Back to the Motherland: the film theatre in the postmedia age

Abstract

<it>Artaud Double Bill</it> (2007) by Atom Egoyan is the perfect illustration of the emergence of a new style of filmic vision. Egoyan's film opposes two female spectators: Nana who watches <it>La passion de Jeanne d'Arc</it> in a clip from <it>Vivre sa vie</it> by Godard; and Anna who watches <it>Vivre sa vie</it> and sends the clip through her mobile phone to her friend Nicole, who is sitting in another film theatre. The opposition underlines four passages: from a text to the hypertext (Nana watches a film, Anna watches a film, a clip inside this film, messages on her mobile phone, and so on); from a centralized gaze to a decentralized glance (Nana gives attention only to a film; Anna displays a multitasking attention); from being immersed to surfing (Nana dives into the world represented on the screen, to the point where she experiences a catharsis; Anna keeps the film as a series of single sequences, and reacts with admiration but without participation); from isolation to connection (Nana abolishes any relation with the exterior world; Anna stays in touch with her friend). These changes draw a new paradigm for spectatorship: from the attendance, tied with classical cinema, to the performance, typical of the cinema ‘outside the film theatres’. Nevertheless, as Egoyan's film claims, we apply the new paradigm to a theatrical situation too: we are irremediably post-spectators.