On Mon, 15 May 2000 09:22:27 -0500 Bill Flavell 
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:



>    That may be true, but I think that "fetishizing" is justly
> deserved on historical grounds. The cinema at it's birth
> was 35mm film, and the other formats appeared later. Also,
> the most cinematically specific film theory concepts like
> the politique de auteurs and mise en scene would not have
> appeared if those involved were looking at 16mm prints of
> the films that they saw.

Firstly, on a historical point (and I've no doubt that well-
practised historians such as Michael Chanan can correct me 
if I'm wrong) I pretty sure that commercial 35mm film 
wasn't invented until the thirties, (by Leitz?) so the 
birth of cinema could not have been on 35mm.

Even if 35mm film WAS used in 1895 (a relatively arbitrary
point of history on the birth of cinema), this point is
not supported by the exhibition practices of the time. 
Cinema had less to do with specificity and more to do with 
entertainment, amusement, and leisure time. Cinema audiences
were attracted to many and various visual entertainments (of
which cinema was just one) throughout the nineteenth century
much as today, and each medium held sway in fashion and 
popularity in its own time. For many reasons there is no 
evidence that patrons saw anything other than entertainment 
via 'message' rather than by 'medium' in any of these other 
than their fashion-status, or a brief period of 
novelty/technological value. To base a cinephilia on such a 
myth of 35mm's historical specificity is, I think, simply 
Romantic. 

Also, I think its largely irrelevant, partly for the 
reasons I've noted above and in previous posts, to claim 
specificity on the pioneering critical work of the cahiers 
critics because of their particular screening experience. 

Cinephilia is practised very differently now from how it 
was in the fifties, or indeed any other period. This does 
not discount the cinephilia of those who view on video or 
on flickbook. Whilst it is not wrong to have near-orgasms 
over a particular format (35mm/16mm/8mm/zoetrope - whatever 
floats your boat), I think it *is* wrong to both blindly 
ignore the existence and importance of other media AND to 
spend time personally attacking those who are less bothered 
about format than the social and cultural implications of 
cinema. 

I find it ironic, in the face of some admirably 
enthusiastic and nostalgic cinema-format-philes that they 
are, in fact supporting many of the post-modern 
anti-nostalgia deconstruction theories that are often used 
to describe new media. 

This cinema-specificy discussion reminds me more and more 
of Baudrillard's concept of 'the medium is the message'!
----------------------
Damian Peter Sutton
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