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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Introduction
Text.Serial.Journal
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Introduction
2004-10-01
2021-10-01
2004-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Mariagrazia Fanchi
2004/10/01
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
2036-461X
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Introduction
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16522/14580
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INTRODUCTION




  The spectatorship experience and viewing forms have deeply changed during cine-
ma’s more than a century of existence. The evolution of the apparatus (from the multi
faceted technological innovations that have transformed the cinema medium, to the
regeneration, driven by digital technology, of the media scenarios), the changing view-
ing conditions (the evolution of the trade, the multiplication and differentiation of the
fruition spaces), the metamorphosis of the social and cultural scenario (the extension
and transformation of the social and discursive networks that the viewers are inserted
into and that constitute the inescapable framework of the viewing experience) have
changed the relationship forms between film and viewer and the habits and the value
of going to the cinema. The present issue of CINEMA & Cie aims straight for the heart of
a question that today, due to the drive towards interactivity and media convergence, is
ever more relevant, by examining in depth the viewer’s experience. This involves on
the one hand an understanding of how many and which factors shape the cinema view-
ing forms, how they interact with each other and what type of observation, method or
approach is more suited to grasp the variety and complexity of the relationships and on
the other hand to assess how the cinematic experience can contribute to define the
usage modes of other media and even a canon of apperception and understanding of the
extra media reality.

  More than on the epoch making changes, we focus our attention on the transitions,
on the small cracks in the social viewing ritual that reveal the dynamism and reactivi-
ty of the spectatorship processes in respect of the evolution of the apparatus and the
transformations that occur in the broader relational and cultural context. The common
theme of the essays collected here is the conviction that the viewer’s experience is a
combination of many variables, a good part of which outside the cinema itself, and that
the viewer’s experience can provide a privileged point of view from which to observe
and understand the transformations taking place in the social and cultural, as well as
the media, environment.

  Francesco Casetti, in the opening essay, highlights the close relationship that ties
movie going to modernity’s trends, needs and restlessness. A bijective relationship in
which the forms of cinematic vision incorporate and render paradigmatic certain dis-
tinctive traits of modernity. Through specific filmic samples, the essay illustrates how
the viewer’s experience is the result of two orders of processes, respectively social and
symbolic, and it highlights their inextricable connection. More specifically he hypoth-
esises a relationship that is at the same time symmetrical and compensational, between

CINEMA & Cie, no. 5, Fall 2004                                                         ­7
FRANCESCO CASETTI, MARIAGRAZIA FANCHI

the contact that the viewer establishes with the screen and the relationship that he
builds with the rest of the public in the cinema. An unresolved tension between the vir-
tual nature, that is never fully realised, of the symbolic identification with the film and
the physicality, never fully sublimated, of the presence of other viewers in the cinema.
  The perception of a liminilaty of the viewer’s experience shapes and guides Annette
Kuhn’s reflection. By studying the recollections of cinema viewers from the 1930s,
Kuhn identifies an essential ambivalence in the images and perception of cinema. The
cinema places, in particular, occupy in the viewer’s memory an interstitial position
between the private and public sphere borrowing from the first the sense of proximity
and safety and from the second the perception of alteration and extraneousness that
feeds the escapist attraction and function of viewing. Veritable transitional spaces that,
due to the intimacy that they establish with the viewer, become safe havens for the
exploration and appropriation of the external environment. In the interwar years going
to the cinema represented an important experience to know and familiarise oneself
with the neighbours and the social context of the neighbourhood. A significance that,
Kuhn specifies, is closely tied to that particular historical moment and the characteris-
tics of the apparatus.
  The inter-dependency of the forms and functions of going to the cinema, with the
social and cultural surroundings and with the configuration of the media environment,
constitute the leitmotiv of Vinzenz Hediger’s research. Hediger examines a particular
form of viewing: the practice of the repeated fruition by reconstructing its progressive
affirmation from the 1930s and by trying to identify its origin both within and outside
the cinema medium. A complex network of interferences is revealed, in which the
apparatus nevertheless plays a primary role. From the restraining effort exercised by
the distribution and exploitation strategies of the films during the classic cinema peri-
od, to the contemporary propulsion exercised by the diffusion of domestic viewing
technologies (VCR and DVD).
  James Hay explores the closeness and interaction between cinema and television and
other forms of consumption. Starting from an analysis of a recent car advert, Hay’s text
highlights the ever-closer interaction between media environments and even non-sym-
bolic forms of consumption. The media convergence is masterfully illustrated through
a rich repertoire of examples that range from the more traditional contamination of the
discursive forms (for example, the translation of contents from one medium to the
other), to the influence of apparatus and other consumptions not necessarily of sym-
bolic goods, in the definition of the usage canons of a medium. The case of the first car
stereos radios as a model of television fruition is exemplary. The fusion and relation
between media, and not only, consumption experiences offers unprecedented interpre-
tations. The association between radio and car, for example, brings into play a series of
values, such as the sense of freedom and contemporaneously the control and obedience
of rules of behaviour (highway code and by extension the social system), that can effec-
tively be applied to the examination and understanding of the television viewing expe-
rience and its social impact.
  Inter-discursiveness and inter-operativeness are other key words that appear in the
text that closes the monographic section. Mariagrazia Fanchi’s analysis concentrates on
the most advanced forms of spectatorship experience tied to the introduction of digital
technology. By examining the institutional forms of cinema consumption, without
looking at its most extreme and innovative aspects (such as the use of the web to down-

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                                                                              INTRODUCTION

load and watch films), Fanchi detects the signs of a change in progress that assails the
status of the viewer and the values and forms of his viewing praxis. The examination of
the multiplexes (with particular attention to the Italian situation) allows us to glimpse
the progressive expansion of the cinema viewer experience: on the sensorial level the
development and diversification of the stimuli, on the social level the crucial role of the
cinema as meeting place and focus of a network of relations that innervate the sur-
rounding territory and on the symbolic level the re-investment on the consumption
experience of the opportunity for self-expression. New ethical principles and rules of
behaviour shape the viewer’s action, which is progressively less tied to a single media
environment and its discipline. It is now engaged contemporaneously in different con-
texts, negotiating between the rules of each context, and organising a variety of offers
in an experience that assumes hyperbolical characteristics.

  Inter-media, evolution of the viewing syntax, development of the senses, radical trans-
formation of the relationship with the filmic text. The new forms of cinema viewing are
still largely to be explored, both in terms of their phenomenology and, especially, in
terms of their social consequences. But also the study of spectatorship from a historical
point of view continues to present broad shadow zones: the complex relationship with
the apparatus, the variety of viewing modes and the interferences, exchanges and con-
nivance with the social environment reveal a poorly explored research territory.
  The following essays do not propose systematic explorations or final mappings. They
provide an awareness (towards the social and cultural, as well as the semantic and sym-
bolic, aspects of viewing) and a method (able to capture and reconstruct the variety of
elements that come into play when defining the viewer’s experience) that can certain-
ly contribute to bringing together in a more critical and conscious manner the
diachronic and synchronous study of cinema spectatorship.
                                                                               [f.c., m.f.]




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