Cinema’s Remediation to Relocation: Interlacing of Narratives and the Vanishing Line

Can we stop for a moment and ponder. I mean, really ponder. One deep, introspective look at the happenings and trivialities around us is quite pregnant with revelations. We see how life has changed; how fast people move; how information has acquired the speed of sound; how an entirely new space, a virtual space, has opened new ways of feeling, seeing, hearing, knowing, and experiencing. Our lives have been interjected with a complex system of technologies - to the extent that our human experiences are embedded in technology in the same way that technology has been acquiring more humanly attributes. As mentioned elsewhere by Donna Haraway, technology acquires humanity, while human beings become more mechanical. Frankly, that is how most of us live. This revolutionary phenomenon has encroached in almost all aspects of our lives – cinematic experience included.

             In Francesco Casetti’s article, the intrusion, welcomed or not, by technology in cinematic experience has been explored extensively. Indeed, at the onset he palpably established how Anna and Nicole’s entire experience in watching two different movies has veered away from a single and monotonous occurrence to one that is characterized by multiple layers – of watching multiple movies of movies in movies and through technology. In the process, film ceases to become merely films of one narrative or discourse. As Casetti points out, “film is a discourse that holds other discourses, that collaborates with other discourse, and that generates other discourses.” It seems to me a mere manifestation of social reality, the audience in the contemporary period confronts a network of social discourses that is an overlapping of ideas, images, genres, narrative, and discourse. There is now an explosion of diverse trajectories emanating from a single experience (though really a plethora of experiences).

Furthermore, as Casetti maintains, there is now a process of decentralization of the spectator’s gaze. What occurs now is the fragmentation of viewing such that the spectator is active but in a different way – he engages with the film but also departs from it to focus on a technology to reflect and communicate her reception of the film, the spectator can also select, record, and “carry home” some segment of the film and as such the experience extends beyond the movie house. Again, this trend appears to me a mirror image of the radical changes in our highly decentralized and mobile society. Today, even in international relations, the most notorious observation is the dispersion of power, the emergence of multilateral tie, and the multi-polarity of influences. Even production in today’s world economy is decentralized: a single product consists of parts made from different locations in the globe. Finally, now the spectator immerses in the film – not separated from it perhaps in the same manner that now, people immerses themselves in technology that the line that separates between humanity and technology starts to become a blur and indistinguishable.

                   It is not surprising that even spectatorship and their narratives also evolved. There has been, as Casetti concludes, a return to the Motherland, “as much as it brings with it new ways of watching, seems to restitute the conditions necessary for amazement and recognition to once again take effect.” What we see the shift of film viewing to a multilayered experience by which one can experience other experiences as well. In the end, perhaps the author is right. Perhaps there I a relocation of film experience that opens other discourse and other narrative. But whether one agrees with him or not, crucial questions remain: how does the decentralization of the viewing experience affect the process of decoding? How does relocation impact to the process of producing and creating films? At the end of day, I still ask, where are films and spectatorship heading to in the future? I hope that is not bleak.