('Are works of art part of the life of the person who observes them? Do they become an element of their consciousness?’); The Failed Hope of Cinema? (2009), GCGCA(i)
The Failed Hope of Cinema?
A Long Goodbye to a Once New Task of Apperception? (Training grounds of distracted reception: from cinema to television to the liquid crystal computer-display screen)
La Cinémathèque Française
22 Dec 2009 - 20 Mar 2010
‘The temple first gives to things their look, and to men their outlook’
- Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art
‘The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behaviour towards works of art issues today in a new form…. A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it…. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art…. Architecture… [is] the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction…. Buildings are appropriated… by use and by perception… by touch and sight… [and] cannot be understood in terms of… attentive concentration… appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit… [and] habit determines to a large extent even optical reception… Reception in a state of distraction… finds in the film its true means of exercise.’
- Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility
‘Both [cinema and autonomous art] are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up' (’The Social Space of the Cinema?’): The Failed Hope of Cinema? (2009), GCGCA(i)
The revolution in techniques of reproducibility was destructive of cultural tradition. Objects technologically reproduced became detached from their embeddedness within tradition. The unique existence of an actor on stage was replaced by the plurality of copies of their performance. Film, as a new form of mass consumption, reorganised human sense perception.
Benjamin wrote of ‘reception in distraction’ as an alternative form of perception. Absorption and flow characterised the creation and reception of traditional art. Cinema offered disruption and estrangement, it its form and experience - montages, jump-cuts and other dissonances: a new ‘mode of human perception’. However, do any such possibilities made by cinema remain constrained by its ideological functioning; namely, to naturalise subjects to capitalist sociality (as an historically specific form of human society), reinforcing an oppressive social reality upon willing subjects?
Yet what is left of the emancipatory potential of the cinema? Is the film spectator ultimately fundamentally apolitical? Can films still productively engage and intervene in the always ongoing processes of constitution of subjects? Is the idea of the emancipation of the film spectator an illusion? Is the social space of the cinema contradictory from the standpoint of a concept of politics understood as the constitution of the social, since cinemas collect individuals together without engaging them together as a collective? Does the cinema constitute a populist mimicry of the contemplative immersion demanded of the viewer of art be aestheticism in its blanking out of all distractions but the screen? Is distraction the sociality of attention?
Audience member 1 (’The Social Space of the Cinema?’): The Failed Hope of Cinema? (2009), GCGCA(i)
Audience member 2 (’The Social Space of the Cinema?’): The Failed Hope of Cinema? (2009), GCGCA(i)
