance to keep on living, albeit in a new way; coming back to the movie theater, cinema contaminates the previous model of experience with the new characteristics that it has acquired elsewhere. Re-relocation signifies precisely a double movement: the departure from the movie theater in search of new territory (relocation); and the return to the theater enriched by a new patrimony (the “re-” added to the relocation).
This double movement, back and forth, highlights the emergence of a complex game board. There are indeed film theaters that not only host new viewing practices but also develop them. I am thinking of the film theaters that increasingly offer operas broadcasted from opera houses such as the Metropolitan or sports events also broadcasted live. These offerings—the former “sanctifies” the environment, while the latter “popularizes” it—transform the theater into a sort of “platform” on which we can find different contents to be enjoyed through different rituals.42 The movie theater becomes a bit less cinematic than it was before—and it is for this reason that it is prepared to welcome a cinema that, in the meantime, has mixed itself with other media. And yet there are also traditional theaters that wish to remain such and refuse the introduction of new forms of viewing, in the name of a rite that cannot be changed. This is what happens particularly during ceremonial situations, such as a festival, a debut, or a film series aimed at true cinephiles, during which the spectator is invited to attend a film and nothing else. In parallel, there are the new environments toward which the cinema converges, to reach a new stage in its history, even if in a different mood; this is the migration extensively explored in these pages. Even if physically different from film theaters, these new environments sometimes try to look like them: This is the case with the home theater, in which spectators watch a film seated on a couch, with the lights dimmed and silence enforced, punctiliously re-creating the most traditional viewing experience. Finally, there are also new environments into which cinema transfers itself, but that end up imposing themselves upon it, so that it ceases to be cinema; this is the realm of the media user who no longer succeeds at being a filmic spectator.
The return to the motherland illuminates a very rich and interesting topography of cinema. The four cardinal points of this topography are the relocated cinema, which colonizes new spaces; the re-relocated cinema, which turns to its most characteristic venue, while contaminating it with new modes of viewing; the non-relocated cinema, which remains stubbornly attached to the theater and to traditional viewing practices; and finally, the radically dislocated cinema—a no-longer-cinema—which leaves its home to lose itself in the vast sea of media. Our experience of cinema now unfolds within these coordinates, in each instance choosing the position that suits it best.43
THE RETURN TO THE MOTHERLAND
Why return to the motherland, with new acquisitions in tow? It seems to me that there are at least four good reasons at the heart of re-relocation, which respond to some profound exigencies.
The first reason concerns a need for territoriality. To see a film has always involved— and continues to involve—a question of place: a where to see, in addition to a what to see. These new modes of vision only offer the spectator an existential bubble in which to burrow (I am thinking of the train passengers who watch films on a portable device, isolating themselves from their immediate context by putting on headphones and ignoring all that is going on around them). It is a fragile and precarious bubble, easily broken by the least disturbance (a conductor who asks for the ticket or the arrival of the train at a station). The movie theater, meanwhile, provides a more solid territory, better defined and protected. In particular, the theater continues to be associated with the idea of a living space: a space in which to dwell together with others (a roof for the community); a space in which one finds oneself immersed in a communal imaginary (in Heidegger’s terms, the language that hosts us). A place both physical and symbolic, the movie theater is that abode that cinema and its spectators continue to search out.44
The second reason highlights a need for domestication. Relocation undoubtedly introduces some changes into an experience that has largely been shaped by the movie theater: sometimes these are minimal, as in the case of home theater, at other times greater, as in the case of a viewing carried out on multiple platforms. In both cases, a challenge is created to traditional modes, which risk not so much extinction as loss of recognition as integral elements of filmic vision. The re-relocation into the movie theater serves to ensure that such novelties are literally incorporated into an experience that explicitly maintains its roots. Flowing back into a typical space, these novelties appear both acceptable and familiar, practicable and customary. Thus, vision as performance—as distant as it may seem from tradition—receives full recognition, in both senses of the word: It is acknowledged as an appropriate mode to watch a film (recognition as legitimization), and it is held up as an example that anyone can follow (recognition as identification). This recognition looks even easier when we think that theaters always hosted a “dynamic” crowd. Among the many testimonies to this fact, I am thinking of the beautiful description of the audience provided by Louis Delluc in his early 1920s essay, “La foule devant l’écran”45: In reviewing several theaters, as well as the films that were projected in them, Delluc highlighted how different strata of the population, from the Parisian elite to the working classes of the suburbs and the provinces, reacted and responded to the screen in different ways, ranging from total self-composure to the greatest enthusiasm, but always showing an active attitude. Theaters have always been the site of an intense activity, which however they were able to keep under control. This is also why relocated cinema, returning to the motherland, succeeds in domesticating the activism connected with performance.
Third, the return to the motherland highlights a need for institution. Watching a film on new devices like the computer and in new environments like an urban space brings our vision closer to other activities hosted by the same apparatus, such as listening to the radio, surfing the Internet, or downloading files. It also brings the film closer to other products hosted on the same screen: touristic documentaries, advertising, YouTube clips, re-dubbed and re-edited films in file-sharing networks, and so on. We inevitably slip away from the realm of cinema and onto the terrain of media in general, and from the field of film to the terrain of audiovisual products. This twofold passage is the consequence of convergence46: Old apparatuses (including the cinematic apparatus, tied to screen/projector/film) are disintegrated in favor of multifunctional platforms (among them the three new screens, television, computer, and smartphone); and old products tied to a single medium (including the fictional feature film) are disintegrated in favor of a rich array of multiplatform and crossover products (the film that is seen in the theater, the director’s cut that is purchased, the clip that is downloaded onto a tablet). Now, in the age of convergence, it can seem like a desperate enterprise to hold in place the confines of the cinema and the profile of a film—and in part it is indeed a desperate enterprise, as cinema today is intrinsically expanded. Re-relocation assures us that the medium we have long enjoyed with affection continues to possess its space and its identity. It not only gives back to the majority of films the place and the modes for which they have been created; it also tells us that whatever may happen, the cinema will continue to exist, and exist as cinema.
Finally, the return to the motherland highlights a need for experience. This is the most delicate of the four points, but also the most decisive. Migration toward new environments and devices presents a double risk. On the one hand, as mentioned above, this migration dissolves the filmic experience into a more general media experience. On the other hand, it forces this experience onto mandatory tracks, which impose themselves especially in the case of strongly predetermined technologies, either because of the way in which a certain device functions or because of the way in which the user utilizes it.47 In the first case, film watching loses its uniqueness, and with it its strength; in the second, it loses its unpredictability, and therefore its freedom. Re-relocation supplies a remedy to this situation. It offers environmental conditions that strengthen vision: The big screen, which dominates the spectators, interrogates them, instead of docilely obeying their commands like the display on a mobile phone or computer. It requires an attitude that restores freedom to vision: The need to change place in order to see a film, instead of receiving it on a display (this is re-relocation), requires spectators to make more precise and exacting choices. The cinematic experience thus recovers a precise and personal sense.
We can think even more radically: A bit of attendance can substantiate an experience that performance often promises but cannot deliver. When the watching of a film is intertwined with a doing, it seems to place spectators at the center of the game, but this centrality and this game risk proving illusory. On the one hand, this doing takes spectators back to everyday practices and may therefore be tinged with indifference: We might think for instance of the computer, which can offer up a film just as it can anything else. On the other hand, this doing absorbs the spectators to such an extent that they no longer have space to face what they find before them and therefore to see what they are confronting: Think for example of file sharing, the end of which sometimes seems to be limited to the mere exchange of material, or remixing, which often serves only to demonstrate one’s virtuosity. In these situations, what can really surprise or grab hold of spectators? And how do they reacquire consciousness of themselves and of what they find in front of them? Do they really undergo an experience—an experience that in order to be worthy of the name requires amazement and recognition? With attendance, spectators still measured themselves against a world—on the screen and around the screen—capable of both interrogation and the formulation of answers. From attendance results the sense of an unforeseen encounter and, simultaneously, the possibility of mastering what is encountered. On the new devices, however, amazement is replaced by self-satisfaction and recognition of skill. There is no surprise, rather there is self-congratulation; there is no awareness, rather there is virtuosity. Spectators do, but their doing often appears to be an end in itself. The return to the motherland, as much as it brings with it new ways of watching, seems to restitute the conditions necessary for amazement and recognition to once again take effect. In the theater, a film continues to seem like an event48 against which one can measure oneself, and from which one can rediscover one’s surroundings. Think of how there, more than elsewhere, a film is not reduced to something ordinary or habitual—it conserves a certain noteworthiness with respect to the everyday. Or think of how it obligates one to take steps in order to meet it—leave the house, buy a ticket, mix with the crowd—which give importance to what one is doing. Or how it makes one share it with others, as a sort of small privilege. Or how it both imposes a rhythm and lets us take part in a rite.49 In the theater, more than elsewhere, a film is an event; in this sense it becomes a small enigma that provokes the spectators, as it restitutes a consciousness of self and of one’s surroundings. The result is that, no matter how much one’s vision is intertwined with a doing—and is therefore now far from a simple confrontation with an object—it can recuperate the sense of an experience. Something returns to surprise and take hold of the spectators, and they, in turn, make space for an awareness. In this sense, we may well say that, thanks to re-relocation, attendance has left us a legacy—I spoke before of gift and conquest—which fills the lacunae left by performance. To see a film does not risk becoming either a narcissistic exercise or an indifferent task.
Indeed, it is still an event, with the persistence of a surprise and of a recognition and the resistance of narcissism and indifference. Re-relocation—superimposing attendance and performance, intertwining tradition and innovation—opens itself better than any other gesture to an experiential dimension. This dimension of experience is really what is at stake, and as long as cinema is able to maintain this, it will survive.
In the Mouth of Madness (John Carpenter, 1995) tells the story of a private investigator, John Trent, who is hired to find a successful writer, Sutter Cane, who has seemingly disappeared. His search quickly transforms into a nightmare: Trent finds himself increasingly thrown into a world in which fantasy and reality are indistinguishable and discovers that it is in fact the reading of Cane’s books that brings about the most absurd events. Very soon, Trent becomes convinced that the writer is an instrument through which evil seeks to dominate the world and whose latest novel thus needs to be prevented from reaching the shelves. No one believes him, however, and he is committed to a psychiatric hospital. Now, violence and horror are ubiquitous: Trent escapes from the psychiatric hospital and makes his way to a ghost town. Here he goes into a cinema and sees projected on the screen the story that he himself has been living, with himself as protagonist.
Using the framework of a genre film, In the Mouth of Madness offers us a possible metaphor. To carry out his investigation, Trent navigates a complex and heterogeneous world (a World Wide Web?). Through successive links, he moves from the big city to a provincial city, then into the imaginary world of a writer, and finally, to what may be Hell itself. In his travel, he uses all of the means available to him (all of the media). He becomes aware that there are “viral” messages circulating and infecting the population. Then, he returns to the cinema and finds on the screen that very world through which he has been moving up to this point. Now, he is repositioned as a spectator: Perhaps what he experienced was only a film. Perhaps. Trent’s final laugh may be one of liberation, but it is also the sign of his madness, for the reality that emerges inside the darkened theater often reveals itself to be more true than truth itself.
