Filmic experience

Abstract

Let us try to consider cinema not for the technology it has developed, nor for the productive systems that have characterized it, nor for the films that have appeared within it, nor even in terms of the effects they have created. Let us try instead to rethink the type of experience that spectators have lived in front of a cinematic screen. It is an experience that began to define itself on the night of 28 December 1895, with the Lumière projections in the Salon Indien, and that was subsequently developed and perfected through film theatres, sound, colour, the panoramic screen, and so on – an experience that today faces a radical transformation in coincidence with the end of two of the most characteristic traits of cinema: its status as a photographic medium and its identity as a collective show. The term experience has a specific (and binding) meaning here. On the one hand, it refers to the act of exposing ourselves to something that surprises and captures us (‘to experience’). On the other hand, it relates to the act of reelaborating this exposition into a knowledge and a competence, so that we are then richer in the face of things, since we are able to master them (‘to have experience’). Indeed, filmic experience is arguably both that moment when images (and sounds) on a screen arrogantly engage our senses and also that moment when they trigger a comprehension that concerns, reflexively, what we are viewing and the very fact of viewing it. We have, then, a stretching of attention while facing something that strikes us, whilst we also have a ‘knowing-how’ to look and a ‘knowing-that’ we are looking, which make us protagonists of what is happening to us. From this point of view, filmic experience is something more than film reception – more than an interpretation or a consumption. It is a situation which combines sensory or cognitive ‘excess’ (there is something that touches or addresses us, outside the taken-for-granted) to the ‘recognition’ of what we are exposed to and the fact that we are exposed to it (a recognition which makes us redefine ourselves and our surroundings). An excess and a recognition: it is thanks to these two elements that we ‘live’ a situation, recuperating contact with what we are viewing; and that at the same time we frame it, giving it a meaning. It is thanks to these two elements that we face things; and that at the same time we enrich our lives to the extent that we may confront new events.1