American photographer Eric Pickersgill, in his eerie series (Removed) , elected to photograph people going about everyday life, using their mobile phones and tablets, but with one crucial change — these devices were physically removed from the hands of people just prior to the photograph being taken and the images that we see are of individuals or people staring intently at their empty hands.
The photographs strike you intensely with a lonely poignancy, reminding us of the rapidity with which the multiple screens of our lives have transformed our experience of ourselves, our intimacy and our collective lives.
These black mirrors (also the name of a brilliant TV series on technology) are now the primary source of our interaction with screens and among them, it is the mobile phone screen that we look at more than any other. Mobile phones are more than just communication devices — they have become the intimate interfaces upon which many of our desires and anxieties find expression.
If earlier the experience of waiting for someone in a public place consisted of passing time by looking at other people, mobile phones are the new protective armour that safeguards us from needing to look at anyone else. The desire to look at the phone may not even have a functional purpose; it is merely what we use to shield ourselves from boredom or from the gaze of the world.
And with smartphones and high-speed Internet, we increasingly see a large number of people watching films on their mobile phones. But unlike classical screens which were based on their appeal to a wider audience, mobile phones and tablets are primarily personal screening devices.
In this context, the word ‘screen’ takes on a particular relevance, reminding us of what American philosopher Stanley Cavell said of classical cinematic experience: that it screens the world to us even as it screens us away from the world. How may we make sense of these new spectatorial practices and how do they transform our very imagination of the cinematic experience? What happens when Pickersgill’s photographs become the basis of a new theory of spectatorship?
Shared solitude
One account of the move of the cinematic experience from movie halls to personal devices is an account of a change in the heightened experience of cinema and our selves since the theatrical experience entailed a commitment not just to our solitude within the space and time of a theatre, but a solitude that we shared with others, whether intimates or strangers, in the presence of something much larger than ourselves — call it the screen or the world.
This play between size and proximity has had an interesting inverted relationship as the moving image has migrated from the silver screen to the black mirror. In a theatre, one sits shoulder to shoulder with a large number of people staring at a large screen that is relatively far from us. As films moved from the silver screen to our television sets and video, the size of the screen decreased but so did our proximity to it.
The size of the screen seemed dwarfed and the number of people we shared this experience with reduced, but what increased was the relational proximity of the people we watched films with — the intimate space, whether the central spot given to a television in a household or in the space of one’s bedroom, meant a reconfiguring of the intimacy with which we watched films, with a more acute sense of who was next to us, the presence of ambient noise, light, and the possibility of interruptions with phone calls or people at the door.
The body could however adapt to relatively mobile positions while watching a film and was less restricted than it was in a movie hall where it was forced to be vertical. Our backs straightened again when we started watching films on our desktop computers, using mini speakers for amplified sound, and the distance between us and the screen decreased further.
But the numbers of those who could sit around a computer screen were considerably fewer than those who could sit around a television set. In fact, in the early days of TV, it was never a family thing but a neighbourhood ritual, with almost everyone landing up for a TV serial or an important cricket game.
And finally, as it moved to our laptops, the screen gained a spatial intimacy hitherto unimagined because for the first time we were truly alone with our films, which now sometimes brings an epiphanic response we did not know we were capable of, and at other times even the most remarkable film only produces a weary sense of ennui.
Regardless of individual experiences, it is abundantly clear that what we have collectively entered into now is a brave new world of viewing — one in which the media is no longer just an extension of our senses but indeed the very zone where the distinction between body and screen gets blurred.
The author started watching films in theatres. Then video came and shocked him. Now, he tries to figure out even smaller screens and the future of image cultures.
