In Broad Daylight. Gabriele Pedulla

section>

      

      IN BROAD DAYLIGHT

      Movies and Spectators after the Cinema

      GABRIELE PEDULLÀ

      Translated by Patricia Gaborik

       London • New York

      This English-language edition first published by Verso 2012

      © Verso 2012

      Translation © Patricia Gaborik 2012

      First published as In piena luce. I nuovi spettatori e il sistema delle arti

      © Bompiani 2008

      All rights reserved

      The moral rights of the author have been asserted

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

      Verso

      UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

      US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

      www.versobooks.com

      Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

      Epub ISBN: 978-1-84467-919-5

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Pedullà, Gabriele.

      [In piena luce. English]

      In broad daylight : movies and spectators after the cinema / Gabriele Pedullà ;

      translated by Patricia Gaborik.

      p. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN 978-1-84467-853-2

      1. Motion picture audiences--History. 2. Motion picture theaters--History. I. Title.

      PN1995.9.A8P4813 2012

      302.23’43--dc23

      Tommaso Russo Cardona

      in memoriam

      Contents

       Introduction

       1. The Cave and the Mirror

       2. Toward the Dark Cube

       3. Vitruvius’s Sons

       4. The Age of Freedom

       5. The Aesthetic of the Shark

       6. Desdemona Must Die

       7. Low-Impact Catharsis

       Bibliographical Note

       Index

      Some may have loved the movie theatre more than the movie and were right to cry betrayal or suffer nostalgia. But others—myself included—preferred the film to the movie theatre. While the first probably loved the Saturday night ritual, the second preferred to invent a whole new series of personal liturgies in the anonymous darkness of a never-ending show. While the first were bound to the theatre and its rituals, the second already had a foot in the flow of the moving images. While the first would never be able to console themselves over their lost object—let’s say Casablanca or Les enfants du paradis—the second were ready to follow theirs to the ends of the earth and even far from the earth, all the way to the television.

      Serge Daney, Le salaire du zappeur

      One mustn’t regret.

      René Barjavel, Cinéma total

      Introduction

      One might think that the evolution of the cinema is an artistic evolution, that cinema evolves because artists demand change. Instead I believe that such evolution is dictated by the progress of technology. Technology, the sensitivity of film, provokes changes that are much more important than artistic volition.

      Andrzej Wajda

      Like the world, and like cinema itself in the course of the last century, the spectator has changed.

      Jean-Louis Comolli, “Suspension du spectacle”

      The age of cinema, it is commonly claimed, is now drawing to a close. Day after day signs of a profound change in our relationship with moving images proliferate. The winnowing of box office receipts, the shrinking size of the audience, the decreasing time lag between a film’s theatrical release and its commercialization on video, tele­vision’s growing cultural prestige: these indications—at once social, economic, and aesthetic—only make the prophecy all the more credible. If cinema for decades represented the standard and even optimal filmic experience, the touchstone for all other forms of viewing, this formerly undisputed and indisputable centrality is today contested at its very core.

      Perhaps, quite simply, a center no longer exists. In recent years the success of new means of image-reproduction has rendered the equation of cinema (the art of the film) with cinema (the place where films are shown) ever more fallacious. This ambiguity emerges with greater ease in languages such as Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German, which do not distinguish between the two through the use of different terms, as American English does by referring to the place as the movie theatre or picture house. Bit by bit, we have become indifferent to whether we see a film on widescreen with Dolby Surround, on an eighteen- or forty-two-inch TV, on a laptop, or on our mobile phones. And the new generation will not even feel deprived for never having seen the work of their beloved directors and divas on the big screen.

      The transformation of technology and viewing habits has rendered instantly obsolete the questions that engaged intellectuals and cinephiles for decades. Who really wonders any longer whether the movie on TV last night was exactly the same as it was two years ago at the Rex or the Flora? The movie theatre’s decline and cinematic memory’s defection from film to video have forever delegitimized queries of that sort. From a technical point of view, the differences are not negligible, but they are not absolute either. It is true, for instance, that on television, films run at a rate of twenty-six frames per second in Europe and thirty in the United States instead of the filmic twenty-four, and thus are slightly shortened; it is also true that the small screen’s format reframes the images, sacrificing their edges. But the list of grievances could go on. The TV image is much less defined, and only thanks to the small screen size does it not appear unpleasantly grainy: in the American standard, video has a total of approximately 350,000 pixels per frame, whereas a 35mm negative instead has the equivalent of about 7 million pixels—a net ratio of 1:20. The same goes for color. While television is capable of producing a maximum contrast (the relationship between the image’s darkest and lightest parts) of 30:1, film can obtain a contrast factor of 120:1—four times as high. As a result, when a film is transferred to video, its colors become more luminous and intense, and the density and gradations of its blacks are immediately lost. The subtlest shadings consequently disappear.

      As Francesco Savio, one of the masters of Italian film criticism, wrote, “their dynamic qualities and tonal contrasts impoverished, movies on video are like gauze dipped in milk, whereas, projected, they reach the screen uncorrupted,