Introduction: Cinema in the Socio-technical Network - Text 1
A medium is always a hodgepodge assemblage of technologies, actors, actions and interactions, a kind of “socio-technical network” whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. So too cinema is a highly heterogeneous assemblage of materials (light, nitrate, celluloid), devices (cameras and microphones, editing and mixing tables, projector and speakers), ensembles and places (studio, movie theatre, large screen), milieux and networks (of production, distribution and reception, with norms and uses) and aesthetic qualities (frame and surface, black and white and colour, movement, grain, flickering, iconicity and indexicality, recording and delayed transmission, duration, shots and editing, various forms and motifs, devices and plots, narratives and genres, and certain generally passive experiences also, with effects and affects). None of these elements is exclusive to cinema. None is essential.
This assemblage appears to have stabilized, in some places – in large studios and commercial movie theatres – and for a time – say between 1910 and 1990. In fact, however, it is always changing in response to circumstances. Some properties (such as photochemical film stock) are abandoned while others are preserved (such as many narrative forms) and new ones (such as surround sound) are incorporated. Cinema is like the Argo, “each piece of which the Argonauts replaced, so that they ended up with an entirely new ship.”[1] But here we must imagine a vessel which, during the voyage, changes not only its materials but also its form and function and whose only identity is its name.
In its precariousness and contingency, this network has been particularly visible at the moment of its institution, when it was in the process of establishing itself, and in moments of crisis, whether socio-economic (such as the stock market crash in 1929 and the Second World War) or technological (such as talking film and radio and television), which produce tensions or ruptures and demand adjustments or reconfigurations. Today cinema’s historical condition is more visible than ever, with digital revolutions blurring the boundaries between images and image systems.
In this way the movie theatre, which is merely one of cinema’s many accidental properties, is today often viewed as essential.[2] Paradoxically, it became the origin of cinema retrospectively, for historical reasons. In the 1950s and 60s especially, against the domestication of electronic images, and in the 1990s and 2000s, against the nomadic nature of digital images, the sedentary and institutional movie theatre proved to be the heart of the network. But by focusing our attention on this particular nub, we lose sight of the network as a whole, and the field of possibilities on the basis of which it is constantly being constituted and reconstituted. This fetishizing of the movie theatre – that singular viewing system which offers up a monumental and collective image in a dedicated space – makes us neglect other image consumption systems, in particular those which offer up-close and individual images in an unmoored space.
The present parcours follows the thread of these up-close and individual viewing systems which in this manner are closely tied up with film history but which have been neglected by historiography because they developed outside the movie theatre, before, after and on the fringes of cinema’s official history and territory, because they appeared to be merely the pre-history, post-history and outer boundary of this history and territory. Here we will examine a few nubs and exemplary moments in which, with the growth of electronics and computerization, the individual viewing system was reactivated, but in a yet more immersive and henceforth interactive form, with new extensions whose nature is both multi-sensory (visual, acoustic, haptic, olfactory, gustatory) and motive (bringing into play the head, hands and the entire body).
