Quotidian Cinema

Quotidian Cinema February 15, 2016

In his 1956 The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, Edgar Morin observes that cinema might have been turned to practical uses instead of spectacle. Its fate could have been the fate of the flying machine and the automobile: “All the commentaries in 1896 looked toward the scientific future of the apparatus devised by the Lumiere brothers, who, twenty-five years later, still regarded the spectacle of cinema as an accident” (6). Instead, it becomes the stuff on which dreams are made: “It is film that soared, always higher, toward a sky of dreams, toward the infinity of the stars – of ‘stars’ – bathed in music, populated by delightful and diabolical presences, escaping the mundane world, of which it was to be, to all appearances, the savior and the mirror” (6).

It may be difficult to see in this day of blockbuster and boring-boring-repetitive-repetitive action sequences, but the genius of the cinema lies in its ability to reflect the everyday back to us, to turn the world around us into spectacle, or, better, to focus our attention on the glory that is shining through all the time.

Morin writes, “The unprecedented craze created by the Lumiere tours was not only born from the discovery of the unknown world . . . but from seeing the known world, not only the picturesque but the quotidian. Unlike Edison, whose first films showed music hall scenes or boxing matches, Lumiere had the brilliant intuition to film and project as spectacle that which is not spectacle: prosaic life, passersby going about their business. He sent Mesguisch and Promio out into the streets. He had understood that a primal curiosity was directed to the reflection of reality. That people above all else marveled at seeing anew that which did not fill them with wonder: their houses, their faces, the settings of their familiar lives. Workers leaving a factory, a train entering a station, things already seen hundreds of times, hackneyed and devalued, drew the first crowds. That is, what attracted the first crowds was not an exit from a factory, a train entering a station (it would have been sufficient to go to the station or the factory), but an image of a train, an image of workers leaving a factory. It was not for the real but for the image of the real that people flocked to the doors of the Salon lndien. Lumiere had sensed and exploited the charm of the cinematographic image” (14).

This is, Morin argues, built into the technology of cinema, which mimics life more exactly than a still photograph and then projects the moving images onto a screen, where they take on a life of their own: “The cinematograph doubly increases the photograph’s impression of reality, on the one hand by restoring natural movement to beings and things, on the other hand by projecting them, liberated from the film as from the Kinetoscope box, onto a surface where they seem autonomous” (13).


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