Private Screens in Public Places

Joana Pimenta, New University of Lisbon

How are cinematic configurations for perception, and our relation to the filmic screen and its forms of both projection and passage, expanded when moving images are transposed outside the film theatre? This paper explores a possible path through this question. The main focus are the ways in which filmic modes of engaging spectatorship are still at stake in very obvious ways in unforeseen platforms, while remaining absent from the ones which most logically would seem to extend its configurations, and it will be approached from a twofold structure. To begin with, by focusing on public screens, it is briefly argued that these screens fail to blend in the flow of the city, functioning as interruptions, rather than integrating themselves in the city's own constructions. Both unable to mobilize the tension necessary even to a distracted attention and, at the same time incapable of intertwining with the movement through public space, these screenfaçades remain private screens in public places. On the contrary, the virtual museum Chris Marker has recently created on Second Life, the Ouvroir, seems to go precisely on the direction of dislocating the cinematic balance between an intimate path and a shared spectatorship from the filmic to the virtual screen. Constructing instead public screens in private places, in the same movement Marker creates the structures to question what cinematic spectatorship has become outside cinema, and in which ways it still bears an intrinsic relation to the cinematic juncture between the filmic and architectural path, in which perception has been configured. Finally, we will look at how the reconfigured space of the film theatre, no longer the locus of cinematic encounter but a place in which multiple screens are inscribed, is articulated to the screenfaçades which unfold throughout the space of the cinematic-virtual-city by analyzing two films recently released for the mobile, unfolding screens: Rage and Shirin, which bring faces to the surface as an intimate interface in contemporary screen-architecture, and through the important cinematic dispositif of the close-up establish important moments of transition to explore this movement of cinema inside-out. What connects all three placements of the screen—through the reconfigured relation they establish between private and public, shared spectatorship and personal passage, projection and transmission—is how filmic configurations for perception continue here to operate as moving interfaces inscribed in contemporary screen-architecture.