Film and Film

Eduardo Russo

Instead of being novelties based on a specificity, cinematographer Lumiere and his competitors were, in fact, a syncretic invention, located in a crossroads between many image projection systems from which we had had some information since ancient times, the photographic developments which had been taking place since the third decade of the century and the array of optical devices which linked popular information of certain scientific theories with entertainment in different scales thus producing a visual ilusion of movement. These first stages gave birth to a new type of subject: the cinema spectator.

In the beginning, and during the first two decades of a show which every season rehearsed new forms in its social definition,the cinema , had a spectator whose plurality and fragility, seen from a one-century distance, seem to curiously correspond with the multiplicity of activities that are exercised nowadays in the screen of different public and private contexts. To a certain extent, the so-called classical cinema came to standarize a situation towards an immensity, towards a certain situation which suddenly found a shape in the format of a film, and the narrative and fictional follow–up of its relationship with images.

If the classical cinema proposed its spectators an intense immersive experience prone to sift in a narrative way by showing and retelling stories which moulded the sensitivity of people worldwide, the modern cinema shaped other expectations. Located after the Second World War, this new cinema continued setting its bases in the hands of fictions. Without neglecting its dimension of collective dream, it was able to change dreams for nightmares, but resorting to a more sensitive spectator, aware of a possible awakening aroused by this fiction. There we can find the meaning of the Italian neorealism, its worldwide spreading and influence. There, we needed an interpelated spectator, his comfort questioned, open to curiosity and to the discovery of not only what would happen in the imaginary universe of the film, but to the activation of his awareness of that world which was awaiting outside the cinema.

The adventures of modern cinema, or to do justice to its characteristic diversity, of the modern cinemas, had its epitome in the "new cinemas" which appeared in the 50s and early 70s. This different explosion became a breakthrough which influenced many spectators. For some modern critics, even nowadays-although with substantial changes with respect to its initital stage- this modernity keeps even today an essential place in the field.[1]

After the 70s the cinema was called in different ways, even disregarding its conceptual correctness. Among terminologies, the most neutral is undoubtedly, the one of "contemporary cinema". The present outlook is characterised by the dispersion and the awareness of a general state of uncertainty in which we can infer a certain degree of certainty. On the one hand, this cinema is a small environment of what is called audiovisual at a global scale. On the other, it remains in critical terms ( not only for the role the critic occupies in its support and delimitation, but also in its condition of risk, as when it is said that a patient is in a critical state), in a state of change. The present of the cinema is a territory of mutatitons. [2] Inside this situation of accelerated transformations, what kind of spectators are we today?

Some decades ago, the electronic image set the foundations of TV and DVD consumption. Some years later, the digital threshold spread its modalities: movie theatre, air TV or cable TV, electronic supports from video cassette to DVD and more recently, downloading of files and forecasting in streaming media. The mix between cinemas, TV, and computer increases the options not only to watch a film but also to start looking for one and find it.

In addition, despite its recent advent, we witness the upcoming of the possibility of operating on and in the films. Another dimension is born, which some people have regarded as the possible access of the spectator to a dimension of co-authorship, and others, like Janet Murray, prefer to consider it as a more exclusive form of stage performance, of traditional acting and not authorial.[3] In this dynamic, it will be necessary to know how much there is of open and creative game in this possibility, and how much of ruled-based game there is in it.

The beginnings of these processes of the transformation of the spectator of the modern were contemporary with the theories which in those years tried to account for the spectator´s activity. The theories hypotheses and models which were proposed at the end of the 70s and at the beginning of the 80s were concentrated on the figure of the classical or modern spectator, but a spectator which did not fit in the changing and diversed experience of the cinema , of a cinema in the times of the audiovisual. The theory of the device examined exhaustively the job of the fascinated spectator captivated in the dark cinema, seduced by the powers of ithe image and the story. Studies carried out from the perspective of the Marxism, the psychoanalysis and semiology gave birth to a sophisticated model of spectatos who was at the same time divided and unified [4] Then a textual analysis in the 80s led to the study of the spectator in the text. Although the theory of enunciation and narration helped for a better understanding of one activity incorporated in a textual dynamics. May be it was the semiopragmatic source focuessed on the different uses the cinema and the subjective operations at stake, which was the one which best showed the new environment , that "world of screens" ( accurately named by Serge Daney ), which imposed new frontiers and posibilities for the spectator. 

In this diverse outlook, more than the continuation and the updating of a hundred –year-old cinema, we notice the upcoming of what could be regarded due to its technical , economical, social and aesthetic factors, as a post-cinema. In the light of this situation, would there be a possibility that the subject was something like a post –spectator? [5]

If the intervention of the cinema was parallel to the invention of of the spectaror- subject, the mutations in the cinema were connected to the spectator´s metamorphosis. Robert Stam and Ella Shohat have devoted themselves, in a recent article, to investigate what a cinema spectator is in the times of the "post".[6] Among the relevant characteristics, we could highlight what we could name a reinvention of the mechanism. Far from organizing in stages whose progression would take each one to the annulment of the previous one, what has been designed is a scenario of increasing complexity. Some of the breakthroughs of the post-cinema include the incorporation of cable TV, which introduced films in thematic channels. Likewise, there was the revolution of the domestic video with the advent of the videocassette. Then, the digital video in the DVD era enhanced the availability of the domestic copies to enter more recently the increasing alternatives of filing, circulation and downloading of digital files. However, we are still speaking about the cinema: it is an identity which has accompanied us through many generations. Nevertheless, the technical, socio psychological and aesthetic environment in which this cinema survives is clearly different.

We agreed with Raymond Belour that in the field we are focussed on "each mechanism invents its cinema".[7] Therefore, the changes in the mechanism make that, even when keeping its reserved identity by this terminology, something of this cinema as regards its recognition prevails. 

Though we are still referring to the films from the shooting to the releasing, the technical reality belongs more and more each time to the world of the digital archives. For a long long time, Jean-Luc Godard considered something ridiculous that in the middle of the digital era we kept on talking about shooting, when nothing was shot any more. With the same traditional spirit, we refer to the monitoring of the electronic cameras as "shooting " or to the cameras which keep their file in a solid memory like " digital cameras ". Continuities and disruptions, is a mix which is difficult to understand, in which, if we extend Bellour´s view, we could also support each mechanism, apart from inventing his cinema, he invents his spectator.

In the modern reinvention of the cinema and its spectator, we must mention the contradictory elements. Among the present complex situations we can neglect the one which shows us a cinema which makes its way between contingence and expansion. On the one hand, an unpredictable state has replaced that core place as an aesthetic experience in a massive scale, thus making the cinema a subordinate area of an audiovisual, whose axis has experienced other modalities as the TV spectator and, in recent years, the increasing participation of the videogames. After basing its possibility conditions in different image machines, the cinema is nowadays regarded as a combined art of image and sound, of time and vivid spaces, open to a multiplicity of technological mixes, a really transmediatic art as it was visualised long time ago by Gene Youngblool.[8] As a witness of a cinema which is undergoing a filmic, electronic and digital experience, a new particularly troublesome spectator has appeared, which is thought of from the electronic audiovisual perspective, from the paradigm of the televisión, and then starting form the digital revolution, in terms which adopt the profile of those who we prefer to regard as users. To add to these paradoxes, for some analysts it is a question of a moving, vague, inconstant, impatient and absent-minded spectator, if we take into account the negative aspects. For other observers, it will be an eager expert spectator, an intertextual, refined, one who will highlight new competences and abilities. To complicate this issue even more, we could add that these same subjects show simultaneously aspects from one or the other side. What is clear is that the spectator and his work can be classified more than ever within an area of conflict.[9]

Tierry Jousse regarded this phenomenon as a new type of tribal formation, with some attributes of an old dandysm, which participated in what he called an electronic cinephilia, whose main challenge would be not reducing itself to a domestic celebration, locked until isolation only prone to consumption, but to create some form of increasing activity from a certain state of clandestinity, which could revew some practice of cinema domesticity. Due to the threat of the confinement to a passive domesticity, the promotion of "camarillas" [10] was left. It might be the heritage of so many decades of living together with electronic screens and their wide range of alternatives with respect to their daily uses, but among those changes that in the present are produced in the spectator, those who refer to the diversity of practices which face in its contact and negotiation with a film are particularly worth noting. Due to an active socialization in the lobby of the cinemas which, although it cannot be reduced to mere modern data, it is not less outstanding ( the noise, the consumption of drinks and food as a complement of the showing the model of the lobbies of the multiplex cinemas, as to remember the lively noise in the first shows in the cinemas) we have to add other details of interest. Not everything is concentrated on the socialization which tends to be noisy even in the encounter with the film, may be to intensify the possibility of putting in phase in this energetic way or sharing the impressions in a documentary-like way, even as a defensive manouvre against any demand of massive capture by the plot, but that we also notice some forms of articulation of the gregarious which turns the spectator more prone to set up some form of identity.

If we moved towards a more "hunter-farmer" spectator whose practises enter a more and more sophisticated field, even against all intellectual pretention, also this spectator looks likely to group in tribal organizations, resorting to the backup of the horizontal contact and certain form of network organization which deals with a new reality as regards the cinematographic aspect. What is outlined is no more than a group of features of emerging spectators. Some of the original characteristics imply a challenge to the system imposed from the market and the marketing strategies.Hand in hand with an increasing proliferation in the audiovisual in every sense, in a net which is irreductible to any estimate of the audiovisual industries, in accordance with a model which threatens to transform the practices connected to the circulation and enjoyment of what is called cinematographic in a such dramatic sense as the one which has affected the world of recorded music, there is an increasing movement of questioning of patters ( and the continuous proposal of others. The availability leads to a permanent revision, to discusión and to a certain state of board meeting of films which reminds uso f the freedom-advocating hypothesis of an Amos Vogel, as his recreation practices of the cinematographic experience departing from the comparison and the sharing of the most different pieces, resorting to a sight emancipation, of which he has left evidence in his both unclassifiable and stimulating Film as a Subversive Art [11]. In accordance with that memorable proposal from Vogel, whose figure seems to grow in importance within the present situation the cinema is in, a recent statement signed by the programmer of the Cinemateca Francesa, Nicole Brenez proposes, together with the increasing availability of files and the need to revise all the classifications inherited from inaccurate classications, a combined action between globalization and the recreation of the domestic environment, taking as a starting point an initial statement which looks crucial: "we have not see the most important films of the 20th century yet".[12]

It is not a question of shooting something new, but also to see what is new in what has been waiting for so long without having been really seen yet. Within the outlook which combines long journeys and foundational dimension, it is worth noting not only the paradoxes, but also some active proposals in the middle of a crisis, which have to do with the emerging trends of the cinematographic art: if there is a critical state, this has no connection with any stranding but to the multiplication of the alternatives. Together with the issues which tend to an increase in the production, which in fact has been produced in accordance with the technological and economic dynamic as well as a dynamic which enables the access to new opportunities, we witness new pratices as regards the circulation and the releasing of the films. This dimension implies renewing the tradicional space of the cinemas unframing them from the multiplex model so in accordance with the convencional circuits, to advance in the creation of a small format as regards the number of spectators but which benefit from the digital format in high definition. On the other hand, as regards domestic spaces, we witness the advent of the posibilities of edition connected to the digital supports (DVD and Blue-ray) and the access through Internet downloading.

Indeed, this access to domestic spaces, so as not to be considered a simple disperse consumption, must be complemented with activities which support this gregarious side which is so characteristic of the spectator as is his intimate relationship with each film. When the virtual communities of a new form of an emerging cinephilia in the cyberspace began to settle a decade ago, the enthusiasm for these new virtual tribes began to show signs of exhaustion, as long as the contacts remained in this unique environment to then fade. As we are exploring our relationship with the new media, it is evident that we should balance the visual contact with the face to face interaction. In this way the isolated enjoyment is replaced by the actions in common. The most important cinema at present is an interventional cinema, both with respect to shooting the film to the ways in which it can be seen, and what is that it can produce en the public environment and in the redefinition of the expectations and activities of its spectators. There we find an increasing importante, for example , of the shows , the thematic festivals, the specialised cinemas , the interchange of the archives and the possibilities of integrating the cinema, for example, to the spaces of the museum and other cultural institutions. The fact of expanding new spaces for the cinema will be crucial to open the way to this "other cinema" proposed by Raymond Bellour.[13]

It is not a question of generating new spaces for the cinema, but also new times. Some of this can be detected, for example, in the increasing importance of the great number of festivals and different cinematographic encounters, which, all around the world and at different scales, from the ones of international status to the most local ones, foster a temporal environment aloof form the routine and reivindicating a different temporality, in which the contact with the films that arouse interest- and very often in an open challenge to the own orientations charateristic of the audiovisual market- it is fostered in a privileged frame, underlined in the cinephile calendar. Through the reinvention of the cinema and its spectator it is worth stating, not only the continuity of well-known experiences, but also the generation and settlement of the emerging ones. The central issue is updating the place the cinema in the words of what Christine Buci-Glucksmann has characterised as an aesthestics of the short-lived, that not only concerns the cinema, but it does involve it very specifically in the core of the artistic practices, due to the uniqueness of its raw material. [14] The cinema is done with visible and audible time. In the general context of a tendency to the configuration of a mere present we require the installing and the creation of other temporalities, moulding new possibilities to listen and to see which could face both the mysteries of the visible and the audible as well as of the invisible or the silence. 

Therefore, it is essential to count, both with the necessary spaces and the essential virtualities of generation of other times. It is taking into accoung both dimensions, enabling environments and events in which spectators can settle and multiply, that the cinema will be able to be regarded as a valid art for the years to come.

*This article was originated in the conference held in the First Iberoamerican Cinema Forum, City of Bogotá (June 14, 2009). His main proposals belong, as regards its ideas about the cinematographic spectator and his present mutations, to an investigation in 2008 -2009 by the SECyT of the School of Fine Arts of the University of La Plata Argentina, about New Modalities of Audiovisual Experiences in Urban Environments.