INTRODUCTION
1. Chambre 666, Wim Wenders (France–West Germany, 1982).
3. We find this line of thought in authors ranging from Lev Manovich, “Digital Cinema and the History of Moving Image,” in The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 293–333, to David Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
4. This orientation of thought is present in authors ranging from Anne Friedberg, “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change,” in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2000), 438–52, to Laura Mulvey, Death 24 x a Second. Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006).
5. This thesis is developed by Paolo Cherchi Usai in The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age (London: British Film Institute, 2005), but also reemerges, with a different emphasis, in Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux, 11, 2009 (available at www.e-flux.com/journal/view/94), then in her The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 31–45.
9. The expression “cinéma d’exposition” has been coined by Jean-Christophe Royoux, “Pour un cinéma d’exposition. Retour sur quelques jalons historiques,” Omnibus, 20 (April 1997). This expression, and other similar ones, are discussed by Raymond Bellour in La querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma-Installations-expositions (Paris: POL, 2012). Bellour’s book is an excellent exploration of this kind of cinema.
10. Philippe Dubois, ed., Extended Cinema. La cinéma gagne du terrain (Pasian di Prato: Campanotto, 2010); see also Jeanine Marchessault and Susan Lord, eds., Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). For an opposite point of view on the topic, see Jacques Aumont, Que reste-t-il du cinema? (Paris: Vrin, 2012), especially pp. 27–49.
11. See Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel, eds., Future Cinema. The Cinematic Imaginary After Film (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).
12. Pavle Levi, Cinema by Other Means (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
13. Luc Vancheri, Cinémas contemporains. Du film à l’installation (Lyon: Aléas, 2009).
15. One example is ORBI, inaugurated in Yokohama on August 19, 2013, as a joint venture between the Sega video game company and BBC International. See http://orbiearth.com/en/.
16. See for example the new seats provided by AMC Theaters: “The Screen Is Silver, but the Seats Are Gold. AMC Theaters Lure Moviegoers with Cushy Recliners,” New York Times, October 18, 2013.
17. Haidee Wasson has made a comparative analysis of products available online through QuickTime and films available in IMAX theaters; see Haidee Wasson, “The Networked Screen: Moving Images, Materiality, and the Aesthetic of Size,” in Fluid Screen, Expanded Cinema, 74–95.
18. This tripartite division is suggested by Martin Jay, “Songs of Experience,” in Cultural Semantics: Keywords of our Time (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 44. Clearly, the idea of experience as Erlebnis and Erfahrung, as elaborated by Walter Benjamin, lies not too far off in the background. See “The Story-Teller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov,” translated from German by Harry Zohn, Chicago Review 16, n. 1 (Winter-Spring 1963), 80–101.—originally “Der Erzähler. Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows,” Orient und Occident (October 1936), now in Gesammelte Schriften, 2.2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 438–65; and the magnificent pages of “Experience and Poverty,” Selected Writings, 2. II (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999), 731–36; originally “Erfahrung und Armut,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 2.1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), 219. A historical revisitation of the idea of experience is Martin Jay, Songs of Experience. Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
19. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, eds., The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2008), 275.
20. John Belton, “Digital Cinema: A False Revolution?” October, 100 (Spring 2002), 98–114.
21. Stephen Prince, “True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory,” Film Quarterly, 49.3 (Spring 1996), 27–37. For Prince “A perceptual realistic image is one which structurally corresponds to the viewer’s audiovisual experience of three-dimensional space” (p. 32). According to Prince, the digital image is perfectly able to “establish correspondences with the properties of physical space and living systems in daily life” (pp. 33–34).
22. Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), in particular page 48 (“Given the similarity of generative methods, it is implausible to claim that one is a photograph and the other is not.”) and page 97 (“all pictures are opaque. It follows that both traditional and digital cinematic images are opaque”).
23. David Bordwell, Pandora’s Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies (Madison, Wis.: Irvington Way Institute Press, 2012), 8.
24. Noël Carroll, “Medium Specificity Arguments and the Self-Conscious Invented Arts: Film, Video and Photography,” and “The Specificity of Media in the Arts,” in Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3–36.
25. Edgar Morin, “Recherches sur le public cinématographique,” Revue Internationale de filmologie, 12.4, (January-March 1953), 3–19.
26. In this sense, I feel close to the position expressed by Tom Gunning in his “Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality,” Differences, 18.1 (2007), 29–52. Gunning retraces in film theory different ways of defining cinema. For example, we are accustomed to thinking that the main characteristic of the cinematic image is its existential link with what it reproduces; there is, however, a well-founded line of thinking that has placed the emphasis instead on the fact that it gives us images in movement.
28. See Barbara Klinger, “Cinema’s Shadows. Reconsidering Non-theatrical Exhibition,” in Richard Maltby, Melvin Stokes, and Robert C. Allen, eds., Going to the Movies. Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema (Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 2007), 273–90.
29. In Que reste-t-il du cinema? Jacques Aumont claims that the cinematic dispositive might change, as it has never had one and only one instantiation; what must not change are two aspects, respectively the temporal continuity and unity of the screening and the capacity of cinema to “encounter” reality. Even if I do not agree completely with Aumont’s argument (in particular, the idea of a continuous and entire vision is a quite recent habit), I agree with him on the fact that the re-articulation of cinema cannot drop the presence of some key features—it can just rearrange them. See Aumont, Que reste, especially the chapter “Permanences,” pp. 73–111.
30. In Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) (originally Soi-même comme un autre [Paris: Seuil, 1990]), Paul Ricoeur opposes two ideas of identity, as sameness and as selfhood: the first is based on the permanence of the same aspects, on an “idem”; the second is a construct that includes the differences, an “ipse.” On identity not as repetition of the same, but as effect of difference, see also Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); originally Différence et repetition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1976).
31. Gilles Deleuze’s “What Is a Dispositif?” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995 (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), 338–48; originally “Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif?” in Deux régimes de fous: textes et entretiens 1975–1995 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2003), 316–25.
32. For a history of film presentation, see Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasure (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).
33. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics, 16 (Spring 1986), 22–27; originally Michel Foucault, “Des espaces autres” (conférence au Cercle d’études architecturales, 14 mars 1967), Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, 5 (October 1984), 46–49.
34. In my opinion, early film theories, if not film theories in general, must be considered as social discourses, occurring in time and space, penned not only by “great personalities” but also by almost anonymous writers, aiming to provide a definition of an unexpected reality (as cinema indeed was, in its granting the persistence of life, offering an unprecedented ubiquity and simultaneity, delivering a vision beyond human capacities, and so forth). From this standpoint, early film theories, and perhaps later ones as well, were above all “glosses” that provided a practical explication of what cinema is or could be; it was in this capacity that they established an intellectual framework for public discussion. See Francesco Casetti, “Theory, Post-theory, Neo-theories: Changes in Discourses, Change in Objects,” Cinémas, 17.2–3 (Spring 2007), 33–45; and “Italy’s Early Film Theories: Borders and Crossings,” in Giorgio Bertellini, ed., Italian Silent Cinema. A Reader (New Barnet: John Libbey, 2013), 275–82.
1. RELOCATION
1. The exhibition was held from October 11, 2011, to March 11, 2012, and was part of the Unilever Series. It was accompanied by the catalog Film: Tacita Dean, ed. Nicholas Cullinan (London: Tate, 2011), in which a series of critics, artists, theoreticians, and filmmakers comment upon the importance of the film and of the analog image in the digital age.
6. See the persuasive analysis by John T. Caldwell, “Welcome to the Viral Future of Cinema (Television),” Cinema Journal, 45.1 (2005), 90–97.
7. The increasing velocity in film distribution has been brilliantly analyzed, especially for the first decade of the twenty-first century, by Charles Ackland, “Theatrical Exhibition: Accelerated Cinema,” in Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko, eds., The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008), 83–105.
9. This question appears in the title of Malte Hagener’s essay, “Where is Cinema (Today)? The Cinema in the Age of Media Immanence,” Cinema & Cie, 11 (Fall 2008), 15–22. A re-reading of film theory in terms of a topology, instead of an ontology, is proposed by Vinzenz Hediger, “Lost in Space and Found in a Fold. Cinema and the Irony of the Media,” in Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg, and Simon Rothöhler, eds., Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema (Vienna: Filmmuseum/Synema, 2012), 61–77.
10. “Experience” here refers not only to an exposure to images (and sounds) that engages our senses, but also to an awareness and to the practices that are consequent to such an exposure. We “experience” things when we encounter them, and we “have experience” because we have encountered things. On the experience of cinema, see the two diverging approaches of Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), and Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). See also Janet Harbord, “Breaking with the Aura? Film as Object or Experience,” in Film Cultures (London: Sage, 2002), 14–38, and Francesco Casetti, “Filmic Experience,” Screen, 50.1 (Spring 2009), 56–66. A concise but effective consideration of what it means for a film historian to focus on the experience of cinema is in Robert C. Allen, “Reimagining the History of the Experience of Cinema in a Post-Moviegoing Age,” in Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst, and Philippe Meers, eds., Explorations in New Cinema History. Approaches and Case Studies (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 41–57.
11. On the distinction between Apparat and Medium in Benjamin, see the comprehensive and persuasive analysis by Antonio Somaini, “‘L’oggetto attualmente più importante dell’estetica.’ Benjamin, il cinema come Apparat, e il ‘Medium della percezione,’” Fata Morgana, 20 (2013), 117–46.
12. Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea.”Art in the Age of Post-medium Condition (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 57.
13. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), xi.
14. Jean Epstein, “The Senses 1(b),” in Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 244. Originally “Le Sens 1 bis,” in Bonjour Cinéma (Paris: Editions de la Siréne, 1921), 27–44. Parallel, and opposed to Epstein, see also the praise of the camera eye in Dziga Vertov, “Kinoks: A Revolution,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, trans. Kevin O’Brien, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 11–12.
15. Antonello Gerbi, “Iniziazione alle delizie del cinema” [“An initiation to the delights of the cinema”], Il Convegno, 7.11–12 (November 25, 1926), 843.
16. Eugenio Giovannetti, Il cinema, arte meccanica (Palermo: Sandron, 1930). The same expression is used by Augusto Orvieto, “Spettacoli estivi: il cinematografo,” in Corriere della Sera, Milano, 22.228 (August 21, 1907). In France, Marcel L’Herbier, in “Hermes et Silence,” defines cinema as “a machine that imprints the life” (“machine à imprimer la vie”): see “Hermes and Silence,” in Abel, 147–55—who translates the phrase as “machine-which-transmits-life,” 147. Originally “Hermès et le silence,” Le Temps (February 23, 1918), then in a larger version in Intelligence du cinématographe (Paris: Correa, 1946), 199–212. Emile Vuillermoz rephrases L’Herbier, saying that cinema is “the machine with which to imprint dreams” (“machine à imprimer les rêves”): see “Before the Screen: Hermes and Silence,” in Abel, 157. Originally “Devant l’écran: Hermès et le silence,” Le Temps (March 9, 1918), 3. On the mechanical dimension in arts, see also this passage by Jean Epstein: “Here the machine aesthetic—which modified music by introducing freedom of modulation, painting by introducing descriptive geometry, and all the art forms, as well as all of life, by introducing velocity, another light, other intellects—has created its masterpiece. The click of a shutter produces photogénie which was previously unknown.” In Epstein, “The Senses 1(b),” in Abel, French Film Theory, 244.
17. Béla Balázs, Visible Man, Or the Culture of Film, in Erica Carter, ed., Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 9. Originally Béla Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films (Vienna: Deutsch-Österreichischer Verlag, 1924).
20. Giovanni Papini, “La filosofia del cinematografo,” La Stampa (Turin) (May 18, 1907), 1.
21. Jean Epstein, “Magnification,” in Abel, French Film Theory, 239. Originally “Grossissement,” in Bonjour Cinéma (Paris: Editions de la Siréne, 1921), 93–108.
22. “This frightful lust in watching horror, fighting and death . . . is what hurries to the morgue and to the scene of the crime, to every chase and every brawl. . . . And it is what yanks the people in the movie theatre as possessed.” Walter Serner, “Cinema and the Desire to Watch,” in Richard W. McCormick and Alison Guenther-Pal, eds., German Essays on Film (New York: Continuum, 2004), 18. Originally “Kino und Schaulust,” Die Schaubüne 9 (1913), 807–811.
23. The first commentators on cinema, just like the first theorists, were fascinated not only by cinema’s capacity to reproduce reality—a capacity it shares with photography—but also and above all by its reproduction of the living world, of life. Two famous reports that followed the first Lumière projection at the Café des Capucines convey this fascination. La Poste writes, “It is life itself, it is movement captured in action,” and “When these devices are delivered to the public, when all can photograph those who are dear to them no longer in immobile form but in movement, action, and familiar gestures, with a word on the tip of their tongue, death will cease to be absolute” (La Poste, 30 décembre 1895, in Daniel Banda and José Moure, eds., Le cinéma: Naissance d’un art. 1895–1920, Paris: Flammarion, 2008, 41). We find the same ideas in an article from Le radical, published the same day: “The spoken word has already been captured and reproduced; now so is life. One will, for example, be able to see one’s family members move about again, long after they have passed away” (Le radical, 30 décembre 1895, in Daniel Banda and José Moure, eds., Le cinéma, 40). This theme is taken up by other commentators and scholars; see in particular G. Fossa, “Orizzonti cinematografici avvenire,” La Scena Illustrata (Firenze), XLIII.5 (1 marzo 1907), who in the name of the reproduction of life imagines that cinema needs to connect itself with the telegraph and the phonograph. Recently, two books, both of them praising the permanence of cinema also in a post-medium condition, highlight the relevance of this “encounter” with reality: Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), and Jacques Aumont, Que reste-t-il du cinéma? (Paris: Vrin, 2012).
24. André Gay, “Le Cinématographe de MM. Auguste et Louis Lumiére,” Bulletin de Photo-Club de Paris, 5 (1985), 311. The French expression is “la sensation saissante du mouvement réel et de la vie.”
25. Ricciotto Canudo, “The Birth of a Sixth Art,” in Abel, French Film Theory, 60. Originally “Naissance d’un sixiéme art. Essai sur le Cinématographe,” Les Entretiens Idéalistes (October 25, 1911).
26. Ricciotto Canudo, “Reflections on the Seventh Art,” in Abel, French Film Theory, 295. Originally “Réflection sur la septiéme art,” in L’usine aux images (Paris: Chiron, 1926), 29–47.
27. Canudo, Reflections, 296.
28. Blaise Cendars, “The Modern: A New Art, the Cinema,” in Abel, French Film Theory, 182–83. Originally “Modernités—Un nouveau art: le cinema,” La rose rouge, 7 (June 12, 1919), 108; later merged into “L’ABC du cinéma,” in Aujourd’hui (Paris: Grasset, 1931), 55–66.
29. On the topic, see Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the [In]Credulous Spectator,” Art and Text (Fall 1989); “Re-Newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature, and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn-of-the-Century,” in David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, eds., Rethinking Media Change The Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 39–59; and “Uncanny Reflections, Modern Illusions: Sighting the Modern Optical Uncanny,” in Jo Collins and John Jervis, eds., Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 68–90.
30. Balázs, Visible Man, 39.
31. Georg Lukács, “Thoughts on an Aesthetics of ‘Cinema,’” in McCormick and Guenther-Pal, German Essays on Film, 12. Originally “Gedanken zu einer Ästhetik des Kino,” in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 251 (September 10, 1913), 1–2; a previous version appears in Pester Lloyd (Budapest) (April 16, 1911), 45–46.
32. Victor O. Freeburg, The Art of Photoplay Making (New York: Macmillan, 1918), especially chapter 6, “The Appeal of Imagination.”
33. Dziga Vertov, “Kinoks: A Revolution,” in Kino-Eye: the Writings of Dziga Vertov. Originally 1923.
34. Sergei Eisenstein, “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” Film Form and The Film Sense (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), 28–44.
35. Louis Delluc, “From Orestes to Rio Jim,” in Abel, French Film Theory, 257. Originally “D’Oreste à Rio Jim,” Cinéa, 32 (December 9, 1921), 14–15. See also “Le cinéma, art populaire,” reprinted in Écrits cinématographiques, 2 vol., ed. Pierre Lherminier (Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 1985–1986), 2:279–88.
36. Faure claims that humankind has always needed “a collective spectacle . . . able to unite all classes, all ages, and, as a rule, the two sexes, in a unanimous communion exalting the rhythmic power that defines, in each of them, the moral order.” Elie Faure, The Art of Cineplastics (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1923), 5. Originally “De la Cineplastique,” in L’arbre d’Eden (Paris: Ed. Crest, 1922).
37. Freeburg focuses on the capacity of film to transform a crowd into a public, able to articulate a deliberate expression: “This deliberate expression is called public opinion,” The Art of Photoplay Making, 8.
38. “The telephone, automobile, airplane and radio have so altered the limits of time and space within which civilizations have developed, that today man has ended up acquiring not so much a quickness of understanding unknown to the ancients, as a kind of ubiquity. Film seems the artistic reflection of this new condition of life, both material and spiritual.” Sebastiano A. Luciani, L’antiteatro. Il cinematografo come arte (Roma: La Voce Anonima Editrice, 1928), 76.
39. Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 290. The idea that cinema brings us back to a primitive condition and offers us an “originary” experience is largely present in early debates. An example is provided by Ricciotto Canudo: “[cinema] is bringing us with all our acquired psychological complexity back to the great, true, primordial, synthetic language, visual language, prior even to the confining literalness of sound.” See Canudo, “Reflections” in Abel, French Film Theory, 296. On the relevance of “primitive” in film theory and in art theory during the 1920s and 1930s, see Antonio Somaini, Ejženstejn. Il cinema, le arti, il montaggio (Turin: Einaudi, 2011).
40. “An essential condition of a good work of art is indeed that the special attributes of the medium employed should be clearly and cleanly laid bare,” Rudolf Arnheim, Film (London: Faber & Faber, 1933), 44. Originally Film als Kunst (Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, 1932).
41. An excellent reconstruction of those years appears in Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience.
42. André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 2 vols., trans. and ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Originally Qu’est ce que le cinéma? (Paris: Ed. du Cerf): vol. 1, Ontologie et langage (1958); vol. 2, Le cinéma et les autres arts (1959); vol. 3, Cinéma et Sociologie (1961); and vol. 4, Une esthétique de la réalité: le néo-réalisme (1962).
43. Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or, the Imaginary Man, trans. Lorraine Mortimer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Originally Le cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire: Essai d’anthropologie sociologique (Paris: Minuit, 1956).
44. Among the many contributions, see for instance Eric Feldmann, “Considération sur la situation du spectateur au cinéma,” Revue Internationale de Filmologie, 26 (1956), 83–97.
45. Karel Teige, “The Aesthetics of Film and Cinégraphie,” in Jaroslav Andel and Petr Szczepanik, eds., Cinema all the Time: An Anthology of Czech Film Theory and Criticism (Prague: National Film Archive, 2008), 147. Originally “Estetika filmu a kinografie,” Host, 3.6–7 (April 1924), 143–54.
46. Luigi Pirandello, Shoot!, trans. C. K. Scott Montcrieff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 8. Originally Si gira, in Nuova Antologia (June 1–August 16, 1915), then in a single volume (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1916). Republished with minor changes and a new title, as Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (Firenze: Edizioni Bemporad, 1925).
47. Ibid., 77–78. On Pirandello and his “cinematic vision,” see Gavriel Moses, The Nickel Was for the Movies: Film in the Novel Pirandello to Puig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
48. Jean Paul Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: George Braziller, 1964), 122–23.
49. Jean Epstein, “The Cinema Seen from Etna” in Sarah Keller and Jason Paul, eds., Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 289.
50. Epstein, The Cinema Seen from Etna, 292.
51. Michel de Certeau, La faiblesse de croire (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 210.
52. Paul Valéry, “The Conquest of Ubiquity,” in Aesthetics (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), 225–28. Originally “La conquête de l’ubiquité,” in Pièces sur l’art (Paris: Darantière, 1931), 79–85. The essay first appeared in De la musique avant toute chose (Paris: Editions du Tamburinaire, 1928).
57. It should be noted that in these same years cinema is considered a medium capable of transporting emotions. Marcel L’Herbier writes, “the cinematograph seeks nothing other than to distribute human emotions, just as ephemeral as they are on the ephemeral film, but stretched out horizontally over the vaster expanse of the world.” According to L’Herbier, this distribution is what opposes cinema to art: If the former spreads emotions that last only a few moments, also because on an ephemeral medium, art does the opposite, concentrating emotions in a work that tries to be perennial. See Marcel L’Herbier, “Esprit du cinématographe,” Les Cahiers du mois 16–17 (1925), 29–35. The question, however, is whether the emotions raised by a film as such find means that let them go beyond the darkened room.
58. Ben Singer has shown the availability of dozens of projectors intended for amateur use in the home and elsewhere just two years after the appearance of Edison’s Kinetoscope. See Ben Singer, “Early Home Cinema and the Edison Home Projecting Kinetoscope,” Film History 2 (1988), especially pp. 42–45. On the long permanence of nontheatrical venues, after the movie theatee became the standard mode of exhibition, see Gregory A. Waller, “Locating Early Non-Theatrical Audiences,” in Ian Christie, ed., Audience (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 81–95.
59. See Barbara Klinger, “Cinema-Shadow. Reconsidering Non-theatrical Exhibition,” in Richard Maltby, Robert Stokes, and Robert C. Allen, eds., Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), 273–90. Klinger strongly advocates for a larger consideration of film experience.
60. Research on the migration of cinema—and on the dissolution of its borders—has exploded recently. In the large bibliography, I want to mention at least Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema, ed. Gertrud Koch, Simon Rothöhler, and Volker Pantenburg (Wien: Filmmuseum/Synema, 2012), and “Screen Attachments. New Practices of Viewing Moving Images,” a special issue of the e-journal Screening the Past, 32 (2011), edited by Katherine Fowler and Paola Voci. An extended and persuasive picture of cinema in the age of digital interaction is provided by Chuck Tryon, Reinventing Cinema. Movies in the Age of Media Convergence (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009), and On-Demand Culture. Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2013). The large industrial landscape in which such a migration takes place is masterly explored by John T. Caldwell in Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008); see also Anna Everett and John T. Caldwell, eds.,New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality (London: Routledge, 2003). A worldwide picture of the new Hollywood is Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko, eds., The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008): see in particular the analyses by Tom Schatz (on the “conglomerate” Hollywood), Janet Wasko (on finance and production), Philip Drake (distribution and marketing), and Charles Ackland (theatrical exhibition).
61. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 45.
62. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
63. The concept of convergence can indeed be taken in this sense; see Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
64. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1977). Originally Anti-Œdipe (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972). See also A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988).
65. Deleuze and Guattari make extensive reference to the dynamic of drives: In the processes of de- and re-territorialization, elements behave as libidinal charges, which can be bound or freed, and can configure systems that are either more compact or more labile. Such a reference reminds us that a medium may also be pushed into movement by a desire, and it is in relation to this desire that it either remains nomadic or allows itself to be trapped in one place.
66. See for example the analysis of the mode of seeing developed by mobile media in different contexts in Laura E. Levine, Bradley M. Waite, and Laura L. Bowman, “Mobile Media Use, Multitasking and Distractibility,” International Journal of Cyber Behavior, Psychology and Learning, 2.3 (2012), 15–29. In a more sociological vein, see Rihannon Bury and Johnson Li, “Is it Live or it is Timeshifted, Streamed or Downloaded? Watching Television in the Era of Multiple Screens,” New Media and Society (November 6, 2013). Some data (mostly from online reports) and amusing descriptions of media users as film spectators appear in Wheeler Winston Dixon, Streaming. Movies, Media, and Instant Access (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2013). It is possible to retrieve quantitative figures in the surveys by Nielsen.
67. A qualitative audience research on the re-enjoyment of films as films in a domestic environment is Uma Dinsmore-Tuli, “The Pleasures of ‘Home Cinema,’ or Watching Movies on Telly: An Audience Study of Cinephiliac VCR Use,” Screen, 41.3 (2000), 315–27.
68. Mauro Carbone has written some important pages on the relationship between form and deformation in An Unprecedented Deformation: Marcel Proust and the Sensible Ideas (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2010). Originally Una deformazione senza precedenti.Marcel Proust e le idee sensibili (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2004). My insistence that the form of an experience emerges from a situation, rather than being applied from the outside, as well as the connection that I propose between the “form of the cinematic experience” and the “idea of cinema,” owes much to Carbone’s book.
69. In “Seeing Theory: On Perception and Emotional Response in Current Film Theory,” Malcom Turvey proposes applying Wittgenstein’s concept of “seeing-as” to the recognition of filmic images. I am trying here to extend Turvey’s claim, applying the concept not only to filmic images, but also to the spectator’s situation, as well as noting that in the case of “seeing-as,” differently than in that of “seeing,” we also keep in mind the possibility of switching from one figure to the other. See Turvey, “Seeing Theory,” in Richard Allen and Murray Smith, eds., Film Theory and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 431–57.
70. I strongly insisted on this quality of theory in “Theory, Post-theory, Neo-theories: Changes in Discourses, Change in Objects,” Cinémas, 17.2–3 (Spring 2007), 33–45.
71. On the role of memory in our experience of cinema, see, among others, Annette Kuhn, Dreaming of Fred and Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
72. Béla Balázs understood this quality quite well, writing that theory, which is expected to bring us such an idea, “is the road map for those who roam among the arts, showing them pathways and opportunities.” Balázs, Visible Man, 3.
73. On the “idea of cinema” as a key element, see François Albera and Maria Tortajada, “Le dispositif n’existe pas,” in François Albera and Maria Tortajada, eds., Ciné-dispositifs (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 2011), 27ff. The need and effectiveness of an “idea of cinema” has recently been displayed by Dudley Andrew in What Cinema Is! (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). How an “idea of cinema” is extracted by imperfect situations is debated by Jacques Rancière in the preface of his The Film Fables (Oxford: Berg, 2006); originally La fable cinématographique (Paris: Seuil, 2001). Naturally, the “idea of cinema” takes us back to the “myth of cinema” discussed by André Bazin in What Is Cinema?
74. This image appears in the essay, “Erfahrung und Armut,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol 2., bk.1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 219.
76. “They sleep; their eyes no longer see. They are no longer conscious of their bodies. Instead, there are only passing images, a gliding and rustling of dreams.” Jules Romains, “The Crowd at the Cinematograph” (1911), in Richard Abel, French Film Theory, 53.
81. “However, on a professional level, there is a major concern on the size of a typical phone’s screen when showing a potential client some videos. It’s just too small to make the visuals and even the sound coming from a very small speaker, well appreciated.” Ibid.
85. Blaise Cendrars, “The Modern: A New Art, the Cinema,” in Abel, French Film Theory, 182–83.
86. Philippe Dubois, “Présentation,” in Phlippe Dubois, Frédéric Monvoison, and Elena Biserna, eds., Extended cinema: Le cinéma gagne du terrain (Pasian di Prato: Campanotto, 2010), 13–14.
87. Philippe Dubois, Lucia Ramos Monteiro, and Alessandro Bordina, eds., Oui, c’est du cinéma: formes et espaces de l’image en mouvement (Paisan del Piave: Campanotto, 2009).
88. Raymond Bellour, La querelle des dispositifs : cinéma—installations, expositions (Paris: POL, 2012), 14.
89. Eric De Kuiper and Emile Poppe, “À la recherche du spectateur. Tentative du mise au clair,” in Extended cinema, 61–69.
90. Miriam Hansen, “Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public Sphere,” in Linda Williams, ed., Viewing Positions. Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 134–52.
91. László Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969), 41. Originally Malerei Photografie Film (Munich: Albert Langen, 1925). Moholy-Nagy called the experiment “simultaneous or poly-cinema.”
92. Anne Friedberg, “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change,” in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2000), 438–52.
93. Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: NLB, 1977). Originally Ursprung des deutschen trauerspiels (Berlin: E. Rowohlt, 1928). A useful reading of the prologue can be found in Carbone, An Unprecedented Deformation.
95. On this issue, see Mauro Carbone, An Unprecedented Deformation, 104.
2. RELICS/ICONS
1. Antonello Gerbi, “Iniziazione alle delizie del cinema,” Il Convegno, 7.11–12 (November 25, 1926), 846.
3. One year before Gerbi, László Moholy-Nagy spoke of a “kinetic, projected composition, probably even with interpenetrating beams and mass of light floating freely in the room without a direct plane of projection.” Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969), 26. Originally Malerei Photografie Film (Munich: Albert Langen, 1925). In the same volume, Moholy-Nagy also envisioned a simultaneous projection of two to four films on a semispherical screen, with images that converged and overlapped: he speaks of “simultaneous or poly-cinema” (see p. 41ff.). The 1920s was a decade that widely attempted new forms of projection; see Patrick de Haas, “Entre projectile et projet: Aspects de la projection dans les années vingt,” in Dominique Paini, ed., Projections, les transports de l’image (Paris: Hazan /Le Fresnoy/AFAA, 1997), 95–126.
4. Robert C. Allen, “Reimagining the History of the Experience of Cinema in a Post-Moviegoing Age,” in Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst, and Philippe Meers, eds., Explorations in New Cinema History. Approaches and Case Studies (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 41.
7. The BFI Statistical Yearbook 2013 summarizes such a trend, with particular focus on the United Kingdom: “Along with the USA and other western European countries, cinema-going in the UK declined sharply in the post-war era as incomes rose and new leisure activities became available. The largest competition came from the growth of television which allowed audiences to satisfy their appetite for screen entertainment in the comfort of their own homes. As cinema admissions fell so did the supply of screens, which led to further falling demand and more cinema closures. By the 1980s the number and quality of the remaining cinemas were at an all time low. The introduction of the VCR in the same decade had a further negative impact on admissions and the nadir was reached in 1984 with cinema-going down to an average of one visit per person per year. However, the introduction of multiplex cinemas to the UK from 1985 onwards reversed the trend and ushered in a new period of growth which saw admissions returning to levels last seen in the early 1970s.” BFI Statistical Yearbook 2013, 12.
9. BFI Statistical Yearbook, 146; see also pg. 8.
11. BFI Statistical Yearbook, 144.
14. I refer, naturally, to the theater that the cinema fashioned in its institutionalized phase, when it changed from a simple assembly point for a crowd, as the temporary canvas theater used by traveling exhibitors, to a stable and specific place where an audience gathered. The transition from early forms of exhibition to the rise of national theater chains is retraced by Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasure (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), especially pp. 2–56. For Italy, see the exhaustive reconstruction of Aldo Bernardini, Cinema muto italiano II. Industria e organizzazione dello spettacolo 1905–1909 (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1981). The passage from a theater that was still a place of confusion to theater as a disciplinary place in the Foucauldian sense of the word was documented in Italy in Gualtiero Ildebrando Fabbri’s novel Al cinematografo (Milan: P. Tonini, 1907), intended as a gift to the most assiduous spectators of Milanese theater of the day, and by articles such as Tullio Panteo’s “Il cinematografo,” La Scena Illustrata, 19.1 (October 1908), reprinted in Bernardini, Cinema muto italiano II, 236. Of course, we also must keep in mind that the nontheatrical exhibitions lasted for a long time, often intended for “specialized” audiences: on the topic, see Gregory A. Waller, “Locating Early Non-Theatrical Audiences,” in Ian Christie, ed., Audience (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 81–95.
15. Regarding the home theater, see, among others, Barbara Klinger, “The New Media Aristocrats,” in Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 17–53.
16. The difference between modes of viewing at the cinema and in front of the television has been framed in various ways. See the distinctions between gaze and glance proposed by John Ellis and the distinctions between viewing and monitoring proposed by Stanley Cavell. See John Ellis, Visible Fictions (London: Routledge, 1992), and Stanley Cavell, “The Fact of Television,” Daedalus, 111.4 (Fall 1982), 75–96, reprinted in Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2005), 59–85.
17. NBC Saturday Night at the Movies was the first weekly program, beginning September 1961, to present relatively recent films, in color, in a time slot of ninety minutes. Prior to this program, television hosted only films in black and while, generally second-rate, and reduced to a length of one hour, or European films, not included in the mainstream market, and also often manipulated. NBC’s program immediately had an influence on the programming of the other channels, which created rival series such as The ABC Sunday Night Movie or The CBS Wednesday Night Movies, but the programming of the same channel also expanded in the direction of cinema, with programs such as The NBC Monday Movie or NBC Tuesday Night at the Movies.
18. The main reason why VHS won over Betamax was the fact that VHS tapes were designed to record 120 minutes rather than 60—the length of an average movie, instead of that of a television program. See James Lardner, Fast Forward. Hollywood, the Japanese, and the Onslaught of the VCR (New York: Norton, 1987).
19. On the new temporality of DVDs, see Anne Friedberg, “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change,” in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2000), 438–52.
20. Chuck Tryon, On-Demand Culture. Digital Delivery and the Future of the Movies (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2013).
21. On the immersive view in museums, see Allison Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
22. I read in this trend a direct influence of the New York World’s Fair of 1964–1965, dedicated to “Man’s Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe,” in which the presentation of the most recent scientific and technological discoveries was made with the use of film clips often projected onto a multiple number of screens: the pavilions aimed not only at providing information and knowledge, but also at creating environments in which the visitors could immerse themselves.
23. See David Morley, “Public Issues and Intimate Histories: Mediation, Domestication and Dislocation,” in Media, Modernity and Technology (London: Routledge, 2007), 210.
24. On the atmospheric theatre, and on the architecture of the interiors of cinemas between the two wars in general, see Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotions: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London: Verso, 2002).
25. “This emphasis on the external has the advantage of being sincere. It is not externality that poses a threat to the truth. Truth is threatened only by the naïve affirmation of cultural values that has become unreal and by the careless misuse of concepts such as personality, inwardness, tragedy and so on—terms that in themselves certainly refer to lofty ideas but have lost much of their scope along with their supporting foundations, due to social changes.” Sigfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin Movie Palaces,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 326. Originally Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963). The essay was written in 1927.
26. On the advent of cinema at the MoMA, see Haidee Wasson, “Studying Movies at the Museum: The Museum of Modern Art and Cinema’s Changing Object” in Haidee Wasson and Lee Grieveson, eds., Inventing Film Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 121–48. Wasson recalls the three guiding principles for such an advent: “First, that the otherwise anamorphous phenomena called cinema should also be understood as a collection of individual films, as an assemblage of objects that endured through time; second, that these selected films should be seen, requiring a form of distribution and exhibition of films outside of commercial movie theaters; and, third, that viewing such films should be augmented by informed research materials, placing film in pertinent sociological, historical, political, and aesthetic dialogue” (pp. 122–23). Wasson also notes that Iris Barry “had a slide projector permanently installed in the museum’s auditorium, equipped with a slide that read: ‘If the disturbance in the auditorium does not cease, the showing of this film will be discontinued’” (pp. 126–27).
27. See Iris Barry, “A Short Survey of the Films in America Circulated by the Museum of Modern Art Film Library. Programs 1–5a” (New York, c. 1936–1937).
28. For example, Barry screened only the reels of The Jazz Singer with music and songs.
29. Louis Delluc, “The Crowd,” in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, ed. and trans. Richard Abel, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1:159–64. Originally “La foule devant l’écran,” in Delluc, Photogenie (Paris: de Brunoff, 1920), 104–118.
30. Robert Desnos, “Charlot,” Journal littéraire (June 13, 1925). Reprinted in Desnos, Cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 145–46.
35. Will Straw has observed that it is precisely the possibility of delivering a film through many channels that has made it an object with its own autonomy and identity: “As windows for the marketing of films proliferate, the branding of films as discrete entities is heightened, such that they maintain their distinctiveness across every channel of exhibition, from the retail videocassette to the pay-per-view event.” Will Straw, “Proliferating Screens,” Screen, 41 (Spring 2000), 117.
36. Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theater,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 345–49. Originally “En sortant du cinéma,” Communications, 23 (1975); reprinted in Le bruissement de la langue: essais critiques IV (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 407–412.
37. Haidee Wasson, “The Networked Screen: Moving Images, Materiality, and the Aesthetics of Size,” in Jeanine Marchessault and Susan Lord, eds., Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 88. Wasson speaks respectively of “cinema of attraction” and of “cinema of suggestion.”
38. Lev Manovich notices an increasing fracture between an immersive gaze and a gaze devoted to control; see The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).
39. See Brett Anderson, Theo Kalomirakis’ Private Theaters (New York: Abrams, 1997). See also TKtheaters, www.tktheaters.com.
40. “Like the great movie houses of the early 20th century, the theaters that Theo Kalomirakis designs lure the audience away from everyday life into a tantalizingly polished and detailed space. Visual refinements in color, light, and texture, as well as spatial transitions, from entering the outer lobby to taking a seat in the auditorium, prepare the client almost ritualistically for the proper experience of the movie. Regardless of their size, they all share a common trait—the theater experience.” And again: “Theo Kalomirakis is the recognized pioneer in the design and development of opulent home theaters; his designs are the gold standard for clients who have the wherewithal, and the space, to dedicate to the ultimate residential cinematic experience”; see www.tktheaters.com.
41. For a discussion of Byzantine thought with regard to icons, see Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), and Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzanthine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico Franses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Originally Image, icône, économie: les sources byzantines de l’imaginaire contemporain (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1996).
42. Bissera V. Pentcheva highlights this dialectic between presence and absence in “The Performative Icon,” The Art Bulletin. 88.4 (December 2006), 631–55. Further remarks in the more recent The Sensual Icon. Space, Ritual, and The Senses in Byzantium (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 83–88.
43. Ricciotto Canudo, “The Birth of a Sixth Art,” in Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism, 1:64–65. Originally “La naissance d’un sixiéme art. Essai sur le Cinématographe,” in Les Entretiens Idéalistes (October 1911), then in L’usine aux images (Paris: Séguier/Arte, 1995).
44. Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 289–304; Antonello Gerbi, Iniziazione alle delizie del cinema, 841.
45. Antone de Baecque recognizes this religious basis of French cinephilia: “On a souvent comparé la salle obscure à un temple, et il est vrai que la cinéphilie, même tenue dans le réseaux les plus laïcs, est empreinte d’une grande religiosité dans ses cérémonies.” [“The dark cinema has often been compared to a temple, and it is true that cinephilia, although it is carried out in the most secular of spaces, is marked by a great religiosity of its ceremonies.”] Antoine de Baecque, La cinéphilie. Invention d’un regard, histoire d’une culture. 1944–1968 (Paris : Fayard, 2003), 14. See also Antoine De Baecque and Thierry Frémaux, “La Cinéphilie ou l’invention d’une culture,” Vingtième Siècle, 46 (1995), 133–42.
46. See http://projectcinephilia.mubi.com/. Last accessed October 2013. On the revival of cinephilia, see Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener, eds., Cinephilia. Movies, Love and Memory (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), and the dossier “Cinephilia. What is Being Fought for by Today’s Cinephilia(s)?” in Framework, 50 (2009), 176–228. See also Jonathan Rosembaum and Adrian Martin, eds., Movie Mutations. The Changing Face of the World Cinephilia (London: BFI Publishing, 2003), in particular 1–34.
47. Nico Baumbach, “All That Heaven Allows,” in Film Comment (March 12, 14, and 16, 2012). Baumbach’s essay is split into three parts: “What Is, or Was, Cinephilia?” (part one) at http://filmcomment.com/entry/all-that-heaven-allows-what-is-or-was-cinephilia-part-one; “What Is, or Was, Cinephilia?” (part two) at http://filmcomment.com/entry/all-that-heaven-allows-what-is-or-was-cinephilia-part-two-criticism; and “What Is, or Was, Cinephilia?” (part three) at http://filmcomment.com/entry/all-that-heaven-allows-what-is-or-was-cinephilia-part-three-cinephilia. This and the following quotations are in the third part. Last accessed November 2013.
48. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14. Originally “L’ontologie de l’image photographique,” in Bazin, Qu’est ce que le cinéma? (Paris: Ed. du Cerf, 1958).
49. “Here one should really examine the psychology of relics and souvenirs which likewise enjoy the advantages of a transfer of reality stemming from the ‘mummy complex.’ Let us merely note in passing that the Holy Shroud of Turin combines the features alike of relic and photograph.” Bazin, The Ontology, 14.
50. Bazin, The Ontology, 15. Bazin follows the sentence saying, “Photography actually contributes something of the order of natural creation instead of providing a substitute for it.”
51. Bazin, The Ontology, 14.
3. ASSEMBLAGE
1. I am using the term dispositive here in order to distance myself from the traditional “theory of the apparatus” and to recuperate those aspects raised by French and Italian scholars on the issue—in particular by Foucault, Deleuze, and Agamben, who use this term. I am following the suggestion made by Jeffrey Bussolini in his essay, “What Is a Dispositive?” Foucault Studies, 10 (November 2010), 85–107, where he offers an analysis of the differences in English, French, and Italian between apparatus/appareil/apparato and dispositive/dispositif/dispositivo. The term dispositive is also used in the important volume edited by François Albera and Maria Tortajada, Cinema Beyond Film (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010). Also worth noting is that the need to take a distance from the term apparatus already emerges in the English translation of Gilles Deleuze’s “What Is a Dispositif?” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995 (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), 338–48. Originally “Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif?” in Deux régimes de fous: textes et entretiens 1975–1995 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2003), 316–25. For the theory of the apparatus, see The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (London: MacMillan, 1980), and Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
2. For a short history of the cell phone, see Jon Agar, Constant Touch (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2003). Roger Odin has devoted much attention to the cinema made with, and intended to be watched on, mobile phones. See “Spectator, Film and the Mobile Phone” in Ian Christie, ed., Audience (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 155–69; “Cinéma et téléphone portable. Approche sémio-pragmatique,” Théorème, 15 (2012); “Quand le téléphone rencontre le cinéma,” in Laurence Allard, Laurent Creton, and Roger Odin, eds., Cinéma et création (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013).
3. See Philippe-Alain Michaud, “Le mouvement des images,” Mouvement des images/The Movement of Images (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2006), 15–30.
4. Many of the following observations are supported by an ethnographic study that I conducted in Italy in fall 2010, together with Sara Sampietro, which had as its object the consumption of cinematic material on the iPhone. The results were published in Francesco Casetti and Sara Sampietro, “With Eyes, with Hands: The Relocation of Cinema into the iPhone,” in Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau, eds., Moving Data: The iPhone and the Future of Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 19–32.
5. For a discussion of “bubbles” and “spheres” in general, see Peter Sloterdijk’s in-depth study Bubbles: Spheres Volume I (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011). Originally Sphären, Band I: Blasen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998).
6. As one of the subjects in my ethnographic research reports: “You can stick yourself in a corner of the train with your headphones on: this way you are a little protected.” Another says: “Watching movies on the train is also a way of passing the time: if you don’t, you end up staring out of the windows for hours, and you get bored.” See Casetti and Sampietro, “With Eyes,” 24.
7. Michael Bull, “To Each Their Own Bubble: Mobile Spaces of Sound in the City,” in Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy, eds., MediaSpace: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age (London: Routledge, 2003), 285.
9. For more on this topic, see David Morley, “What’s ‘Home’ Got to Do with It?: Contradictory Dynamics in the Domestication of Technology and the Dislocation of Domesticity,” European Journal of Cultural Studies, 6.4 (November 2003), 435–58.
10. The spectator’s itinerary—from being exposed to the gazes of others when the lights are still on to the progressive level of concentration on the narrated world—is described well by Erich Feldmann in “Considérations sur la situation du spectateur au cinema,” Revue Internationale de Filmologie, 26 (1956), 83–97.
11. A comment from the ethnographic research: “If you want, you can even watch something together with someone else. You just have to concentrate on the screen and stay together. I have watched tons of stuff together with my friends.” Casetti and Sampietro, “With Eyes,” 28.
13. Mariagrazia Fanchi, in Spettatore (Milan: Il Castoro, 2005), distinguishes between epidermal, multitask, and intimate forms of consumption. The first is characterized by “a mobile and inattentive gaze, bored and fickle” (p. 41). The second consists in “an attentive yet dispersive gaze, which does not concentrate in a single object, but devotes its attention impartially to various elements” (p. 43). Here, the act of vision is woven together with disparate activities (chatting with one’s neighbor, monitoring the surrounding space, and so forth). Finally, intimate consumption is “an experience centered on the screen, and characterized by an exclusive relationship with the text” (p. 39). Casetti and Sampietro, in “With Eyes,” have verified the existence of these three forms of consumption in mobile vision.
14. Lucilla Albano, “Cinema and Psychoanalysis: Across the Dispositifs,” American Imago, 70.2 (Summer 2013), 191–224.
15. “Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibrium among the other organs and extensions of the body.” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 49.
16. François Albera and Maria Tortajada, “Le dispositif n’existe pas,” in François Albera and Maria Tortajada, eds., Ciné-dispositifs (Lausanne : L’Age d’Homme, 2011), 13–38.
17. Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 286–98. Originally “Cinéma: effets idéologiques produits par l’appareil de base,” Cinéthique, 7–8 (1970), 1–8.
18. Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema,” Camera Obscura, 1 (Fall 1976), 104–126. Originally “Le Dispositif,” Communications, 23 (1975), 56–72.
19. It is worthy of attention that Baudry uses the term appareil in reference to movie camera and projector and the term dispositif in reference to the triad of projector, screen, and darkened theater. But despite the difference in terminology, what Baudry has in mind are two aspects of the same entity.
20. For the “apparatus theory,” see Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, eds., The Cinematic Apparatus (London: MacMillan, 1980), and Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Among the various elements that contribute to the “theory of the apparatus,” we should not overlook the idea of the “ideological state apparatus.” See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 85–126. Originally “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État: Notes pour une recherche,” La Pensée, 151 (June 1970); reprinted in Positions (1964–1975) (Paris: Les Éditions sociales, 1976), 67–125.
21. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, Post-theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).
22. Christian Metz, Imaginary Signifier. Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). Originally Le signifiant imaginaire: Psychanalyse et cinema (Paris: UGE, 1977).
23. Especially in the field of media there were many contributions that tried to escape such a deterministic orientation. See in particular Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken Books, 1974). First of all, according to Williams, technology should be viewed in close relation not only to a subject, but also to production processes and social structures—two elements that both influence technology and are influenced by it. Second, technology never offers singular solutions, but rather a series of possibilities, which, in turn, are measured against social and individual needs in a confrontation in which neither side has the last word. Finally, the path that leads to the creation of a technical device is never immediate or linear. On the one hand, it is guided by an idea, based on available possibilities, but on the other hand, it depends on political and social contingencies, which bring to the fore different priorities.
24. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).
25. Rosalind Krauss, Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000).
27. Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). Originally Che cos’è un dispositivo? (Rome: Nottetempo, 2006). The translation of Agamben’s book adopts “apparatus” as more respectful of the tradition in the English-speaking debate, but it misses the differences that Agamben puts forward with the framework of the “apparatus theory.”
28. Agamben, Apparatus, 12.
31. Agamben argues against the idea of the “correct use” of a device. If “correct use” signifies the facile release from the enslaving chains of a device, he is quite right. However, if it means that it is impossible for the subject to move outside of the position assigned to her, then he has fallen into a contradiction. Who could possibly “profane” a device if it entirely generates its subject? Is profanation introduced by the device itself, thereby neutralizing itself? Or by a non-human agent—which is for sure a possibility? Or is it introduced by a mythical, nonsubjugated individual—let’s say, a philosopher without a cell phone?
32. See Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation,” in Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 73–92. Originally “Elogio della profanazione,” in Profanazione (Rome: Nottetempo, 2005), 83–106.
33. Deleuze, “What Is a Dispositif?” in Two Regimes of Madness.
38. Gilles Deleuze, “Eight Years Later: 1980 Interview,” in Two Regimes of Madness, 179. Originally “Huit ans après: entretien 80,” in Deux régimes de fous, 162–66.
39. Roberto De Gaetano, “Dispositivi, concatenamenti, incontri,” in La potenza delle immagini: Il cinema, la forma e le forze (Pisa: ETS, 2012), 181–89.
40. François Albera and Maria Tortajada, Cinema Beyond Film. See especially “Introduction to an Epistemology of Viewing and Listening Dispositives” (pp. 9–22) and “The 1900 Episteme” (pp. 25–44). See also Ciné-dispositifs, ed. Albera and Tortajada (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 2011), especially “Le dispositif n’existe pas.”
41. For an analysis of the cinematic dispositive in terms of aggregate and focused on the current changes, see Thomas Elsaesser, “Entre savoir et croire: le dispositif cinématographique après le cinéma,” in Albera and Tortajada, Ciné-dispositifs, 39–74.
42. See André Bazin, “The Ontology of Photographic Image” and “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? Ed. and trans. Hugh Gray, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 1:9–16 and 1:17–22.
43. Edgar Morin, Cinema, or the Imaginary Man, trans. Lorraine Mortimer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Originally Le cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1956).
44. On the process of de-territorialization and re-territorialization, see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Viking Press, 1977). Originally L’Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 291 and 306–307.
45. On the processes of negotiation in the field of media, and on the structure of the cinema as a machine of negotiation, see Francesco Casetti, Communicative Negotiations in Cinema and Television (Milan: VeP, 2001), and Eye of the Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
46. Edgar Morin, “Recherches sur le public cinématographique,” Revue Internationale de Filmologie, 12.4 (January–March 1953), 3–19.
47. On this “suture,” see Jean Pierre Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” Screen, 18 (Winter 1977–78), 35–47. Originally “La suture,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 211 (1969); see also “La suture II,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 212 (1969), and “L’effet de réel,” Cahiers du cinéma, 228 (1971), 19–26. See also Stephen Heath, “Notes on Suture,” Screen, 18 (Winter 1977–78), 66–76.
48. See Albert Michotte, “Le caractére de ‘réalité’ des projections cinematographiques,” Revue Internationale de Filmologie, 3–4 (1948), 249–61.
49. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (New York: Viking Press, 1971).
50. Albera and Tortajada write of a “notion clé” that frames both the basic elements and the concepts that these draw attention to. See “Le dispositive n’existe pas,” 27.
51. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
52. The dream that media and especially new media are intrinsically emancipatory affects also Hans Magnus Enzesbergerger’s “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” New Left Review, 64 (1970), 13–36, especially in the section “Democratic Manipulation.” See also an interesting note by Félix Guattari, “Towards a Post-Media Era,” in Clemens Apprich, Josephine Berry Slater, Antony Iles, and Oliver Lerone Schultz, eds., Provocative Alloys: a Post-Media Anthology (Mute-Posty Media Lab, 2013), 26–27.
53. We can also say that spectators look for an increasing emancipation from the “machine,” but at the same time technology progressively continues to “innervate” them. On innervation, see Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. Second Version,” in Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, eds., Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–55.
54. “Une seule chose est sure: le cinéma vivra en tant qu’il y aura des films produits pour être projetés ou montrés en salle.” [“One single thing is certain: cinema will live as long as there are films produced to be projected or shown in cinemas.”] And moreover: “Le dispositif de projection est la seule évidence permettant, depuis toujours, mais d’autant plus en ces temps de mélange et de crise larvée, de spécifier le cinéma comme tel à l’intérieur de la sphère de jour en jour plus vaste des images en mouvement et des innombrables dispositifs propres à les accueillir.” [“For a long time, but even more in these times of mixing and of incipient crisis, the projector is the only evidence that allows us to define cinema as such, within an ever-growing sphere of moving images and innumerable particular apparatuses that host them.”] Raymond Bellour, La Querelle des dispositifs (Paris: POL, 2012), 19 and 33.
55. “Du cinéma hors la salle, hors les murs, hors ‘le’ dispositif. Fini le noir, les sièges, le silence, la durée impose. Démultiplication folle des formes de présence de l’image lumineuse en mouvement. La pellicule n’est plus le critère, ni la sale, ni l’écran unique, ni la projection, ni mêmes les spectateurs. Oui, c’est du cinéma.” [“Cinema outside of the theater, outside of walls, outside of ‘the’ apparatus. Gone is the darkness, the seats, the silents, the imposed duration. Mad proliferation of the luminous and moving image’s forms of presence. Film is no longer the criterion, nor is the theater, or the single screen, or the projection, or even the spectators. Yes, that’s cinema.”] Philippe Dubois, “Introduction,” in Philippe Dubois, Lucia Ramos Monteiro, and Alessandro Bordina, eds., Oui, C’est du Cinéma (Paisan di Prato: Campanotto, 2009), 7.
56. On grassroots practices, useful examples are given in Chuck Tryon, Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009). An analysis of the mash-up practices is given in Stefan Sonvilla Weiss, Mashup Cultures (Wien: Springer Verlag-Vienna, 2010). Useful observations occur in Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau, eds., The YouTube Reader (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009).
57. Putting grassroots practices and the idea of profanation side by side can be useful to avoid the weakness of sociological approaches, which look at the former, and in general at the practices of appropriation, as an action by a free subject “on” a dispositive and not “from inside” it. Such an approach erases the fact that a reconquest is taking place within a forest of intersecting determinations. The idea of profanation can restore to grassroots practices their true profile.
58. See Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation.” Agamben, however, also suggests that playful emptying out has now become a widespread practice in capitalistic processes, and this therefore renders profanation increasingly difficult.
59. On Zen for Film and in general on Fluxfilms, see Bruce Jenkins, “Fluxfilms in Three False Starts,” in Janet Jenkins, ed., In the Spirit of Fluxus (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1993), reprinted in Tanya Leighton, ed., Art and the Moving Image. A Critical Reader (London: Tale and Afterall, 2008), 53–71.
60. On Carolee Schneeman and Valie Export, see Pamela Lee, “Bare Lives,” in Leighton, Art, 141–57.
61. On Exploding Plastic Inevitable, see the accurate reconstruction by Branden W. Joseph, “My Mind Split Open. Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” Greyroom, 8 (2002), 80–107.
63. On bricolage, see the pages by Claude Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), in particular pp. 15–30. Originally Le pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962).
64. Raymond Bellour, in La querelle des dispositifs, reconstructs in a masterly way this landscape.
65. László Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969), 41. Originally Malerei Photografie Film (Munich: Albert Langen, 1925). Moholy-Nagy called the experiment “simultaneous or poly-cinema.”
66. Moholy-Nagy, Painting, 26.
67. Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy, and Farkas Molnár, The Theater of the Bauhaus (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961).
68. László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision: Fundamentals of Design, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938; reprinted New York: Wittemborn, 1947), pp. 50–51 for the projections of light and pp. 83–86 for painting with light. Originally “Von Material zu Architektur,” Bauhaus Buch (Munich: Langen, 1929), 14.
69. Velimir Khlebnikov, “The Radio of the Future,” in The King of Time, trans. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 155–59.
70. Sergei Eisenstein, “The Dynamic Square,” in Jay Leyda, ed., Film Essays, with a Lecture (New York: Praeger, 1970), 48–65.
71. See Sergei Eisenstein, Glass House, ed. François Albera (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2009). For a detailed analysis of the project, see Antonio Somaini, Ejzenstejn (Turin: Einaudi, 2011), 101–108.
72. “There are frames for which the entire screen assumes a distressing Saharian vastness, while for others it is restricted: the former want to be enclosed in an intimate framing, while the latter would like to be projected beyond the walls of the theater or descend, descend to the feet of the spectators.” Enrico Toddi, “Rettangolo-Film (25 × 19),” In penombra, 1.3 (August 25, 1918), 121–23.
73. Karel Teige, “The Aesthetics of Film and Cinégraphie,” in Jaroslav Andel and Petr Szczepanik, eds., Cinema All the Time: An Anthology of Czech Film Theory and Criticism (Prague, National Film Archive, 2008), 145–54. Originally “Estetikafilmu a kinografie,” Host, 3.6–7 (April 1924), 143–52.
74. Roger Odin, Cinéma et production de sens (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990).
75. Raymond Bellour, L’Entre-Images: photo, cinéma, vidéo (Paris: La Différence, 1990), and L’Entre-Images 2: mots, images (Paris: P.O.L., 1999); see also La Querelle des dispositifs.
76. See, in particular, Raymond Bellour, “An Other Cinema,” in Tanya Leighton, ed., Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader (London: Tate Publishing-Afterall, 2008), 406–422.
77. Thomas Elsaesser speaks of a “gray zone” in “Entre savoir et croire,” 65.
78. Of course, there is no shortage of gestures aimed at a total break, rather than at conciliation. Many film and video artists of the 1970s were moved by an antagonistic spirit: for them, “other” meant “no longer cinema.” Nevertheless, it is no coincidence that the essay that best captured the sense of these artistic experiments, Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood, imagined those new territories precisely as an “expansion” rather than as an “alternative.” For Youngblood—who was more attentive to the role of cinema in the media system than to questions of style—“other” meant “even more.” See Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970).
4. EXPANSION
2. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970).
3. “A whole new area of film and film-like art has appeared in the sixties: expanded cinema. Expanded cinema is not the name of a particular style of film-making. It is the name for a spirit of inquiry that is leading in many different directions. It is cinema expanded to include many different projectors in the showing of one work. It is cinema expanded to include computer-generated images and electronic manipulation of images on television. It is cinema expanded to the point at which the effect of film may be produced without the use of film at all.” Sheldon Renan, An Introduction to the American Underground Film (New York: Dutton, 1967), 227. For a recent reconsideration of the expanded cinema, see David Curtis, A. L. Rees, Duncan White, and Steven Ball, eds., Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film (London: Tate Publishing, 2011).
4. “What happens to our definition of ‘intelligence’ when computers, as an extension of the human brain, are the same size, weight and cost as transistor radios?” But also: “What happens to our definition of ‘man’ when our next door neighbor is a cyborg (a man with inorganic parts)?” Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 52. For Youngblood, the same questions could be asked of the concepts of morality, creativity, family, and progress.
5. Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 58.
12. An interesting re-reading of Youngblood’s book is in Volker Pantemburg, “1970 and Beyond,” in Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantemburg, and Simon Rothöler, eds., Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema (Vienna: Sinema, 2012), 78–92.
13. I borrow the idea of “light cinema” from Paola Voci, who connects it in particular with the small-screen practices: see Paola Voci, China on Video: Smaller-Screen Realities (London: Routledge, 2010), in particular pp. 179–187. See also Paola Voci, “Online Small-Screen Cinema: The Cinema of Attractions and the Emancipated Spectator,” in Carlos Rojas and Eileen Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 377–97.
14. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), and Fans, Bloggers, Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2006).
16. Chuck Tryon, Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 149.
17. Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: NYU Press, 2010), 20. Gray’s book focuses on “how hype, synergy, promos, narrative extensions, and various forms of related textuality position, define, and create meaning for film and television” (p. 3).
18. John T. Caldwell, “Hive-Sourcing Is the New Out-Sourcing: Studying Old (Industrial) Labor Habits in New (Consumer) Labor Clothes,” Cinema Journal, 49.1 (Fall 2009), 160–67. Chuck Tryon, too, writes of “studio appropriation of movie remixes” in Reinventing Cinema (p. 171). These positions stand in contrast to Henry Jenkins’s idea of a conflict between the two dimensions, according to which grassroots production follows a logic of participatory culture, while Hollywood follows the logic of convergence culture. See Henry Jenkins, “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture,” in Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner, eds., Media and Cultural Studies (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 549–76.
20. The Web site http://disney.go.com/pirates is exemplary, as it refers, one after the other, to movies, television, music, videos, live events, games, books, theme park and travels, and a store.
21. Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn,” 95.
23. Chuck Tryon, “Toppling the Gates: Blogging as Networked Film Criticism,” in Reinventing the Cinema, 125–48.
24. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 3–16. Originally Le significant imaginaire: Psychanalyse et cinéma (Paris: UGD, 1977), 9–25.
25. On the advent of digital, see W. J. T. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post Photographic Era (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), and Thomas Elsaesser, “Digital Cinema: Delivery, Event, Time,” in Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffman, eds., Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel, or Cable. The Screen Arts in the Digital Age (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), 201–222. See also the counterevidence offered by John Belton, “Digital Cinema: A False Revolution,” October, no. 100 (Spring 2002), 98–114.
26. David Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
27. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).
28. Tom Gunning, “The Sum of Its Pixels,” Film Comment, 43.5 (September–October 2007), 78; and “Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality,” differences, 18.1 (2007), 29–52. In: “Sutured Reality: Film, from Photographic to Digital,” October, no. 138 (Fall 2011), 95–106, I have suggested that the impression of reality relies on four components: the indexicality of the sign, the verisimilitude of the content, the veridiction (telling-as-true) by the author, and the trust of the audience.
29. Stephen Prince, “True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory,” Film Quarterly, 49.3 (Spring 1996), 27–37.
30. It is no coincidence that the term expansion is used to designate also this kind of emigration. See, for example, Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema, ed. Jeanne Marchessault and Susan Lord (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).
31. For Serge Daney, where the visual is characterized by the indistinct, while the image—which is typical of cinema—brings difference with it: “The visual, then, is the optical verification that things are functioning on a purely technical level: there are no reverse shots, nothing is missing, everything is sealed in a closed circuit, rather like the pornographic spectacle which is no more than the ecstatic verification that the organs are functioning. The opposite would be true for the image—the image that we have adored at the cinema to the point of obscenity. The image always occurs on the border between two force fields; its purpose is to testify to a certain alterity, and although the core is always there, something is always missing. The image is always both more and less than itself.” Serge Daney, “Montage obligé. La guerre, le Golfe et le petit écran,” in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main: cinéma, télévision, information (1988–1991) (Lyon: Aléas, 1991), 163.
38. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
39. McLuhan, Understanding, 23.
41. “Typographic man took readily to film just because, like books, it offers an inward world of fantasy and dreams,” McLuhan, Understanding, 292.
42. “The giving to man an eye for an ear by phonetic literacy is, socially and politically, probably the most radical explosion that can occur in any social structure. This explosion of the eye, frequently repeated in ‘backward areas,’ we call Westernisation.” McLuhan, Understanding, 55.
44. Jean Epstein, “Magnification,” in Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 1:235.
45. Béla Balázs, Visible Man, Or the Culture of Film, in Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory, ed. Erica Carter (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 39.
46. Giovanni Papini, “Philosophical Observations on the Motion Picture,” La Stampa (May 18, 1907), 1–2.
47. Ricciotto Canudo, “The Birth of a Sixth Art,” in Abel, French Film Theory, 61.
48. John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
49. Sergei Eisenstein, “About Stereoscopic Cinema,” The Penguin Film Review, 8 (January 1949), 37.
52. Miriam Ross, “The 3-D Aesthetic: Avatar and Hyperhaptic Visuality,” Screen, 53.4 (Winter 2012), 381–97.
53. See Thomas Elsaesser, “Il ritorno del 3-D: Logica e Genealogie dell’Immagine del XXI Secolo,” Imago, 3.1 (2011), 49–68.
54. Eisenstein, “Stereoscopic Cinema.” 41ff.
55. Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux 11 (2009), available at www.e-flux.com/journal/view/94, then in The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 31–45; quote p. 32.
56. “The past mechanical time was hot, and we of the TV age are cool.” McLuhan, Understanding, 27.
58. “The principle that during the stages of their development all things appear under form opposite to those that they finally present is an ancient doctrine.” McLuhan, Understanding, 34.
61. “In the physical stress of superstimulation of various kinds, the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense or function.” McLuhan, Understanding, 46.
63. On Farocki, see the excellent Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004); in particular, my argument is akin to Christa Blumingler’s essay “Harun Farocki: Critical Strategies,” in Harun Farocki, pp. 315–22.
64. We should recall that these were remade by De Palma because of the impossibility of using ones found online or taken from the soldiers, but the difference in image quality is respected.
65. Jean Epstein, “The Senses 1(b),” in Abel, French Film Theory, 244. Originally “Le Sens 1 bis,” in Bonjour Cinéma (Paris: Editions de la Siréne, 1921), 27–44.
66. The concept of “reality effect” has largely been discussed in film studies. Nevertheless, it could be useful to recall that its roots are in research on the perception of filmic images and on the sensorial density (we may say: the “high definition”) that they possess compared with other kinds of images. See Albert Michotte, “Le caractére de ‘réalité’ des projections cinematographiques,” Revue Internationale de Filmologie, 3–4 (1948): 249–61.
67. Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008). Originally Images malgré tout (Paris: Minuit, 2003).
68. In the same year as Zero Dark Thirty, a film with an extremely suggestive title, End of Watch (David Ayer, USA, 2012), was also released: The film is largely made up of video footage shot on a hand-held camera by one of the protagonists, but the effect is purely superficial, without any sense of self-reflexivity.
71. “I call the distribution of sensible the system of self-evident facts of senses perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.” Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (New York: Continuum, 2004), 12. Originally Le partage du sensible (Paris: Fabrique, 2000).
72. Giovanni Fossi, in 1907, in one of the first essays dedicated to the cinematic public, noted: “It is, in sum, a bit of democracy that is spread in customs. Or better, it is the new custom, the new invention, that invites the spread of the democratic spirit.” Giovanni Fossi, “Il pubblico del cinematografo,” Il Secolo Illustrato (Milan), March 27, 1908; later in La Rivista Fono-Cinematografica, February 11, 1908, p. 20.
73. In his 1907 description of a film screening, the journalist Angiolo Orvieto observed: “From every point in the room, one must be able to see well, equally well, the entire scene.” Angiolo Orvieto, “Spettacoli estivi: il cinematografo,” Corriere della Sera (Milan), no. 228 (August 21, 1907); now also in: Cinema/Studio 4.4–16 (April–December 1994), 18–21.
74. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2007), 43. Originally Le destin des images (Paris: Fabrique, 2003).
76. Ibid., 45. The solution, for Rancière, would be to find an ordering principle that is not imposed, but rather allows for a rearticulation of the territory. This ordering principle is offered by montage: Beyond its application to cinema, montage presents itself “as a measure of that which is measureless or as a disciplining of chaos.” Ibid., 48.
77. See Rancière on the naked image, the ostensive image, and the metamorphic image; The Future, 22–29.
78. It is worthy of attention that the distinction between hot and cool allows McLuhan to evaluate also the social and political weight of various media. He demonstrates that hot media of the mechanical era tend to favor the diffusion of professional specialization, logical-linear thinking, individualism, nationalism, and detribalization of culture, while cool media of the electronic age tend instead to favor a return to forms of knowledge that are integral, nonlinear, and simultaneous, as well as a return to a renovated unity of social community and new forms of tribalism. See McLuhan, Understanding, 27ff.
79. On the amateur film in Muriel, see Roger Odin, “Le film de famille dans l’institution familiale,” in Roger Odin, ed., Le film de famille, usage privé, usage public (Paris: Méridiens-Klincksieck, 1995), 27–42.
80. On this presumption, see Franco Marineo, “Il cinema nell’era dell’intermedialità. Redacted di Brian De Palma,” in Gianni Canova, ed., Drammaturgie multimediali. Media e forme narrative nell’epoca della riproducibilità digitale (Milan: Unicopli, 2009), 11–22.
5. HYPERTOPIA
1. For more on the mega-screen in Piazza del Duomo, see Miriam De Rosa and Glenda Franchin, “Forme dell’abitare. Pratiche di tracciabilità tra mondo e reale,” Comunicazioni sociali online 1 (2009), available at http://comunicazionisocialionline.it/2009/issue/.
2. It is no coincidence that for special public events, sporting events in particular, a smaller screen is temporarily erected in the same spot, which briefly transforms the square into an enormous stage.
3. “Public events now occur, simultaneously, in two different places: the place of the event itself and that in which it is watched and heard. Broadcasting mediates between these two sites.” Paddy Scannel, Radio, Television and Modern Life. A Phenomenological Approach (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 76. See also Shaun Moores, “The Doubling of Place: Electronic Media, Time-Space Arrangements and Social Relationships,” in Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy, eds., Media Space: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age (London: Routledge, 2004), 21–37. On how television merges spaces, see Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
4. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Originally La production de l’espace (Paris: Editions Anthropos, 1974).
5. Arjun Appadurai, “The Production of Locality,” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 178–99.
6. Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” “Railway Navigation and Incarceration,” and “Spatial Stories,” in Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 91–130. Originally “Marches dans la ville,” “Naval et carcéral,” and “Récits d’espace,” in L’invention du quotidien (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1980).
7. See in particular de Certeau, Practice, 117ff. To him, a place is “the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationship of coexistence,” which is to say, a simply topological structure; while space “occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. . . .In short, space is a practiced place.”
8. On the construction of space as a speech act or as an act of enunciation, see de Certeau, Practice, 97ff.
9. Ben Singer, “Early Home Cinema and the Edison Home Projecting Kinetoscope,” Film History, 2.1 (Winter 1988), 37–69.
10. Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex. Cinema, the New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), in particular, pp. 17–53.
11. Maeve Connolly, “Temporality, Sociality, Publicness: Cinema as Art Project,” Afterall, 29 (Spring 2012), 4–15.
12. Connolly, “Temporality,” 15.
13. Mary Ann Doane, “Scale and the Negotiation of ‘Real’ and ‘Unreal’ Space in the Cinema,” in Lúcia Nagib and Cecília Mello, eds., Realism and the Audiovisual Media (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 63. On the scale of the screen, see also Haidee Wasson, “The Networked Screen: Moving Images, Materiality, and the Aesthetics of Size,” in Jeanne Marchessault and Susan Lord, eds., Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 74–95.
14. Erkki Huhtamo, “Messages on the Wall. An Archaeology of Public Media Displays,” in Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin, and Sabine Niederereds, eds., Urban Screen Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009), 15–28.
15. “[The process of gulliverisation is] a two-directional optical and cultural mechanism that worked against the idea of a common anthropomorphic scale.” Huhtamo, “Messages,” 20.
16. See Thomas Y. Levin, “Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of ‘Real Time,’” in CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 578–93. An interesting parallel between three old media for different reasons akin to cinema—photography, the phonograph, and the telephone—and the new media as devices for surveillance is Josh Lauer, “Surveillance History and the History of New Media: an Evidential Paradigm,” New Media and Society, 14.4 (2012), 566–82.
17. Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex, 37.
18. In 2013, the chain AMC Theaters replaced the old seats with what it called “plush power recliners,” openly to compete with the home theaters placed in living rooms and bedrooms. See the description of the new film theaters in “The Screen Is Silver, but the Seats Are Gold. AMC Theaters Lure Moviegoers With Cushy Recliners,” New York Times, October 18, 2013, available at www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/movies/amc-theaters-lure-moviegoers-with-cushy-recliners.html?_r=0. Last accessed October 2013.
20. See an interesting description of such a situation in the account that Ryan Lambie gives of an in-flight vision: “Blissfully unaware of its content, I chose The Disappearance of Alice Creed as my in-journey entertainment, only to discover that its protagonist, played by Gemma Arterton, spends much of the movie naked, handcuffed, and screaming for help. I was travelling alone, and the person sitting next to me was a lady who I was convinced would look over at what I was watching at any moment and think I was some sort of sociopath. On arriving at yet another scene of nudity and screaming, my nerve left me and I put Iron Man 2 on instead. It wasn’t very good, but it was better, I thought, than sitting in fear of what the person sitting next to me might think.” “The Weird Experience of Watching Movies on Planes,” available at www.denofgeek.us/movies/21761/the-weird-experience-of-watching-movies-on-planes.
21. Anne Friedberg, “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change,” in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2000), 438–52.
22. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).
23. Boris Groys, “Iconoclasm as an Artistic Device. Iconoclastic Strategies in Film,” in Art Power (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 67–81.
24. On the film spectator as a flaneur, see Anne Friedberg, Windows Shopping (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), and Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), and Atlas of Emotion (London: Verso, 2002).
25. I take here the concept of environment as parallel to the Umwelt: see Jacob von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (Berlin: Springer, 1909).
26. To understand the nature of cinema as an occurrence in its early years, it is enough to read the great texts of Jean Epstein from the first half of the 1920s.
27. Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 8–9.
28. Victor Burgin, In/different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 22.
29. “Collecting such metonymic fragments in memory, we may come familiar with a film we have not actually seen.” Burgin, In/different Spaces, 23.
30. Eric Feldmann, “Considérations sur la situation du spectateur au cinéma,” Revue Internationale de Filmologie, 26 (1956), 83–97.
31. Antonello Gerbi, “Iniziazione alle delizie del cinema,” Il Convegno, 7.11–12 (November 25, 1926), 836–48; Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theater,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 345–49. Originally “En sortant du cinéma,” Communications, 23 (1975); reprinted in Le bruissement de la langue: essais critiques IV (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 407–412.
32. See also “The Delights of the Cinema Begin Immediately After Buying Your Ticket,” Gerbi, Iniziazione, 836.
33. Feldmann, “Considérations,” 90.
35. “Moviegoers are clients of trades people; they are members of the audience and at the same time members of the group in which they find themselves; but they are not spectators in the true sense of the word, until the representation begins.” Feldmann, “Considérations,” 37.
36. Ibid., 91. The mechanism of projection-identification as constituent of participation and as belonging to film at all levels is analyzed in Edgar Morin’s important volume Cinema, or, the Imaginary Man (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Originally Le cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire. Essai d’anthropologie sociologique (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1956). Morin’s work is quite close to Feldmann’s study, and it was published in the same year.
37. Feldmann, “Considérations,” 92. Stanley Cavell, in analyzing the situation of the theater spectator, reaches the same conclusion: The “catharsis” is not triggered by a full identification with the destiny of a character, but on the contrary by the impossibility of intervening on this destiny. Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love. A Reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 267–353.
38. In Eye of the Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), I argued that the impossibility for a spectator to “merge” with the depicted world facilitates the possibility of a fusion with the audience.
39. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics, 16 (Spring 1986), 22–27. Originally Michel Foucault, “Des espaces autres” (conférence au Cercle d’études architecturales, 14 mars 1967), in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, 5 (October1984), 46–49.
40. “There is probably not a single culture in the world that fails to constitute heterotopias.” Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24. Foucault adds that traditional societies were mostly interested in the elaboration of so-called heterotopias of crisis, that is, “privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, the elderly, etc.” Contemporary society instead constructs heterotopias of deviation: “those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed. Cases of this are rest homes and psychiatric hospitals, and of course prisons” (pp. 24–25).
46. Per the Oxford English Dictionary.
47. Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article,” in Meenaskshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Keller, eds., Media and Cultural Studies (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), 73–78.
48. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis, eds., Culture, Media, Language (London: Routledge, 2002), 128–38.
49. Per the Oxford English Dictionary.
50. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), in particular the chapter “Navigable Space,” 244ff.
51. Manovich, Language, 245.
54. Ibid., 253. Also: “The VMRL universe … does not contain space as such but only objects that belong to different individuals” (p. 258).
55. Sergei Eisenstein, “About Stereoscopic Cinema,” The Penguin Film Review, 8 (1949), 38.
56. Philip Sander, “Out of the Screen and into the Theater: 3-D Film as Demo,” Cinema Journal, 50.3 (Spring 2011), 67.
60. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. Second Version,” in Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, eds., Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 39–40. In a very fine essay, Andrea Pinotti reconstructs the various meanings of the legend of the Chinese painter in Benjamin. If, in Berlin Childhood around 1900, the possibility of entering into an artwork is considered a positive movement, tied to the diminishing of the subject, in “The Work of Art” this gesture is associated with contemplation and with the old forms of cult. Pinotti also brings to light the more general aspects of the near/far opposition and their role in Benjamin’s thought. See Andrea Pinotti, “Sindrome cinese. Benjamin e la soglia auratica dell’immagine,” Rivista di Estetica, 52 (2013), 161–80.
61. The “percussive effect on the spectator” refers specifically to the change of scenes and focus in film: Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 39. Benjamin also notices: “From an alluring visual composition or an enchanting fabric of sounds, the Dadaist turned the artwork into a missile. It jolted the viewers, taking on a tactile quality.”
62. “Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at close range in an image, or, better, in a facsimile, a reproduction.” Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 23.
63. Giovanni Papini, “La filosofia del cinematografo,” La Stampa (May 18, 1907), 1–2.
64. Gerbi, “Iniziazione,” 845.
66. “The mounted group approached ever closer; at first the horses were as small as moles, then as big as hares, then finally life-sized as they grazed the edges of the screen with their quick-moving hooves. Then something extraordinary happened to me: in a flash the mounted knights entered into the theater, climbed the bright path of light emitted from the projector, and I was carried off.” Camillo Mariani dell’Anguillara, “Una avventura cinematografica,” Lo Schermo (August 23, 1926), 11–12. Published again with a few variations in Avventura cinematografica (Milan: Orior, 1929). I owe this reference and the following one to the generosity of Luca Mazzei.
67. Massimo Bontempelli, “La mia morte civile,” in Corriere della Sera (October 21, 1924), 3, then in Miracoli. 1923–1929 (Milan: Mondadori, 1938), 48–57.
68. Examples of two other films that represent this movement from the screen to the audience are René Clair’s Entr’Acte (1924), in which the word FIN appears on a white background after the magician has made all the characters disappear (including himself). However, this background turns out to be a screen through which Francis Picabia erupts in close-up. In Sherlock Junior (1924), Buster Keaton—amateur detective and projectionist by necessity—walks to the front of the theater and enters into the screen: the first time he will fall back into the theater; only on the second attempt will he find a place in the narrated world.
69. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle, 8.3–4 (1986), 63–70.
70. Sergei Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, trans. H. Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 34. Originally Neravnodušnaja priroda, in Izbrannye proizvedenija v šesti tomach (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1963–1970, vol. III).
6. DISPLAY
1. For a useful reconstruction of the history of the split screen, see Malte Hagener, “The Aesthetics of Displays: From the Window on the World to the Logic of the Screen,” in Leonardo Quaresima, Laura Ester Sangalli, and Fedrico Zecca, eds., Cinema e fumetto/Cinema and Comics (Udine: Forma, 2009), 145–55.
2. Not by chance, two years later the television series 24 adopted the split screen as one of its characteristic features.
3. “That which is used to cover, to shield something or someone from external agents, inclement weather, harmful elements, or to hide from view.” Salvatore Battaglia, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, vol. 17 (Turin: Utet, 1994).
4. “At once I thought of making this lovely lady a screen to hide the truth [. . .].” Dante Alighieri, Vita nuova, par. 5, trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973).
5. “A contrivance for warding off the heat of a fire or a draught of air.” Oxford English Dictionary.
6. “A frame covered with paper or cloth, or a disk or plate of thin wood, cardboard, etc. (often decorated with painting or embroidery) with a handle by which a person may hold it between his face and the fire; a hand-screen. Also applied to a merely ornamental article of similar form and material.” Oxford English Dictionary.
7. “A contrivance […] for affording an upright surface for the display of objects for exhibition.” Oxford English Dictionary. In the same period, the term screen-cell also arose to describe “a part of a gaol where a prisoner may be kept under constant observation.” Oxford English Dictionary.
8. Richardson’s Handbook of Projection, fourth ed. (New York: Chalmers, 1923), 226–33, lists seven classes of screens, in particular “(1) white wall, (2) the cloth screen, (3) the kalsomine screen, (4) the painted screen, (5) the metallized surface screen, (6) the glass or mirror screen, and (7) the translucent screen” (p. 226).
9. For more on the history of the word screen, see Erkki Huhtamo, “Elements of Screenology: Toward an Archaeology of the Screen,” ICONICS: International Studies of the Modern Image, 7 (2004), 31–82.
10. Jean Epstein, “The Senses 1(b),” in Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1:235–41. Originally “Le Sens 1 bis,” in Bonjour Cinéma (Paris: Editions de la Siréne, 1921), 27–44.
11. Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010).
12. “[At the cinema] what matters is feeling calmly as if one is an indifferent spectator, as if at the window, of whom neither intelligence of judgment, nor the exertion of observation, nor the nuisance of investigation is required.” Tullio Panteo, “Il cinematografo,” La scena illustrata, 19.1 (October 1908).
13. André Bazin developed the metaphor in “Theater and Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? Ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1967), 1, 76–124.
14. This reference is to the title of Siegfried Kracauer’s volume Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960).
15. For example, Freeburg observes that one of the conditions of cinema is that “it must practically always fill a rectangular frame of unvarying shape.” Freeburg, The Art of Photoplay Making (New York: MacMillan, 1918), 39. See also Pictorial Beauty on the Screen (New York: MacMillan, 1923), in which Freeburg explores various types of composition and their effects on the spectator.
16. For just such a consideration of the screen, an exemplary approach is Sergei Eisenstein’s. See his contributions, from “The Dynamic Square” (in Close Up, March–June 1931), to “A Dialectic Approach to the Film Form” (firstly and partially translated as “The Principles of Film Form” in Close Up [September 1931], reprinted in Film Form, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda [New York: Harcourt, 1969]), to Non-Indifferent Nature, trans. Herbert Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
17. “Sitting before the white screen in a motion picture theatre we have the impression that we are watching true events, as if we were watching through a mirror following the action hurtling through space.” Giovanni Papini, “La filosofia del cinematografo,” La Stampa (May 18, 1907), 1–2.
18. Not surprisingly, the idea of the mirror leads Jean-Louis Baudry to suggest that in cinema we mistake a representation for a perception. See “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema,” in Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 299–318. Originally “Le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité,” Communications, 23 (1975), 56–72.
19. Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, in Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2010), provide a general definition of cinema following the great metaphors for it. For the idea of cinema as window, frame, and mirror, see also Vivian Sobchack, Address of the Eye (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 14–15; and Charles Altman, “Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Discourse,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 2.3 (1977), 260–64.
20. Jean Epstein, “Magnification,” in Abel, French Film Theory, 237. Originally “Grossissement,” in Bonjour Cinéma, 93–108. In more recent times, the equivalence between screen and skin has been reaffirmed by Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000).
21. In defining the constituents of cinema, Élie Faure reminds that between the author and the public there are “three intermediaries, the actor—let us call him the cinemimic—the camera and the photographer.” Élie Faure continues: “I do not speak of the screen, which is a material accessory, forming a part of the hall, like the setting in the theatre.” Élie Faure, The Art of Cineplastics (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1923), 22. Originally “De la cinéplastique,” in L’arbre d’Eden (Paris: Éd. Crès, 1922).
22. Antonello Gerbi, “Iniziazione alle delizie del cinema,” Il Convegno, 7.11–12 (1926), 842.
23. “From the uniform rows of spectators (or of the faithful? Or of wandering lovers?) not even the light murmur of a prayer rises up: this perfect adoration is carried out, following the teachings of all of those learned in mysticism, in perfect silence.” Gerbi, “Iniziazione,” 840–41.
24. “Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extension of man—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge, 2001 [1964]), 3–4.
25. Already in 1937, Rudolf Arnheim underlined the conceptual continuity between cinema and television: “Television will not only reproduce the world like cinema—its images will be colored and perhaps even plastic—but it will render this reproduction even more fascinating by making us take part, not in events which have simply been recorded and conserved, but in far-away events at the very moment in which they occur.” See Rudolf Arnheim, La radio cerca la sua forma (Milan: Hoepli, 1937), 271. Nevertheless, the two media possess quite different characteristics: Cinema is a medium of expression, while television is a medium of transmission. The chapter “La televisione” in La radio takes up and expands “Vedere lontano,” published in Intercine, 2 (February 1935), 71–82. “A Forecast of Television,” included in Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 188–198, is also a rewriting, more than a translation, of “Vedere lontano.” The sentence quoted above appears only in La radio. On Italian writings by Arnheim, see Adriano D’Aloia, I baffi di Charlot (Turin: Kaplan, 2009). For more on Arnheim and television, see Doron Galili, “Television from Afar: Arnheim’s Understanding of Media,” in Scott Higgins, ed., Arnheim for Film and Media Studies (London: Routledge, 2011), 195–212.
26. Lynn Spiegel documents how the television functioned as a domestic cinema in its early phases in “Designing the Smart House: Posthuman Domesticity and Conspicuous Production,” Electronic Elsewheres, ed. Chris Berry, Soyoung Kim, and Lynn Spigel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 55–92.
27. See Beatriz Colomina, “Enclosed by Images: The Eameses Multimedia Architecture,” Grey Room, 2 (Winter 2001), 6–29. The Eameses’ project was preceded by a multiscreen projection of their Glimpses of the USA at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959. During the New York World’s Fair, Francis Thompson also made a great impression by projecting the film To Be Alive on three screens.
28. Andy Warhol employed multiscreen projections also for the performances of his Exploding Plastic Inevitable. On the topic, see Branden W. Joseph, “My Mind Split Open. Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” Grey Room, 8 (2002), 80–107.
29. Anne Friedberg reminds us that in 1985, only 20 percent of American households had a VCR; by 1997, the total had reached 88 percent. See “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change,” in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2000). The Sony Betamax was introduced in 1975 and the VHS was marketed by JVC in 1976; see Luís M. B. Cabral, Introduction to Industrial Organization (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 317–18. Atari’s Pong console, the first to enjoy significant success, was designed in 1966 and introduced in 1972, while the consecration of the video-game console occurred in 1977 with the Atari 2600; see Computer History Museum, “Timeline of Computer History: Graphics & Games” (2006), available at www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?category=gg.
30. The Minitel was introduced in France in 1982.
31. The desktop computer began to grow in popularity at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s: the Apple II debuted in 1977 (see Computer History Museum in note 29); the IBM PC in 1981, the Commodore 64 in 1982, and the Macintosh Portable in 1989 (see Benj Edwards, “The [Misunderstood] Mac Portable Turns 20” [2009], available at www.pcworld.com/article/172420/the_misunderstood_mac_portable_turns_20.html), while the ThinkPad 700 came out in 1992 (see Scott Mueller, Upgrading and Repairing Laptops [Indianapolis: Que, 2004], 33).
32. The first commercially automated cellular network (1G: first generation) was launched in Japan by NTT in 1979; see Guy Klemens, The Cellphone: The History and Technology of the Gadget that Changed the World (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2010), 65–66. The GSM, which represents the second generation (2G) of cell phones, came online in 1991; see Theodoros Pagtzis, “GSM: A Bit of History” (2011), available at www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/t.pagtzis. The 3G began operation in 2001; see BBC News, “First 3G Launched in Japan” (October 1, 2001), available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1572372.stm.
35. Among the early tablets was the GRiDPad, released by GRiDPad System Corporation in 1989 (Evans, “Ten Memorable”). The Amazon Kindle was first introduced to the market by Amazon.com’s subsidiary Lab126 in November 2007 (ibid.). Apple released the first iPad in April 2010 (ibid.).
36. Lev Manovich, “Screen and Users” and “Screen and Body” in The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 94–115.
37. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979). Originally Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).
38. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript to Societies of Control,” October, 59 (1992), 3–7.
39. Sometimes they imply a mechanical gaze. Drones in war zones gather images that a machine examines to highlight any discrepancies with prior surveillance of a given area—and it is only after this first “gaze” that an analyst is summoned to intervene, in order to give (or not give) the order for an attack on a possible enemy.
40. See the self-introduction of the controversial online forum 4chan: “4chan is a simple image-based bulletin board where anyone can post comments and share images,” available at www.4chan.org/.
41. For the concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia in Mikhail Bakhtin, see in particular his essay “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981 [originally 1934–1935]).
42. Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or, the Imaginary Man, trans. Lorraine Mortimer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Originally Le cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire: Essai d’anthropologie sociologique (Paris: Minuit, 1956).
43. Dudley Andrew reaches the same conclusion regarding the computer screen: “Monitor and display seem more apt terms than screen to designate the visual experience that computers deliver.” See “The Core and the Flow of Film Studies,” Critical Inquiry, 35 (Summer 2009), 915.
44. Vilém Flusser writes fascinating pages on just such a touching; see Into the Universe of Technical Images (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 23–32. Originally Ins Universum der technischen Bilder (Berlin: European Photography, 1985). On the genealogy of the touch screen, see Wanda Strauven, “Early Cinema’s Touch(able) Screen: From Uncle Josh to Ali Barbouyou,” Necsus, (1), 2, (2012), available at www.necsus-ejms.org/early-cinemas-touchable-screens-from-uncle-josh-to-ali-barbouyou/.
45. On the opposition of the dimensions of push and pull, both in new media and in the wider culture, see James Lull, “The Push and Pull of Global Culture,” in James Curran and David Morley, eds., Media and Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2006), 44–58.
46. An excellent analysis of how computers and cell phones are used in China to share images devoted to document or to denounce, in the tradition of cinema, can be found in Paola Voci, China on Video: Smaller-Screen Realities (London: Routledge, 2010).
47. Harold Lasswell, “The Structure and Function of Communication in Society,” in Lyman Bryson, ed., The Communication of Ideas (New York: Institute for Religious and Social Studies, 1948), 37–52.
48. McLuhan, Understanding Media.
49. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken Books, 1974).
50. The idea that the screen constitutes a moment in which circulation slackens speed is well illustrated by David Joselit’s concept of the “slow down trajective.” See Feedback: Television against Democracy (Cambridge, Mass,: MIT Press, 2007).
51. Flusser, Into the Universe, 31
53. Flusser opens his book with a genealogical reconstruction of the various phases of the history of images. The process Flusser describes is one of increasing abstraction with respect to the concreteness of immediate experience: During the first moment (first rung), “natural man” (Naturmensch) lives a concrete and purely sensorial experience, like that of other animals. Then man dedicates himself to the creation of functional, tridimensional artifacts. In a third phase, “traditional” images appear—paintings, drawings, sculptures—which structure the relation between man and the world in magical-imaginative terms. The fourth moment is one in which writing appears, and, therefore, conceptual thought. The fifth phase is the one where we now find ourselves, in which abstraction has led to a loss of the “representability” of concrete phenomena. See Into the Universe, 5–10. For another “history of the image,” which is set up according to a schema not distant from Flusser’s, see Régis Debray, Vie et mort de l’image: une histoire du regard en Occident (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).
54. “The production of technical images occurs in a field of possibilities: in and of themselves, the particles are nothing but possibilities from which something accidentally emerges.” Flusser, Into the Universe, 16.
55. “From now on, concepts such as ‘true’ or ‘false’ refer only to unattainable horizons.” Flusser, Into the Universe, 17. I want to note that Flusser, while denying the “certitude” of a relation between technical images and reality, claims that the technical image can find such a relation after all. His orientation deserves more attention, and it could be compared with the idea of “precession of simulacra” foregrounded by Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1–42. It suffices here to mention the question.
56. “Envision should refer to the capacity to step from the particles universe back into the concrete.” Flusser, Into the Universe, 34. And moreover: via technical images, “are we able to turn back to concrete experience, recognition, value and action and away from the world of abstraction from which these things have vanished” (p. 38).
57. Peter Sloterdijk notes that “The res publica arises from this act of capturing objects” and emphasizes the way in which this process is based first of all on a series of techniques for recording the spoken word. “To this extent, democracy is preceded by a prepolitical dimension in which the means to slow down the flow of speech/es is made available.” See Peter Sloterdijk, “Atmospheric Politics,” in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 944–51, in particular 949ff., in which Sloterdijk discusses “a media-based foundation of the polis.”
58. On the end of the “grand narratives” in the postmodern condition, see Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
59. On different aspects of contingency in the current cinema, see Janet Harbord, The Evolution of Film (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), in particular pp. 123–127.
60. Ricciotto Canudo, “Trionfo del cinematografo,” Il Nuovo Giornale (December 25, 1908), 3; and “La naissance d’un sixiéme art: Essai sur le Cinématographe,” in Les Entretiens Idéalistes (October 1911). For the English translation of the latter, see “The Birth of a Sixth Art,” in Abel, French Film Theory, 1:58–66.
61. See, for example, Erich Feldmann, “Considérations sur la situation du spectateur au cinéma,” in Revue Internationale de Filmologie, 26 (1956), 83–97. Boris Groys suggests that the immobility of the spectators risks functioning as a parody of the “active life,” which films seem to celebrate; see Art Power (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), especially pp. 71–72.
62. It would be useful here to recall Siegfried Kracauer’s farsighted definition of the cinemas as a “shelter for the homeless.” Today’s shelter is simply open to inclemency of every kind, and the homeless are mobile subjects. Siegfried Kracauer, “Shelter for the Homeless,” in The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany (London: Verso, 1998), 88–95. Originally “Die Angestellten. Aus dem neusten Deutschland,” serial publication in Frankfurter Zeitung (1929), then as a book (Frankfurt: Societats Verlag, 1930).
7. PERFORMANCE
1. This is an episode in the omnibus film Chacun son cinéma ou Ce petit coup au coeur quand la lumière s’éteint et que le film commence (France, 2007). Produced by the Cannes Film Festival, it is a film directed by thirty-six different directors, from Theo Angelopoulos to Zhang Yimou.
2. Beyond the fact that Egoyan is the author of Artaud Double Bill and of one of the two films that the two spectators go to see, The Adjuster, and the fact that Arsinée Kahnijan, who plays the role of Nicole, also acts in The Adjuster, the film that Nicole watches.
3. I owe to Carol Jacobs the observation that the anagrams in this film work not only on the side of the female characters (let’s also notice that Anna, the spectator of Godard’s film, shares the name of the film’s actress, Anna Karina), but also on the side of the film director: Ego-yan echoes Je-an of Jean-Luc Godard, putting a “first person”—Ego, Je— before the character’s name—An, Anna.
4. For discussion on hypertexts, see the classic works by George Landow, in particular: Hypertext 2.0 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), and Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
5. For more on the network of social discourses, see Francesco Casetti, “Adaptations and Mis-adaptations: Film, Literature, and Social Discourses,” in Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, eds., A Companion to Literature and Film (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 81–91.
6. For distracted perception, see Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. Second Version,” in Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, eds., Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–55.
7. John Ellis formulated the gaze/glance opposition in Visibile Fictions (London: Routledge, 1982).
8. Stanley Cavell proposes the viewing/monitoring opposition in “The Fact of Television,” Daedalus, 3.4 (1982); reprinted in Cavell on Film (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2005), 59–85.
9. In this sense, we may say that between the gaze and the glance, Anna and Nicole activate a third viewing style, that of multicentered watching, at once attentive and divided. For more on the multicentered gaze, see Fanchi, Spettatore (Milan: Il Castoro, 2005), 43ff.
10. This surfing, particularly in the moment at which Anna captures the image of Artaud on the screen in front of her, recalls the “scan-and-search” analyzed by Tara McPherson in “Reload: Liveness, Mobility, and the Web,” in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan, eds., New Media, Old Media (London: Routledge, 2006), 199–208.
11. On cinematic catharsis and on its capitulation, see the perceptive observations of Gabriele Pedullà, In Broad Daylight (London: Verso, 2012), 123ff. Originally In piena luce (Milan: Bompiani, 2008). Pedullà takes up and develops further Stanley Cavell’s important intuition in “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 267–353.
12. Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theater,” in The Rustle of Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 345–49. Originally published as “En sortant du cinéma,” Communications, no. 23 (1975), 104–107.
13. Stanley Cavell sums up this condition when, for example, he observes that at the movie theater, “we wish to see . . . the world itself,” and at the same time, “we are wishing for the condition of seeing as such.” Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections of the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 101–102.
14. Concerning contemporary practices of collecting and of cult, see Barbara Klinger, “The Contemporary Cinephile: Film Collecting in the Post Video Era,” in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby, eds., Hollywood Spectatorship. Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 131–51.
15. An ample space of negotiation has opened up to the new spectators, who find themselves first having to draw a mediatic cartography, then having to assign roles and functions to the various platforms, and finally having to perform a demiurgic action on the device, defining its times, modes, and the situation in which it is to be used. See Mariagrazia Fanchi, “L’esperienza della visione,” in Francesco Casetti and Severino Salvemini, eds., E’ tutto un altro film. Più coraggio e più idee per il cinema italiano (Milan: Egea, 2007), 90.
16. The term performance is used by Robert C. Allen to designate one of the four components of reception: “By this I mean the immediate social, sensory, performative context of reception.” Robert C. Allen, “From Exhibition to Reception. Reflections on the Audience in Film History,” Screen, 31.4 (1990), 352. I will use the term performance not just to designate an active component of film-going (what I call attendance also implies a large set of actions, and in that I follow Allen), but to underline that spectators today must largely “construct” the conditions of their own vision, while traditional spectators found these conditions largely “constructed” by the institution.
17. For more on the emotional dimension in a cognitive perspective, see Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, eds., Passionate Views (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Films and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), and Torben Grodal, Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). For a different perspective, see Mathias Brütsch et al., eds., Kinogefühle. Emotionalität und Film (Marburg: Schüren, 2005).
18. See Chuck Tryon, On-Demand Culture. Digital Delivery and the Future of the Movies (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2013), in particular chapter 6, “Twitter Effect: Social Media and Digital Delivery” (pp.117–135).
19. Some theoretical remarks on this type of doing in Francesco Casetti and Mariagrazia Franchi, eds., Terre incognite (Florence: Carocci, 2006).
20. For more on self-construction on blogs, see Guido Di Fraia, Blog-grafie. Identità narrative in rete (Milan: Guerini e assoc., 2007); and Jan Schmidt, “Blogging Practices: An Analytical Framework,” in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12.4 (2007), 1409–1427. Concerning the processes of identity construction on social networks, see Sonia Livingstone, “Taking Risky Opportunities in Youthful Content Creation: Teenagers’ Use of Social Networking Sites for Intimacy, Privacy and Self-Expression,” New Media and Society, 10.3 (2008), 393–411
21. For more on the public’s textual doing, see Nick Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst, Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination (London: Sage, 1998).
22. See Barbara Klinger, “Cinema’s Shadows. Reconsidering Non-theatrical Exhibition,” in Richard Maltby, Melvin Stokes, and Robert C. Allen, eds., Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), 273–90.
23. For more on the synaesthetic involvement of the spectator, see Alain J. J. Cohen, “Virtual Hollywood and the Genealogy of Its Hyper-Spectator,” in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby, eds., Hollywood Spectatorship, 131–51.
24. See in particular Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), and Laura U. Marks, Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000).
25. Allen, “From Exhibition to Reception,” 352.
26. See among others John Fiske, Television Culture (London, Routledge, 1987). A critique to the notion of spectator as bricoleur is given in David Morley, Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992).
27. For Pro-Am, see Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller, The Pro-Am Revolution: How Enthusiasts Are Changing Our Economy and Society (London: Demos, 2004); for produsage, see Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (New York: Peter Lang, 2008). Concerning the manipulative action of the public, Alvin Toffler’s description of the prosumer may still be of interest: Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1980). A synthetic but enlightening analysis of these concepts is Mariagrazia Fanchi, L’audience (Bari: Laterza, 2014).
28. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 17. Originally Le pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962).
29. Lévi-Strauss, Savage Mind, 18.
30. Lévi-Strauss, Savage Mind, 21.
31. See Michel de Certeau, “Reading as Poaching,” in The Practices of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 165–76. Originally L’Invention du Quotidien, 2 vol. (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1980).
32. Régis Debray, writing on the passage to the “videosphere,” speaks of the “end of spectacle,” associating it with a broader weakening in the role of vision. See Vie et mort de l’image. Une histoire du regard en Occident (Paris : Gallimard, 1992).
33. For more on fan activity—not limited to the accumulation of clips, but involving the actual reconstruction of the cult object—see Henry Jenkins’s classic study, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), and the extremely rich Chuck Tryon, Reinventing Cinema. Movies in the Age of Media Convergence (New Brunswick, N.J.: London: Rutgers University Press, 2009).
34. On mobility, see John Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Routledge, 2000); on mobile communication, and in particular the sense of being part of a community as opposed to the sense of individuality and isolation, see Rich Ling and Scott W. Campbell, eds., Mobile Communication. Bringing Us Together and Tearing Us Apart (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2011). Interesting remarks on mobility and leisure in Araba Sey and Peppino Ortoleva, “All Work and No Play? Judging the Use of Mobile Phones in Developing Countries,” in Information Technologies and International Development, 1, 3 (2014), 1–17
35. Jacques Aumont, Que reste-t-il du cinéma? (Paris: Vrin, 2012), 80–83.
36. Laura Mulvey, Death 24X a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 161.
37. The concept of the “pensive spectator” was introduced by Raymond Bellour in “Un spectateur pensif,” in Le corps du cinéma (Paris: POL, 2009), 179–221.
41. McPherson speaks of three major new directions in which the Web spectator moves: volition mobility, scan-and-search, and anxiety for transformation. See “Reload,” in New Media, Old Media.
42. The presence of a composite spectacle, with components that do not directly belong to the cinema (what French criticism often calls “hors cinéma”), brings back the film theater to the stages of the film history in which it has been a multifunction and a multimedia environment.
43. On the rearticulation of film-going, see Charles Acland, Screen Traffic (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003). For the new typologies of film theater, see Laurent Creton and Kira Kitsopanidou, Les salles de cinema. Enjeux, defies et perspectives (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013). For a historical account, see Janet Harbord, Film Cultures (London: Sage, 2002).
44. The relevance of a “territorialization” in media has been highlighted by David Morley. See part four of Media, Modernity and Technology (London: Routledge, 2007).
45. Louis Delluc, “La foule devant l’ecran,” in Photogenie (Paris: de Brunoff, 1920), 104–118. A previous version has been translated as “The Crowd,” in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, vol. 1, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 159–64.
46. On convergence, see Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006). On convergence and new products, see Simone Murray, “Brand Loyalties: Rethinking Content Within Global Corporate Media,” Media, Culture and Society, 27.3 (2005), 415–35, and Ivan D. Askwith, Television 2.0: Reconceptualizing TV as an Engagement Medium, M.Sc. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007, available at http://cms.mit.edu/research/tese/IvanAswith2007. Last accessed November 22, 2010. On convergence and new strategies of consumption, see Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn, eds., The Audience Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), 323–25.
47. On contemporary media’s channeling of experience, see the perceptive analysis of Pietro Montani, Bioestetica (Firenze: Carocci, 2007).
48. On the very nature of the event of the experience of cinema, see Robert C. Allen, “Reimagining the History of the Experience of Cinema in a Post-Moviegoing Age,” in Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst, and Philippe Meers, eds., Explorations in New Cinema History. Approaches and Case Studies (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 41–57.
49. On this theme, it is interesting to note the parallel tendency of the television public to go physically to the place where television footage is being shot and to participate on the ground in big events involving single programs (for example, the “MTV Day” event). For more on this, see Nick Couldry, “The View from Inside the Simulacrum: Visitors’ Tales from the Set of Coronation Street,” Leisure Studies, 17.2 (1998), 94–107, and Matthew Hills, “Cult Geographies: Between the ‘Textual’ and the ‘Spatial,’” in Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2003). See also Anna Sfardini, Reality TV: Pubblici, fan, protagonisti, performer (Milan: Unicopli, 2009).
8. THE PERSISTENCE OF CINEMA IN A POST-CINEMATIC AGE
1. Antonello Gerbi, “Iniziazione alle delizie del cinema,” Il Convegno, 7.11–12 (November 25, 1926), 836–48.
2. Gerbi, “Iniziazione,” 837.
5. Jules Romains, “The Crowd at the Cinematograph,” in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, ed. and trans. Richard Abel, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1:53–54. Originally “La foule au cinématographe,” Les puissances de Paris (Paris: Eugène Figuière, 1911), 118–20.
6. Giovanni Papini, “La filosofia del cinematografo” (“Philosophical observations on the motion picture”), La Stampa (May 18, 1907), 1–2.
7. Walter Serner, “Cinema and the Desire to Watch,” in Richard W. McCormick and Alison Guenther-Pal, eds., German Essays on Film (New York: Continuum, 2004), 17–20. Originally “Kino und Schaulust,” Die Schaubüne, 9 (1913), 807–811.
8. “By showing the women that they could sit in the dark only a few centimeters away from a man who was not closely related without having to faint with fear, the motion picture theater made its contribution towards moral education in provincial towns, strengthening the awareness of respectful behavior, moderating personal character and conduct. The darkness of the motion picture theater put a stop to the problem of jealousy.” Emilio Scaglione, “Il cinematografo in provincia,” L’Arte Muta (Naples), no. 6–7 (December 15, 1916–January 15, 1917), 14–16.
9. Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theater,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 345–49. Originally “En sortant du cinéma,” Communications, 23 (1975), 104–107; reprinted in Le bruissement de la langue: essais critiques IV (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 407–412.
10. Hollis Frampton, “A Lecture,” in Bruce Jenkins, ed., On Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 125.
11. A reconstruction of this episode can be found in Francesco Casetti and Silvio Alovisio, “Il contributo della Chiesa alla moralizzazione degli spazi pubblici,” in Dario Viganò and Ruggero Eugeni, eds., Attraverso lo schermo. Cinema e cultura cattolica in Italia, vol. 1 (Rome: Ente dello Spettacolo, 2006), 97–127, and 108–110 in particular.
12. To remain in Italy, there were many attempts at projections in full light: thanks to screens with a metallic surface or covered with a “white varnish mixed with celluloid” to reflect the projector’s rays (see Stanislao Pecci, “A proposito di schermi,” La Cine-Fono e la Rivista Fono-cinematografica, 5.180 [December 16, 1911], 7), or thanks to rear-projection onto parchment-like screens (see “La cinematografia in piena luce,” La Cine Fono e la Rivista Fono-cinematografica, 8.284 [June 13, 1914], 71). There was also a screen structured in hexagonal cells like a bees’ nest and patented by the Milan firm M. Ganzini & C., which could display movement images “in the bright afternoon light” (“La cinematografia in piena luce,” La Cinematografia Italiana ed Estera, 2.55–56 [June 15–31, 1909], 322). In the United States, starting from 1910, “Roxy” Rothafel developed the “daylight pictures,” which were installed in many theaters, from Cincinnati to Detroit, and from New York to California. See the accurate reconstruction of this episode in Ross Melnick, American Showman: Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertaiment Industry, 1908–1935 (New York: Columbia, 2012), 60–64.
13. Gabriele Pedullà has written a volume on the departure of cinema from the darkened theater, the title of which, symptomatically, is In Broad Daylight (London: Verso, 2012). Originally In piena luce (Milan: Bompiani, 2008).
14. “Un fin qui n’en finit pas de ne pas finir.” Raymond Bellour, La querelle des dispositifs, 13.
15. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. I, 1913–26 (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 235. Originally Gesammelte Schriften, VI (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 126–27, Fragment 96.
16. Antonio Somaini, “‘L’oggetto attualmente più importante dell’estetica.’” Benjamin, il cinema come Apparat, e il ‘Medium della percezione,’” Fata Morgana, 20 (2013), 117–46.
17. “For the creator the Medium surrounding his work is so dense, that he cannot cross through it from the same position that the work demands from the spectators. He can cross through it only in an indirect way.” Benjamin, Fragment 96, Gesammelte Schriften, VI, 127. The English Selected Writings does not include this part of the fragment.
18. Benjamin will develop such a topic in his “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” For the Second Version of the essay, see Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–54.
19. Benjamin highlights the resistance of the artwork to its own creator, due to the thick atmosphere around it. This gives rise to a paradox, namely the necessity of approaching the work through other senses: “The composer would perhaps see his music, the painter hear his image, the poet touch his poem, if he tried to come close enough to it.” Benjamin, “Fragment 96” (also this part of the fragment is not included in the English Selected Writings).
20. With Benjamin, we may say that the fainting of the medium allows music to become audible again, the poem readable, and the painting visible.
22. André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, “A Medium is always born twice . . . ,” Early Popular Visual Culture, 3.1 (May 2005), 3–15.
23. “This implies, on the one hand—that of reception—a recognition of the ‘personality’ and often increasingly specific use of the medium, and on the other—that of production—a consciousness of its potential for an original, medium-specific expression capable of disassociating the medium from other media or generic ‘expressibles’ that have already been distinguished and are being practised.” André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, “A Medium,” 3.
24. Gaudreault writes of a “second birth”: I would like to suggest that it is more accurately a “baptism,” thanks to which something that exists in an undefined form acquires a name, and therefore becomes what it is.
25. See the following presentation by the company Home Cinema Modules, the title of which is “The Ultimate Home Cinema Experience”: “From trendy modern to antique picture palace from the Fifties, Home Cinema Modules offers you everything you need to make your Home Theatre in a style recreating the atmosphere that you are looking for in your home environment.” Available at http://homecinemamodules.nl/english/. Last accessed July 2013.
26. See how the following review takes this approach: “Taking their cue from Brian Selznick, author of the popular source novel, Scorsese and screenwriter John Logan focus their attention on French director Georges Méliès, best known for the 1902 silent ‘A Trip to the Moon.’ Méliès, an early master of cinematic legerdemain, paved the way for the modern film fantasists, from Ray Harryhausen to Terry Gilliam to the James Cameron of Avatar. Méliès’ mix of music-hall magic and in-camera tricks, Scorsese reminds us, was, and remains, the stuff that dreams are made of.” Glenn Lovell, “Hugo: A Clockwork Fantasy,” Cinemadope. Available at http://cinemadope.com/reviews/hugo-%E2%9C%AE%E2%9C%AE%E2%9C%AE/ .
27. An example of this is James Cameron’s interview in the Telegraph, in which his output is ascribed to a precocious fascination with 2001: A Space Odyssey. “As a teenager Cameron was so astounded at Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey that he saw it 10 times and became inspired to experiment with 16mm filmmaking and model-building. From his earliest filmmaking days—he first gained recognition for writing and directing The Terminator in 1984—he has been a leading science-fiction auteur and special-effects visionary.” John Hiscock, “James Cameron Interview for Avatar,” Telegraph, December 3, 2009, available at www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/6720156/James-Cameron-interview-for-Avatar.html.
28. Two excellent examples among others: Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Alison Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
29. See the special issue of Cinema & Cie, 2 (Spring 2003), edited by Leonardo Quaresima, on “Dead Ends/Impasses,” in which contributors trace back early discourses on cinema and three-dimensionality (Paola Valentini) or cinema and hypnosis (Ruggero Eugeni) and simultaneously analyze recent realizations that look back to pre-cinema (Leonardo Quaresima).
30. Thomas Elsaesser, “The New Film History as Media Archaeology,” Cinémas, 14.2–3 (2004), 85–86.
31. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 293–333; Siegfried Zielinski, Cinema and Television as entr’actes in History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999).
32. Anne Friedberg, “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change,” in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2000), 438–52.
33. Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena und Varia zur zweiten Fassung von Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, bk. 3, 1046.
34. Ibid. The sentence ends with these words: “in ways that clearly differentiate inspired works from those less successful.”
37. “The dialectical image is an image that emerges suddenly, in a flash. What has been is to be held fast—as an image flashing up in the now of its recognizability.” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 473 (N9, 7). Originally “Das Passagenwerk,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, bks. 1–2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982). On dialectical images, see especially Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
38. Benjamin, Arcades, 462 (N3, 1).
39. Ibid., 462–63 (N3, 1).
41. The same sense of time underpins Mieke Bal’s Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). In her analysis of a series of contemporary works that quote Caravaggio and the Baroque, Bal notes that the source becomes one inasmuch as the work authorizes it to do so. This leads to a reversal of the chronological order, “which puts what came chronologically first (‘pre’) as an effect behind (‘post’) its later recycling” (p. 7). I would like to add that such a process not only echoes relevant pages by Benjamin, but also recalls the deep rethinking of some traditional notions such as genealogy, causality, origin, and repetition that punctuates the twentieth century. Let’s take for instance the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit (translated as afterwardness or deferred action): It emphasizes how the cause of a trauma is brought to light and constituted by the presumed effects that it creates (Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17 [London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974], 1–122). Or let’s take the way in which Jacques Derrida empties out the idea of origin, erased by the intervention of a constant—and constituent—deferment (Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976]. Originally De la Grammatologie [Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967]).
42. Eisenstein’s project is reconstructed in Notes for a General History of Cinema, ed. Naum Kleiman and Antonio Somaini (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014). See also Antonio Somaini, Ejženstejn. Il cinema, le arti, il montaggio (Turin: Einaudi, 2011), 383–408.