The Lumière Galaxy

Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come

Francesco Casetti

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231538879
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica del cinema

Francesco Casetti believes new media technologies are producing an exciting new era in cinema aesthetics. Whether we experience film in the theater, on our hand-held devices, in galleries and museums, onboard and in flight, or up in the clouds in the bits we download, cinema continues to alter our habits and excite our imaginations.

Casetti travels from the remote corners of film history and theory to the most surprising sites on the internet and in our cities to prove the ongoing relevance of cinema. He does away with traditional notions of canon, repetition, apparatus, and spectatorship in favor of new keywords, including expansion, relocation, assemblage, and performance. The result is an innovative understanding of cinema's place in our lives and culture, along with a critical sea-change in the study of the art. The more the nature of cinema transforms, the more it discovers its own identity, and Casetti helps readers realize the galaxy of possibilities embedded in the medium.

1. Relocation

TACITA

In October 2011, the British artist Tacita Dean presented Film at the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London.¹ Dean’s work is a film short, projected in a continuous loop onto a large screen in a dark space furnished with a bench for visitors. The written explanation at the entrance to the room draws attention to the presence of all these elements: “35mm colour and black & white portrait format anamorphic film with hand tinted sequences, mute, continuous loop, 11 minutes. Large front projection; projection booth; free standing screen; loop system; seating.” In her article in the Guardian, Charlotte Higgins described Film as “pay[ing] homage to a dying medium,”² and Film is undoubtedly an act in defense of film stock—the same film stock that Kodak had announced, on June 22, 2009, it would cease to sell after 74 years of production because of a steep decline in sales. Beyond the preservation of a medium-support, Film also seems to invoke the preservation of a medium-device: in the Tate we find a projector, a reflective screen, a dark room, a bench—all things that the new forms of image consumption, on laptops or tablets, seem to renounce. In essence, Tacita Dean attempts to restore to us all the principal elements of the cinema, those that characterize its material basis. Paradoxically, she sets them before us as components of an artistic installation: She gathers them together and reunites them for the purposes of a work intended for a gallery or museum. It is no accident then that the visitors to the Turbine Hall do not hold the same expectations or display the same behavior as they would if they found themselves at the British Film Institute Southbank (which, by the way, is located not far from the Tate) to see a Woody Allen retrospective in one of its small theaters or even to see Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol in its IMAX theater. This audience did not go to Turbine Hall to experience what is usually called cinema, that is to say, a set of images and sounds that provide a particular representation of the world and a particular relationship with a spectator. It went there for art. Immediately a question arises: Did Tacita Dean, in her attempt to preserve cinema, focus exclusively on its material elements while leaving aside or dispensing altogether with the social practices that it involves?

In an opposite movement, if we exit the Tate—or the British Film Institute, too easily identifiable as a “temple” in which canonical works are worshipped—we find many cases in which cinema, understood as a form of representation and spectatorship, not only continues to live but also expands beyond its traditional support and device. For example, at almost the same time as Tacita Dean’s exhibit was being inaugurated, a group of Londoners reappropriated a space alongside a canal, under a highway overpass, and transformed it into a kind of outdoor movie theater where films were projected for the neighborhood residents.³ In August of the same year, the gardens in front of Paris’s Trocadero (the old site of the Cinémathèque) hosted the Moon Light Festival with open-air screenings.⁴ Some months prior to this, Cairo’s Tahir Square, a space that had already been active during the Arab Spring, was reanimated with a projector and a large screen on which videos of various kinds were shown.⁵

Indeed, the diffuse presence of cinema goes well beyond these examples. In 2011, it was still possible to rent a DVD in a Blockbuster shop, and already at a Redbox kiosk; spectators were able to choose a title from the catalogs of Netflix or Hulu and receive it in a streaming format on their television set or on their computers; a good number of films and clips were also available on YouTube. Similarly, movies were screened on airplanes, as well as in cafés and bars, although often mingled with sports and news. The film industry itself supported these new forms of distribution,⁶ moving a film from one channel of distribution to another with increasing velocity.⁷ There was also an enormous profusion of images and sounds that used a cinematographic language other than that of the feature-film format: We found cinema in television series, documentaries, advertisements, musical clips, and didactic presentations. We encountered it, in disguise, in waiting rooms, stores, public squares, along streets, and on urban media façades. Finally, we found on the Internet a vast array of objects that still had something to do with cinema, from trailers to parodies, video diaries to travelogues. Today, this trend continues, but the picture has grown even larger. The enormous diffusion of screens in our daily life—including those of the latest generation, which are well integrated into domestic and urban environments, interactive and multifunctional, in the form of windows or tabletops⁸—brings with it a greater presence of cinema. This diffusion give movies new trajectories along which to circulate, new formats, new environments in which to be enjoyed. It allows cinema to continue to live—and not only to survive—as it adapts to a new landscape.

Therefore, we find ourselves before a minor paradox: on the one hand, we have an artist defending a traditional technology, even to the detriment of a mode of consumption; on the other hand, there is an evident tendency among industry, consumers, and fans to promote the permanence of a mode of consumption even while renouncing a technology. It is precisely this paradox that allows us to begin to think about the state of cinema today beyond the facile proclamations that announce its death or celebrate its triumphs. What is happening to cinema in an age in which it is losing essential components and gaining unprecedented opportunities? What is it becoming at a moment in which all media, due to the processes of convergence, seem to be spilling out beyond their usual routes and embarking along new paths? What is cinema, and moreover, where is it?⁹

I will begin to respond to these questions by analyzing four points in order to map out the terrain. First of all, a medium is not only a support or a device. A medium is also a cultural form: It is defined most of all by the way in which it puts us in relation with the world and with others, and therefore by the type of experience that it activates. By experience, I mean a confrontation with reality (to experience something), the re-elaboration of this reality into knowledge (to gain experience), and the capacity to manage this and similar relations with reality (to have experience).¹⁰ From its very beginnings, cinema has been based on the fact that it offers us moving images through which we may reconfigure both the reality around us and our own position within it. Cinema has always been a way of seeing and a way of living—a form of sensibility and a form of understanding, as a brief overview of the film theories of the early decades of the twentieth century will clearly demonstrate.

Second, the two faces of the medium, its status as a support or device on one hand, and its status as a cultural form on the other, are usually closely linked together: We experience reality in the ways that a technology allows us to. These two faces, however, are also distinct from one another, and it is therefore useful to use two different names for them: it is not by chance that Benjamin speaks of the Apparat and of the Medium of perception¹¹; Rosalind Krauss of mediums and media¹²; W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen of technological forms and forms of mediation.¹³ One is the material basis of a medium, while the other is the way in which this material basis organizes our experiences. The distinction is becoming particularly important today, at a moment in which the type of experience that characterizes a medium seems able to be reactivated even without the full presence of its traditional material basis. Indeed, we have just seen an example of this: The cinematic experience can arise even outside of the traditional darkened theater, thanks to other devices, and though it is certainly not the same, it still retains many of its characteristic traits. Once again in this case, an overview of the film theory of the 1920s and subsequent years will illuminate how cinema was long ago conceived of as a medium that could also emerge in other situations.

Third, what allows an experience to relocate itself in new physical and media environments? A new context brings transformations along with it. Even so, an experience—for example, the experience of cinema—remains in some way the same when the new situation in which we find ourselves conserves, if not the traditional individual elements, at least a “cinematic” profile or shape. In such cases, we “recognize” the presence of cinema even when it is no longer as it was, or where it was, before.

Fourth, to recognize a medium, and cinema above all, in a new environment that is not its own is a complex operation. In a sense, this recognition takes us backwards: If our recognition is based on memory and habit, we look for something that corresponds to a canonical model. But recognition can also take on a progressive aspect: Before a situation that is necessarily imperfect, we literally imagine what cinema could be, and thus open ourselves to new possibilities. It is also in this sense, in suspension between past and future, between having being and potentially being, that cinema, relocating itself, can survive.

BACK TO THE EXPERIENCE

The cinema, from the moment of its birth, has been considered a particular form of experience. Obviously, it also involves a technical device; after all, it was born from a set of patents, and the earliest commentators and theoreticians were fascinated by the presence of a “machine.” Jean Epstein’s famous portrait of the movie camera comes to mind: “The Bell and Howell is a metal brain, standardized, manufactured, marketed in thousands of copies, which transforms the world outside it into art. . . . [A] subject that is an object without conscience—without hesitation and scruples, that is, devoid of venality, indulgence, or possible error, an entirely honest artist.”¹⁴ Then there is Antonello Gerbi’s description of the projection: “From the back of the long room, seated up high behind the audience—like the drivers of old hackney cabs in London—the projectionist holds in his fist the taut reins of the projection that is taking place. The band of rays that keeps the images bridled on the screen gives unity to the three essential elements of the cinema: it holds the screen, the audience and the projection booth together in a collected and peaceful order.”¹⁵ It is no coincidence then that in Europe during the first three decades of the twentieth century, one of the most common epithets for the cinema was “the mechanical art”—a term that is found in the title of a book by Eugenio Giovannetti, a text filled with proto-Benjaminian ideas.¹⁶

Nevertheless, the “machine” is not valued for what it is, but for what it can do and for what it makes the spectator do. Béla Balázs, in one of the more crucial pages of The Visible Man, speaks of cinema as “a technology for the multiplication and the dissemination of the products of the human mind.”¹⁷ The printing press is a technology, too, but while it has “in time rendered men’s faces illegible,”¹⁸ cinema rehabilitates our visual abilities and restores our familiarity with the language of the body. “Every night millions of people sit in the cinema and through their eyes live the experience of events, characters, sentiments and emotions of every kind, with no need of words.”¹⁹ The emphasis is placed on the way in which the device mobilizes our senses and places us in relation with reality—on the type of experience that it engenders.

This experience owes much to the “machine,” but not everything. It relies on a technology, but it also finds sustenance elsewhere. For example, the exaltation of vision is undoubtedly linked to the fact that cinema works through screened images, and furthermore, it presents them to us in a darkened room, which augments our concentration. As Giovanni Papini recalls, “[cinema] occupies a single sense, the sight . . . and this unique focus is ensured even further, in an artificial manner by the dramatic Wagnerian darkening of the theatre, which prevents any distraction.”²⁰ However, if we are compelled to watch, it is also a result of our curiosity and our obsessions. Jean Epstein notes, “We demand to see because of our experimental mentality, because of our desire for a more exact poetry, because of our analytic propensity, because we need to make new mistakes.”²¹ And Walter Serner, in an extreme and fascinating text, speaks of a “desire to watch,” which has always pushed humankind to attend the most terrifying spectacles, and has kept us from backing away from blood, fire, and violence.²²

The filmic image places us in contact with reality—or better, with life.²³ In one of the earliest descriptions of the Lumières’ invention, André Gay connects “the striking impression of real movement and life” directly to the way that the device works.²⁴ A few years later, Ricciotto Canudo, in his celebrated manifesto “The Birth of a Sixth Art,” while underlying cinema’s ability to capture reality in its wholeness, speaks of a “scientific theatre built with precise calculations, a mechanical mode of expression.”²⁵ And yet Canudo lists other instances that push cinema toward a perfect reproduction of life: the inclination of modern times toward objective documentation instead of fantasy, or Western civilization’s predilection for action instead of contemplation. In one of his last contributions, Canudo will draw an even more general picture. He claims that cinema is essentially a new form of writing, and writing, he remarks, is born not only as “a stylization or schematization . . . of ordinary images which had struck the first men,” but also as an attempt “to arrest the fleeting aspects of life—internal or emotional—images or thoughts, so others could know them.”²⁶ From this perspective, cinema meets man’s enduring need to achieve “triumph over the ephemeral and over death.”²⁷

To capture the real also means to openly trans...