Page 193 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 193
transcending cinema as the art of mass culture
scribed as directly a part of mass culture, produced approaches to filming,
which had huge consequences also in mainstream cinema. It is more im-
portant that this special phenomenon in the history of cinema anticipated
what became possible in a much more extensive form, when moving imag-
es became digital. Transcending cinema, regarding the very constitution of
reality, therefore, started within it, when the technological “quantum leap”
could not have yet been imagined.
Towards the Digital
When we are trying to think and/or imagine the future, which undoubted-
ly transcends cinema, we must keep in mind that cinema had a special po-
sition within the “aesthetic regime” in Rancère’s terms. As such, it was fully
recognised as an art form also outside the circles of cinema enthusiasts not
much earlier than maybe in the 1960s. Alain Badiou made a crucial remark
concerning the role of cinema as an art:
It is effectively impossible to think cinema outside of something like
a general space in which we could grasp its connection to the oth-
er arts. Cinema is the seventh art in a very particular sense. It does
not add itself to the other six, while remaining on the same level as
them. Rather, it implies them – cinema is the ‘plus-one’ of the arts.
It operates on the other arts, using them as its starting point, in a
movement that subtracts them from themselves (Badiou, 2013: 89).
Let us be reminded by Stanley Cavell about the mutual effects in the
relationship of cinema to other arts: “/…/as Robert Warshow and Walter
Benjamin more or less put it, to accept film as an art will require a modi-
fication of the concept of art” (Cavell, 1979: xvi – xvii). In Cavell’s writing
on cinema, the notion of “reality”, which was highlighted for that matter
in a similar reflexive gesture also in the above mentioned Rancière‘s recent
work, marks the field of contemporary coming to terms with the digitally
generated art works in a whole range of different genres in spite of the fact
that at the time3 Cavell could not have imagined the digital revolution. “Ob-
jects projected on a screen are inherently reflexive, they occur as self-ref-
erential, reflecting upon their physical origins” (Ibid. xvi). Further, Cavell
in his unique discourse reminds the reader of one more “element”, which
is indispensable and makes part of the cinematic reality. When he exam-
3 The time is the year 1979, when Cavell wrote a foreword to the new edition of World
Viewed…, whose first edition appeared in 1971.
191
scribed as directly a part of mass culture, produced approaches to filming,
which had huge consequences also in mainstream cinema. It is more im-
portant that this special phenomenon in the history of cinema anticipated
what became possible in a much more extensive form, when moving imag-
es became digital. Transcending cinema, regarding the very constitution of
reality, therefore, started within it, when the technological “quantum leap”
could not have yet been imagined.
Towards the Digital
When we are trying to think and/or imagine the future, which undoubted-
ly transcends cinema, we must keep in mind that cinema had a special po-
sition within the “aesthetic regime” in Rancère’s terms. As such, it was fully
recognised as an art form also outside the circles of cinema enthusiasts not
much earlier than maybe in the 1960s. Alain Badiou made a crucial remark
concerning the role of cinema as an art:
It is effectively impossible to think cinema outside of something like
a general space in which we could grasp its connection to the oth-
er arts. Cinema is the seventh art in a very particular sense. It does
not add itself to the other six, while remaining on the same level as
them. Rather, it implies them – cinema is the ‘plus-one’ of the arts.
It operates on the other arts, using them as its starting point, in a
movement that subtracts them from themselves (Badiou, 2013: 89).
Let us be reminded by Stanley Cavell about the mutual effects in the
relationship of cinema to other arts: “/…/as Robert Warshow and Walter
Benjamin more or less put it, to accept film as an art will require a modi-
fication of the concept of art” (Cavell, 1979: xvi – xvii). In Cavell’s writing
on cinema, the notion of “reality”, which was highlighted for that matter
in a similar reflexive gesture also in the above mentioned Rancière‘s recent
work, marks the field of contemporary coming to terms with the digitally
generated art works in a whole range of different genres in spite of the fact
that at the time3 Cavell could not have imagined the digital revolution. “Ob-
jects projected on a screen are inherently reflexive, they occur as self-ref-
erential, reflecting upon their physical origins” (Ibid. xvi). Further, Cavell
in his unique discourse reminds the reader of one more “element”, which
is indispensable and makes part of the cinematic reality. When he exam-
3 The time is the year 1979, when Cavell wrote a foreword to the new edition of World
Viewed…, whose first edition appeared in 1971.
191
