From the readings this week I realised the importance of the change in what determines audience approval. At the very start of cinema, spectators were amazed and intrigued purely by the apparatus that permitted images to move across a screen, whereas nowadays we expect films to project an image of reality so real that we may become lost in it. As Williams mentions, “it seems to be that case that the success of these genres is often measured by the degree to which the audience sensation mimics what is seen on screen” (605), that is, if we are watching a ‘chick flick’ or a “weepie” (605) as Williams calls it, we expect it to make us cry, and we expect a horror to scare us or make us jump, and that is the bar by which films are now judged, I feel, by how close they are to reality.

I found it interesting reading Gunning’s point about how “the usually small scale of trompe l’oeil paintings and the desire to reach out and touch them contrast sharply with the “grandeur naturale” of the Lumière train film and the viewer’s impulse to rear back before it, as well as with the spectator’s physical distance from the illusions of the magic theatre.” (740). It seems to demonstrate a shift in audience participation from one of active to passive. I ask myself whether this is to our detriment. Bazin states that “photography is clearly the most important event in the history of plastic arts” (163) because it enables us to represent reality exactly, as “no matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image (161)”, with which I entirely disagree. What about the discovery of linear perspective in the Renaissance? Or the sheer effort it took to make paints and pigments? During the Renaissance an artist’s studio would have been more like a science lab than the stereotypical well-lit room strewn with easels and sheets we see today. The subjectivity present in a work of art produced by a human hand is what makes it a work of art, I feel. It seems that the invention of the photograph has indeed enabled us to present an exact copy of reality, but in doing so we have also lost the ability to capture the viewer’s engagement, making them less likely to want to reach out and ‘touch’ a photograph, and also making it harder to impress an audience and elicit the desired response.

No one would deny that the painter has nothing to do with things that are not visible. The painter is concerned solely with representing what can be seen.

—Leon Battista Alberti, 1435