Manovich and Barthes and screens
Apologies, but I'm going to get academic on yo asses. I was pondering Manovich's assertion that the advent of the WWW and the windows aesthetic engenders a potential (inavoidable?) move away from traditional linear narrative formations into something which is more open and subjective. His belief that a partnership is formed between the screen and the user resembles closely Barthes' 'On CinemaScope' for mine.
Barthes insists that with the broadening of the screen in CinemaScope, the viewer is freed from the screen's power, where previously viewers had received 'cinematic nourishment' as if through a drip feeder. For Barthes', a relationship of mutual dependency is formed as the viewer now has an 'arm's length' distance from the screen, meaning that they have a certain power of creation over the text - that is, the power to fashion their own subjective experience of the text by picking out from the vast screen what they see. I guess this ties in very much with Barthes' 'Death of the Author' idea, empowering audiences in their subjective interpretations.
Surely this process is carried on through the creation of the GUI, and Manovich's belief in a new cinematic aesthetic for the digital age which resembles that of the GUI. The power of the user/viewer is certainly greater than ever before in the communicative exchange, especially with their direct influence over the narrative they experience in using the WWW. Barthes' claim always seemed pretty extreme in response to something as simple as making the cinema screen a bit wider, but could it be said that the digital era allows the realisation of his claims? Does the windows aesthetic attribute even greater power to the user than Barthes' might have imagined? Do filmmakers need to go as far as Manovich claims in not prescribing meaning, as the very process of reception now gives the viewer so much power?
I'm sure that the power relations have changed in favour of the viewer, but since both Barthes and Manovich claim a partnership (equality impled), who is right? haha, right.
Questions, comments? or am I being a dork?
Sam
Barthes insists that with the broadening of the screen in CinemaScope, the viewer is freed from the screen's power, where previously viewers had received 'cinematic nourishment' as if through a drip feeder. For Barthes', a relationship of mutual dependency is formed as the viewer now has an 'arm's length' distance from the screen, meaning that they have a certain power of creation over the text - that is, the power to fashion their own subjective experience of the text by picking out from the vast screen what they see. I guess this ties in very much with Barthes' 'Death of the Author' idea, empowering audiences in their subjective interpretations.
Surely this process is carried on through the creation of the GUI, and Manovich's belief in a new cinematic aesthetic for the digital age which resembles that of the GUI. The power of the user/viewer is certainly greater than ever before in the communicative exchange, especially with their direct influence over the narrative they experience in using the WWW. Barthes' claim always seemed pretty extreme in response to something as simple as making the cinema screen a bit wider, but could it be said that the digital era allows the realisation of his claims? Does the windows aesthetic attribute even greater power to the user than Barthes' might have imagined? Do filmmakers need to go as far as Manovich claims in not prescribing meaning, as the very process of reception now gives the viewer so much power?
I'm sure that the power relations have changed in favour of the viewer, but since both Barthes and Manovich claim a partnership (equality impled), who is right? haha, right.
Questions, comments? or am I being a dork?
Sam
posted by Anonymous at 4:08 pm
3 Comments:
Yes, Barthes is so relevant here. But whilst debates in new media (and especially on the subject of hypertext and hyperfiction) frequently reference the 'death of the author' thesis (I do this myself in the encylopedia essay available on CECIL under 'week 1'), the piece on Cinemascope isn't commonly discussed: thanks for forcing me to go and read it! Clearly, Barthes is talking here about something which prefigures the fascination with immersion / cyberspace / virtual reality that kicked in several decades later. For me, the 'death of the author' idea has been overstated (by Barthes's followers if not Barthes himself) and that's why I like Manovich's perspective: one that sees the function of 'authorship' changing (and decentering?) in the age of interactive media, but certainly not dying. Let's not forget that the Internet has brought about the fantasy that now we can all be authors. Few really want to give up on that fantasy, right?
I sort of wondered if Luke was going to bring the Hegelian dialectic into this (not that I'm particularly confident with the term - so I could be entirely in my own world in regards to its relevance). When I was notetaking during the lecture and Luke touched on questions of control/authorship and Manovich, I wrote, "Soft Cinema plays on/recognises a synthesis", and right then he mentioned Hegel and I was like whoa.
So, um, does Hegel's (or Marx's, okay Sam?) idea of history as a series of master/slave relationships have anything to do with the idea of 'dialectic' in general?
Did that sentence make sense?
Yes, definitely - the idea of two contradictory forces (thesis and antithesis) out of which a new state of affairs (synthesis) emerges. And I guess Manovich (big into Eisenstein - undoubtedly loves a bit of dialectical thinking!) does advance the notion that some kind of synthesis (i.e. something greater than the sum of its parts) emerges out of the encounter between human and software.
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