The End of the Screen and its Beginning

But it really is a retreat from the big screen, which is too overbearing, too melodramatic for us now. We live in a time poisoned by irony; we need our ironic mediums. It's hard to conceive of a Total Anything anymore; the small screeen--a fragment, a reminder of our old sincere days--is the perfect medium of expression. Postmodernism once said, see, I can deconstruct it for you. But now, that claim is made redundant, unecessary by the very mediums around us. If anything, we are nostalgic for the old deconstructionists; they at least had something to deconstruct. If academia is now turning to "video game" theory, it is only because it realizes s that critique now lies hidden away within the games themselves. And its professors--like those who gather at the "Mission of the Cathode Ray Tube" in David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983), understand that it is they who must be instructed.

To mourn the splintering of the screen in to smaller and smaller squares is not to mourn the end of cinema, for one suspects there will always be stories told on screens. And anyway, it is always the medium that invents the narrative: the sorts of stories that will eventually be told on 2.5 inch screens will be the sorts of stories that should be told on 2.5 inch screens. And perhaps someday the inches will seem like miles--the 2.5 millimeter screen is on the horizon. And then, of course, the disappearance of the screen altogether.

Or rather its dominance, inside us. Already the physical, the material artifact of "movies" is disappearing. Celluloid gives way to digital, gives way to....what? Disembodiment. Movies are losing their bodies, and so are screens. This is not a lament. It is not the death of the screen, but rather its birth.

Comments

[Joe Swanberg]

Plus, it's always really easy to plug something into a projector and blow it up as big as you want. It can go from 2.5" to 25 feet in a matter of seconds.

[Matt]

"Movies are losing their bodies, and so are screens."

Coincidentally, this is what I'm writing about for 'Post-Identity'!

[Nick]

Excellent Matt--very much looking forward to your Post Identity piece.

[Will Luers]

also, i think it should be mentioned that screen size is all relative, isn't it? what is the size of a screen if you sit at the back of a theater? or if you hold the ipod a foot away from your face.

the difference we are talking about is the distance from the screen. and how many viewers that distance accomodates. one or a thousand.

a paperback book is designed for the individual, but it can be read aloud to the group. multi-dimensional and portable.

[Nick]

Will--

A great point about relative screen size--but there's probably an "optimum" distance from which to hold the iPod away from your face.

[Kurtiss Hare]

What relative-screen-size does not take into account is the "mise-en-scene" of the screen's periphery, which, apart from the fistful of discontinuous technical anachronisms, like resolution, framerate, and aspect ratio, I believe will come to be recognized as the most significant difference between a 2.5" and a 25' screen.