Curtains, carts and the mobile screen

Abstract

One hundred-and-ten years after the first cinema showmen presented actualities in fairgrounds, eighty years after the 16 mm gauge helped film burst free of the darkened movie house, and sixty years after regularized television broadcasts began to animate living rooms, we continue to hear the plaintive cry of the cinema-mourner, railing against the degradation of the magic of films and cinemagoing that has resulted from the ubiquity of moving images. Theatrical celluloid projections tenaciously reside in the scholarly imagination as part of a foundational definition of cinema, making extra-theatrical screens always appear to be second-best options or curiosity venues. Senior film theorists can still be found making perplexed observations about the presence of moving images on buses, in subways and on handheld devices. Such bewilderment only reveals the primacy of the motion picture theatrical situation in their conceptualization of cinema – a powerful site of formative movie memories, certainly, but a reified, select and privileged location for the moving image experience all the same. Cinephilia can be a beautiful affliction, yet that admission seems to have blinded us to the variety of forms of moving image culture that have been with us for so long.