Introduction: A Heterotypology of Viewing Systems - Text 1
In the introduction to his book La querrelle des dispositifs, Raymond Bellour (or rather his alter ego in this anonymous dialogue) laments the use made today of the word “cinema” and the way this art form has been “diluted” in contemporary art and the expanded field of the “visual.”[1] Even as he remains the indefatigable champion of what lies “in-between images,” Bellour believes that none of all that is cinema: neither video art, nor installation, nor digital images. For him, cinema is defined by an essential condition, a “unique,” “specific,” “absolute” condition at once trans-historical and historical (because it was fixed “magically” from cinema’s very first appearance with the Lumière brothers): “projection in a hall,” “in the dark for the prescribed duration of a screening in some degree collective.”[2]
In fact, this “viewing systems quarrel” is first and foremost a quarrel between milieux and institutions: it pits art against cinema, museums against the network of movie theatres. But it is also and especially a quarrel between places: it pits the white cube[3] against the darkened hall.[4] We must situate this peculiar quarrel in a general typology or even a heterotypology[5] of dispositifs, or viewing systems. For a viewing system is not only the fastening of an image to a body, but rather the fastening of an image to a body in a place.
Just as Rosalind Krauss once conceived of sculpture in an “expanded field,” in its dialectical relation with that which it is not—architecture and landscape[6]—we must conceive of cinema in an analogous expanded field, one defined by the places of reception against which it is constituted. But what is cinema’s expanded field? Against which viewing systems and places is it conceived? Everything depends on the moment under consideration: at the end of the nineteenth century, with the birth of mass culture and the rivalry of other attractions, cinema sought its identity amidst museums, fairs, arcades, concert halls and the home;[7] in the 1910s and 20s, the movie theatre was gradually institutionalized, becoming cinema’s principal venue (even though the industry continued to explore home cinema); in the 1930s, with the economic crisis and the growth of radio, and then in the 1950s with the expansion of television, the movie theatre once again began a dialectical relationship with domestic space; and at the end of the twentieth century, with successive waves of the digital revolution (computers, personal computers, the Internet, mobile platforms), cinema was once again obliged to enter into a dialogue with domestic space, the museum and public space.
The movie theatre experienced a major crisis, one of the worst in its history, during the period following the Second World War. In the United States, for example, attendance fell drastically from 1946 to 1960; in the period from 1950 to 1953, 5,000 theatres closed their doors, an average of three per day.[8] This brought upheaval to the film industry with respect to the kinds of films scripts written and films made, the production techniques used and the dissemination standards which came to the forefront. The entire industry, and movie theatre operators in particular, because they were directly affected by this decline, swung into action.
Here we will examine how cinema, that singular viewing system which offers a monumental and collective image in a dedicated space, sought to reinvent itself in opposition to television, a viewing system which offered a more intimate image in domestic space. In this competition, cinema employed various kinds of often immersive strategies: “upgrading” movie theatres with bigger or multiple screens and surround sound, but also with 3D, odours and vibrating seats; or, on the contrary, “reducing” movie theatres to their simplest expression to be the site of a pure audiovisual experience. Although some of its technologies, such as the wide screen and stereophonic sound, took hold quickly and were incorporated into the movie theatre’s viewing system, other innovations were seen instead as passing ways to hook viewers, and their presence in movie theatres was short lived, or their history was one of rising up briefly, disappearing and reappearing. This was the case in particular of 3D, the use of odours, vibrating seats and the invisible cinema.
