11. Miniature Pleasures: On Watching Films on an iPhone

New Review of Film and Television Studies

The encounter between the cinema image, originally created to be seen on a large screen, and the mobile phone used as screening device, stands as one of the most striking instances of what Erkki Huhtamo calls the "Gulliverisation" of our contemporary environments: "a twodirectional optical-cultural 'mechanism' that works against the idea of a common anthropomorphic scale". In what follows, I focus on the aesthetic impact of the coexistence of images coming from extremes of the representational scale, from the cinema to the monumental projections that typify the contemporary trend in spectacular displays in museums and public spaces, to the tiny screens of our mobile phones. With reference to practices of collecting, archiving and possessive viewing, as well as the relationship between off and on-screen space, I suggest that strategies of making strange allow us to remain alert to, but also to historicize the diverse modes of reception and appreciation of the moving image that such shifts in scale produce.

On the one hand, the mirror-screen, on the other the sensitive screen. The mirror-screen is a “reflecting surface on which an image is projected, or which intercepts it, without retaining anything of it—the screen that is by design insensitive, and which must get in the way of any imprint, so that the image arrives, before going back to white, once the projection is over.” The whole history of film is dependent upon this accepted meaning of screen. The sensitive screen, on the other hand, is “equipped with memory, in the depths of which an image is deposited or formed, without there being any need, in the end of the day [at least], for any exhibition or any projection, any more than any developer, but by simple injection, manipulation, or transfer of signals.” (Hubert Damisch)

As a scholar of film, I am constantly torn in two different directions when I use my eyes. I am trained to read. I sift through written material quickly to find the nuggets of information or analysis that will help me to make sense of something else. But I am also trained to look – and looking isn’t always reading. Looking is as much to do with observation, as it is to do with analysis. It is as much about understanding how to describe what I see, as it is about interpreting those things that I see. Fittingly, one of the dominant paradigms of Film Studies lies in the textual analysis of films. This is the one that I was initially trained in. For the purpose of textual analysis, our powers of observation and informed scrutiny enable us to ‘read’ films as flat, legible surfaces. Characters reveal ethical, behavioural or narrative features of the film. Mise-en-scène can be decoded for political or aesthetic means. But how does one ‘read’ an image floating on a screen, when the screen itself is different every time? Is a moving image the same moving image if we’ve seen it on a tablet, or as a massive immersive multi-screen installation? How do we account for the differences between experiencing moving images in a cinema auditorium, versus the experience of moving image projection in a gallery, or in another site-specific installation? All of these seem like logical and valid questions. But perhaps in the rush to distinguish what we ‘read’ into a film from the individual acts of looking that we each commit when viewing the moving image, there is something of an artificial barrier put in place. If films are flat ‘texts’, then they can only be read in certain lights and from certain angles. What becomes legible – eligible even – as ‘film’ stays firmly in the realm of screen images that can be sustained in an upright manner in a fairly limited set of circumstances: in a cinema auditorium, on a television screen or more likely, on a portable computing device. So where does that situate all the marginal, evanescent examples of moving images, that still have an extremely powerful effect on the ways that we look at and experience screen media?

Screens

The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics

Detection in contemporary genre films is in the process of being transformed: viewers see less and less of moving, traveling, and active human bodies entering in interaction and exchanging words. Instead, what takes up a significant part of film time is the view of computer screens, with digitally stored and retrieved traces, meaningful for detection, playing the lead role. One result of this type of detection on screen – rather than detection in the streets or on murder scenes – is that detection is (re)presented as a process happening on the human-computer interface. With reference to Lev Manovich the article asks how the “illusion of navigating through virtual spaces” is recreated, when the context of such an illusion is filmic diegesis defined by genre rules (in this case: detection films), where “the virtual spaces of the screen” should have a direct effect on “the real spaces of filmic diegesis”?

What does a Chameleon look like? Contesting Immersive Cultures, edited by Kiwi Menrath & Alexander Schwinghammer, Herbert von Halem Verlag, Köln, 2010

Necsus #Futures, 2021

Film scholars in the new millennium have to live with an existential dilemma. Their very raison d’être, i.e. ‘film’, has become a chaotic constellation of audiovisual artefacts, mostly in digital form, bearing little or no relation to the endearing perforated film strip that continues to illustrate so many of our activities. Whether as synonymous to ‘film’ or as the name of film theatres, ‘cinema’ is equally undergoing an identity crisis in an environment dominated by giant Video-on-Demand (VoD) streamers, cashing in on the easy pleasure of home-viewing, which in pandemic times has become impossible to resist. For decades now we have been juggling with alternative appellations to account for the elusive object we study and teach, two of our favourites being ‘screen’ and ‘lens-based’ media. However, modes of audiovisual production and exhibition have evolved beyond these descriptors, some of them dispensing with lenses for their creation (as in CGI, or Computer-Generated Imagery) or the traditional screen for their fruition (as in VR or Virtual Reality productions). Even the adjective ‘audiovisual’ reveals its limits, when it comes to works addressing our haptic and olfactory senses, as well as our vision and hearing, examples including AR (Augmented Reality) and expanded-cinema experiments.

2019

Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine Abstract Cinema today is similar to the process of immersing yourself in another reality.<br> You can often find comparisons with a diving, and a kind of contact with the<br> visualized space of the imaginary. The position of human in the process of film<br> viewing has changed today. Now the viewer is turning into a subject who has<br> some special skills of the film literacy, media literacy, and for orientation in the<br> digital dimension of the virtual space of modern life. A person watches a movie, it<br> enriches his social experience, he can see and evaluate those events from the<br> distant past, or events, which were taking place elsewhere on the globe in which<br> the subject could not participate directly. On the other hand, today more than<br> ever, cinematic reality is built into the schemes of thinking, perception, and<br> memory of modern man in the form of str...