WHAT CINEMA WAS

In the new millennium, returning to a preoccupation with classical cinema, Raymond Bellour argued, as discussed in the previous chapter, that hypnosis rather than the dream (as proposed in the view of Christian Metz) offers the most accurate metaphor for understanding the cinematic viewer's relationship to the screen narrative. Bellour posits a viewer caught by, and subject to, somatic responses, like an animal, that are basically emotional in nature (hence not under his or her rational control) and generated from outside him or her, but that he or she experiences as autogenic in origin. The physicality of these responses draws attention to the tenuous dividing line between that which is human and that which is animal, within a worldview that dispenses with “the soul” under modernity. Thus, Bellour maintains that the images of animals that appear in films “mirror” the condition of the spectator in the theater.

This strategy of reflexivity extends to other elements that are part of the cinematic experience, which, in Bellour's view, are consistently reproduced in rhetorical form within the film's narrative and mise en scène. The body of cinema is always minimally doubled, according to Bellour, for whom the body represented on the screen serves as the double of that of the spectator himself or herself sitting in the theater. The cinema is, then, an embodied experience in which it is not the ideas portrayed on the screen to which a spectator initially responds, but rather the emotions that the film evokes before the spectator may even consciously know what he or she has seen.

In this context, Raymond Bellour was one of the first scholars to stress how the radical transformations in technologies of the moving image had consequent ramifications in terms of the spectator's viewing experience. Defining what cinema was highlighted what it is not. If cinema was once characterized by the shared experience afforded theatrical audiences in the classical era, which produced a “unique” memory in the spectator that would mark the film retrospectively as an experience, this experience is no longer available to contemporary audiences who view and review films through any number of different platforms.