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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Jacques Aumont, Que reste-t-il du cinéma?, Vrin, Paris 2012, pp. 120
Text.Serial.Journal
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12
Reviews / Comptes rendus
2012-10-01
2021-09-09
2012-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Luca Malavasi
2012/10/01
Università di Genova
2036-461X
19
en
Jacques Aumont, Que reste-t-il du cinéma?, Vrin, Paris 2012, pp. 120
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16330/17197
12
                                                       pretive hazard of the American school, Hansen
by Hansen “as a form of mimetic innervation            leaves us illuminating philological interpreta-
                                                       tions and unexpected questions. Not only does
   If Cinema and Experience’s interpretation           she confront Adorno’s writings on musical aes-
of Benjamin and Kracauer is not altogether a           thetics and propose a sort of ‘implicit theory
novelty in Hansen’s oeuvre, the interpretation                                                            -
of Adorno is undoubtedly new and surprising            opher, but she also builds an unexpected and
if compared with his stereotypical image as a          fruitful bridge between past and present: she
                                                       never reduces history to a relic but releases the
is almost a counter-interpretation of Adorno,          new and the unexpressed that the past brings to
depending less on classic references to his Cul-       us and that still belongs to us. It is ‘the heritage
ture Industry in Dialectics of Enlightenment,                                                             -
and more on his essays on theory of music. In          er, exiled in America, had understood.     1


Adorno’s analysis of the changes brought about                                       [Luisella Farinotti,
in musical listening by the new technologies                                 Università IULM, Milano]
of sound reproduction and diffusion, Hansen
                                                       1   Negt and Kluge’s Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung
the opportunities imposed by all technological             (1972) is the continuation of (and the an-
media. The author challenges Adorno with the
same weapons and uses his categories to inter-                                       Strukturwandel der
pret in an emancipatory way the new sensory                Öffentlichkeit, 1962 (The Structural Transfor-
                                                           mation of the Public Sphere). Miriam Hansen
culture created by technological modernity.                wrote the foreword to the American edition:
  By combining the speculative accuracy of the             Public Sphere and Experience, University of
                                             -             Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1993.




                                                       time, about the constant elements of its tech-
Que reste-t-il du cinéma?,                             nological, experiential and cultural identity,
Vrin, Paris 2012, pp. 120                              elements that have proved to be necessary and
                                                       urgent in some ways. And France has undoubt-
  The digitalization of the media had the effect,      edly been the center of this renewed specula-
among others, of having renewed an ontological         tion, as evidenced by, among others, Horizon
speculation. Or, at least, that was the case of cin-   cinéma                                Virtuel?
ema, an ‘old’ medium apparently overwhelmed            by Angel Quintana (2008), Cinémas contempo-
                                                       raines by Luc Vancheri (2009) and La querelle
the emergence – in the name of plurality and           des dispositifs by Raymond Bellour (2012).
                                                       The publication of Que reste-t-il du cinéma?
a movie’ and ‘going to the movies,’ and crossed
by unusual phenomena, in nature and intensi-
ty, of displacement and evasion from itself.           this scenario, but it is also an attempt to pro-
                                              -
ema in contemporary society and, at the same

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“Le cinéma, seul,” to quote Daney: it carries not     titled ‘Permanences,’ is properly of ontological
only the meaning of a lonely cinema, perhaps          order: the author proceeds to analyze the rea-
put aside as something outdated, but it rather        sons for this centrality, of what cinema is – and
conveys the idea of “just the cinema.” Aumont’s       continues to be – on the basis of what it does

very popular today – of convergences, changes
of medium and short circuits. This model seems        de conditions de réception propices à la cap-
                                                -     tation psychique sur un mode à la fois indivi-
ested in understanding the differences and not -      duel et collectif,” which, in fact, continues to
for the umpteenth time - in the superimposition       “distinguer le cinéma de toutes autres sortes
of practices and languages. On the contrary, it       d’images en mouvement et de pas mal d’autres
shows a peculiarity of contemporary commu-            pratiques culturelles et artistiques.”
nication strategies: “redouble their media and          A triple singularity, that of cinema: the struc-
remove all traces of mediation: ideally, it would     ture of the device, the linguistic operations, the
                                                      values offered to the experience of the viewer.

A model that, among other things, feeds a             into the common error of interpreting the cur-
dangerous tendency: that of “plaquer le même          rent proliferation of visual platforms as an index
nom de ‘cinéma’ sur ce magma,” the magma              of the dissolution of cinema identity; the archi-
of contemporary vision; that of exchanging the        tecture of the cinematic apparatus, historically
dissemination of cinematographic models or el-        settled, should be rather understood as a men-
ements with the dissolution or the uncontrolled       tal model, formed by the junction of some ele-
expansion of cinema (Youngblood and the Vul-          ments (in particular, the dynamics of the projec-
gata of expanded cinema are liquidated maybe          tion and the experience of a “matière visuelle”
a little too radically), and hastily assimilating     that is released in front of the viewer) and liable
the fate of cinema to the fate of moving images.      to happen even outside the context of a seem-
  Aumont’s discussion then proceeds, in the           ingly ‘canonical’ model such as that of movie
                                                -     theater. In short, the cinematographic device
es or, better, to remember that there are, even                                                         -
today, differences; that cinema is neither dead
                                                      image and an intention, that of a spectator who
being unrecognizable. And the progress of the                                                          -
argumentation is both historical and ontologi-        spect of the temporal integrity of the projection.
cal: on the one hand, in fact, Aumont focuses         This last comment introduces the second value
on the ‘historicity’ of cinema in the present, he
establishes a comparative path with art, and he       the production and the complex management of
concludes that if it is true that cinema has lost     time, which leads to a ‘three-dimensional’ ex-
the monopoly of the moving image – more rad-          perience of temporality: the time of the vision,
ically, “il n’a plus tout à fait le prestige d’être   the time represented by the diegesis (through
le seul art d’image mouvante” – it continues                                                      tout
nevertheless to appear, for ethical and aesthetic     court), and the time “sculpté, modelé, mis en
reasons, “la référence positive et dernière.” On

154
                                                      confrontation between the human being – whose
                                               -      “corps tout entier” is brought into play – and the
rative and articulation, that cinema can achieve      reality that surrounds him. Including, of course,
                                                      that of contemporary society, in which cinema
and life, where it gives rise to a unique and orig-
inal ‘meeting,’ to the “expérience d’un monde         but continuing to exercise its faculties. Those
que nous ne connaissons pas, mais qui s’accorde       that belong to cinema, and to cinema only.
                                                                                      [Luca Malavasi,
celebrates and realizes a dramatic and aesthetic




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