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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ariel Rogers Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies Columbia University Press, New York 2013, pp. 352
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2014-10-01
2021-09-10
2014-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Simona Pezzano
2014/10/01
Libera Università di Lingue e Comunicazione IULM
2036-461X
22-23
en
Ariel Rogers Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies Columbia University Press, New York 2013, pp. 352
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16353/17033
14
Ariel Rogers
Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies
Columbia University Press, New York 2013, pp. 352




   “Psychocinematics,” according to Shimamura, “is grounded on a scientific
analysis of our aesthetic response to movies” (p. 2, emphasis in original). The
critical approach that Ariel Rogers carries out here consists in comparing how
the experience of cinema has been formulated in conjunction with radical tech-
nological transformations which occurred in the 1950s – such as widescreen,
together with stereoscopic 3D – and in the 1990s and early 2000s – when the
emergence of digital cinema became a key issue in the industrial and popular
media. The result of this long and detailed study is double. Not only does it shed
light on some crucial periods in cinema history, but it also provides a historical
overview of the discursive and affective frameworks within which the relation-
ship between films and viewers was formulated. Despite some similarities in the
public speeches of these different eras, the kind of experience that cinema offers
today – regarding the involvement of the body of the viewer – is very different,
because it has been profoundly transformed in conjunction with both the evolu-
tion of society and the concomitant technological change.

   From a theoretical point of view, Rogers draws on some suggestions that come
from the apparatus theory, even though she moves away from it. She, in fact,
points out that the concept of film experience is historically rooted, following on
this point some academic studies on spectatorship which are focused on “early
cinema” and its relationship with the modern metropolis and the supremacy of
capitalism. More specifically, on the one hand, she borrows from Baudry1 the
concept that we can fully understand the cinema effect on the audience only if
we consider both the cinema material’s organization and the kind of viewing ar-
rangements that it produces. But, on the other hand, she takes a different idea of
a viewer’s position from Gunning, and other scholars, that focused their atten-
tion on “early cinema,” arguing that until 1906-7 the film experience was differ-
ent from the type of immersive absorption that the apparatus theory presented as

1
  See Jean-Louis Baudry, The Apparatus: Metapsycological Approaches to the Impression of Reality
in Cinema, in Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus Ideology, Columbia University Press, New
York 1986, pp. 286-98.

                                             Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIV, no. 22/23, Spring/Fall 2014
                             Reviews / Comptes-rendus


intrinsic to the spectatorship. Taking ideas elaborated by Kracauer and Benjamin
about the experience of industrial modernity, they instead underline the histori-
cal specificity of the cinematic encounters.

   Moreover, Rogers acknowledges as influential the notion of experience she
uses here, which is not only established in specific historical contexts, but also
related to the various technologies that have emerged in those moments. That
is the reason why she focuses her attention on examining historical materials,
such as technical manuals, fan magazines, marketing materials, trade journals
and popular periodicals to explore how the dominant culture promotes the new
cinema’s appeal. She believes, however, that these materials, even if reflecting the
promotional rhetoric, are essential to understanding the encounter between cin-
ema and audience, since they allow us to infer the frameworks within which the
cinema experience has been developed in different periods. In the first chapter,
for instance, she investigates how the public discourses about widescreen cinema
invite beholders into a close, tactile and sensual immersion in the film spectacle.
Conversely, as many commentators at that time pointed out, the gigantic figures
displayed on the screen would render the human image strange, if not grotesque.
In short, widescreen offered a bodily participation that was both thrilling and
frightening, inviting spectators to feel more intimate with the overwhelming im-
ages and, at the same time, to feel more anxious and uncomfortable with technol-
ogy (in general) that was transforming life both inside and outside the theatre.

   Although the bodily involvement of the viewer in the experience of cinema
is considered to be central in all the historical periods taken into account here,
specific to the contemporary period is the problematization of concepts of
bodily experience and intersubjectivity. The author, in fact, not only analyzes
the public discourses surrounding the emergence of 3D cinema in 1950s and
2000s, but looks carefully at some prominent movies – such as Creature from
Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954) and Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) –, com-
ing to the conclusion that the terms with which the cinematic experience was
framed should be reviewed in the light of the new context, profoundly changed
by the emergence of digital technologies.
   Looking at the aesthetic of these films, Rogers points out that they both em-
phasize the experience of immersion, but while the usage of 3D in the earlier
movie promises a scary tactile encounter with Otherness, underlining the body’s
vulnerability, the latter movie’s use of 3D invites a bodily free navigation into a
digital rendered world, Pandora, providing a new type of encounter with a digi-
tally mediated environment.
   In addition, the author underlines that, even if the form of bodily immersion,
offered by the 1950s technologies, has never disappeared, as we have just seen,
the contemporary discourses surrounding the idea of digital cinema problema-
tize this very concept of immersion. We can find similar terms through which
the cinema experience has been framed in both periods, but the meaning of

202
                             Ariel Rogers, Cinematic Appeals


them should be reconsidered. In the era where the information has seen as
immaterial and transmissible as a flow, through the wide variety of digital de-
vices, the spectatorial embodiment is being reformulated in conjunction to the
deeply changed contemporary context.

   Ariel Rogers, then, leads us into a fascinating journey full of information, which is
theoretically robust, and in which she illustrates how public discourses and modes
of presentation (including film style and form of exhibition) act together to device
cinema’s appeal for beholders, arguing that the forms of this cinema experience,
historically articulated, continue to develop along with contemporary concerns.


        [Simona Pezzano, Libera Università di Lingue e Comunicazione IULM]




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