The Post-Cinematic Venue: Towards an Infrastructuralist Poetics 2016
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Repositorium für die Medienwissenschaft Billy Stevenson The Post-Cinematic Venue: Towards an Infrastructuralist Poetics 2016 https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/13478 Veröffentlichungsversion / published version Sammelbandbeitrag / collection article Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Stevenson, Billy: The Post-Cinematic Venue: Towards an Infrastructuralist Poetics. In: Shane Denson, Julia Leyda (Hg.): Post-Cinema. Theorizing 21st-Century Film. Falmer: REFRAME Books 2016, S. 817– 840. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/13478. Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Dieser Text wird unter einer Creative Commons - This document is made available under a creative commons - Namensnennung - Nicht kommerziell - Keine Bearbeitungen 4.0/ Attribution - Non Commercial - No Derivatives 4.0/ License. For Lizenz zur Verfügung gestellt. Nähere Auskünfte zu dieser Lizenz more information see: finden Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 6.4 The Post-Cinematic Venue: Towards an Infrastructuralist Poetics BY BILLY STEVENSON One of the key questions confronting a post-cinematic media ecology is— what constitutes a post-cinematic venue? More specifically, how has the traditional cinematic venue been remediated and reimagined in the wake of the seismic shifts in film production, consumption, and distribution that have occurred over the last decade? Traditionally, attachment to the cinematic venue was a symptom of cinephilia, if not quite the tradition of cinephilia that has been re-examined in the light of Christian Keathley’s groundbreaking monograph, Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in The Trees. Whereas Keathley posits a cinephilic history based on privileged moments in the film, moments that exceed their intended or nominal significance (20), there is an alternative cinephilic history that focuses more on the symbiosis and synergy between venue and screen, as well as the serendipities and pleasures of the venue as a spectacle in itself. While it is neither the aim nor the ambit of this article to historicize these two different modes of cinephilia, it suffices to say that what might be described as venue-cinephilia tends to derive from Siegfried Billy Stevenson Kracauer’s observations on the symbiosis of urban space and cinematic spectacle, while Keathley’s brand of cinephilia, which might be described as moment-cinephilia, tends to derive more from Walter Benjamin’s reflections on cinema’s discordant relationship with the even more discordant experience of everyday urban life. Writing in Theory of Film, Kracauer describes venue-cinephilia by observing: Films make us undergo similar experiences a thousand times. They alienate our environment in exposing it. One ever-recurrent film scene runs as follows: Two or more people are conversing with each other. In the middle of their talk the camera, as if entirely indifferent to it, slowly pans through the room, inviting us to watch the faces of the listeners and various furniture pieces in a detached spirit . As the camera pans, curtains become eloquent and eyes tell a story of their own . How often do we not come across shots of street corners, buildings, and landscapes with which we were acquainted all our life; we naturally recognize them and yet it is as if they were virgin impressions emerging from the abyss of nearness. (55) Part of what renders this description so powerful is that it fuses—or at least leaves open the possibility of fusing—the viewer’s drift across the screen with their drift across the architecture of the theater. If this “film scene” is “ever-recurring,” that isn’t simply because it occurs in every film but because it describes a process that can be enacted in every film— namely, the eye’s drift from an onscreen conversation to the “furniture” of the movie theater, the “faces of the listeners” in the audience, the “curtains” around the screens and, finally, all the eyes in the audience that “tell a story of their own.” In describing how this process translates into urban attachment more generally, Anke Gleber notes that “the art of taking a walk introduces an aesthetics of movement that, more than any other artistic form, reveals an affinity with the long, extended tracking shots of a camera whose movement approaches and embraces the visual emanations of the exterior world” (152). However, if the tracking-shot is to procedurally 818 The Post-Cinematic Venue inculcate flânerie, rather than merely absorb it, then the viewer needs to create their own tracking-shots within the cinema theater itself. It is the very willingness of the individual eye to approximate a camera in this way, to drift away from the screen and across the reticulations and nuances of the theater, that signals Kracauer’s movement from Benjaminian flânerie to something closer to the venue-cinephilia I am describing. In elaborating his ideas about moment-cinephilia, Keathley introduces the “cinephiliac anecdote” (140)—“cinephiliac” following Paul Willemen (227)—as a new discursive and communicative tool. Cinephiliac anecdotes, Keathley argues, are the stories we tell, both to others and ourselves, about the cinematic moments that come back to haunt us again and again (130). For the most part, cinephiliac anecdotes are originary narratives, stories about when we first experienced these moments. Keathley argues that these narratives can reflect back upon wider historical and cinematic concerns if looked at in the right way. In the five exemplary anecdotes that he provides at the back of his book, he shows how this might be done, moving from some of his most precious experiences to more general theoretical concerns by way of an idiosyncratic combination of generalization and association. In doing so, he makes a claim for the cinephiliac anecdote as a new way of “doing” cinematic history, specifically as “points of entry, clues to another history flashing through the cracks of those histories we already know” (124). Rather than claiming that the cinephiliac anecdote offers a mere “alternative” history, Keathley suggests that it represents something like a materialist challenge to the very notion of history and historicism itself—an empirical “point of entry” that forces us to challenge and reconstitute the grand narratives and generalizations we’ve become accustomed to, instead of offering others in their place. For such a materialist outlook, such a yearning to glimpse the roots of historical production, it is perhaps surprising that Keathley’s anecdotes are themselves so minimally interested in the materiality of the film fragments they describe. No doubt, he gleans from his anecdotes certain 819 Billy Stevenson reflections or observations on technological, material history—one, for example, revolves around VHS production—but there is no sense that he is attached to the cinematic venue in the same way that he is attached to the cinephiliac moment, or that the two could possibly be part of the same attachment, with the exception of an anecdote he recounts about his first experience of Bonnie and Clyde: My first viewing of Bonnie and Clyde was on the film’s re-release in the early 1970s. I was probably about nine years old—much too young to be seeing it. I had been taken to the film—along with four older siblings, all in their early teens—by my college-aged brother, Tim, and his friend, Cathy Reed. I had heard all about the film’s final massacre scene, and with the above-described shootout functioning as a preview, I was getting anxious. During the shootout, Cathy noticed my discomfort and offered to wait with me in the lobby until the film was over. Relieved, I accepted. It was for things like her extraordinary kindness and empathy that Cathy was a favorite of ours. We were always excited to see her driving down the street towards our house, and hers was an easy car to spot. The front license plate ironically sported her initials: CAR. This screening of Bonnie and Clyde was the last time any of us would ever see Cathy. Two weeks later, she was dead from meningitis. (158) From the outset, this anecdote has a more sensuous attention to the screening space and conditions under which the film was viewed than any of the other four. There is a very specific, detailed awareness of who was in the audience on the night of the film, heightened by the fact that Keathley was much younger than the people with whom he saw the film, as well as the intended audience itself. This disparity was clearly a large part of his experience of the film, both in anticipation and actuality, and it seems to have created as much awe for the audience as for the film itself. It is this disparity, this fusion of anticipation and experience, that leads on to the paradox at the heart of this particular cinephiliac anecdote: the 820 The Post-Cinematic Venue cinephiliac moment, the moment of cinephile attachment, is not in fact attached to the moment and venue of the anecdote itself: I did not see Bonnie and Clyde again for several years—until I was a teenager and could watch the film on video. When I did see it, it was the moment of Clyde being hit by the shotgun blast that provoked a frisson of involuntary recognition . But when I saw the film that second time, was I really remembering the moment of Clyde hit by the shotgun blast from the first screening when I was nine? It was about this point in the film that Cathy took me out to the lobby. Was that image of Clyde the final one I saw; was it the last memorable image I had from the film? The only mental image I can recall from after that moment is one of Cathy sitting on a bench in the theater lobby: long, straight brown hair, gold- rimmed aviator-style glasses, tan overcoat.