The film theorist and professor at Yale University Francesco Casetti was invited at the Université de Montréal to give a lecture, the second in the cinEXmedia Distinguished Speaker series.
Olivier Du Ruisseau
On 7 November 2024 Laboratoire CinéMédias welcomed Francesco Casetti, film theorist and professor at Yale University, to give the second lecture in the cinEXmedia Distinguished Speaker series. He followed on from Vittorio Gallese, who spoke in the spring of 2023. In his lecture at the Carrefour des arts et des sciences at the Université de Montréal, Casetti, who is also a member of the cinEXmedia partnership, shared thoughts taken from his book Screening Fears: On Protective Media (Princeton University Press, 2023).
In this volume, Casetti offers a novel historical perspective on screens, which he describes as “protection systems”. Media are “extensions of man”, Marshall McLuhan wrote in his essay Understanding Media (1964). But while Francesco Casetti acknowledges that screens of every sort generally enable us to “apprehend external realities”, they also occupy a “protection function” which “ends up isolating us more and more”, he remarks.
This thesis, he explains, “became apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic”. Because the past few years have been marked by “the shift in our social interactions onto digital platforms”, Casetti observed that “screens protect us more than ever against external threats and stimuli”.
Historical Backdrop
Although the “protective” function of screens may have been apparent during the pandemic, Casetti claims – and herein lies the novelty of his perspective – that this has been true for a long time. To demonstrate this, he divides his argument into four periods: the advent of the phantasmagoria; the golden age of majestic movie theatres; the arrival of the Internet and computer and mobile telephone screens; and the development of virtual reality. His ideas are based on both theoretical texts and historical documents demonstrating the role of screens as protection systems during each of these four periods.
“The phantasmagoria represented a first slippage, in which the screen acted both as a projection system and a filter”, he remarks. On the one hand, the phantasmagoria screen made it possible to project human or supernatural figures and, as a result, to tell visual stories. On the other hand, it filtered the technical equipment necessary for the projection and created distance between the audience and the objects projected.
Later, movie theatres filled this dual role of projection and protection. During the Great Depression, American cities became increasingly unsanitary, but movie theatres, which remained popular, were seen as hygienic, even sanitized. Casetti mentions in particular instruction manuals for employees of American movie theatres instructing them to keep the premises very clean. “In the 1930s, the Chicago health department even recommended that the public, and especially the children of less well-off families, go to the movies once a week because the air there was purer than in the city”, Casetti adds. Siegfried Kracauer, for his part, wrote that throughout the United States movie theatres had become “sanctuaries for the homeless”.
“Electronic Bubbles”
This was when there crystallized a conception of the movie theatre as an escape (from both the unsanitary outdoors and a morose social atmosphere) and of the screen as something which, while immersing us in a fictive world, protects us from the dangers it depicts. This idea was particularly well described by the writer Joseph Roth in his Berlin diaries (1920), which Casetti quotes:
Snow, ice and the sky. Walls, castles, cities, worlds of snow. Sledges, dogs and a couple of people. Penguins, a tent, a whale. And we are sitting in a modern theatre. All the so-called blessings of civilizations are there: proper and clean girls in white aprons with program booklets; electric light; central heating; and a film screen. Protected from all sides against all the evils of nature, we look into a most impossible world in which the most impossible fate of the most impossible challengers takes its turn.
This description of the cinema is still relevant today. At the end of his lecture, Francesco Casetti examined the Internet, our portable personal screens and virtual reality. “Platforms such as Zoom are a strange paradox”, he remarks. “They reduce our peripersonal space (the space separating us from the screen, from the object with which we are interacting) while at the same time extending our social space”.
In this sense, strictly on the level of our interactions with screens, Francesco Casetti believes that today more than ever we are establishing “electronic bubbles”. In his view, this function is advancing in tandem with the “growing individualization of our societies” and the “echo chambers” brought about by social media.
According to Casetti, these dynamics, inherent in our use of media today, conceal a final protection function specific to screens: they act like vaccines. At a time when the media are showing us “increasingly violent images”, screens prepare us, at the very least, he says, “to face up to the harshness of the real world”. This hypothesis, which also closes Casetti’s book, was the topic of an animated discussion during the question period following his lecture.
