With respect to the current broken digital screening system currently destroying cinema and the imaginative capacities it produces in its witnesses. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cinema is called ‘cinema’ for a reason: it isn’t the screen that ‘cinema’ refers to; it isn’t the image on the screen that it refers to’; and it isn’t the interpretation of what’s on the screen it refers to. A ‘cinema’ is a screening-room in which a film or movie or talkie or motion-picture is screened. And, as such, when one refers to ‘cinema’ they are referring implicitly to the effects that are transmitted from off of the screen and back into the audience in a screening-room. The problem with digital screens is that what is projected on them is not itself an object, it is merely an image, if it is that at all1. Film, on the other hand, when it is projected, maintains itself as a whole by being a projection of a single slide of a physical film print; this is what is seen actually at 24-frames/second. It isn’t the aesthetic qualities of film such as ‘grain’ or ‘color’ or ‘tonality’ that constitutes a film image that renders itself as cinematic2, rather it is the fact that a film image is a whole itself at any given time(which is where the notion of a motion-picture comes from).
At one level, this notion of a motion-picture comes to be what it is only in conjunction with a frame-rate that has been purposefully chosen to make an image ‘hang’ in consciousness for a split-second or so. This produces(as was commonly known more than a century and a half ago) a ‘dream-like’ effect where what is seen is at once motion but also photographic, and, thus, an instantaneous image of a specific reality itself becomes noticeable when a detail is focused upon. This ‘noticing’ is the frame-rate interruption of motion that reflects back from the specific detail and back onto the broader whole of the film-slide itself as an object in space which, by extension, reflects back onto the chamber in which the viewing is taking place. This effect becomes imagineable: one needs to comprehend the dysjunction at work between what they are seeing on screen, the reality depicted thereupon and that virtuality(as it has become at that moment) in which the spectator views the photograph. This requires imagination on the part of the viewer to make sense of what it is about the viewing of this particular detail on screen with respect to its position in a specific context(in the fictional world presented there): e.g., ‘it is not I who inhabit this location myself to see this detail precisely, rather it is I who inhabit this cinema presently watching it’. As such, cinema produces an ongoing act of imagination with respect to the course of the film and the reflection on one’s own reality as having come into contact with it together with a room full of other spectators(who also have reasons for being in that room and that themselves also become part of this form of cinematic cognition). The space of the room as a shared environment is never lost with cinema; in fact, the sliding up and off the screen of the motion of the film is itself further definition of the screening-room as ceremonial space3.
Digital cinema, on the other hand, produces no such interruption of the viewing procedure; rather, it is absolutely continuous no matter whether or not it is artificially ‘framed’ with black-screen insertion(something laser projection seems to have done away with entirely). What is seen in a digital movie is, instead, thusly, the continuous movement of action and discourse on the screen. It becomes purely and simply about plot, narrative, and story. Any aesthetic elements that are grafted onto this imagery only serve to further determine the interpretive framework one is necessarily predisposed to generate with respect to this sequence of depicted action(i.e., using a specific stylized aesthetic to render the film as ostensibly part of a specific genre, including that of so-called ‘film’ history). It is impossible to grasp the frame as a whole in relation to a detail; focusing on a detail moves along with the movement of light on the screen from one location and scene to the next in a claustrophobic imprisonment to details(of lips, cars, bodies, movements, etc). In order to grasp the whole, one needs to draw back their focus to include the blurred contours of the whole screen together(which is the experience of going cross-eyed in a movie-theatre while others sit and watch the movie contentedly, so it doesn’t seem, because the ‘cinema’ is basically almost always empty these days). The ‘whole’, as such, is either this or the ‘story’, in its best appraisal, that is constitutive of the whole which, further, becomes part of a narrative, which becomes part of a politics, which becomes part of an action(even just writing), and back around again, ad infinitum, until, apparently, everyone agrees on the endlessly sprawling nature of the interpretive framework such stories produce in this so-called ‘cinema’.
What this means: the imaginative cognition that takes place while watching actual cinema becomes the stuff that can link people together once they leave the cinema. All the specific moments of reflection that may or may not have culminated in some realization or another with respect to oneself and others in the cinema with respect to what was depicted on screen in certain moments(which necessarily occurs with a film projection techno-logy) become a collective imagination in which the imagination of one is shared by others by the simple fact of all having been exposed to the same productive procedure as spectators in the cinema. Imagination isn’t simply the so-called ‘imaginary’ world represented; rather it is representation with respect to actuality which produces symbols4 that can, through reconciliation of differences of exposure, organize social life. Reality, on the other hand, is reconciling this imagineability of actuality(which is what commonly passes for reality as such) with respect to a future in which another human being will be in accord with one’s own understanding of something or another specific(i.e., a table is ‘real’ to the extent one can imagine sitting at a table with someone else and sharing a meal over it; when one eats alone, the table is ‘real’ to the extent leftovers might be left for someone else to witness; otherwise it is actual5). As such, what cinema produces for people on account of its capacity to facilitate a shared imagination is the ability to reconcile the possibility of a shared future, together. Without this, and being stuck with digital the opposite occurs: imagination is pilfered for stories that becomes reasons to take action in reality with respect to other people guided by nothing other than the stereotype-casting presented on a primarily black screen. There is an enormous difference at play there. Literally. An orchestratable becoming-animal economic concept in a coincidental actuality versus edifying human conduct according to reason in reality.
Footnotes
Having started with full-image projection using CCDs, for example, digital ‘cinema’ so-called, now relies predominantly on lasers, which means that the screen itself is primarily black. ↩
Although aesthetic qualities are important and themselves further decompose film cinema into distinctions in kind between different film stocks revolving primarily around how many layered-substrate are used to produce a single image that is itself a pure artifact of reality rather than an interpolated interpretation of one, as with single-layer dye color film. ↩
This notion of cinema as a ceremonial space or secular religious experience extends, furthermore, to the way in which film cinema is necessarily produced as an industry in distinction from a digital workflow(and the obligatory ‘waste’ it entails that promotes the concept of a faith-based economic model that expresses its belief in absolute quality in its use of silver as a substrate for its most pure forms of capture). ↩
‘Symbols’ aren’t just given in a picture as such but need to be produced by the imagination in reference to a specific empirical reality(see next sentence above). ↩
On the contrary, when one ‘taps’ on the table oneself, one confirms the reality of their sense of what is real, but the table itself as a concept is only actual; it is notionally ‘real’ to the extent one can imagine the extension of a body corresponding to this concept in time and space. On the other hand, when one merely looks at the table, it is a perception of invisibility, i.e., that there is something there that, if one were to imagine taking an action with respect to it, they may confirm according to the aforementioned(what is ‘visible’ being nothing particular but the entire field of vision). However, in neither case, alone, does the table have reality; only in conjunction with the imagineable future shared perception of the table that renders the table as implicitly present as an object of common concern does the table become something real through the concordance of implied understanding with respect to what can no longer be considered simply an object of individual hypothesis(because in the former what is real about the table is only an empirical experiment that tests the agreement between a concept of actuality with its notionality; what it lacks is the reconciliation of this imagined concordance with other human beings that give this hypothesis with respect to this agreement its reality). The problematic, generally, that is raised above with respect to film cinema, thusly, is that concerning the way in which a reality is constituted as such(i.e., rather than the conflict of ideas concerning what should be real of a digital action-politics with regard to interpretations, what is imagineable with respect to what is actually real according to reason(which is external to all human beings)—>reality). ↩