This article has brought me more insight into watching movies in cinema.
Having got used to the everyday hustle and bustle, as well as the rise of video streaming platforms like YouTube and Netflix, people would rather watch movies on handy small screens than spare a few minutes to have a quality enjoyment in the cinema. I used to find it quite unnecessary to go to the cinema, in particular with the surge of varied alternatives in recent years. This article, however, pinpoints the immersive environment of the cinema, which contributes to the full experience of watching a movie. It mentioned the darkness, unfamiliarity and anonymity in the cinema indeed create a “pre-hypnoid” environment for getting into the “hypnosis” of movies. Unlike watching movies at home or anywhere else, we could fully liberate ourselves from distractions in the cinema, immersed into a sequence of images presented on the big screen in front. After that, we get an image-repertoire of ourselves from the movie, which is like a mirror, dividing into “two bodies” in mind. One is a “narcissistic body” with critical eyes, one is a “preserve body” who immerses into the film. Only the cinema could bring such an experience to the audience for having both the enjoyment inside and outside the movie.
Despite the irreplaceable experience in cinema, I still find it inevitable for the general public to switch from cinema to the television with Netflix in home. Art is sacred, which was first attached to the religion, not enjoyed by the majority. The inviolability has no wonder made art more appealing. However, it is still finally given to the public, and only when art is no longer the thing of the minority, it shines brightly. Although watching movies in cinema is the best experience after all, it is the “minority thing”. It is meaningless to compare whether watching movies in cinema sounds more noble than watching at home as long as the movie itself is well respected and appreciated by the audience. Ultimately, we are still focusing on movies in cinema, not cinema itself.
Name: Amy Fu
UID: 3035779650
a nice reflection on cinema, but i would argue Barthes’ “narcissistic body” is the one which is acritical, “hypnotized by a distance; and this dis distance is not critical (intellectual)” (1986, 349) while he called for criticality in the “perverse body”, to be “ready to fetishize not the image but precisely what exceeds it” (1986, 349)
In the second paragraph, perhaps you’d like to weave in Benjamin in your point on the accessibility of art in correlation to its patrons and method of reproduction. Is watching movies in the cinema for the minority, the elitists as what art was for in the past?