Cinema Lost and Found: Trajectories of Relocation
in Screening the Past, No. 32, ‘Screen Attachments’.

“While film scholarship deepens its reflection on what the new digital revolution and its multiple windows are adding or taking away from cinema as we have known it for over a century, Casetti urges us to look backwards and not just forwards. He proposes that in order to find out what really happens to cinema once it leaves the movie theatre or the “Motherland” that has been its predominant location, we should refocus on the filmic experience itself. In so doing we might understand how cinema’s unique identity separates it from other media experience.

In the essay he has contributed to this special issue, Francesco Casetti goes a step further in his analysis of cinema’s relocation both theoretically and historically and directly addresses the main issues involved in the theorization of what we have referred to as screen attachments. He explains spectators’ new attachments to cinema’s relocated screens and explores the breaking of the “original” unity of the filmic experience following two main “paths”. The first path he re-traces is based on delivery and the second on setting. According to Casetti, in the first path, we recognize cinema because what we watch is still the film object (narrative cinema) that we used to watch in the movie theatre, even though it is delivered on other screens that, unlike in the movie theatre, presuppose interrupted and fragmented viewing. In the second path, we recognize cinema because of how we are watching, that is in a setting that mimics the movie theatre, even if the film object (narrative cinema) may have been substituted for other objects. In the two paths for relocation cinema is both “faithfully” reconstructed and “treacherously” transformed.”

from Screen Attachments: An Introduction, by Paola Voci and Catherine Fowler