Screen Genealogies. From Optical Device to Environmental Medium

Edited by Craig Buckley, Rüdiger Campe and Francesco Casetti
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019

Against the grain of the growing literature on screens, Screen Genealogies argues that the present excess of screens cannot be understood as an expansion and multiplication of the movie screen nor of the video display. Rather, screens continually exceed the optical histories in which they are most commonly inscribed. As contemporary screens become increasingly decomposed into a distributed field of technologically interconnected surfaces and interfaces, we more readily recognize the deeper spatial and environmental interventions that have long been a property of screens. For most of its history, a screen was a filter, a divide, a shelter, or a camouflage. A genealogy stressing transformation and descent rather than origins and roots emphasizes a deeper set of intersecting and competing definitions of the screen, enabling new thinking about what the screen might yet become.

Early Film Theories in Italy, 1896-1922
Edited by Francesco Casetti with Silvio Alovisio and Luca Mazzei
Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2017

How Italian writers, scholars, clergymen, psychologists, members of parliament and philosophers reacted to the advent of cinema? How they established a common language to discuss an invention that exceeded habits and expectations, and that transcended existing forms and categories of thought? This anthology for the first time gathers a large number of social discourses that in Italy tried to define and contextualize cinema from the 1890s to 1920s. What results is an impressive picture of a culture at distress with a “scandalous” event and eager to appropriate it for the sake of modernization.

Table of contents and Introduction

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

Welcome on my website and weblog on cinema in the post-media age. Please add your voice to the debate by posting a comment. Let’s start from my essay Back to the Motherland: the film theatre in the postmedia age, that has just been published on Screen, No, 52 : 1, Spring 2011. In this article I argue that Artaud Double Bill (2007) by Atom Egoyan is the perfect illustration of the emergence of a new style of filmic vision. Egoyan’s film opposes two female spectators: Nana who watches La passion de Jeanne d’Arc in a clip from Vivre sa vie by Godard; and Anna who watches Vivre sa vie and sends the clip through her mobile phone to her friend Nicole, who is sitting in another film theatre. The opposition underlines four passages: from a text to the hypertext (Nana watches a film, Anna watches a film, a clip inside this film, messages on her mobile phone, and so on); from a centralized gaze to a decentralized glance (Nana gives attention only to a film; Anna displays a multitasking attention); from being immersed to surfing (Nana dives into the world represented on the screen, to the point where she experiences a catharsis; Anna keeps the film as a series of single sequences, and reacts with admiration but without participation); from isolation to connection (Nana abolishes any relation with the exterior world; Anna stays in touch with her friend). These changes draw a new paradigm for spectatorship: from the attendance, tied with classical cinema, to the performance, typical of the cinema ‘outside the film theatres’. Nevertheless, as Egoyan’s film claims, we apply the new paradigm to a theatrical situation too: we are irremediably post-spectators.