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

“Initiation to the Delights of the Cinema” is an extraordinary text written by Antonello Gerbi in 1926.¹ Gerbi describes the cinematic experience in all its aspects, complete with erudite references and great irony. Among the topics under discussion is darkness. We encounter it in the first lines of the essay, as Gerbi follows the cinemagoer who buys a ticket, crosses the foyer, and approaches the velvet curtain draped across the entrance to the darkened theater: “Discreet and alert, [the attendant] opens the jaws of the shadows immediately upon arrival; and he opens them just slightly—I don’t know if it is out of fear that the outside light would disturb or wound the sacred darkness, or that the darkness collected in the room, having found some small opening, would spread out into the lobby, would hinder a careful checking of tickets, would pour out into the street and would shortly flood the entire city.”² The “sacred darkness” described here constitutes neither the erasure of day nor the absence of natural light. On the contrary, it is a state that positively characterizes the movie theater; it is the constitutive attribute of an environment in opposition—black against white—to the universe that we usually inhabit.

The dark returns a bit further on in Gerbi’s text, when he describes the audience gathered before the screen: “The spectators—subdued by the darkness, dull, wan and weighty without light inside, lacking any space around them or a bright background behind them—sit there silent and well-behaved, one next to the other, one just like the other.”3 Darkness creates a condition of suspension: The environment loses its consistency and becomes an indistinct container; individuals lose all conception of themselves and enter into a kind of hypnotic state. It is precisely this state of suspension that allows the spectators to consolidate into a single body to the point of forming a small community, as well as to become one with what they are watching, immersing themselves in the events recounted on the screen.

Finally, Gerbi evokes the dark with regard to the world that comes to life on the screen. This world possesses a luminosity that seems to come from the theater: “The light, quickly drained away from the hall where it first spread out, and immediately cast with the rhythm of swift waves from the small window of the projectionist booth to the great window constituted by the canvas, transforms itself into the light of apotheosis.”⁴ Therefore, there exists a sort of circularity between the theater and the screen: If the former is dark, it is because it literally bestows that bit of feeble light it possesses to the latter; in exchange, the screen allows a new reality to burst forth in all its splendor.

Gerbi brings us this far. However, we also come across the theme of darkness in numerous other writings on cinema from its earliest days. Jules Romains associates the dark with the dream state typical of the movie spectator.5 Giovanni Papini speaks of “the theater’s Wagnerian darkness,” which prevents distractions and intensifies vision.⁶ Walter Serner writes of the “sweetness” of the dark, in contrast with the ferocity of what is often represented on the screen (and with our very desire to see that horror).⁷ Emilio Scaglione suggests that the dark permits spectators’ bodies to approach each other and remain in close proximity, transforming the theater into a space of intimacy.⁸ It is along these same lines that Roland Barthes, in a text written when cinema had already begun to confront the radical transformations that characterize it today, would discuss the erotic quality of the theater’s darkness, the particular atmosphere it creates, and the pleasure of immersing oneself in it, which mirrors the pleasure of projecting oneself ideally onto the screen.⁹ Hollis Frampton would voice a similar sentiment in 1968 when he opened one of his lectures saying, “Please turn out the light. As long as we are going to talk about films, we might as well do it in the dark.”¹⁰

Darkness seems to be an essential element of the cinematic experience. At times, however, some have sought to lessen it. In the first decade of the 1900s, some Italian cinephile clerics proposed projecting films in churches. In order to prevent the spectators from being too powerfully struck by the cinema, not to mention being in a state of potential promiscuity, they tried to figure out how to keep the space illuminated, attempting to adopt more powerful projectors and more reflective screens.¹¹ They were not the only ones to try and exorcise the darkness¹²: If such efforts prove unsuccessful, however, it is not because technology forbids them, but because the darkness constitutes an integral part of the cinema. It emphasizes the separation and the allure of the site of projection, it permits a group of individuals to be converted into spectators and into an audience, and it nurtures the possibility that the projected image may become its own true world.

If there is one element of the relocation of cinema toward new environments and devices that is particularly striking, it is precisely the absence of the dark.¹³ Vision occurs ever more frequently in broad daylight, on modes of transportation, in city squares, and even at home; when we prepare ourselves to follow moving images (and sounds) on our computers, tablets, or televisions, we often do not require that the environment be dark.

We should consider this a significant symptom of the contemporary situation and not a mere detail to be dismissed. In fact, the loss of darkness highlights the cinema’s progressive rejection of the three fundamental pillars discussed above. We are no longer tied to an enclosed environment; on the contrary, places of vision are often open, exposed, and lacking a defined threshold. Filmic images no longer aspire to world creation; rather, the material that arrives on our screens is often uncertain, composite, made up of constituent parts of diverse natures, and intended for various destinations. Finally, an audience immersed in viewing can no longer be taken for granted; on the contrary, the act of following a film is an increasingly solitary and superficial action. Exaggerating just a bit, we could say that the disappearance of the dark may signal the dissolution of the cinematic experience itself.

Nevertheless, cinema is still alive. Its end, as Raymond Bellour reminds us, is “an end that never stops ending.”14 Not only do there still exist darkened theaters, audiences that gather to watch movies, and worlds that come to life on the big screen; there are also cinematic experiences that are re-created, perhaps with some difficulty, in my living room, in a museum or art gallery in the form of an installation, or in a city square, thanks to devices such as DVDs, tablets, or media façades. Cinema survives also in broad daylight—or, better, in regimes of light that differ from its own.

In the preceding pages, we have inquired at length into the persistence of cinema and the way that it is affected by the changes occurring in the media universe more broadly. These changes point to a new and different terrain toward which we are inevitably moving; nevertheless, they frequently offer new opportunities to a model of cinematic experience that has its roots in the past and that through incorporating the new may continue to maintain its own identity. Thus, while it is true that we find ourselves before a no-longer-cinema, it is also true that in the process of change we often see a still-cinema or a cinema-once-again emerge. The seven chapters of this book have sought to follow the different processes that allow cinema to maintain its identity even in transformation, and the key words that serve as their basis have sought to sketch out the conceptual paradigm that allows us to understand this phenomenon better.

What does let this persistence in difference occur? We have already analyzed the main crucial elements: for example, the fact that experiences are not only repeatable, but also relocatable; the fact that the cinematic machine is no longer an apparatus, but an assemblage; the fact that cinema is no more defined by a canon, but by an expansion; and so on. Beneath these elements, there are at least two factors that allow cinema to continue to be itself, not in repeating itself in an identical way, but as part of and as a result of the differences. Both make explicit reference to the history of cinema, constructing a bridge between past and present; neither, however, conceives of the present as a simple return of the same, but rather as a distancing that, by its very nature, unites. We will call these two factors the fainting of the medium and the paradox of recognition.

Let us begin with the first element. In a fragment written in 1920, Walter Benjamin argues, “The medium through which works of art continue to influence later ages is always different from the one in which they affect their own age. Moreover, in those later times its impact on older works constantly changes, too. Nevertheless, this medium is always relatively fainter than what influenced contemporaries in the time it was created.”15 As Antonio Somaini has pointed out,¹⁶ Benjamin does not use the word medium to refer to a technical dispositive (which he calls Apparat or Apparatur), but rather to the modalities with which a work, a language, or a technology actuates its mediation. In this sense, the term precisely indicates both the environment and the conditions of a perception—and therefore, if you will, the fabric of an experience. The same definition applies in this fragment. It indicates the fact that the “atmosphere” that is created around a work and that conditions its reception, both by contemporaries and by future generations, gradually becomes thinner and less dense with the passage of time. It is not that works change as such; rather, their modes of accessibility change. They loosen the bonds and the necessities that marked their birth (and, Benjamin observes in the same fragment, that rendered the medium so “dense” that the creator could not manage to penetrate its own creation fully).¹⁷ Works acquire greater lightness. They can be more easily encountered, even outside their previous context.¹⁸ And they can be understood in a more direct way, avoiding the resistance that they posed even to their creator.¹⁹ This availability and immediacy has a positive effect: The works not only become a more familiar presence, but also come to show their true characteristics. What was hidden by an overly dense atmosphere can now appear with great clarity. Works finally speak to us about themselves.²⁰

Let’s return then to the cinema—and to a cinema that manifests itself in broad daylight. It seems to me that Benjamin’s brief fragment can help us to understand its particular character. In this stage of its history, cinema becomes thinner and lighter. Compared with the “classical” era of studios and movie theaters, the “atmosphere” changes: Contact with a film is no longer signaled by a well-structured set of norms, constraints, and intentions, but it becomes easier and more direct. We can approach cinema under a variety of different circumstances. It is now free to relocate itself in new environments and into new devices. It can conquer new spaces, such as the home; it can accompany us as we move about; it can enter into gray zones, between tradition and the new, such as art galleries; it can remain in the movie theater. In all of these cases, it penetrates into the folds of our daily life, and we find it there within arm’s reach. We can simultaneously capture what it has been and what it still is. The thinning of the atmosphere that surrounds it brings its true nature to light. We increasingly discover what cinema is, what it wanted to be, and what it could have been. No longer protected by the density of an institution, it speaks fully of itself to us.

We are far, then, from any idea of decline or decay.21 Relocated cinema represents a moment of the medium’s fainting that allows for both the availability and the penetration of the object of our experience. Cinema exists in thousands of different situations: through the many faces it takes on, we can finally understand it.

The second element that allows for cinema’s persistence takes us back to strategies of recognition. In the preceding pages, I have often emphasized the importance of the act of recognition. It not only allows us to identify who or what we have in front of us, even if it is in another guise (this is the case of Ulysses’ dog, Argos, who recognizes his owner disguised as a beggar), but it also leads us to accept the identity of whoever or whatever does not yet have one (this is the case when a government gives recognition to a newly formed state). Recognition may be a detection or an acknowledgment. Through both of these aspects in combination, it is therefore that which makes something what it is.

It is no accident that André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, in retracing the process that led to the birth of cinema,22 attribute more importance to social recognition than to the introduction of a technology. The appearance of a technology simply opens the way to a series of possibilities. After this initial appearance, there must follow a phase in which procedures are established, possibilities are channeled, and practices are made recurrent. This moment leads to a third phase, in which there is a recognition of the personality that cinema has assumed and an awareness of its potential as a form of expression. ²³ It is in this final phase that cinema acquires a collectively perceived identity and is transformed into an institution.²⁴

Today we find ourselves at a similar turning point, in which cinema, affected by a series of changes, asks for confirmation. It asks to be recognized as cinema, regardless of its guise. So how do we implement this recognition? In broad terms, we move from a certain idea of cinema that is part of our cultural patrimony, and we compare it with the situations in which we find ourselves implicated, careful to bring out the typical traits of cinema (identification) and to confirm the fact that what we have before us is cinema, no matter its appearance (acceptance). It is thanks to this double feat that we can solve spurious situations such as many of those created by the relocation of cinema, and we can recognize as cinematographic experiences those such as watching a film at home, on a trip, in a waiting room, on a DVD player, or on a computer, and chatting about what we are watching on a social network.

This operation comes at a cost that cannot be ignored. To place these situations within the sphere of our idea of cinema, we are compelled to force the schema and ignore certain elements. We accept these situations and minimize the distortions in favor of the canonical. We set aside the fact that we are not in a movie theater, that perhaps we are not seated, that we may be surrounded by a distracting environment, that the screen is fluorescent instead of reflective, that the duration of the film is not the traditional one, and perhaps that what we are viewing may not even be a film. Instead, we accentuate that, as before, we are viewing mechanically reproduced images, which must cope with reality and at the same time concretize fantasy. We remain attached to a model that we have in mind, and we manipulate what we have in front of us slightly in order to render it more compatible with what we know. We say, or we think: “It is cinema after all, even if it doesn’t seem to be.”

However, in the name of compatibility, we also slightly manipulate the idea. We force it into relation with the situation in which we find ourselves, so that the situation does not seem overly modified. We fudge certain traits of our model of reference; others we exalt, and still others we add. We imagine the cinema must be that thing that is reflected in the reality in front of us.

We do this with respect to the present, as well as with respect to the past. Not only do we attribute to cinema characteristics that are only now emerging, but we also project these characteristics back, so that our model of reference can seem historically founded. In doing so, however, we “create” a sense of continuity that is deeply instrumental: It serves to avoid a conception of the past as a completed phase and to give a foundation to the contemporary cinema, in all its guises.

I am thinking of the technology suppliers for home theaters who insist on the quality of couches, screen, sound, and who suggest that cinema has always been identified with a particular kind of environment of vision.25 Historically speaking, they forget other essential aspects, but in return, they make sure that a model of the experience attainable at home appears aligned with a long-standing canon.

Similarly, we find directors who claim ancestors that allow their films to latch onto a tradition. Movies today have much in common with graphic novels, video games, or theme parks; however, if they pay allegiance to the past, and especially if they pay homage to the “fathers” of the sixth or seventh art (I am thinking of Hugo by Martin Scorsese), voilà, they become the “heart” of cinema.²⁶

Additionally, there are critics who reconstruct remote influences, transforming new aspects into the development of old institutions.²⁷ There are historians who look back at history with the eyes of the present and find—and rightly so—that cinema has always been projected outdoors, or inside museums, or in the home.²⁸ And there are historians of theory who recuperate hypotheses of cinema that were never realized or that never went anywhere, but that seem to be undergoing a resurgence today.²⁹ It is in this way that contemporary cinema finds its roots.

I want to be clear: These direct and indirect revisitations all have their own legitimacy. They seek to profit from cinema’s past. In particular, many current historiographic studies consistently contribute to the discovery of the “tributaries that join up to become the mighty river we know as the cinema,” to use Thomas Elsaesser’s words.30 My point, however, is another. The relocation of cinema triggers a discursive strategy aimed at rendering the past and the present instrumentally compatible. In reading current situations in light of what cinema has been, we interpret in a somewhat forced way not only what we find before us, but also our point of comparison itself. In this manner, we seem to “invent” a continuity. This is the price to be paid.

In exchange, however, the persistence of cinema finds a motivation, and does so in the right way. “Inventing” a continuity, we inevitably accept the difference of contemporary cinema in respect to its past. We no longer claim that it is the same; we know that it is discordant. Even so, we expand our frame of reference to include new possibilities, and then seek to see if these have already been realized. In this way, we give cinema an identity that links it not to a fixed model, fated to repeat itself perpetually (or to die definitively), but whose basis is in a continual process of transformation. In a word, we recognize identity based on difference. In this way, we allow cinema to continue to live. It is cinema precisely because it asks us to recognize it on the basis of how it diverges from what went before.

We have spoken of past and present and of the links between them. In recent years, the history of cinema has appeared more and more as a problem. Many now tend to consider it as a kind of “parenthesis” within a wider history,³¹ while others try to reformulate the genealogy of cinema by taking its new conditions of existence as a point of departure, as Anne Friedberg called for already in 2000.³²

The fainting of the medium and our paradoxical recognition of it paint an interesting picture. In the first case, we find a truth about the cinema that can only be realized when the atmosphere around it has lost its density. In the second case, we find a truth about the cinema that emerges from the past, but only when it is interrogated from the present. In both cases, we have a past and a present that are constructed in relation to one another.

Such a conception of history brings us back again to Walter Benjamin. In an extraordinary page in the appendix to “The Work of Art,” Benjamin states: “The history of art is a history of prophecies. It can be written only by beginning from the point of view of a completely current present, since every age possesses its own new, though non-inheritable, occasion of interpreting exactly those prophecies that the art of past epochs contained within itself.”33 So, the past offers examples that cast light on the present, but these examples may be focused only by the present. Moreover, only the present can make prophecies of these cases, as they do not provide clear statements—because in themselves they are not prophecies. Benjamin is clear: “No one of [these prophecies] in reality has ever fully determined the future, not even the most imminent future. On the contrary, in the work of art nothing is more difficult to grasp than the obscure and nebulous references to the future that the prophecies—never occurring singly, but always in a series, no matter how intermittent—have brought to light along the course of the centuries.”³⁴ If these cases become prophecies, and therefore antecedents of what is happening nowadays, it is only because particular conditions now exist that make possible the attribution of an exemplarity to the past. Benjamin indeed writes: “In order for these prophecies to become comprehensible, the circumstances which the work of art has often already covered centuries or even just years before, must first arrive at maturation.”³⁵

This point of maturation is coincidental “on the one hand with certain social transformation that changes the function of art, and on the other hand with certain mechanical inventions.”36 But what explicitly allows a reconsideration of the past in light of the present, and an insight into the present in light of the past, are the images that Benjamin, in his great fresco of the Paris passages, identifies as “dialectical.” They are those “flashing images”³⁷ that succeed in making “legible” both yesterday and today, linking them together outside of the usual parameters of consequentiality. Thanks to these images, yesterday is consigned to today’s consciousness: “the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at a particular time.”³⁸ And it is thanks to these images that today can be made knowable to itself: “Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it; each ‘now’ [Jetzt] is the now of a particular recognisability.”³⁹ Dialectical images make us look simultaneously back and around them, giving a meaning to what is seen. They simultaneously provide a vision and a perspective. But the mutual illumination of past and present that dialectical images permit undermines the idea of consequential development: Yesterday does not determine today any more than today determines yesterday. Rather than a timeline, we should speak of a constellation: “It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now [Jetzt] to form a constellation.”⁴⁰

At issue here are prophecies that are only retrospectively recognized, elements that ensure the legibility of both yesterday and today, and a link between past and present that is not characterized by chronological linearity, but by a constellatory configuration. Benjamin’s lesson is clear, and it explains well the idea of cinema history we have in mind when we find ourselves implicated in the processes of relocation. When a new situation begs recognition as cinematographic, we ask the past to shed light on it while simultaneously reading the past in light of this new situation; we see in this situation the maturation of preceding conditions, while we construct, in parallel, what should be its premises. We use yesterday to define today, while also creating a yesterday because today asks to be defined. We therefore break the sense of a chronology—though we pretend to respect it—and make of each moment the consequence of the other. In essence, relocation offers us provocative cases that function as “dialectical situations.” Thanks to them, we are able to rethink cinema and its history. We create a constellatory temporality, far from a progressive and causal logic, but, on the contrary, a kind of back and forth that moves us in many different directions and opens for us many different paths. In this way, we do not only pay attention to a more subtle sense of time,⁴¹ but also we fully capture the dialectics underlying identity.

This brings us to a final observation, with which I would like to conclude this book. Between 1946 and his death in 1948, Sergei M. Eisenstein embarked on an ambitious project: the writing of a history of cinema.42 His idea was to place it within the frame of the history of the arts—not as their final outcome, but rather, on the contrary, as the agent capable of drawing out from other artistic fields what they were unable to display on their own, particularly the anthropological need to capture ephemeral phenomena. In this project, cinema is seen as an active, dynamic force that breaks down a consolidated situation and draws new aspects from it. I would say that cinema is what relocates the old arts, leading them out of a bottleneck in which they would otherwise risk extinction.

If we compare the Eisensteinian scenario with what is currently taking place, we have to reverse the terms somewhat: Today it is cinema that is being relocated into new devices and into new social environments; it is cinema that is seeking a way out of its own bottleneck. It is cinema that has been called into question, and which must find a new terrain in which to assert its own lesson. No longer capable of aiding the other arts, it is now cinema that is in need of assistance.

The feeling that cinema currently finds itself in a perilous situation is widespread, and it is precisely in order to face up to this danger that we recall an idea of cinema and use it to attribute a cinematicity to borderline situations, even at the cost of a biased rereading of history. We do this because we are convinced that it is the permanence of this idea—the permanence of a form of experience—that guarantees the survival of cinema. In other words, it is the possibility, and perhaps even the imminence, of its demise that motivates and moves us. However, this lends our action a somewhat tragic cast: The idea of cinema to which we are attached ends up functioning above all as a medicine or an exorcism. It is the cure that is administered to the patient, whose case we hope is not terminal. It is the rite we celebrate in an attempt to ward off an impending disaster. In any case, it is something that at most prolongs survival.