When Analog Cinema Becomes Digital Memory. ..

Introduction: Memory as Open Territory

For a brief moment in time, film/videomakers may join with empowered spectators and open up the boundaries of the cinema machine. In a unique reflexive environment, film/videomakers and spectators can unravel their own memory/history. Each, in their own way, may dredge the matrix of their home environment--the country landscape, the urban grid, the tenement clusters, ethnic neighborhoods, farmhouses, barns, and the recorded ghosts of their occupation. The landscape models the intersections in their work, complex networks of intermittent movement, commerce, and ideas. The bonds stretch between the text and the spectator. Memory and technology become inseparable, the effects of each structuring the other. Prodding a living memory, the tools mediate the social experience and the social, political implications of the captured image.

Efforts to explore the relationship between the social and the technical have taken many forms by many artists. Media artist Peter d'Agostino describes a childhood experience of flinching and ducking when the 3D objects came flying out of the cinema screen in the nineteen-fifties. He imagines how Lumière's Train Coming Into The Station prompted some discomfort on the part of an audience that realized the illusion but could not break away from reacting to its shocking effects. While the "high tech" of the eighteen-nineties now looks relatively crude, at the turn of the century people ducked and scrambled out of the way of this virtual train reality.

In the nineteen-sixties, Austrian film artist Peter Kubelka designed a cinema theater which enclosed the spectator in a wooden cocoon. Wooden partitions isolated the individual from the other members of the audience in order to minimize the possibility of anything distracting the spectator from his/her relationship with the images projected on the screen. Not surprisingly, an individual experiences the cinema differently when isolated from the audience. For example, laughing patterns change when partitions break up the group.

At times, audiences can lose their restraint. Spectators can lose their individual identity or willingness to process information individually. Group identity prevails. In a commercial venue, teenagers will vocally deride the manipulative conditions of a film by collectively resisting its operation. The audience resists the film's passion and its emotional engagement by calling attention to it. They scream back at the characters by taunting the walking spectres. In a non-commercial screening, for example at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, adult audiences fresh from their odyssey through galleries of abstract paintings will vent their displeasure at watching an abstract film. When an audience yields to the filmmaker's temporal control, its expectations narrow.

We continue to invent the cinema. As film becomes video becomes digital, the cinema remains a fluid vehicle, perpetually in process, unstable in its projection and reception, and more difficult to interpret and deconstruct. ¹ Accompanying each shift, options appear that expand the possibilities for resistance within the text by forming gaps in the flow of the experience. Those intervals provide an opportunity for reconstructing meaning. The forks in the road set up decision- making junctures. Each becomes a moment of silence, a negative space. Positioned to maneuver within those gaps, film and video makers and spectators can incrementally break down and gradually rebuild the codes binding them in their experience.

Newer interactive work restores temporal freedom, but at what cost? New decisionmaking intervals affect the arrangement of movie fantasies and speculations. At the very least, the maker/spectator pauses and assesses the situation before the text can move on. The prevailing cinema, television, departs from the coherence of classical drama. Navigating branches that overlap, intersect, and diverge in different directions, home television spectators channel graze, mute, record, replay, or ignore given sequences. Television commercial interruptions and their offspring MTV (music television) reinforce these interruptive, fragmenting, and often abrasive patterns.

No longer "ceaselessly restoring the illusion of the homogeneous and the continuous," television, nevertheless, approaches the real by "confirming the spectator in...