Bibliographie
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André, Emmanuelle. “Seeing through the Fingertips.” In Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attraction of Uncertainty, edited by Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron and Arild Fetveit, 273-288. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2017.
Aumont, Jacques. Que reste-t-il du cinéma ? Paris: Vrin, 2013.
Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Lebanon [NC]: University Press of New England, 2006.
Bellour, Raymond. La Querelle des dispositifs. Paris: P.O.L., 2010.
Beugnet, Martine. “Miniature Pleasures: On Watching Films on an iPhone.” In Cinematicity in Media History, edited by Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau, 196-210. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014.
———. L’attrait du flou. Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2017.
Blumlinger, Christa and Mathias Lavin. Geste filmé, gestes filmiques. Paris : Mimésis, 2017.
Boden, Margaret A. and Ernest A. Edmonds From Fingers to Digits. An Artificial Aesthetic. Cambridge[Mass.]: MIT, 2019.
Bruno, Giuliana. Surface. Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality and Media. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Bublitz, Christoph, Steffen Steinert, Steffen, Jox, Ralf and Orsolya Friedrich. “Doing Things with Thoughts: Brain-Computer Interfaces and Disembodied Agency.” Philosophy Technology, (March 2018). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-018-0308-4 <accessed on November 11, 2020>
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009.
Casetti, Francesco and Sara Sampietro. “With Eyes and Hands: The Relocation of Cinema Into the iPhone.” In Moving data – The iphone and the Future of Media, edited by Pelle Snickars et Patrick Vonderau, 19-33. New York: Columbia UP, 2012.
Citton, Yves. Pour une écologie de l’attention. Paris: Le Seuil, 2014.
Coleman, Rebecca and Liz Oakley-Brown. “Visualizing Surfaces, Surfacing Vision: Introduction.” Theory, Culture & Society 34, no. 7-8, (2017): 5-27.
Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception. Attention, Spectacle & Modern Culture. Cambridge [Mass.]: MIT Press, 2001.
———. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. New York: Verso, 2013.
Davenport, Thomas H. and John C. Beck. Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2002.
Davis, Whitney. A General Theory of Visual Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011.
de Kuyper, Eric and Emile Pope. “L’Autre Histoire du cinema ou la perte du spectacle : Qui gagne, qui perd ? » In In the very beginning, at the very end, edited by Francesco Casetti, Jane Gaines and Valentina Re, 143-51. Udine: Udine Forum, 2009.
Dubois, Philippe, Lúcia Ramos Monteiro and Alessandro Bordin, eds. Oui, c'est du cinéma: formes et espaces de l'image en mouvement. Udine: Pasian di Prato, 2009.
Ellis, John. “What Are We Expected to Feel? Witness, Textuality and the Audiovisual.” Screen 50, no. 1, (2009): 67-76.
Fedorova, Ksenia. Tactics of Interfacing. Encoding Affect in Art and Technology. Cambridge [Mass.]: MIT, 2020.
Flusser, Vilém. Für eine Philosophie des Fotografie. Göttingen: European Photography, 1983. Towards A Philosophy of Photography. Translated by Anthony Mathews. London: Reaktion Books, 2000.
———. Les Gestes. Bandol-Paris: Al Dante & Aka, 2014. Gestures. Translated by Nancy Ann Roth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Fowler, Catherine. “Room for Experiment: Gallery Films and Vertical Time from Maya Deren to Eija Liisa Ahtila,” Screen 45, no. 5, (2004): 324-34.
Gaudreault, André and Philippe Marion. La Fin du cinéma ? Un média en crise à l’ère du numérique. Paris: Armand Colin, 2013.
Grusin, Richard. “Radical Mediation.” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1, (Autumn 2015): 124-48.
Hanich, Julian. “Watching a Film with Others: Towards a Theory of Collective Spectatorship.” Screen 55, no. 3, (Autumn 2014): 338-59.
Hirschhorn, Thomas. Critical Laboratory. The Writings of Thomas Hirschhorn. Cambridge [Mass.]: MIT Press, 2013.
———.“Pourquoi est-il important aujourd’hui de montrer et de regarder des images de corps humains détruits ?” In Que peut une image ?, edited by Dork Zabunyan, Carnets du BAL #4, 106-116. Paris: Le BAL / Éditions Textuel / Centre National des Arts Plastiques, 2013.
Susanne Jaschko, “Space-time correlations focused in film objects and interactive video,” Future Cinema, The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, Jeffrey Shaw et Peter Weibel (Eds.), ZKM-Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe/The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002, pp. 430-435, http://www.arpla.fr/canal20/adnm/?cat=110&paged=3, <accessed on November 11, 2020>.
Kuntzel, Thierry. “Le défilement.” La Revue d’Esthétique 2-3-4, (1973): 97-110.
Marks, Laura U. “Information, Secrets and Enigmas: an Enfolding-unfolding Aesthetics for Cinema.” Screen 50, no. 1, (March 2009): 86–98.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham [NC]: Duke UP, 2002.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Le Visible et l'Invisible. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.
Mitchell, W.J.T. What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004.
———. Cloning Terror. The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Monk, Philip. “Paint it Black: Curating the Temporal Image.” In Projecting Questions? Mike Hoolboom’s Invisible Man Between the Art Gallery and the Movie Theatre. Toronto: The Art Gallery of York University, 2004.
Osborne, Peter. “Distracted Reception: Time, Art, and Technology.” In Time Zones, edited by Jessica Morgan and Gregor Muir, 66-75. London: Tate Publishing, 2004.
Rancière, Jacques. Le Spectateur émancipé. Paris: La Fabrique, 2008.
Serres, Michel. Le Parasite. Paris: Grasset, 1980.
Shapiro, Roberta and Nathalie Heinich. “When is Artification?” Contemporary Aesthetics 4, (2012). http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7523862.spec.409, <accessed on November 11, 2020>.
Silverstone, Roger. Media and Morality: on the Rise of the Mediapolis. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.
Steinert, Steffen, Christoph Bublitz, Ralf Jox, Ralf and Orsolya Friedriech. “Doing Things with Thoughts: Brain-Computer Interfaces and Disembodied Agency,” Philosophy & Technology 32, 457-482 (2019), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-018-0308-4, <accessed on November 11, 2020>.
Steyerl, Hito. “In Defense of the Poor Image.” e-flux journal 10, (November 2009). http://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image, <accessed on November 11, 2020>.
———. “How to Kill People: A Problem of Design.” In Duty Free Art. Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War. London: Verso, 2017.
Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. London: Hogarth Press, 1938.
Zabunyan, Dork. “Devant l’effroyable – Art des images et principe de dignité,” Art press 2 41, (mai-juillet 2016): 75-83.
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Notes
Vilém Flusser, Les Gestes (Bandol-Paris: Al Dante & Aka, 2014), 115. Publications of Flusser’s work in different languages tend not to include the same texts even when they bear the same title (Flusser himself wrote in several languages). In what follows, I will therefore refer alternatively to publications in French and in English. Translations from the French are mine.
The term is here taken in its current meaning, as a historical phenomenon that lies at “the intersection of vision (and visibility) and culture (and visible culturality).” Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 8.
More than ever, our ability to decipher images needs to be supplemented by a critical understanding of the conditions of reception, as popularized for instance by John Berger’s work.
As pointed out by Richard Grusin. See Richard Grusin, “Radical Mediation,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1, (Autumn 2015): 124-48.
Flusser’s phenomenology of gesture focuses, amongst other phenomena, on the production of technical images, specifically photography. Flusser devoted a chapter of Les Gestes to photography, as well as a separate volume: Für eine Philosophie des Fotografie? (Göttingen: European Photography, 1983). Towards A Philosophy of Photography?, trans. Anthony Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).
On the history and aesthetics of the relation between hand and eye, see the work of Emmanuelle André, including “Seeing through the Fingertips,” in Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attraction of Uncertainty, ed. Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron and Arild Fetveit (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2017), 273-88.
Flusser writes well before digital encoding became the predominant form of communication and imaging. The distinction he makes between one’s ability to simply operate the machine (which turns us into a good “operator”) and that of the appropriation and diversion of technology towards unintended usages and unexpected effects remains completely topical however. See Towards a Philosophy of Photography. See also Martine Beugnet, L’attrait du flou (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2017), 115-18.
By “surfacing” Rebecca Coleman and Liz Oakley-Brown describe how surfaces themselves become sites of visualisation: “Visualizing Surfaces, Surfacing Vision: Introduction,” Theory, Culture & Society 34, no. 7-8, (2017): 5-27.
Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Lebanon [NC]: University Press of New England, 2006); Yves Citton, Pour une écologie de l’attention (Paris: Le Seuil, 2014); Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception —Attention, Spectacle & Modern Culture (Cambridge [Mass.]: MIT Press, 2001) and 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (New York: Verso, 2013).
Doing so, I am aware that I am at odds with one of the dominant trends in media and software studies. Inspired by Gilbert Simondon’s approach, it advocates an integrated techno-aesthetic approach based on a naturalized conception of the human-technology relationship. See, amongst other recent publications, Ksenia Fedorova, Tactics of Interfacing. Encoding Affect in Art and Technology (Cambridge [Mass.]: MIT, 2020) and Margaret A. Boden and Ernest A. Edmonds From Fingers to Digits. An Artificial Aesthetic (Cambridge[Mass.]: MIT, 2019).
For a recent contribution to the field, see Christa Blumlinger and Mathias Lavin, Geste filmé, gestes filmiques (Paris : Mimésis, 2017).
Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux journal 10, (November 2009) http://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image, <accessed November 11, 2020>. See also Hito Steyerl, “How to Kill People: A Problem of Design,” in Duty Free Art. Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (London: Verso, 2017).
Published in English in Thomas Hirschhorn, Critical Laboratory. The Writings of Thomas Hirschhorn (Cambridge [Mass.]: MIT Press, 2013), and in French as “Pourquoi est-il important aujourd’hui de montrer et de regarder des images de corps humains détruits ?”, in Que peut une image ?, ed. Dork Zabunyan, Carnets du BAL #4, (Paris: Le BAL / Éditions Textuel / Centre National des Arts Plastiques, 2013): 106-16. See also: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xshfl0_thomas-hirschhorn-insoutenables-destructions-du-corps_creation, <accessed on November 11, 2020>.
W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror. The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Laura U. Marks, “Information, Secrets and Enigmas: an Enfolding-unfolding Aesthetics for Cinema,” Screen 50, no. 1, (March 2009): 86–98.
“The universe of images contains all possible images in a virtual state, and certain images arise from it, becoming actual.” It is worth keeping in mind that for Laura Marks, forms of enfolding include cinematic style, as well as the algorithmic language. Marks, “Information, Secrets and Enigmas,” 87.
“Images are in a position to ‘unfold’ information, and thus to connect it back to the world.” Marks, “Information, Secrets and Enigmas,” 87.
Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image.”
In “Visualising Surfaces, Surfacing Vision,” Coleman and Oakley point out that surfaces are means by which particular ideas are visualized, but that, in turn, vision is constituted by the particular kind of surface where it becomes located, and by the kind of interactions such positing implies.
As Michel Serres explains, “systems work because they don’t work.” Where interfacing ceases to be perceived as such, when we stop to register its parasitical presence, then it fails to properly “mediate” Le Parasite (Paris: Grasset, 1980), p.107. Similarly, Alexander Galloway, notes that, when an interface becomes “as naturalized as air or as common as dust,” it is merely superimposed to the existing mediatic layers. We then fail to engage with its potential meaning-making function which he coins the “intraface,” that is, the relationship “within the object between the aesthetic form of the piece and the larger historical material context in which it is situated.” “The Unworkable Interface,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 2013), 619-636.
Dispositif is understood in its classical meaning, as the way the apparatus that presides over the display of the images is put together so as to facilitate and mediate the viewer’s access to and eventual identification with the visual content. On the recent evolution of media dispositifs, see Giorgio Agamben, Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif? (2006; Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2007).
I am stretching somewhat the meaning of the term as proposed by sociologists Roberta Shapiro and Nathalie Heinich. In their work, the term artification designates the process whereby cultural productions that do not originate in recognized artistic practices come to be considered as art works or art forms. Roberta Shapiro and Nathalie Heinich, “When is Artification?”, Contemporary Aesthetics 4, (2012). http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7523862.spec.409, <accessed on November 11, 2020>.
Flusser, Les Gestes, 327.
Whilst suggesting that “attunement” might be an adequate translation for Gestimmheit, translator Nancy Ann Roth settles on “affect” – an unsatisfying solution as it draws the meaning of the German term towards the experiential to the detriment of its cultural dimension (both of which my “being in the world” attempts to capture) and fails to account for the uses of the term “affect” in art and media studies. See translator’s notes in Vilém Flusser, Gestures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 177-78.
Flusser, Gestes, 319-29. See also the introduction to Gestures, 1-9.
Flusser, Gestures, 10-12; Les Gestes, 307-308. In the shift from “why” to “how”, he argues, the machine is increasingly perceived “as a system that can serve as a model for the world,”Gestures, 14.
Talking about the ways in which the iPhone may be used to watch moving images, Francesco Casetti and Sara Sampietro designate “epidermal” a mode of utilization where the technical, operational dimension dominates the user’s activities. The content is more or less important, what matters is the mastery of the device’s various functionalities. Francesco Casetti and Sara Sampietro, “With Eyes and Hands: The Relocation of Cinema Into the iPhone,” in Moving data—The iphone and the Future of Media, ed. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 19-33. See also Martine Beugnet, “Miniature Pleasures: On Watching Films on an iPhone,” in Cinematicity in Media History, ed. Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 196-210.
Flusser, Les Gestes, 104.
The swipe gesture, like the wipe, draws attention not on depth and perspectival space, but on the instability of the field of vision, and the relativity of such principles in the spatio-temporal constructs of moving image media. For a discussion of the impact of digital aesthetics on montage and perspective see Emmanuelle André, “Seeing Through the Fingertips,” in Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attrations of Uncertainty, ed. Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron and Arild Fetveit (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U.P, 2015), 273-288, and Susanne Jaschko, “Space-time correlations focused in film objects and interactive video,” Future Cinema, The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, Jeffrey Shaw et Peter Weibel (Eds.), ZKM-Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe/The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002, pp. 430-435, http://www.arpla.fr/canal20/adnm/?cat=110&paged=3 <accessed on November 11, 2020>.
See later footnote on the etymology of to move / emovere. The swiping or scrolling belongs to a radically different regime of the moving image than the one Thierry Kuntzel once associated with the movement of an animation film passing through a projector. Kuntzel talked of the film’s power of émouvoir (“moving” both in the sense of movement and affect), derived from the mysterious and inexorable movement of the images that come into view then escape, activating the desire of the spectator to see who is helpless in altering its flow. Thierry Kuntzel, “Le défilement,” La Revue d’Esthétique 2-3-4, (1973): 97-110.
This kind of interface may be alien to cinema’s dispositif, but it nonetheless features prominently in science fiction films, as in the classic scene from Minority Report (2002) where Tom Cruise deftly rearranges virtual contents, manœuvering transparencies around, and occasionally and decisively sweeping away an irrelevant frames.
See for instance: Steffen Steinert, Christoph Bublitz, Ralf Jox, and Orsolya Friedrich’s article on BCIs (Brain-Computer Interfaces): “Doing Things with Thoughts: Brain-Computer Interfaces and Disembodied Agency,” Philosophy & Technology (March 2018), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323686843_Doing_Things_with_Thoughts_Brain-Computer_Interfaces_and_Disembodied_Agency, <accessed on November 11, 2020>.
Following the iconological method, one could compare and contrast the delicate gestures of hands found in renaissance and modern paintings with the stylized representations of touch screen gestures in designers’ reference guides. Art memes have already made such connections.
Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2002).
I am following Brian Massumi’s definition of affect as an unqualified intensity, to be differentiated from emotion. Contrary to emotion, which fits through “action-reaction circuits” into “meaning and function,” affect does not yet belong to “semantically or semiotically formed progressions.” Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham [NC]: Duke University Press, 2002), 28.
Giuliana Bruno, Surface. Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality and Media (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'Invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 174-75.
Not unlike the meaning of wipe and swipe, the latin verb emovere means to move something out of somewhere, to dislodge, to chase away or disperse (hence, the later meanings associated with movement but also with emotion as mental agitation, with “being beside oneself”). Given that the isolated “e” now tends to stand for electronic, one can anticipate how “e-motion,” in newspeak, may serve to describe the interface-designed manipulation of images.
An observation that puts into proper light applications such as Tinder, where the swipe is used to “like” (right) or “dislike” (left), that is, to archive or erase the profile of potential dating partners.
Lest one swipes backwards, as if retrieving an item from a virtual bin. The touchscreen scroll, on the other hand, is closely connected to the pre-digital meaning of the term, and implies continuity; going up-and-down is not felt, as in the wipe or swipe, as a rupture (going from one kind of object, page or material to another).
Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009).
Jacques Rancière, le Spectateur émancipé (Paris, La Fabrique, 2008), 33; quoted in Dork Zabunyan, “Devant l’effroyable – Art des images et principe de dignité,” Art press 2 41, (mai-juillet 2016), 78.
Zabunyan, “Devant l’effroyable,” 75-83. A work of art like Touching Reality also raises the question of the relationship of documentary images and art. In an op-ed article historian Philippe Artières summarized the issues at stake in relation to George Didi-Huberman’s exhibition Soulèvements (Jeu de Paume, January 2017). Pointing to the show’s undifferentiated absorption of historically and politically grounded material, Artières denounced the levelling effect of its assemblage of decontextualized images. “L’histoire sociale n’est pas de l’art !,” Libération (8 janvier 2017).
A choice one may relate to Hirschhorn’s characteristic denunciation of commercial imagery. Through the years, Hirschhorn has produced series of collages, including Collage-Truth (2012), Easycollage (2014), or Ur-Collage (2008) in which he explores topics similar to that of Touching Reality, assembling elements extracted from advertisements with fragments of documentary photographs, to establish parallels between the former’s idealized and the latter’s destroyed bodies.
A possible countershot to Hirshhorn’s images might be found in the classic scene in Agnès Varda’s Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), where the film director holds a video camera in one hand so as to film her other hand: the hand of an ageing woman who assumes responsibility for, and creative ownership of, her work.
In its use of a feminine hand, Hirshhorn’s postulate is a far cry from Virginia Woolf’s argument about war, images and genre in her essay Three Guineas, where she famously argued that there is a profound difference in the way men and women look at images of war. For women, such images are doubly inacceptable, she says, for women reject war in all its forms, even when it is presented as a just or necessary conflict. Virginia Woolf Three Guineas (London: Hogarth Press, 1938).
I have seen the work on two occasions, at the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, in 2012 (as part of the Intense Proximity exhibition), and at the FRAC Poitou-Charente, in Angoulême, in 2015. On both occasions, I watched the video in the company of a handful of other visitors.
See, amongst others, Jacques Aumont, Que reste-t-il du cinéma ? (Paris: Vrin, 2013); the introduction to Raymond Bellour, La Querelle des dispositifs, Paris: P.O.L., 2010; Eric de Kuyper and Emile Pope, “L’Autre Histoire du cinema ou la perte du spectacle : Qui gagne, qui perd ?,” in In the very beginning, at the very end, ed. Francesco Casetti, Jane Gaines, and Valentina Re (Udine: Udine Forum, 2009), 143-51; Catherine Fowler, “Room for Experiment: Gallery Films and Vertical Time from Maya Deren to Eija Liisa Ahtila,” Screen 45, no. 5, (2004): 324-34; André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, La Fin du cinéma ? Un média en crise à l'ère du numérique (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013); Philip Monk, “Paint it Black: Curating the Temporal Image”, Projecting Questions? Mike Hoolboom’s Invisible Man Between the Art Gallery and the Movie Theatre (Toronto: The Art Gallery of York University, 2004); Peter Osborne, “Distracted Reception: Time, Art, and Technology,” in Time Zones ed. Jessica Morgan and Gregor Muir (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), 66-75; Philippe Dubois, Lúcia Ramos Monteiro and Alessandro Bordin, eds., Oui, c’est du cinéma: formes et espaces de l'image en mouvement (Udine: Pasian di Prato, 2009).
Sontag criticizes Sebastião Salgado’s “Family of Man-style rhetoric” and what she sees as its reductive approach to the depiction of misery where “the powerless are not named in the captions.” Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 78. Similar issues may be raised in relation to a number of recent art projects inspired by the contemporary return to a Warburgian aesthetic, as exemplified by Georges Didi-Huberman and Arno Gisinger’s exhibition, Nouvelles histoires de fantômes. In its version for the Palais de Tokyo, (Paris, February 14 – September 7, 2014) extracts from fiction and documentary films depicting suffering were projected on the gallery floor side by side. Though the names of the films were given, the context for the depicted events were not explained. The search for the iconic resonances and universality of suffering thus arguably results in the kind of “globalizing” effect that Sontag denounced as “too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention.” Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 79.
This problematic of the shared exhibition space is echoed in Sontag’s discussion of the documentary photograph printed in magazines; she recalls the first appearance of Robert Capa’s famous photograph of the shot freedom fighter in the pages of Life, next to an advertisement for hair cream. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 120.
W.J.T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 31-34.
In the conclusion to Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag suggests that cinema remains the medium most appropriate to a constructive confrontation with the suffering of others—not the cinema designed for the spectacular treatment of violence, but cinema as a representation constructed so as to account for the historical context of the events depicted, to be viewed without the encroachment of peripheral, extraneous material such as advertisement. “A narrative seems likely to be more effective than an image. Partly it is a question of the length of time one is obliged to look, to feel.” Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 122. Though the issue of (the kind of) narrative would need to be carefully unpacked, and that of the incorporeity of the gaze addressed, Sontag’s observation remains topical in the way it points to spectatorial conditions and the experience of duration as dimensions of the cinema that contribute to creating a space where the necessary attentive contemplation allows for a reflexive, critical encounter.
By “proper distance,” Silverstone means the distance, often not denied by media representations, between recognizing the other as “just like us” and acknowledging and valuing the difference of the other. Roger Silverstone, Media and Morality: on the Rise of the Mediapolis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 172, quoted in John Ellis, “What Are We Expected to Feel? Witness, Textuality and the Audiovisual”, Screen 50, no. 1, (2009), 75.
Ellis, “What Are We Expected to Feel?,” 75.
See Julian Hanich, “Watching a Film With Others: Towards a Theory of Collective Spectatorship,” Screen 55, no. 3, (Autumn 2014): 338-59.
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