'In the cinema, like the novel and the theater before it, the fiction effect depends on a sense of safety or distance in time and space (…). The latter media represent a world that is past and elsewhere; television and the computer present virtually shared worlds, unfolding temporally in some virtual relation to our own.' (Morse 1998: 19f, original emphasis).

BLOSSOM

‘To combine a present experience (stage), which, though rehearsed, nevertheless has the touch element, with a past experience (film), presented as present, is thus to combine the unconscious (recorded) which the conscious (present). Sounds heard from the stage area can only come from visible or hidden (that is, potentially tangible) sources. Even from off-stage this is true. But a sound heard from a movie track or a tape recorder has a visible-tangible source only in the projector or tape recorder. Its “real” source is removed in time. Thus the stage sounds heard during filmstage, even from off-stage, become localized as present. Time thus, perhaps for the first time in theatre, becomes present as a spatial element.’ (Blossom, 1966: 70)

‘Another element the camera has, which the stage has not, is (…) it can, within a shot, examine an object from all sides, close up and/or far away. It can sonically blur, magnify, distance, slow down, hasten. (…) we are (usually) looking at a screen which, if it has taken away tangibility, has replaced it with extraordinary powers, imitating consciousness. And the man on stage, the woman on stage? What is it they become in the presence of this overflowing tumult of freedom against them and around them, their larger consciousness?’ (ibid.: 70) ‘Our presence as bodies begins to be suspect, our presence as consciousness more real. (ibid.: 72)

References

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