Courtney - Friday 5/20 Response
Salvesen's point of entry provides a helpful entree into the admittedly dense article by Elsaesser. Salvesen begins by correcting the assumption that cinema had always offered a "seamless illusion to passive, susceptible observers." Salvesen argues that, "instead, the medium's first decade was characterized by improvisation and interaction." Although a seamless illusion supposes an idealized notion of frictionless immediacy, it is also a kind of interaction. The development of this idea within the historiography of film theory in the 1970s-2000s is the subject of Elsaesser's article. Elsaesser believes that the possible interactions that cinema has been theorized to produce have been too restrictive and not historically grounded. The "cinematic dispositif" -- which to the best of my understanding is a theoretical term used to describe a medium-specific relationship between image, material support, and spectator -- is not as discrete nor as technologically-dependent as it has been made out to be. By comparing early cinema, cinema in the museum, and installation video art, he makes the extended point that the phenomenological experiences made possible through cinema have always been multiple, and thus will require more complex terms of definition.

I am particularly interested in the moments when he assigns moral or political allegiance to certain artistic tendencies or scholarly reactions. Artists were (and are!) interested in the "glitch" aesthetic and its material connotation of roughness, he suggests, because they think it can act in discursive ways as a model for ideological resistance. Furthermore, he characterizes the special interest among scholars in the pre-industrialized, handmade features of some early cinema as coming out of an interest in the philosophical and political "deconstruction" of monocular perspective. To this end, his reflection/analysis of his embodied experience in a video installation art was especially striking. He seems to suggest that the diffusion of linear narrative opens up possibilities both for boredom (not enough) and ecstasy (too much). In this case, his own formal interpretation seems to be encoded with a "post-media" valorization of multiplicity -- of medium, identity, and authorship.

Elsaesser eventually links the "aesthetic effects" of the video installation art back to period anxieties about the physiological effects of early cinematic experiences. The sheer diversity of moving-image experiences that were possible in the late 19th century, however, seems to illustrate Elsaesser's point about multiple "cinematic dispositifs" even better. Salvesen goes on in her essay to describe many examples of pre-cinematic and concurrent optical devices that each solicited a slightly different form of spectatorship. These forms of "encounter" depended in large part on their spatial format (front or back projector, monocular or binocular apparatuses, seating in dark or well-lit space, theatrical stages, tabletop format, large or small scale, etc). She argues that these various devices operated within an overstimulated visual culture "to organize sensory input and focus attention, shoring up the idea of spectatorship as a skill that could be deployed for survival and pleasure." Although Salvesen does not outright dismiss the possibility that cinema could later have developed into a spectatorship marked by passivity, she does hint that a different understanding of early cinema might cause us to look askance at such assumptions. The questions that Elsaesser's article raise for Salvesen's essay, then, have to do with the following: how we interpret the spatial, material, and temporal forms of encounter produced by different apparatuses; how much we trust our intuitive or first-hand understanding of those apparatuses as "universal" experiences; and how - even if we decline to define an ontology for cinema - we must still delimit which kinds of devices produce which kinds of encounters that we recognize as "cinematic." These questions reveal, to me, a set of rather urgent stakes underlying this pair of readings. Put another way, how did particularly "cinematic" encounters become recognizable as such when they had developed from a diverse range of optical apparatuses and viewing practices?

Courtney