BOOK REVIEWS • COMPTES RENDUS

FLUID SCREENS, EXPANDED CINEMA. Edited by Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord. : University of Toronto Press, 2007, 361pp.

Reviewed by Marc Furstenau

The word “cinema” functions rather ambiguously in this collection of essays. The book, as the editors say in their introduction, “considers the shift from tra - ditional cinematic spectacles to works probing the frontiers of interactive, per - formative, and networked media,” and “examine[s] how digital technologies are transforming the semiotic fabric of contemporary visual cultures.” It is not a “digital cinema” that is under consideration here—a cinema transformed by new, computer technologies, or a cinema of digital effects and computer generated imagery—but rather an “expanded” cinematic realm, “a range of moving-image technologies that are encompassed by the phenomenology of cinema.” A variety of aesthetic and political uses of moving imagery is elaborated in the book within the context of an increasingly diverse space of proliferating and “fluid” screens. Marchessault and Lord are guided, as the title suggests, by Gene Youngblood’s notion of an “expanded cinema,” which is, as they put it, “an explosion of the frame outward towards immersive, interactive and interconnected forms of culture.” As Youngblood himself has claimed, in his 2003 essay “Cinema and the Code,” the new, digital technologies of the image are merely the latest tools to be deployed in an ongoing cinematic project. “Cinema,” Youngblood writes, “is the art of organizing a stream of audiovisual events in time.” Such an art may be realised, he argues, through a variety of media, and he identifies “at least four—film, video, holog - raphy and structured digital code.” Youngblood’s “expanded cinema,” as originally presented in his 1970 book, was a utopian ideal, the means through which moving imagery would have a galvanising political effect, transforming human consciousness, and awakening a sense of global unity against oppression, subjugation and the misuse of power. This collection ends with an “AfterwordAfterward” by Youngblood, a polemic describing “What We Must Do” in an era when the cinema has expanded, when what he imagined in 1970 has been realised—or at least partially realised—in the form of the World Wide Web, a tool in which he sees enormous potential, noth - ing less than the “possible realization of humankind’s ultimate utopian dream— a global democratic sphere,” a network providing the opportunity for “a unifying global ritual that marks a transformation of human reality.” Youngblood’s utopian enthusiasm is tempered somewhat by Marchessault’s opening essay, which provides a careful and richly detailed historical analysis of

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES • REVUE CANADIENNE D’ÉTUDES CINÉMATOGRAPHIQUES VOLUME 17 NO. 2 • FALL • AUTOMNE 2008 • pp 99-105 the Labyrinth Project at , designed by and . on “immersion” and “synesthesia,” and the elaboration of modern, technical Known at the time for their directorial work in Unit B of the National Film Board “labyrinths” of images, within which we might achieve what Youngblood hoped (NFB), they were given the more architectural and technical task of creating a would be an “oceanic consciousness,” the radical potential of new video and digita l multi-screen, “immersive” pavilion, where they hoped to extend and radically technologies has been found in local and small-scale applications and incursions, expand the cinematic experience. Indeed, the pavilion was described in Young - many fascinating instances of which are described in this volume. Examples and blood’s book as an exemplary instance of cinematic expansion, revealing the rad - case studies include Rinaldo Walcott’s essay on John Akomfrah’s film The Last ical potential of experimental visual configurations, and providing one of the Angel of History (1995), and Sheila Petty’s account of the Senegalese web pro - inspirations for his concept of a future cinema. Such “synesthetic” cinema was, ject Amika , which she calls “an exemplar of early African interactive narrative Youngblood argued, capable of reproducing and expanding the structures of form,” demonstrating “how existing narrative strategies and aesthetic constructs modern consciousness. Indeed, as Marchessault says, it was for him, “the only can be adapted to new media contexts.” Abigail Child ruminates on the effects language suited to the post-industrial, post-literate age with its ‘multi-dimen - of digital editing tools in her work as a filmmaker, and Michael Uwemedimo and sional simulsensory network of information sources’,” the machinic means for Joshua Oppenheimer describe the strategies of the Vision Machine collective, mind expansion. Low and Kroitor had similarly high hopes. As Marchessault who produce reenactments of political violence and oppression, which they insists, they “believed that the synesthetic cinema they were designing for Expo describe as “archaeological performance,” relying “in large part on digital media was a new medium that could well revolutionize visual culture.” as the relay channel between different participants, or the same participants at While she acknowledges and appreciates the techno-enthusiasm of Low and different stages of the process.” Kirsty Robertson likewise discusses a work of Kroitor, and of theorists like Youngblood, Marchessault is careful to place such “cell-phone art” called Dialtones , by Golan Levin, a “telesymphony” that forces discourse and technical experimentation within a specific historical context, noting a “rethinking of the cell phone as a tool of community formation and mutuality.” the influence of prevailing utopian concepts of global citizenship and communi - These essays are complemented by careful theoretical accounts of the con - cation, and of a (particularly Canadian) notion of a “mythological cultural mosaic temporary states of digital mediation. Glenn Willmott offers an account of what of humankind” that might be realised (or re-established) through technological he calls “digital tragedy,” the capacity of digital media to reveal the limits and consciousness raising. The “new revolutionary medium” that Low and Kroitor contradictions of consumer capitalism. Laura U. Marks provides a subtle descrip - imagined they were creating was not fully realised, however, as Marchessault tion, via Peirce and Bergson, of “immigrant semiosis,” the experience of those notes, except in the limited form of the commercialised IMAX system, which who move “illegally” across national frontiers, but who are also “agents of social Kroitor went on to develop. The significance of the Labyrinth experiment, she meaning,” using and “reinventing” media such as the internet and cell phones. argues, is not in the realisation of its utopian aspirations, but rather in its “for - John McCullough analyses the global film industry, looking at the Canadian con - shadowing of the intermedia networks, the mobility of images, the cultures of text, where digital technologies have further facilitated the “export” of cultural the Internet, and the concomitant multiplication of screens in everyday life labour. Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter describe Full Spectrum Warrior , around the world.” The radical potential of an expanded cinema as it was origi - which is used as a military training simulator, but is also available commercially nally imagined has been blunted by its commercialization, and subordinated to as a video game, explicitly blurring the boundary between combat and enter - corporate control. But while Kroitor went on to found the IMAX corporation, tainment. Haidee Wasson offers a careful analysis of the altered conditions of Low became involved with the NFB’s project, a “citizen’s cinematic circulation. “Distribution and exhibition networks,” Wasson insists, action media experiment” which began by providing the marginalised residents “shape the cultural life of any given film or group of films.” Films “mean” only of Fogo Island, off Newfoundland, with film and video equipment, and with the in so far as they are “screened,” and screens exist in a multitude of forms and conceptual support to document their own lives and to thereby change their within a wide variety of contexts where they are available for many kinds of uses. circumstances. For Low, Marchessault notes, “[t]he future of the audio-visual Central to this book is the notion that the artistic mobilisation of digital rev olution...lay in the small screens, the do-it-yourself technologies of video and technologies is where their radical potential will be discovered, and essays by community-based television that, for a brief time (and arguably to this day), Susan Lord, Ron Burnett, Caitlin Fisher and Sean Cubitt all consider the sort of enabled greater citizen participation and democratic expression.” aesthetic challenges that digital technologies present. But it is the historical con - The effect of digitisation has not, then, been the realisation of a Bazinian text provided by the editors’ canny redeployment of Youngblood’s concept, and “total cinema,” as manifested imaginatively (and only really suggestively) in the by Marchessault’s opening essay (and Steven Crocker’s account of sixties audio “expanded” experiential space designed by Low and Kroitor. For all the emphasis experiments), that allows us to see most clearly the role that aesthetic practice

100 Volume 17 No. 2 BOOK REVIEWS • COMPTES RENDUS 101 has played in our understanding of new media. Marchessault begins her essay with the claim that “[m]edia histories are located across a variety of artistic and industrial practices, institutions, and technologies. One aspect of this,” she notes , “includes the history of an attitude towards the media, and more specifically towards what makes them new and meaningful.” This is a very suggestive notion. A “history of attitudes” could be taken as a watchword for media schol - arship, which is too often focused on the specific technical aspects of new media, rather than the uses to which they are actually put, the generative sphere of prac - tice and experiment, and the competing practices of citizens and corporate culture . Many of our contemporary attitudes about new media come directly from what Lord and Marchessault describe as the “experimental media cultures of the sixties,” where efforts were made to expand and transform existing media like the cinema, by linking it to other media, to larger technological contexts, and to broader social and political goals. The effect of such experiments is not to be found, however, in the actual realisation of the often fanciful utopian goals of those cultures, but rather in the lesson that the meaning of new media, their potential value and significance, is produced through use and experiment . In media analyses we are searching not for essences or characteristics, nor techni - cal properties or material specificities, but rather for attitudes . As a catalogue of media attitudes, this collection is invaluable, a compendium of stories of the kinds of uses that we have dreamt of, or may dream of, for our media.

Carleton University

BEYOND THE MULTIPLEX: CINEMA, NEW TECHNOLOGIES, AND THE HOME. Barbara Klinger. Berkeley: University of Press, 2006, 310pp.

Reviewed by Paul Monticone

Refreshingly immune to millennial anxieties anticipating the end of cinema, Barbara Klinger’s Beyond the Multiplex admirably reckons with the fact that viewers primarily see films not in the dedicated exhibition site of the theatre but in a multifaceted home-viewing context. Klinger’s introductory chapter—framed by the question “what is cinema today?”—incisively disperses myths about an “authentic” viewing experience that have too long precluded serious study of the home as a legitimate exhibition site. New technologies of convergence, far from signaling its death, evince the “depth and breadth of cinema’s social circulation and cultural function.” Congruent with this move, Klinger ably demonstrates that home-viewing practices are not necessarily fugitive, resistant viewing modalities that contest the hegemonic power of global cultural industries. She points out that they are determined by the interests of media industries, which

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