Cinematic Experience - Essay Example

Full Cinematic Experience (CCS101 – Essay No. 2) 11 October (word count = 800) Introduction The simple or layman's definition of cinematic experience is the collective and tactile but often very short collective experience when a person watches a film production that depict the modern world and the many situations in which life itself is experienced by use of film. To use a more technical definition, the cinematic experience is the reference made to the devices and models of the “cinematic apparatus” that elaborated on film theory to portray a real-life or imaginative situation by which audiences can hopefully relate to their lives through encounter with the cinema.

In other words, cinematic experience deals with the actual feeling of viewers when seeing a film that is emblematic of their thoughts about that film based on conditions of spectatorship. Prior to the invention of the phonograph and the manufacture of film for the use by photography, storytelling was either verbal through storytellers or written only in books or other printed materials and people read these themselves; the invention or discovery of films and photography gave way to the rise of virtual prostheses for human perception, primarily the senses of sight and hearing.

The rise of new technologies that enhance human perception through a more intense enjoyment by these two senses greatly altered the human experience. Because of this technological prowess or capabilities, people now shifted their enjoyment of visual experiences from the arcades to diorama to photography, and to panorama and then on to cinema (Friedberg 70). A good cinematic experience means an altered state of mind for the audiences due to good material in the hands of a good director who utilizes all the cinematic tools and devices to give audiences what they want in a special way which makes them a very surprised audience indeed, and at the same time teaches them through their two senses.

Discussion The advent of cinema in the early twentieth century enabled people to recover most of their own appreciation for myth, which Walter Benjamin had espoused in his theory of the realm of the senses which he termed as “aural perception” enhanced by cinematic experience. The cinematic experience had been preceded by a series of technical innovations or inventions such as the rise of the Industrial Revolution in which Machine gradually replaced Man in his many areas or spheres of activity.

Along the same line, the rise of photography helped to put a painting into some degree of decline as people now preferred the photos they get as a better version of a representation, much more than what the best painting can ever hope to provide. The art of cinematography came from the science of photography, much in the same way that the rise of arcades in Paris presaged the arrival of a different type of architecture in a revised paradigm called as tectonics or architectonic design (Benjamin 97).. This was made possible with the new use of iron as an artificial material for engineering construction such as rails or bridges, and then included other long-span structures such as massive exhibition halls or an extremely large railway station to shelter arriving and departing passengers.

Cinematic experience was exemplified by the concept of Fourier called as Utopia where workers can be laborers but to their own liking or delight (attractive work); work is not forced upon them . Prior to the arrival of cinematography, people were contented with dioramas or small representations (miniatures) of real-life situations found in Nature, but photography took that away as people now preferred cinematography as a more realistic representation of their lives. Moreover, the dioramas were supposed to showcase the relationship of art to technology but a new combination of technology and artistic talent found its way in cinematography.

The film became a recorder of the epoch under study; cinema is now the new kind of literature based on visual graphics and moving images; the diorama became a panorama (Benjamin 100). Conclusion As cinematography further evolved over the next decades after its invention, so it was with the cinematic experience in which directors and cinematographers developed their own style in the art and craft of film making, using and testing all stylish variations of camera use and technique. The cinematic experience alters the consciousness (Holmes 3) and as what was mentioned earlier elsewhere, by enhancing human perception through the senses, using the stereoscope and the stereograph.

Daguerreotype was only the beginning towards the full flowering of cinematography, by which images, illusions, and instability (evanescence) can be preserved for history and posterity. Through the wonders of cinematic experience, a fleeting moment can be etched in time by the warping or compression of time and space (Hirsch 165), much in the same way that architectonic design had compressed time and space through the wise use of glass and detailed drawings by an architect. Works Cited Benjamin, Walter.

“Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Fourier, or the Arcades.” The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media. Ed. Walter Benjamin. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. 96-98. Print. Benjamin, Walter. “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Daguerre, or the Panoramas.” The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media. Ed. Walter Benjamin. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. 99-100. Print. Friedberg, Anne.

“The Passage from Arcade to Cinema.” Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Ed. Anne Friedberg. Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press, 1994. 68-94. Print. Hirsch, Robert. “New Ways of Visualizing Time and Space.” Seizing the Light: A History of Photography. Ed. Robert Hirsch. Boston, MA: McGraw Hill, 2000. 164-170. Print. Holmes, Oliver Wendell. “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph.” The Atlantic. 1 June 1859. Web. 11 Oct. 2013. .