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

Watching Chambre 666, the film that collects all of these responses, more than thirty years later produces an odd effect1: The transformation that cinema has undergone since 1982 has been much more radical than could have ever been imagined. The advent of digital technologies, which transformed the character of image and sound, and the processes of convergence, which led different media to integrate, have resulted in entirely unforeseen scenarios. The cinema is no longer only a strip of film to be passed through a projector aimed at a screen inside a public space; it is also a DVD that I play at home to relax, or a video I follow in a museum or in a gallery, or content that I download from the Internet onto my computer or my tablet. Similarly, the newspaper is no longer only a sheaf of printed paper pages; it is also a series of windows I open on my tablet. And the radio is no longer an apparatus for tuning in to various broadcast stations; it is also an aural flow that I can access on my telephone. Media have ceased to be identified with a particular device or with a single support and now utilize new technologies, change their size, and redefine their functions. Products and services have been interchanged, and they now overlap within “digital platforms,” which allow us to read, write, listen, see, receive, archive, and send.

This loss of traditional characteristics has led many scholars to speak of the end of individual media, and this is true above all for cinema, as the progressive abandonment of photographic film and the darkened theater has given rise to discussions of its death. Chambre 666 is one of the first sources in which we see this preoccupation appear. In the mid-1990s, Susan Sontag sounded the alarm once again, arguing that the proliferation of screen condemns cinema to an inevitable and progressive decline.2 In the following decade, this notion became a veritable leitmotif. The conviction arose that the digital image lacked that direct contact with reality that represented one of the constitutive elements of the cinema.³ It was observed that the new ways of watching film on television or in one’s DVD player overturned the traditional parameters of film consumption.⁴ Finally, the suspicion grew that the multiplication of images would bring about their loss, both because the new supports that held them were impermanent and, even more importantly, because their abundance brought with it a sense of indifference.⁵ The death of cinema seems to be a given fact. Peter Greenaway, with his usual eccentricity, even assigns a date to its death: “September 31, 1983,” the day on which the remote control made its debut in our homes and obliged us to transform spectatorship into an interactive relationship.⁶

Yet the cinema has certainly not died. Movie theaters, for example, not only continue to exist, but also are increasing in number. In 2012, theater screens multiplied by 5 percent worldwide, due to the double-digit growth in the Asia Pacific market, raising the total number to just under 130,000. In the same year, box office grosses rose by 6 percent, reaching $34.7 billion with the help of increasing attendance in countries such as China, Brazil, and Russia.⁷ Going to the cinema seems to be a firmly entrenched habit.

Furthermore, we continue to call “cinema” what we watch at home, in our home theater, or while traveling, on our tablet, thanks to our ability to rent DVDs or download films online.⁸ The equipment and the support change, as does the viewing environment, but habit seems to persist even in these new situations.

Finally, we consider many of the images that surround us to be cinematic, even if they are not films in the traditional sense of the term. I am thinking of the so-called cinéma d’exposition, widespread in contemporary art and intended for projection in galleries and museums.⁹ I am also thinking of the many other formats that we encounter online but also screened in public spaces such as in squares and malls, and that have been, hardly by chance, placed within the category of an “extended cinema.”¹⁰ There also exist the kinds of installations, videos, Web projections, video games, and laboratory experiments that Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel hosted in 2003 in a great exhibition in Karlsruhe with the title “Future Cinema” (and with an even more suggestive subtitle: “The Cinematic Imaginary After Film”).¹¹ And lastly I am thinking of the works based on a re-materialization or a re-instantiation of the cinematic apparatus—something already familiar in the avant-garde, which Pavle Levi names “cinema by other means.”¹² Luc Vancheri has proposed that this complex of noncanonical productions simply be called “contemporary cinemas” (plural).¹³ Cinema is a brand that is also applied to new products.

Cinema thus survives and in many senses is expanding. This survival, of course, is intertwined with a series of major changes. For example, most theaters are now digital, meaning that they no longer project film, and many of these are equipped for 3-D, which means that they promote a different (although not truly new) mode of viewing.14 Furthermore, many projection sites are adopting facilities that make them rather similar to theme parks¹⁵ or to domestic environments.¹⁶ Television sets, computers, and tablets mark the abandonment of reflective screens: The projector is no longer an essential component of the cinematic complex. Spectators not only watch movies on different devices, but often also watch a film moving from one device to another, for example from their television set to their smartphone, using a multiplicity of screens. Finally, many new products, although inspired by cinema, take on forms that shift our traditional notions about film: think for example of the short clips on YouTube or Vimeo (fictional vignettes, travel diaries, or short improvised sketches) or on the contrary of the large images of IMAX—modern versions of the panorama and diorama.¹⁷ There is a persistence of cinema, but it faces deep transformations at every step of the way.

This is not, however, an unprecedented dialectic: Throughout its history, cinema has often met with changes that seemed to push it beyond its technological, linguistic, and institutional boundaries, and at the same time it has always sought to remain itself, also negotiating or appropriating novelties. Today, the tension between persistence and transformation seems to be reaching its high point and thus takes on a particularly meaningful—and even dramatic—character.

Using the idea of experience will allow me to distance myself from an approach that places the technology of cinema at its center. There is an academic tradition, of which authors such as Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler are often considered major exponents, holding that the “material base” of the medium not only determines the way we perceive what it shows to us—and the world for which it acts as mediator—but also directly defines the nature of the medium itself. Following this line of thought, cinema would be reduced to a support and a device. If this were the case, every change in the technological complex would result in a change in the medium’s nature, and those who preach the death of cinema would be correct, against all evidence to the contrary. Granting a central position to experience, meanwhile, means overturning this perspective: What constitutes the defining core of a medium is the way that it activates our senses, our reflexivity, and our practices. The way it does so is undoubtedly influenced by the technical complex, but it has also crystallized over time into a cultural form that is recognizable as such and which can also find different instantiations. Such an orientation does not imply a return to “the philistine’s concept of ‘art’ … stranger to all technical considerations”—to use Benjamin’s words.¹⁹ It simply suggests that we deal with a more complex framework, in which technology does not play a causal role, especially in an epoch like ours, in which it is increasingly light and available for different purposes. In this context, what identifies a medium is first and foremost a mode of seeing, feeling, reflecting, and reacting, no longer necessarily tied to a single “machine,” not even to the one with which it has been traditionally associated. It is the case of cinema: born as a technical invention, it soon came to be identified as a particular way of relating with the world through moving images, as well as of relating with these images. As a consequence, cinema will live on for as long as its way of engaging us does, whatever the “device” that it takes as its support might be.

There is, however, another reason that the concept of experience will be particularly useful here. Many scholars have noted how the advent of the digital functions less as a point of rupture than as an element of potential continuity; John Belton, for example, has spoken of a “false revolution.”20 In particular, Stephen Prince has noted how the digital image allows for a “perceptual realism” strongly analogous to what characterized the photographic image. While it is true that the digital image no longer functions as a direct “trace” of the real, the process through which we understand what it shows us as real is the same as the one set into motion by the photographic image.²¹ Berys Gault has developed a parallel argument: The difference between a digital camera and a film camera is the support on which information is registered, not the way in which reality is captured. Therefore, even a digital image can be considered a photographic one; it is not by chance that we react to it in the same way that we react to traditional photographic images.²² David Bordwell has retraced the transition to the digital in an e-book. There is no doubt that “films have become files.”²³ Nevertheless, the enduring presence of the film industry provides a sense of continuity: We look at the digital movies as if they were film movies. In a text dedicated to cinema’s specificity, Noël Carrol had earlier dismantled the idea that cinema possesses physical elements or constituents capable of defining its intrinsic nature, showing instead its wide variety of uses and styles; we can thus add that cinema may have many faces, some of which may emerge in another medium.²⁴

I am sympathetic to these “anti-essentialist” approaches, and here I will seek to enrich this line of thought. If we assume that the continuity of a medium is determined by its endurance, or at least the endurance of a certain type of experience, and if we take the term experience broadly, as outlined earlier, we can delineate other elements that function as bridges, providing continuity: In addition to the particular way of seeing images offered by cinema, and certain recurring subjects, an important role is played by environmental factors (the fact of being in front of a screen), cultural factors (the memory of what cinema was), linguistic factors (the presence of a “cinematic language,” whatever that term is taken to mean), and broadly psychological ones (the need for cinema, to use an old term coined by Edgar Morin).²⁵ It is on the basis of a multiplicity of elements that we recognize our experiences as “cinematic” and thereby give cinema another chance to live.²⁶

This does not mean, however, that the “cinematic” experience is not often contested. At a remove from the projector-film-theater complex, what we experience and the ways we experience it tend to change. Small screens instead of large, fluorescent instead of reflective, in open spaces instead of closed spaces, accompanied by imperfect sound, are regarded as a threat to the pleasure of viewing. Many of the new devices and new environments imply forms of attention that are no more solely centered on a screen. The availability of a movie everywhere and at any time diminishes the sense of an event traditionally tied with film-going. More radically, on my DVD player, film may become a text, the chapters of which I can read individually, as if it were a book; projected in a museum or art gallery, it may become an exhibited object, as if it were a painting or a sculpture; on my tablet, it may become a private diversion, as if it were a video game; on a media façade, it may increase its value as spectacle, to the point that it becomes an environmental decoration, and so on. Placed in new devices and new contexts, cinema risks losing itself. It is this sentiment that leads David Lynch, in a parody commercial for the iPhone, to declare, “Now, if you are playing the movie on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film.”27

Even so, it is also the case that many of these transformations, more than creating a rupture with the past, seem to bring with them an expansion of cinema’s horizons. They allow it to conserve some of its fundamental characteristics, albeit in a compromised manner, as in the case of the home theater, which responds to a desire to re-create the movie theater in my living room. They also open up new, unprecedented opportunities, like that of reaching a mobile spectator who can nonetheless isolate himself from his context and concentrate on what he is seeing. They let cinema test and adjust itself while exploring new territories. Last, but not least, they allow for the recuperation of certain characteristics that cinema once had, earlier on in its history, but has now partially lost, like the ability to invade nonspecialized public spaces, work with multiple different types of screens, and mix together with other forms of spectacle.²⁸ What results from these changes is not so much an abandonment of the experience of cinema as its rearticulation: It takes on new forms that paint a more complex and varied picture of the whole.²⁹

Cinema is thus confronted with changes to itself. Sometimes it risks giving in to these and transforms its own nature; in other instances it attempts to resist, in order to remain itself. Most often, however, it weaves together these changes with a tradition, memory, and set of habits, and incorporates them. As a consequence, it unfolds an identity based not on the simple repetition of the same but on the acceptance of variations and differences—an ipse-identity, instead of an idem-identity, as Paul Ricoeur would say.30 More than reaffirming the usual features, what is highlighted is the presence of a field of possibilities, even apparently discordant ones, that give us back a reality in its multiple aspects and moreover in its becoming. A self is an opening to the other. It is such an identity that in the past allowed cinema to remain itself even when it adopted new guises. It is such an identity that today allows cinema, threatened by more radical modifications, to continue on its path.

The first chapter of the book engages with cinema’s relocation to other devices and to other contexts. As I have suggested, what migrates is not a technical complex but rather a form of experience, which reestablishes itself in a new context. If cinema can now be transferred into my living room, as well as into city squares, public transportation, the Internet, my television, and my smartphone, while remaining itself in some sense, this is due to two reasons that bring us back to the film theories of the first decades of the twentieth century. On the one hand, cinema has been a medium expansively characterized by the type of experience it created: From its inception, it was presented not simply as a specific kind of “machine,” but as a particular way of seeing the world and making the world visible through images in movement. On the other hand, its gaze has often seemed to emerge in other situations as well: As many commentators have emphasized from its beginnings, we sometimes feel as if we are at the cinema even when far from the darkened theater. These two aspects have made cinema both well defined and capable of going beyond its borders: If today it relocates itself on a massive scale, this is due to these long-established tendencies. For cinema to remain itself, however, is not a simple enterprise. In relocating, cinema continually risks losing itself. It remains for us to recognize its presence in situations that are in many cases ambiguous and which can be understood in different ways. For the most part, we end up identifying our experience as “cinematic” because, due to habit or the strength of memory, we find in it the reemergence of several typical and already well-established elements. But oftentimes we identify our experience as such also because we imagine, wager, or decide that it is. In this case, we cause an identity to spring forth not on the basis of the repetition of the same, but rather from cinema’s capacity for taking on different guises—not as sameness, but as selfhood. Cinema then unfolds itself, regardless of the mask it wears.

The second chapter revolves around two words: relic and icon. With respect to the darkened movie theater, new situations reduce the original experience by half. In some cases—for instance, when I watch a film while traveling, likely on my tablet, which is intended to deliver content in any possible situation—I recover the object of the cinematic experience, but not its environment. In other cases—as when I watch a television series on my home theater, which is designed to provide high-quality vision and sound—I retrieve the modalities of the cinematic experience, but I recover its object only indirectly. The situation that follows is in some ways curious: We can watch films in an un-cinematographic manner (a DVD while traveling, for example), and cinematic vision can also apply to other products (a television program on a home theater, for instance). For more than a century, cinema has denoted both a particular product and a particular form of use; these two aspects now risk being split apart. However, even when separated, these two situations remain “authentic” in their own way. A film on DVD is nonetheless a fragment of the whole of cinematic production, even when broken away from it and placed elsewhere. In this sense, it is as if it were a relic. It is precisely because of the fact that this fragment was a part of (or could have been a part of) the holy body of cinema that it puts me in contact with the latter. My home theater, meanwhile, attempts to reincarnate the darkened movie theater, even while it is a copy of it. In this sense, it constitutes an icon, which is to say, a substitute that reactivates the presence of the model, even as it simultaneously draws attention to the model’s absence. Here, it is the similarity it shares with the original—more than contact at a distance—that allows cinema to live again. Relocated cinema is precisely a relic or an icon, and it is because it takes on these identities (I repeat: on the one hand the fragment and contact, on the other hand similarity and reincarnation) that cinema conserves its “authenticity,” as it were.

The third chapter discusses the new forms taken on by the technological complex and foregrounds the notion of assemblage. The point of departure here is the observation that in situations that might be called “imperfect” in contrast with the viewing of a film in a theater, the spectator often responds by “repairing” whatever falls short. For example, in cases in which one is exposed to an external environment—as often happens when using portable devices—spectators construct an existential bubble in which to seek refuge, and in doing so they recapture a sense of intimacy in regard what they are watching. In the same way, in many instances of individual viewing, spectators construct for themselves an imagined audience as, for example, when chatting online after watching a film—or even during a film—with other spectators who have been having the same experience. Such behaviors inevitably lead us to reconsider the role of the cinematic machine. Do the conditions in which we find ourselves, or, more specifically, the devices that we use, determine the modality of our viewing and our status as spectators, or are they modifiable factors? In the 1970s and 1980s, much of film theory considered the dispositive in terms of an apparatus, that is to say as a closed and binding structure; the spectator was what the “machine” wanted him to be. There is, however, another line of thought (for example, in the work of Gilles Deleuze)31 that considers the dispositive in terms of an assemblage, in other words as an alterable complex of components that includes the spectator. The concept of assemblage is useful insofar as it allows us to see how the cinematic “machine” is made up of multiple elements that recompose themselves in response to the circumstances, and thus how its usage has variable and adjustable aspects. This does not mean, however, that the spectator can do whatever he wants: He continues to respond to the dispositive but can in turn intervene in it. This dialectic, which is particularly visible today, does not represent an entirely new element of cinema. If we look back on cinema’s history, we see that it has always been a much more adaptable machine than we have often been led to believe. The cinema has always been prepared to change its own structures and to exceed its own boundaries; at the same time, it has always sought to remain faithful to itself. It continues to do so today, but by way of a global transformation.

The fourth chapter examines the ongoing expansion of cinema. The idea of “expanded cinema” enjoyed a certain success in the 1960s and 1970s; it may be useful to revisit it today to uncover a tendency that has been incubating for a long time. Today, cinema’s expansion is developing in several precise directions. First, there is the imposition of a transmedial logic, which requires that content be conceived of for multiple media—beyond cinema, to television, theme parks, video games, and so forth. Then, there is an expansion of modes of production and reception, with an always-greater space for so-called grassroots practices. There is also a growing tendency to include within the boundaries of the film what were once accompanying texts, such as the trailer, working journal, or critical comments, which can now be found on a film’s DVD or Web site. Finally, there is an opening to new types of images, no longer linked to the analogical reproduction of reality. Of course, the risk of expansion is that cinema will end up being reabsorbed into a larger category—that of “screened images”—to the point that it loses its own identity. However, cinema in expansion seems to retain its own terrain of choice. It reaches this goal through two paths. On one hand, cinema continues and intensifies its traditional vocation of offering images in “high definition”: The recent success of 3-D signals its desire to immerse the spectator even deeper into the represented world. On the other hand, cinema increasingly recuperates “poor” images, such as those produced by webcams, smartphones, or on the Web, in order to constitute a kind of critique of the way in which other media present a world often transformed into pure simulacra. In this case, the “high definition” pertains less to the perceptual level than to the level of our consciousness. We thus have three cinemas: first, one that while expanding risks its dispersion, then one that enhances its appeal to the senses to include the spectator in the depicted world better, and finally one that lowers its level of sensory appeal as a critical stance. These three cinemas—cinemas of dispersion, of adhesion, and of awareness—are not always at ease in establishing mutual connections. Nevertheless, they shape a common ground that defines what remains specific to cinema in an era of media convergence.

The fifth chapter analyzes the space that is created both in front of and around a screen and introduces the notion of hypertopia. Cinema’s migration toward new environments implies many new elements. While the darkened theater appeared to be a space mainly oriented to the film viewing, and was recognizable as such,32 today sites of viewing—domestic spaces like my living room, or urban spaces like public squares of the hall of a train station, or exposition spaces like galleries and museums—take on a more complex status. In these sites, cinema is no longer an exclusive presence, but rather is placed alongside other points of interest; it is not a permanent presence, but often closely tied to specific occasions; it is thus not something that we can rely on finding consistently in the same place, but rather something that seems to “take place” from time to time. These changes overturn the traditional dimensions of cinema. If the darkened movie theater implied that I would literally go to the cinema, in these new environments it is as if the cinema comes to me. Moreover, if, in the movie theater, cinema allowed us to travel to other worlds, in these new environments it makes these worlds available wherever I happen to be, placing them in my hand, so to speak. This is particularly true when I download a film from the Internet: here the word access no longer implies that I must pass over a threshold and enter into a particular place; rather, it indicates that something arrives before my eyes at my command. We now need to have everything “here,” as opposed to being obliged to move “elsewhere.” We can summarize this new situation by saying that we find ourselves not before heterotopias—that is, as Michel Foucault has explained,³³ spaces with points of passage toward different dimensions—but rather before hypertopias, points that attract and absorb other ones into themselves. The early cinema, with its ability to strike the spectator viscerally rather than absorbing him into the narration, already experimented with the hypertopia. Today, relocated cinema can move more freely in this direction.

The sixth chapter deals with the evolution of the screen. The new devices into which cinema relocates—from computer to smartphone, from tablet to media façade—change the very nature of the screen. It is no longer the surface on which reality is represented with renewed strength and clarity (including the reality of dreams). In other words, the screen is no longer the site of epiphany, to take up a term used by the early film theorists. New devices have a screen that functions rather like a display, which is to say that it has become a place on which free-floating images stop for a moment, make themselves available to users, allow themselves to be manipulated, and then take off again along new routes. Moving to these new devices, cinema too has ended up following the logic of the display: Its images appear more precarious, less limited by narration, and open to different meanings. The increasing success of films using images that come or purport to come from some preexisting archive symptomizes how filmic images too now seem to be part of a tornado of images that occasionally subsides and leaves a few behind. However, the point at which images “land” is never arrived at by chance. An image may make itself available to a crowd or to an individual, in a public space or in private, close in time to the events it represents or distant from them: In each of these cases, an image acquires different valences, both experiential and political. For a long time, cinema has been acting as a perfect public sphere and in this way has displayed the relevance of sharing images and sounds. Now, in a regime of intense and endless circulation, it is valuable to be reminded that images and sounds must be shared, even in the context of increasingly precarious audiences and situations.

The seven chapters lead to a conclusion. The cinema is moving to new places and to new devices, and in doing so, it seeks to remain itself. This migration, though, hides a small paradox. Many situations we meet are puzzling, and to recognize them as “cinematic” is not easy at all. If we do indeed recognize them, it is because we recall an “idea of cinema” and we apply it to what we find before us. In doing so, we often “force” the situation: We believe in a certain continuity, and we try to find it at any cost, hoping that cinema’s relocation will be just another step in its history. In the name of continuity, however, we often readjust also our “idea of cinema.” We want the medium to continue its journey—we want it to survive—and in order to guarantee its survival, we are also disposed to changing the model we refer to, in order to adapt it to what we encounter. In this way, we literally rewrite cinema’s history. Sometimes we make room for lost pages; sometimes we simply reimagine the past, so that it may also include the present. Cinema remains with us: Its survival represents a real and genuine rebirth, which returns it to what it was or could have been. But its survival is also marked with the sense of death, if only as a reflection of the fear that it could indeed disappear.

In this framework, the method of investigation needs to be purposefully heterogeneous. In examining the present, I will make abundant references to the past: in particular, to the film theories of the first three decades of the twentieth century, which I read not as well-substantiated explanations, but—as they were—as practical attempts to define cinema’s identity and to spread it through the public sphere;34 and to the media theories and film experimentation of the 1960s and 1970s, which I consider to be the moment at which cinema began the transformation that is now coming to completion. Historical references will help me both to underline the novelty of many phenomena that are now unfolding and to uncover the roots of these new phenomena. Today, cinema faces many questions that it has already met along its way. To see how they resurface is enlightening.

In any case, I will also keep in mind that the past is often a construct that emerges from current needs. It is a source, but also a myth that is shaped retrospectively. Cinema continually rewrites its genealogy under the pressure of the situations that it is coping with. This will be true also for this book, which is keen to connect the possible end of cinema with its beginnings.

Similarly, I will read the present not as the development of a coherent and inevitable design, but as an open contest between different forces and exigencies. More than one single thing, cinema has always been a field of possibilities. That is true also at the present. Before the cinema lies not a single destiny, but many open trajectories. If it wants to survive, it should not necessarily adopt an obtuse fidelity to itself projected into the future; rather, it must call its history into question, even at the risk of losing it.

In observing the present, I will select my examples based on the questions that I will grapple with; however, I will do so in such a way that these same examples reformulate the questions under discussion. Hence, I have a preference for symptomatic details, controversial elements, junctions, and provocations. I will examine everyday life (keeping in mind the most prosaic ways in which media work) as well as specialized ambits (those of artistic and linguistic experimentation) and that great virtual world that is the Internet. My fields of observation will be living rooms, town squares, public transportation, art galleries, YouTube, Facebook, and other Web sites, as well as films themselves, particularly those that interrogate the cinema.