The Cinema Screen as Prosthesis of Perception

I have a book from the library called The senses still [C. Nadia Seremetakis, 1994; The University of Chicago Press]. It's a collection of essays around questions like "What happens when perception and memory are globalized through transnational media and the homogenization of material experience?".

The first essay I think we should all read is The Cinema Screen as Prosthesis of Perception [Susan Buck-Morss]. Here's an amateur attempt at a synopsis:

She proposes that Cimema (the consumption of images by large numbers of people via a screen) is a good way to understand what Husserl was getting at in The Idea of Phenomenology [1964], where Husserl was trying to uncover the essential truths of 'perception': what exactly it is 'to see'. Buck-Morris suggests that Cinema actually does what Husserl tries to theorise.

When something is perceived you've got:
a) The person perceiving
b) The thing being perceived
But to get at the pure nature of perception (some kind of universal truth of it) you have to get rid of a) and b). He did this in a really complicated and academically rigorous way which most people will never understand.

Because cinema provides a space where no thing or things are actually experienced, only the image of things which are not really there, then b) is removed. What we see is the presence of an absence, and it doesn't matter what we are shown: makes no difference if it's fact or fiction, because it's not actually there!!

Because in cinema every individual perceives exactly the same representation (whatever the director decides the camera should capture), then there is a standardisation which can be allied with universality. In an actual experience, each individual percieves from their subjective view point. In a cinema experience the entire audience perceives from one point of view: they have no choice, there is no subjectivity to their "seeing".



I am going to stop here because I don't know if writing all of this on the blog is useful or not... If it is, then I will post some quotes which feed in to quite a few things we are doing.