In the last few weeks, I’ve seen some films. Some on the television and computer. Others on the big screen, in different cinemas, in different cities. One afternoon, in a seat near the back of a cinema, I suddenly experienced a sort of general amazement. Glancing at a space holding a few hundred people, I realised that something was missing. At first, it was like a fog, distracting me from the big screen, and then I understood what it was: nobody was taking photographs. A spectacular event was before me, and it certainly deserved importance given how much they had paid for the ticket and the way their gazes were converging, but nobody, including me, felt the need to photograph or film it.
Yes, it’s banned. But it’s also banned at concerts, at the theatre and in other places we don’t even know about. In Italy, it was also banned in museums before Decree no.83 [Decreto Legge n. 83] was made law on 31st May 2014, which allowed the ‘reproduction of objects of cultural value if carried out in a way that does not entail physical contact with the object, nor exposing it to light sources, nor the use of stands or tripods. So, it was not the fight against piracy that was stopping us.
But if “everybody” now takes photos in museums, why does “nobody” take photos at the cinema? The question kept coming up, and I was unable to overcome a sense of general amazement.
Reading The Lumière Galaxy, the new book by Francesco Casetti about the forms of contemporary spectatorial experience – about the continuous relocations that mean that we encounter images in movement in increasingly heterogeneous situations – did help me to put my thoughts in order and hypothesise a response.
If nobody takes photos at the cinema, it’s certainly due to a discipline of vision shared in front of the screen, which is much stronger and more deeply rooted than some campaign against piracy. The cinema is a space that is capable of framing the spectator’s mobility and gestures; it’s a space illuminated in chiaroscuro, where the big screen is more likely to hold back light than to give the right amount for a selfie.
But if we don’t take photos at the cinema, it’s also because it’s the place where we rediscover the aesthetic conditions (as well as the political and ethical possibilities) of those practices of reproduction and editing that characterise the new media, and that involve more and more users. What Casetti effectively calls a “return to the motherland” is the expression of a desire harboured by the users of small, inter-connected screens to re-relocate themselves in the cinema, to stay connected to the big screen. It’s the retrospective recognition of a family resemblance, a line of continuity beyond the opposition between “old” and “new”.
If, on the other hand, the museum tends to be a space of “prosumer culture” – where we aim to develop a participatory conception of interpretation and creation – then the cinema is its premise, where one of its experimental precognitions takes place. In retrospect – as Walter Benjamin foresaw in his reflections that culminated in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction – the cinema seems to be the first manifestation of a specific way of perceiving that will take hold over the years.
Allowing yourself the experience of the cinema has always meant attending a “reproduction” as a challenge to the “unique”, and, above all, confronting the dialectic between continuity and discontinuity, and therefore the fragmentariness of the horizons of meaning of so-called “digital natives”.
Going to the cinema is learning to select and edit, without wanting to become a film-maker, among an audience of “friends” or “friends of friends”; it is simply learning with them about what it means, and how much effort it requires, to try to share a gaze on the world.
This blog post was adapted and translated by Kate Willman from a longer Italian version available on Il Lavoro Culturale
