Dear Robin Dunn,
Perhaps this footnote 19 of mine from my essay '"OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER
THAN THEY APPEAR": The Virtual Reality of JURASSIC PARK and Jean Baudrillard'
will be of interest. The essay is published in JEAN BAUDRILLARD, ART AND
ARTEFACT, ed. Nicholas Zurbrugg, Sage, London, 1997. You'll see how toward the
end I take up Barthes' essay 'Upon Leaving The Movie Theatre'.
Best,
Alan Cholodenko

19 In this regard Tom Gunning¹s essay ŒAn Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early
Film and The (In)credulous Spectator¹, Art & Text 34, Spring 1989, links the
advent of the cinema to the aesthetic of attraction, which, though narrative
will come to overlay it, never ceases to run its course through the history of
cinema. Of course, for me a film like Jurassic Park ecstacizes the attraction
and, as well, all the more suggests that Gunning¹s strong piece would benefit
from the qualifications that an acknowledgement of his own use of the terms
Œcanny¹ and Œuncanny¹ would call for. That is, for me the advent of the cinema
is an uncanny advent, one which necessitates a complex analysis that would
avoid simply inverting and replacing the classic passive slave, Œdupe¹ model
of the early film spectator with an active master, Œall-knowing¹, urban
sophisticate model (a reduction Gunning does not always avoid, though it
appears he would wish to), one that would acknowledge that all that Gunning
says of the character of this advent is already in Freud¹s Œlogics¹ of the
uncanny; that the attraction, film and a fortiori animation are of the order
of the uncanny (what I characterize as the animatic); that when Gunning says
that the shock‹the simultaneous attraction and repulsion, fascination and
dread‹at seeing what was still Œcome to life¹ founds the cinema and persists
as an undercurrent in narrative cinema, he is saying that the uncanny, the
animatic, Œfounds¹ cinema‹the inanimate become animate, and vice versa; and
that any thinking of cinema cannot delimit itself to the thinking of the
subject and its desires and the cinema as only a mode of production and
appearance but must at the same time consider what American film theorists
have typically ignored, that is, the object and its games, games superior to
the subject‹the non-organic, artificial life of objects of the cinematic, or
rather animatic, apparatus and its modes of seduction, play, dissemination and
disappearance. The non-organic life of objects‹for me what we mean by
Œmagic¹‹is a Œlife¹ coimplicated with the notion of the Death Drive, for which
all uncanny returns are stand-ins, that is, it is death which returns, and
more, as it is a life coimplicated with not only a system of explosion but
simultaneously one of implosion. And, of course, such a complex analysis would
acknowledge the implications of such a model for the very analysis under way,
acknowledge the limitations set up thereby to the theorist¹s ability to
account for what he/she seeks to render an account of, so that the theorist
would not, like Gunning, on the one hand attempt to forge a sophisticated
Œboth/and, neither/nor¹ model for describing the cinema and its spectator
while on the other hand buying into an either/or binary, assuming the position
of master demystifying showman-theorist who could simply stand outside the
logics of the system being described (in this case the cinematization of the
world), who, like his spectator, could find, upon leaving the movie theatre,
the world outside the cinema untainted by the world within. For me the radical
coimplication of film and world offered by Baudrillard¹s The Evil Demon of
Images would call any assumption of such a simple Œleaving¹, including
Barthes¹, into question (as Barthes¹ own appeal in his essay, ŒUpon Leaving
the Movie Theater¹, to a Œcinematic condition¹ of Œcrepuscular reverie¹
outside the cinema arguably disturbs his maintenance otherwise in that piece
of an opposition of inside versus outside the movie theatre), as it would call
for a more complex thinking of the Œsuspension of disbelief¹, one that
acknowledges that the cinematization of the world would of necessity
incorporate the spectatator and theorist, even the theorist as master
demystifier, within it and that the cinematic apparatus is, despite all the
¹70s discourse and project of the revelation of its mode of production, never
givable, producible, as such. Indeed, that the cinema issues a challenge to
the either/orism of the master/slave, active/passive model, as it does to all
productivist efforts to unveil its/the mode of production. Such banal efforts
of demystification are no match for the fatal strategies of the cinema and
their seduction of film theory, turning it into a special effect.

On Sat, 6 Oct 2001 22:28:43 -0700 [log in to unmask] (Robin Dunn) wrote:

>I've been pondering this:
>Why is that, when walking out of the cinema, especially if the film just
>watched was especially good, intriguing, and thoughtful -- why is it that
>the world often seems dreamlike for a while?
>
>I asked this question in a yahoo chat room, and people suggested the
>following:
>-- Perception of the screen differs from conception of space
>-- Watching a film is living someone else's life -- you have to readjust to
>your own.
>--  Film is a form of escapism -- the dream ends and life begins again.
>--  Voyeurism:  you become a bystander on the street
>-- The mental focus of watching a film differs from watching life.
>--  You are *thinking* about the film afterwards -- not thinking about
>reality
>
>This was just some general brainstorming.  But I would be very interested to
>know what goes on in the brain while watching a film, versus what goes on in
>the first 5 minutes or so of leaving the cinema.  Is there a hypnotic effect
>to the screen, akin to the brain-wave state change that accompanies TV
>watching, due to the cathode rays?
>Is it a communal experience -- a brief moment of collective consciouness
>followed by reimmersion in solitatry life?
>Is watching a good film similar, in important and actual ways, to dreaming?
>Like David Lynch always tries to approach the quality of dream (or
>nightmare) in his films . ..
>
>Food for thought.
>
>Thanks,
>Robin Dunn
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