Public Space, Media Space

C. Berry, J. Harbord, R. Moore, C. Berry, J. Harbord, R. Moore

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349439744, 9781137027757
• eBook ISBN: 9781137027764
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

Public Space, Media Space asks how media saturation are transforming public space and our experience of it. From the role of graffiti and Youtube videos of street art in the Cairo revolution, to OOH (Out of Home) advertising, the book is diverse in its approach and global in its coverage.

1

What Is a Screen Nowadays?

Francesco Casetti

Mike Figgis’ film Timecode recounts 93 minutes in the life of a group of people living in Los Angeles (Timecode, 2000). The duration of the movie and of the events it relates coincide: the story is captured in one long take without intervals or cuts. Most surprising is the possibility of following more than one situation simultaneously: it was shot with four different digital cameras, and all four takes are presented contemporaneously, on one screen divided into four sections. Sometimes the plotlines of the various characters intersect with one another more or less haphazardly, and when this happens the camera that has been following one of the characters may shift to another character and follow him or her instead. At other points the plotlines converge, and we discover retrospectively the correlations. More often, however, the events proceed in parallel, without intersecting, but also without excluding the possibility of eventually crossing paths. We watch the stories in the four adjacent sections of the split screen, jumping from one to another, attempting to establish connections, selecting what seems to be the central point, at the mercy of the flow of images.

This is not the first time that cinema has experimented with the split screen (Hagener, 2009, pp. 145–155). However, there is something new in Figgis’ film: something quite different from the traditional desire to enlarge visible space or to juxtapose contemporaneous events that take place in separate spaces. His screen, divided into four, evokes the new kinds of screens that already constituted a familiar presence at the beginning of this millennium. It reminds us of the mosaic structure of the television screen, inside of which many conduits of communication coexist. It suggests the computer screen, with all the available applications in view, or the television monitors placed one next to the other that display images from surveillance cameras in the security centers of office buildings and malls. It also reminds us of the conglomeration of screens in the great media-facades of many cities, such as New York’s Times Square. Timecode suggests that the movie screen no longer stands by itself; on the contrary, due to outside influences its very nature is changing. We can on longer observe it as we did before, nor can we expect that it will offer us the same kind of images as it used to.

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

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

The cinematic screen

What exactly was the screen? The term has an intriguing history. In the fourteenth century the Italian word schermo denoted something that protects against outside agents, and that therefore presents an obstacle to direct sight.¹ Along this line, the term also indicated someone who serves to mask the interests of another person, as in the Dantean formulation donna schermo or “screen woman.”² The English term “screen” also referred to a protective surface in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially against fire or air.³ However, “screen” (or “skren”) also indicated smaller devices, used to hide oneself from others’ glances, such as fans, or partitions of a mostly decorative nature.⁴ At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the term began to enter into the sphere of entertainment: in the phantasmagoria, “screen”, schermo and écran designated the semi-transparent surface onto the back of which a series of images were projected so that the screen now served to open our gaze to something hidden. This association with the instruments of spectacle was strengthened with the introduction of the shadow play (which the West had already imported from the East in the seventeenth century), and moreover with the magic lantern, from which the projection is cast from in front of the screen rather than from behind it (see Huhtamo, 2004). Contemporaneously, “screen”, at least in English, acquired yet another aspect: during the Victorian age it referred to those surfaces on which figures and cut-outs were pasted, forming both a private collection of images and a small public exposition.⁵ It is from this rich background that the term arrives, in various languages, at the turn of the twentieth century to indicate the white curtain onto which filmic images are projected, finding its most widespread meaning in this connection to the cinema.

The route traveled by the word is instructive. It demonstrates a slippage of meaning: from a surface that covers and protects, to one that allows us to glimpse images projected from behind, to one that gathers representations of new worlds, to one that can contain figures that reflect our personality. The major metaphors employed by classical film theories for the cinematic screen encapsulate this entire history. The first metaphor is that of the window: the screen is a breech in the barrier that keeps us separated from reality, thanks to which we re-establish contact with the world. The obstacle between us and the outside is represented primarily by the walls of the movie theater; however, the most powerful impediments are the cultural filters that do not allow us to look directly at reality. Among these filters there are our habits and prejudices, as Jean Epstein underlined back in 1921 (Epstein, 1984, pp. 235–241), or the massive presence of writing and the press, which make the human being readable but not visible, as stated by Béla Balázs in 1924 (Balázs, 2010). Therefore, the screen should be understood as a laceration that allows us to see reality directly, again and anew. One of the first occurrences of the metaphor of the window is found in an Italian reflection by Tullio Panteo, which highlights the immediacy of the gaze: “[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” (Panteo, 1908). But the metaphor of the window found particularly fertile ground in the realist theories of cinema, including André Bazin’s (Bazin, 1967). In fact, these theories are all characterized by a desire to reactivate a direct gaze on things, and by the knowledge that, in order to do so, one must overcome resistance, obstacles and impediments. In this light, cinema literally offers to the world the possibility of a redemption.⁶

The second major metaphor is that of the frame: the screen is a surface within which appear figures capable of depicting the, or at least a, world.⁷ Here we are no longer dealing with a direct gaze on things but rather with a representation of them. This leads to the emergence of new aspects: in particular, the content of the image, from a simple datum, becomes a construct at the root of which is a work of mise-en-scène. Nevertheless, a representation does not cease to speak to us about reality; every time an understanding of the laws of nature is applied to a representation (something that true artists always do eventually), it also ends up revealing to us the dynamics and composition of reality. This explains why the metaphor was utilized most of all by formalist theorists of cinema, who were well aware that an image within a frame is just an image. Nevertheless, if well designed, it is capable of fully restoring to us the sense of the world in which we live. For just such a consideration of the screen, an exemplary approach is Sergei Eisenstein’s (see his contributions from “The Dynamic Square”, to “The Principles of Film Form”, to Nonindifferent Nature (Eisenstein, 1931a, b, 1987)).

The third major metaphor is that of the mirror: the screen is a device that restores to us a reflection of the world, including a reflection of ourselves. This metaphor had already emerged in earlier cinematic theories. Giovanni Papini suggested in 1907 that “sitting before the white screen in a motion picture theater we have the impression that we are watching true events, as if we were watching through a mirror following the action hurtling through space” (Papini, 1907, pp. 1–2). Yet the metaphor of the mirror finds its most fully developed elaboration in the psychoanalytic approach, which asserts that spectators may identify with the film’s protagonists and with the gaze (of the director, of the camera, of a transcendental subject, of the gaze as such?) that captures them on the stage. Film’s spectators see a world to which they yield themselves, but they also see a point of view regarding this world with which they associate themselves. In this sense, they see themselves seeing. I should add that the mirror reunites that which the two preceding metaphors held apart: the former underlined the possibility of perceiving things directly, while the latter highlighted the necessity of passing through their representation. This third metaphor posits a reflection that allows us to see things as they are, and ultimately offers up only an image of them.

These three major metaphors, which, among others, Elsaesser and Hagener retrace usefully (Elsaesser and Hagener, 2010), share one important trait: they all identify the screen as the place in which reality offers itself to spectators – in all its immediacy, consistency and availability (see also Altman, 1976, pp. 260–264; Sobchack, 1992, pp. 14–15). At the cinema we have access to the world; through its cinematic representation, we may sense its structure and its possibilities, and thanks to the process of identification, we can make the world ours. It should not be surprising then that the first theories of cinema often speak of an “epiphany”: on the screen, reality reveals itself in all its density to eyes ready to witness it. Antonello Gerbi writes: “Submerged by the sounds, we are ready to receive the new Epiphany. Are we buried in the deep or hovering among the stars? I don’t know: certainly we are very close to the heart of the cinema” (Gerbi, 1926, p. 842). These references to epiphany often lead early theories of cinema to assume a religious tone: cinema is a miracle, and to experience it means participating in a rite. To quote Gerbi again,

This piece of crude canvas … is reborn as an altarpiece for the liturgies of the new times. 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, pp. 840–841)

On a more secular note, the three metaphors mentioned above allow us to glimpse an idea of the cinema as media. Marshall McLuhan suggests that media form the nervous system of a society: “we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media” (McLuhan, 2001, pp. 3–4). If his claim is correct, the movie screen is essentially a terminus from which we gather data from outside (window), as well as an organ with which we re-elaborate data (frame), and a device for self-regulation and self-recognition (mirror).

Beyond cinema

The television screen differs from the movie screen: it is small rather than large; it is made from glass as opposed to canvas; it is fluorescent rather than reflective; and the world it hosts is broadcasted live rather than recorded. However, in its early years, this screen recalled the same major metaphors mentioned above: it was a window, even if the walls it faced were those of the home instead of a public space; it was a frame, even if its components were arranged differently; and it was a mirror, even though it was more reflective of a society than of an individual. 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.

(Arnheim, 1937, p. 271)⁸

More recently, in her historical reconstruction of the early television, Lynn Spigel highlights how the television set functioned as a home theater (Spigel, 2010, pp. 55–92). In its initial stages, television apparently did not alter a well-consolidated system of concepts.

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

A greater sense of novelty came on the scene in the 1960s with the appearance of multi-screens. One such form of installation consists of the simultaneous projection of a film onto multiple surfaces. The New York World’s Fair of 1964–1965 provided more than one example of this. For instance, there was Charles Eames’ spectacle, which involved 14 projectors and 9 different screens.⁹ This structure was then immediately reinterpreted in an e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. What Is a Screen Nowadays?
• 2. Multi-screen Architecture
• 3. Mapping Orbit: Toward a Vertical Public Space
• 4. Cairo Diary: Space-Wars, Public Visibility and the Transformation of Public Space in Post-revolutionary Egypt
• 5. Shanghai’s Public Screen Culture: Local and Coeval
• 6. iPhone Girl: Assembly, Assemblages and Affect in the Life of an Image
• 7. In Transit: Between Labor and Leisure in London’s St. Pancras International
• 8. Encountering Screen Art on the London Underground
• 9. Direct Address: A Brechtian Proposal for an Alternative Working Method
• 10. Domesticating the Screen-Scenography: Situational Uses of Screen Images and Technologies in the London Underground
• 11. Privatizing Urban Space in the Mediated World of iPod Users
• 12. Publics and Publicity: Outdoor Advertising and Urban Space
• Index