Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (review)

Barbara Klinger’s Beyond the Multiplex examines the notion of what contemporary cinema means to society in an era of increased media consumption, synthesis of media forms and technological innovation. Her ambitious work discusses issues of exhibition, production and reception, and traces the change in our relationship with film viewing, using a multiplicity of methodological approaches. Primarily interested in the way in which film is ‘re-purposed’ in the home – re-purposing here refers ‘generally to the media industry’s attempt to gain as much revenue as possible from a given property’ (7) – Klinger explores the ways in which contemporary media technologies are able to collapse the boundaries between what have previously been seen as separate private and public spheres and re-defines the home as ‘a media hub that synthesize[s] grand technical achievements’ (17). She deftly takes the reader through an introductory discussion of the history of visual technology, which attempts to lay the ground for later chapters on the development of the home theatre system, private film collecting, the re-screening and canonisation of films on cable networks, the repeat viewing practices of audiences and the realm of new media exhibition, such as the Web-short or e-cinema. In doing this, Klinger sheds further light on both the industry’s and our own relationship with the visual form and, indeed, the array of technological practices that inform twenty-first-century cultural and social interaction.

What Klinger’s book does well is re-imagine the history and discourses of film consumption by resurrecting the link between contemporary and historical modes of exhibition. She suggests that today’s media synthesis in the home is a natural continuum in ‘media synergy’ that emerged in the mid-to-late nineteenth century with new visual technologies. She states:

Films have been shown in domestic space since the medium’s invention in the late 1800s. Only two years after Edison’s Kinetoscope appeared in 1894, manufacturers began producing projectors intended for use in the home and in other off-theatre sites. Regional brickand- mortar outlets as well as mail order systems for renting or purchasing films quickly followed. At the time, entrepreneurs saw cinema as another medium that could be successfully identified with and exploited for home leisure, along with other audiovisual phenomena such as phonographs, magic lanterns, and slide projectors.

(6)

Indeed, her suggestion of media synthesis as a historical rationale for gaining revenue beyond a first exhibition of a film and the notion of connectivity in media forms are the most interesting aspects of her book, and something that can be clearly seen in contemporary media products. While not commented on by Klinger, items such as the iPhone (and associated Apple products), multifunctional gaming consoles, multimedia packages for the home PC and the crossover between film and other media forms, such as gaming, which extend the life of and engagement with any one product, all confuse the boundaries between disparate modes of exhibition, providing a potentially diverse arena for the re-purposing of film with which Klinger is principally concerned. Thus Klinger’s book, while primarily about film and the home, firmly situates itself within the remit of ongoing research into new media.

An interesting aspect of this book is the link to wider commentaries on forms of convergence and connectivity that it could provide to other areas of media and film study. For example, Klinger’s observations regarding the advertising discourses that surround home theatre systems, which encourage a physical transformation of domestic space, reflect the thematisation of the continual erosion of discrete boundaries, which is increasingly the subject of contemporary sf film. For example, Klinger notes subtle transformations such as that of supposedly benign, domestic space, stating that ‘whatever the extent of the renovation, home theatre companies emphasize the architectural integration of entertainment technologies with home design, thus advancing the notion of interface’ (29–30). This concept of ‘the interface’, identified by Klinger as being engendered...