From Attendance to Performance: The Spectatorial Experience and the Emergence of Live Cinema
From Attendance to Performance: The Spectatorial Experience and the Emergence of Live Cinema

Summary/Abstract: Cinema is a medium of possibilities. The trajectory of cinema is not beholden to a single future. Its intent is to sketch out a framework of transformation in an ever-changing cinematic landscape. A landscape which recognizes its genealogy from analog film to digital cinema, from attending spectatorial witness to performative intervention upon the object of vision, environment and ourselves. Contemporary cinema has not forgotten its roots; strongly grounded in the past, but receptive to innovation, modification and transition. This is clearly seen in the current cinematic landscape which emphasizes the spectatorial experience1 — participating in its unfolding, part of its presence, but more than anything the ontology of cognitive recognition, affects, and bodily perceptions. Cinema, a time-based, temporally specific occasion, has long established an encounter which addresses spectatorial experience, but now may no longer require the form of time, space and agency to produce a narrative. I will consider the combination of sounds and moving-images that give credibility to ‘here’ and ‘now,’ and their relation to spectator. The intersection of the cinematic dispositif2 and the elusive spectator has been at the center of a rich debate since the late twentieth century. The cinematic spectator has gone through transformations and modifications, even shifting focus from ocular to haptic. The reference models comprise the work and theories of Jean-Louis Baudry, Laura Mulvey, Christian Metz, Vivian Sobchack, Gene Youngblood, and Laura U. Marks. Their contributions, moving from an ocular-centric epistemology of the late-twentieth century to an embodied, tactile, proprioceptive experience in the twenty-first century, have brought forth an ontology which provides deep consideration to the cinematic spectator within a live performance space. The following theoretical investigation focuses on the expansion of contemporary cinema and what constitutes a spectatorial experience in the twenty-first century. I argue for a theoretical framework of metamorphosis in a form of contemporary cinema, namely Live Cinema, which engenders affective movements in the spectatorial experience. The performer and spectator in a live cinema performative setting are met with communicative exchanges entrenched in participation, improvisation, human agency, and communal relationships. Both parties enter an affectively composed journey built on proprioception, accidental performative occurrences, visceral desires, and ephemeral behavior. These developments in a live cinema framework are witness to a shift towards immediacy, spontaneity, immersion, and engagement found in an intuitive encounter with live performance components, mediatization and instrumentation; a practice which becomes visible in a real-time fractal performance space.

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