ABSTRACT
New questions in Film Studies seem to have acquired urgency recently. We have seen some major changes in Film Studies, such as a focus on the spectator and the viewing experience, and cinema’s special appeal to historical audiences. Moreover, the current rapid transitions in digital and optical techniques and viewing practices have also called for attention. These current research interests in Film Studies are explored by Laura Mulvey, Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, who, in her latest book Death 24X a Second. Stillness and the Moving Image (2006), addresses the role new technologies play in the viewing experience and re-evaluates the nature of the filmic medium. By investigating the ramifications of these new technologies, Laura Mulvey is able to explore some aspects of spectatorship and the film’s materiality that have been transformed by the new developments, particularly the way the viewer experiences the unfolding of time, space, and movement. She also looks at the arrival of the cinema and the ways it affected the, as yet, “inexperienced” moviegoer. In doing so, she reconsidered some interesting aspects of the early movie going experience and the unexpected confrontations with the uncanny it elicited in particular that are relevant to this present discussion on ostranenie. As Laura Mulvey has explained, one may see the introduction of the cinema into culture as an abrupt one, and as a decisive point in its history. She agrees with film historians that the cinema and its prehistory “are too deeply imbricated, ideologically and technologically, for an abrupt ‘birth of the cinema’ to be conceptually valid,” as she wrote. But she does not agree with them that this is all that there is to it. In her last book, she argued that “from the perspective of the uncanny, the arrival of celluloid moving pictures constitutes a decisive moment.” 1 Early cinema “baffled” its audience by reproducing “the illusion of life itself,” as she analyzed, but “the image of life was necessarily haunted by deception.” 2 Laura Mulvey’s approach creates some fundamentally new insights into the nature of these early viewing experiences, highly relevant for our rereading of Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique.” It is in the light of this that I invited Laura Mulvey to elaborate on some of the issues concerning ostranenie and film at the end of this book.
