• kudos
    373
    I would like to draw a hypothetical portrait of cinema that rests on an unproven and unsubstantiated claim that, together with a sort of Freudian analysis, reveal reflections of satisfaction in collective psychosexual contingencies in the development of Western technology. That the rise of nineteenth and twentieth century technology has been compared to a type of uninhibited sexual drive reifies this idea in the medium of filmmaking whose journey began in the post-industrialized pre-war precursor to the prolifteration of ephemeral satisfaction of technology from Lumiere (Inventors) to Méliès (Magician) and proceeded to be shaped by it through successive technological developments such as sync sound, radio wave propagation, and finally the digital abstraction.

    In film there is an easy metaphor to establish that is grounded in: first, that it is a medium that is inherently social and secondly, that it symbolizes in its technological basis erotic drives in form and content. How Western society has embraced it, film spectatorship and production have both reflected a notion of ephemeral joy paired with the collective empathy and control of the collective. As an example, in the ending of the film 'The Cabin in the Woods,' a narrator explains that the different characters see different fates in the horror genre based on the roles they reflect: the whore, the warrior, etc. Its institution of group spectatorship allows for narrative judgement and sanction by a collective audience - in a sort of tribalism - of what will occur in reference to expectation, and in the erotic narrative of who should end up in a relationship with who I.E. The hero gets the girl, or the woman who cheats on her husband is punished with loneliness, and so on.

    A similarity dawns between this medium and past tribal lifestyles that often involved arranged marriage and allocation of courtship by the tribal chief and were thus collectively determined. The role of auteurism in film itself, with the spectator (female) in a sort of inactivity while the filmmaker (male) satisfies and inseminates their manifestation of subjective reality reflects the convergence of the productive collective to the individual auteur. It is frequently said of auteurist filmmaking that it uniquely appears to gain us access to the subjective reality of the artist through the juxtasposition of images and visual language.

    The auteur development seems to rest concurrent with the exhibitionism prevalent in this symbolism, which is in itself present by metaphor. As the spectator embodies a metaphor of the filmmaking process as erotic in form and a collectively determining entity of the same, I find the idea more and more of a continuity between the two; a metonymy. Hence, before the wide expansion of auteurism in cinema it was popular to tell stories on screen about the politics of marriage and family life, and in later auteur-based cinema it became popular to represent the tribal politics of on-screen sex and eroticism. The former an act of collective judgement and sanction of collective institutions and liberties, and the latter the represented collective judgement embodied in the individual 'chief' of the practical sexual relation.

    Again, this is just one perspective and not meant to represent the sole drive constituting the development of cinema and filmmaking as a whole. Here is just one speculation on possible patterns in it that may have analytic meaning in their historical-cultural context.
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