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ABSTRACT
The encounter between the cinema image, originally created to be seen on a large screen, and the mobile phone used as screening device, stands as one of the most striking instances of what Erkki Huhtamo calls the ‘Gulliverisation’ of our contemporary environments: “a two-directional optical-cultural ‘mechanism’” that works “against the idea of a common anthropomorphic scale”. In what follows, I focus on the aesthetic impact of the coexistence of images coming from extremes of the representational scale, from the cinema to the monumental projections that typify the contemporary trend in spectacular displays in museums and public spaces, to the tiny screens of our mobile phones. With reference to practices of collecting, archiving and possessive viewing, as well as to the relationship between off- and on-screen space, I suggest that strategies of making strange help us historicize, as well as appreciate the aesthetic complexity such shifts in scale produce.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The Grand Palais was transformed into a military hospital in the First World War, and used as an exhibiting space in the service of Nazi propaganda in the Second World War.
2. https://www.grandpalais.fr/fr/evenement/emotion; https://thejamproject.athem.fr/les-projets/emotion-wim-wenders, accessed 18 May 2022.
3. See the Grand Palais’ web site, including the interview with the head of the ATHEM studio which provided technological support through the JAM PROJECT. https://www.grandpalais.fr/fr/article/trois-questions-sur-la-scenographie-de-levenement-emotion-wim-wenders, accessed 18 May 2022.
4. Auguste and Louis Lumière had to scale down from their initial project (of a 700 m2 screen) to accommodate other exhibitors.
5. See, amongst others, Les inrockuptibles and Vogue, https://www.lesinrocks.com/2019/04/news/emotion/, https://www.vogue.fr/fashion-culture/article/paris-exhibitions-wim-wenders-emotion-at-the-grand-palais-a-free-immersive-installation-has-landed, accessed 08 September 2019.
6. Peter Greenaway, in particular, has produced several such installations. See Mandelli (Citation2019).
7. See the work of Erkki Huhtamo, Thomas Elsaesser, Oliver Grau, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Mary Ann Moser, Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, and Jonathan Crary amongst others.
8. On the ‘parasitic’ quality of the relationship between cinema and mobile phone as recording and screening devices, see Beugnet and Ravetto (Citation2016).
9. Amongst the recent publications on scale, Zachary Horton’s The Cosmic Zoom questions the kind of continuous, loop-like conception of the micro and macro that is epitomized by Charles and Ray Eames’ film Powers of Ten (1977). In this vision, the smallest and the largest are shown to resemble, and ultimately collapse into one another, with the human scale remaining as the median, and the stable reference of it all. Mary Ann Doane’s book on the close-up and scale, on the other hand, emphasizes cinema as an art of disruption. In spite of the alignment of the terminology of framing with that of the human body, and of classical Hollywood’s attempts at stabilizing spatial relations, the cinema works to disturb our perception of size and scale, proximity and distance.
10. Janet Staiger characteristically argues that “contextual factors (…) more than textual ones, account for the experiences that spectators have watching films and television.”.
11. “To be preoccupied with the aesthetic properties of digital imagery (…) is to evade the subordination of the image to a broader field of non-visual operations and requirements (…) what fully occupies individual attention is the management of the technical conditions that surround them: all the expanding determinations of delivery, display, format, storage, upgrades, and accessories.”.
12. See also (Odin Citation2012). In the context of film watched on mobile phones, the term “remediation” is used somewhat anachronistically since Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s classic book predates the invention of the smart phone as viewing device.
13. That is, the relative conditions of display rather than capture. Miniaturization reverses the logic of the close up described by Sergeï Eisenstein in his comparison of cockroaches and elephants. No matter how it was framed, how close up it was shot, though it appeared much larger on cinema screens, seen on a small device, the average body appears smaller than the human hand.
14. The notion of an “optical unconscious” is addressed in “Little History of Photography” (1931), and in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2, 1931–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999), 510–512, and vol. 3, 1931–1938 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2002), 117–119.
15. On the coexistence of capitalistic and non-capitalistic (or divergent) dream images and dreamworlds in Benjamin, see (Buck-Morss Citation1986).
16. Miniaturization and enlargement are processes readily adopted by advertisement.
17. See Martine Beugnet (Citation2021), Le cinéma et ses doubles : L’image de film à l’ère du foundfootage numérique et des écrans de poche. Bordeaux: Bord de l’eau, 2021.
18. Benjamin points to the development of an internal capacity to reconfigure the visible. Quoting Rudolf Borchardt, he proposes to educate the “‘image-making medium within us, raising it to a stereoscopic and dimensional seeing into the depths of historical shadows’.” See (Smith and Sliwinski Citation2017).
19. As media archeologists emphasize, historical “short-cuts” whereby we identify a direct lineage between the IMAX and the panorama, or the mobile phone with the flipbook and kinetoscope, tend to “naturalize” evolutions that are neither linear nor consistent. See also (Elsaesser Citation2004; Strauven Citation2013).
20. Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’espace (1958). Translated in English by Maria Jolas, Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 184.
21. My thanks to Clémence Folléa for pointing this text out.
22. It is worth noting that as an immersive form of viewing (a precursor to VR’s HMD set-ups in the way it detaches the viewer from its own body) peep-hole viewing produces a relationship to scale and relative size specific to its apparatus.
23. Stewart, op.cit., 46.
24. Job’s demonstration creates additional scale-shifting effects since images of the iPhone were displayed on a large screen, to a crowd of viewers.
25. Stewart, op.cit., 112.
26. Stewart, op cit., 125–127.
27. See Beugnet and Ravetto, op.cit.
28. See the introduction to Joëlle and Mairesse (Citation2017).
29. Anton Corjin, Tricky, Los Angeles, b&w digital print, 39 2/5 × 39 2/5 inches, 2002.
30. To use the expression coined by Landsberg (Citation2004).
31. Pisters relates the film’s title to the butterfly wing allegory of Chaos Theory. “The Filmmaker as Metallurgist”, 164. Such complexification of time and space is also reminiscent of the Benjaminian optical unconscious. See Smith and Sliwinski, op. cit.
32. Photography, and its spectator, has to contend with a long tradition of objectifying depiction of the “racial other”, a “defining feature of modern social and psychic structures”. Corbjin’s surrealist touch (the presence of the butterfly, the model’s pose and hair) hints at the possibility of an oneiric world of images unrestricted by prejudice. On the optical unconscious and the repressed memory of colonialism and slavery see Smith and Sliwinski, op. cit., 14.
33. Susan Stewart, op. cit., 148–149 (on the exotic) and 153–156.
34. See my discussion of Jean-Luc Godard’s Nos espérances (2019) in Le cinéma et ses doubles, op. cit.
35. Spiritualism itself has proved a lucrative activity, exploiting people’s grief to mercantile ends. However, in Assayas’ film it is portrayed as a redemptive and (in contrast with the mere consumption of goods and images) creative activity that paradoxically brings the character back in touch with concrete forms of expression: preparing to enter into communication with a ghost, Maureen produces detailed drawings of the haunted house.
36. In his critique of the “soulless” deployment of technology, Henri Bergson emphasizes how if “the tools developed by humanity are an extension of the human’s body (…) the augmented body awaits a supplement of soul (…) The origins of this technology are perhaps more mystical than one would believe; it will not find its true direction, rendering the services proportionate to its power, unless the humanity which it has bent even more towards the earth, uses it to stand up, and to look at the sky”. Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (1932) (Paris: PUF, coll. Quadrige, 1984), 329–331.
37. See also Le cinéma et ses fantômes, interview of Jacques Derrida by Antoine de Baeque and Thierry Jousse, Cahiers du Cinéma (April 2001), 74–85.
38. See Tom Gunning, “Re-Newing Old Technologies”: Astonishment, Second Nature, and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn-Of-The-Century.” In Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, edited by David Thorburn, Henry Jenkins, David Thorburn, and Henry Jenkins 39–60, and “To Scan A Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision”, Grey Room no 26 (Winter 2007), 94–127.
39. Laura U. Marks contrasts the experience of caressing the surface of a blurred image with that of lingering on the detail of a minutely rendered Dutch painting.
40. André Bazin (Citation1999) Qu’est-ce que le cinéma ? Paris: Cerf, 160. At the same time, the metaphor of the window inherited from Alberti has continued to flourish in our contemporary technological imaginary, nourished by the terminology associated with connected digital screens.
41. Pascal Bonitzer classically describes mainstream cinema as a reconfiguration of the visible designed to hide the space of its own production: “Hors-champ (un espace en défaut)”, in Cahiers du cinéma no. 234–235 (Decembre 1971– January/February 1972) and Bonitzer (Citation1982).
42. Rather than the decorative, isolating frames of classical painting, casings provide “object-frames”.
43. See also Gilles Deleuze’s description of the out-of-field which testifies to “a more disturbing presence, one which cannot even be said to exist, but rather to ‘insist’ or ‘subsist’, a more radical Elsewhere, outside homogeneous space and time”.
44. Sorlin implies television as a medium-sized screen rather than as home cinema.
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Martine Beugnet
Martine Beugnet is Professor in Visual Studies at the Université Paris Cité. She has curated exhibitions and written articles on a wide range of film and media topics. Her publications include Claire Denis (M.U.P, 2004), Proust at the Movies (2005, with Marion Schmid), Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (E.U.P, 2007, 2012), L’Attrait du flou (Yellow Now, 2017), Le cinéma et ses doubles. L’image de film à l’ère du foundfootage numérisé et des écrans de poche (Bordeaux: Bord de l’Eau, 2021) and the volume of collected essays Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty co-edited with Allan Cameron and Arild Fetveit (E.U.P, 2017). She co-directs, with Kriss Ravetto, E.U.P.’s book series Studies in Film and Intermediality.