"Alone, hidden in a dark room, we watch through half-open blinds a spectacle that is unaware of our existence and which is part of the universe." That was André Bazin, writing in 1951. It's an admission that cinema is essentially solitary. But is it?
Then there's this: "Beyond a certain scale, architecture acquires the properties of Bigness. The best reason to broach Bigness is the one given by climbers of Mount Everest: ‘Because it is there'; Bigness is ultimate architecture . . . discredited as an intellectual problem, it is apparently on its way to extinction-like the dinosaur-through clumsiness, slowness, inflexibility, difficulty. But in fact, only Bigness instigates the regime of complexity that mobilizes the full intelligence of architecture and its related fields." Substitute "architecture" for "cinema," and this quote, written by radical Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas (whose buildings look like the spawn of movie set designers' nightmares/wet dreams) in his 1994 polemic "Bigness, or the Problem of the Large," suggests the other half of the dialectic introduced by Bazin, the less often discussed relationship that undergirds the cinematic experience.
Anyone who has thought and read seriously about film has been introduced to analyses of the subject/object, viewer/text interaction; unpacking this nexus is a cornerstone upon which all film theory is based. But what of the highly fungible relationship of the text and the screen on which it reaches its eventual viewer? Screen and text are inseparable, but if we are truly in an age of proliferating screens of countless types and sizes, how does a text change when shrunk down or writ large?
Read the rest of the essay by Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert, and watch their seven-minute accompanying video essay at Moving Image Source.