We usually look for references for the analysis of live audiovisual performance in the history of light shows and visual music. In doing so, we acknowledge a historical paradigm that associates contemporary club video projections with the color concerts of the XIX century and the psychedelic wet shows of the 1960s, among other artistic manifestations. This epistemological approach is defined both by the general non-narrative appeal of live audiovisual works, as well as by the circumstances of exhibition of a VJ performance, in which the message is generated, edited or composed in real-time – a strategy traditionally associated with music presentations.

Nevertheless, the real-time processing of visual media seems to be directly opposed to the most conventional dynamics of moving images exhibition: the century-old cinematographic screening. While in live audiovisual performances the image is rendered at the same moment it is created, in cinema screenings the image (the movie) is generated months before its instantiation (during the projection), in a complex process that goes from scriptwriting to post-production, and may take years to be completed.

From a practical perspective, however, the difference between both situations is subtle. Film projection is not a fully automatic operation, but an active effort that demands a lot of technical expertise from the operator. It involves changing film reels, adjusting the audio mix, monitoring and correcting the image conditions. The film projectionist, just like a VJ, must operate in real-time to convey the message.  In a certain sense, he is also a performer, albeit a negative one: he must prevent the feature-length film from losing its coherence during the screening. The VJ, on the other hand, enacts a positive performance: he creates coherence from distinct visual samples.

Therefore, the difference between live audiovisual performances and cinema screening is not exactly like the one between live music presentation and playback, but more similar to that between improvising and following a score. Both practices were even more indiscernible in the early years of cinema, when the so-called scores did not exist yet, and the protocols to be followed by the projectionist were really loose ones. In fact, VJing recreate certain possibilities that were the ordinary reality of the first cinematographic exhibitions – a reality that was suppressed over the years by the progressive crystallization of the movie theater.

Ina Hae Rark groups the places for cinematographic exhibition in three main categories, historically successive: those of the “cinema of attractions”, such as fairs and amusement parks, where the movie cohabited with other leisure activities; the nickelodeons, the first outlets to exhibit exclusively movies and to treat them like products; and the movie palaces, built like opera houses, which fostered the exhibition as a cultural event. [1]

According to Hark, shopping mall multiplexes recover the connections between display and consumerism that characterized nickelodeons. Following that logic, the VJing space could be considered another step back, since it brings up to date the characteristics from the cinema of attractions. Flávia Cesarino Costa, who did a very complete study on the early cinema years, even argues that “the initial period of the cinema is much more related to the typical video situation than to a cinema situation”. [2]

Cinema situation is the term used by Hugo Mauerhofer to address the particular viewing regime of the movie theater, defined as the most complete isolation from the exterior world and its sources of cognitive disturbance. [3] It is the specific architecture of the movie theater that makes cinema situation possible, capturing the audience’s attention and directing it towards the movie. The VJing space confronts this configuration by promoting cognitive dispersion. Among several stimuli, the projection is just another one. Negotiating with these conditions, live audiovisual performances establish a viewing regime that is practically the contrary of the cinema situation, denying its historical evolution and foregrounding the artificial construction of the movie theatre

The venues of exhibition have always occupied a determinative position in the cinematographic industry. They are the point of contact between the consumer and the product, the place where the production investments must be finally paid. We cannot forget that the feature-length movie is a very specific product, which takes years to be made, and whose commercial value lowers each day after its release. [4] Few goods require so much spend of capital per unit produced as the feature film, and it is not even sold,[5] increasing even more the importance of its places of consumption, and the necessity of controlling these outlets. Besides, the conditions of exhibition have a deep impact on all cinematographic institution. They establish the basis for filmic reception [6] – that is, they restrict the viewer experience to commercially determined socio-cognitive dynamics. The movie theatre is much more important to define movie format and production than the celluloid film, its secular platform.

This logic becomes clear nowadays, when film has turned into an obsolete medium, but nevertheless survives because of the resilience of the traditional procedures of projection. Electronic and digital technologies, historically related to video, are already widely used in cinematographic production. Today, there is no movie that is not digitized in some step of its production. [7] Even the recording of raw footage can be made using high-definition digital cameras, like in George Lucas’ The War of the Clones (2002). The final result is exported to film reels just because cinema dynamics of consumption – based on analog movie theaters – so requires.

We are about to witness the metamorphosis of cinema into a completely digital medium. All that is missing to fulfill this process is the digitization of the mechanisms of distribution and exhibition. But the industry resists, and has chosen the movie theatres as its last trench. Contrary to what is publicized, [8] the reasons for this resistance are not immediately aesthetical. Digital projection technologies capable of generating images as defined as a 35 mm projector are already available in the market. [9] The industry does not adopt these technologies for operational reasons.

Producers, distributors and exhibitors have not yet decided what are the best standards. This decision process is lead by the Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI), a consortium formed by the seven biggest Hollywood studios. [10] The DCI embodies the industry’s resistance to yield the axis around all cinema economy turns, the point from where this economy can be controlled: its places of consumption. The main interest of the agents that dominate the market is to maintain their privileged positions. Digitization is a serious threat to the present configuration of the cinematographic institution, since it would replace the existing technological park in vigor for a more open, dynamic and flexible structure. [11]

For that reason, more than ever, we must reflect on viewing regimes and movie exhibition practices – i.e. “all the practices that come together within a time and place to enable viewers to watch a film”.[12] This paper takes part of this field of research. It intends to set some basis for the comparison of the movie theatre with the VJing space, which also hosts a particular exhibition practice. We suggest that the VJ arena is to the projection room what digital video is to celluloid film. Thus, it would be a very convenient parameter to study an appropriate viewing regime for a cinema that is becoming increasingly digital. After all, live audiovisual performances use all the technological possibilities that cinematographic industry presently despises: digital projection systems; online networks for file sharing; cultural practices like sampling and remixing.

In 1963, Stan Brackage still talked about the projection as performance ­– i.e. a creative practice. [13] However, the development of the industry has undermined this capacity, as it instituted a commoditized viewing regime. Technical (and symbolic) standards became necessary to guarantee the inclusion of different works in different exhibition venues. [14] In this process, the movie became the economic pivot of the cinematographic industry. The tableaux vivants and the travelogs lost their place to the multi-million blockbuster. At the same time, the exhibition became more and more of a transparent and regulated procedure, so that the less interference possible operated over movie consumption as it was originally planed.

In the end, the noisy nickelodeon and the luxurious movie palace were substituted by the shopping mall multiplex, whose Spartan architecture does not have any spatial mark, and favors an unstoppable flux of public and works. It is hard to tell causes apart from consequences in this complicated evolution. All we can do is to make its results clear: that cinema’s particular viewing regime – the articulation between the screening room and moviegoing – is nowadays a hyper-determined practice.

On the other hand, we can also point that it has not always been like this. Cinema once had extremely fertile viewing regimes, which the industry has suppressed throughout the years. But these long-forgotten practices are on the lookout, in p2p file-sharing networks and low-luminance projectors at nightclubs. The more cinema is digitized, the more the pose a threat to the traditional movie theater.

The First Cinema and the VJing space

During the first cinematographic exhibitions, from 1895 to 1907, cinema was not a localized practice. In fact, we may say that there was no appropriate place for it, as most exhibitions were itinerant. [15] The place for cinema was created slowly, by the cinematographic institution itself, as it became consolidated as an economically stable practice. [16]

The first cinema screenings were held in places traditionally dedicated to public entertainment, such as fairs, amusement parks, vaudevilles and cafés. [17] These places made possible the commercial exploration of the display. There, movies were presented as it better suited the setting: as spectacle or scientific curiosity; sometimes after a can-can show, sometimes in the place of the bearded woman. Cinematographic experience was not only contaminated, but completely defined by the organization of the place where the projection was done and by the traditional behavior of its patrons. The viewing regime was vulnerable to the most diverse influences:

Movies were watched in different ways, and had a wide degree of meanings, depending on the localization and status of the theatre; on the ethnical and racial qualities of its habitual audience; on the mix of genders and ages; on the ambitions and abilities of the exhibitor and the acting crew. [18]

It is interesting to note that aspects related to film production are not mentioned by Fell. That is because, at that time, a film was not dissociable from its exhibition – or, as Flávia Costa says, “it only appeared in its presentation-performance”. [19] The economic structure of cinema was very similar to that of live audiovisual performance today. The manufacturers of cinematographic apparatus not only made the movies for their equipments, but also took on the role of projectionists. For some time, the Lumière brothers even tried to hold monopoly of screening, renting their cinematographer (along with a technician) to any outlet interested. That strategy proved to be an economic failure, as equivalent equipment – like the vitascope – appeared on the market. By 1897, the French brothers had already given up the idea, and were selling units of their invention to whoever could afford. [20]

That illustrates how, in the beginning of cinema, the allure of moviegoing was in the apparatus. People did not go to the movies (a place that did not exist yet), neither went to see a movie (a product that did not had any autonomous existence). In fact, the audience was just interested in witnessing the marvels of the Lumière’s cinematographer [21]or Edison’s vitascope. [22] Individually, movies did not worth much. Disconnected from the appropriate projection apparatus, they were reduced to the most banal materiality. Even during projection, a film alone was nothing. For many reasons, especially technical ones, a film did not last long enough to fulfill an entire screening session. That regime was culturally reinforced. As early as 1925, speaking about Chicago’s Capitol Theater, John Eberson already said: “variety is the primary demand of an amusement-loving public”. [23]

This lack of concern with movie specificity was reflected in the treatment it received as a product. Film reels were originally sold to the exhibitor. Since they were relatively short and cheap to produce, the most efficient way to profit from their production was selling them to the movie theaters. The value was determined in the most material way possible: by its length in meters. [24] This structure lasted until the 1910s, when the producers started renting film copies. Until then, the exhibitors’ control over screening sessions was almost absolute. As Suzanne Schiller says, “when a print is sold outright to the exhibitor it may displayed and used without limitation”. [25]

This control had a deep influence on the way film appeared on screen, in a way that can be compared to the live-editing performed by VJs. “Throughout the 1890s”, says Charles Musser, “the exhibitor thus had a creative control over a variety of elements that we would now call post-production”. [26]

In organizing and presenting sequences of short films they not only shaped meaning but created it. […] Programming and editing were, in this respect, not yet distinct phenomena. [27]

For that reason, Musser says that narrative was not strange to the cinema of attractions. According to him, the first exhibition of the vitascope would have created “a highly structure, if oblique, narrative”. [28] But it is useless to look for a common coherence in the six works screened in that 23rd April 1896 night, since the narrative would have been built exclusively during it ensemble display.

Because of the extremely unregulated viewing conditions, the meaning created in the exhibition, even though ephemeral, invariably overcame any discursive arrangement originally present in the movies. In 1911, in a review ironically entitled The Murder of Othello, H. F. Hoffman reports a particularly catastrophic screening of a cinematographic version of Shakespeare’s play. “He was murdered by an operator last night”. [29] Among several mistakes committed by the so-called operator, the most serious was putting the film in reverse, so that “the title and sub-titles came through reading backwards”. Instead of stopping the screening to correct this error, the projectionist tried to “disguise” it, fast-forwarding the movie every time the titles showed up. Doing that, he transformed the drama into comedy, and ended up attracting more attention to himself than to what was on screen.

In Hoffman’s critic, we can already note a certain concern with “the one thing that brings the people to the place”, the movie. [30] It is also evident how hard it was to maintain the coherence of this element. The exhibition techniques (and technologies) were not automatic at all, and the perfect reproduction of a work depended on the arrangement of a series of factors over which there was merely functional standardization. If we ally these conditions of exhibition to the inattentive audience of the first movie theaters, we will get a picture that resembles the contemporary VJing spaces.

Originally, cinema did not have a specific audience; it borrowed its public from the various places that it had invaded. These patrons brought with them a series of cognitive expectations that the screening was never obliged to fulfill, but the producers couldn’t do otherwise, in order to keep their job commercially viable. There was no way to control the audience. The audience controlled the exhibitions.

The front row is invariably filled with children kicking their heels, giggling and talking for the pictures. The audience as a whole indulges in fervent hand-clapping at frequent intervals. The boys love to whistle accompaniments to the music, regardless of either tune or time. [31]

Although the last paragraph refers to the sufferings of the piano players in the nickelodeons, it describes rather well the behavior of the audience in the first cinematographic exhibitions. Here, there is no vestige of the superperception and the submotricity that Christian Metz considered indispensable for a cinematographic situation – but who can deny that it constitutes one? [32]

When the first outlets for movie exhibition appeared, around 1905, the frivolous posture of the vaudeville audience was imported into them. These places were called nickelodeons, a term that combines the Greek word for theater, Odeon, to the coin whose value corresponded to the ticket, the nickel. Russel Merritt says that the typical nickelodeon was “a small uncomfortable makeshift theater, usually a converted dancehall, restaurant, pawnshop, or cigar store, made over to look like a vaudeville emporium”. [33]

Not by chance, the audience commonly associated with the nickelodeons is the proletarian and immigrants of the big cities. [34] At that time, the commercial exploration of entertainment was especially favored by the reduction of working hours and the increase of middle class family revenue. [35] Venues of every kind appeared all along the cities. Among them, the only ones that were compatible with working class life rhythm were the nickelodeons.

For that reason, the nickelodeons were soon converted into some kind of refuge for the ghetto population. What was on the screen did not matter; the important was to be there. Merritt suggests that, to these people, going to the movie theater was a way to escape from the crowded slums and the insalubrious factories. [36] It was also a way to socialize with other people: the projection room, the unique space in the nickelodeons, soon became a socializing space.

In a 1909 newspaper article, Jane Addams reports that the movie theater “is also fast becoming the general social center and club house in many crowded neighborhoods. […] The room which contains the […] stage is small and cozy, and less formal than the regular theater, and there is much more gossip and social life as if the foyer and pit were mingled”. [37] Rosenzweig says that the patrons adopted an “interactive, lively, and often rowdy public behavior” [38] that does not seem very different from the behavior of the audience in vaudevilles and cafés. Nevertheless, even though this behavior was completely appropriated for the cinematographic exhibitions in these other venues, it did not suit the theatre atmosphere – the parameter according to which the nickelodeons intended to compare cinematographic exhibitions.

For many scholars, that creates a romantic aura around the nickelodeons and the beginning of the cinema. But the truth was not really like this, especially because the exhibitors never intended to offer a democratic entertainment – they were after a profitable business. It was out of necessity, not by choice, that they welcomed workers, immigrants and the unemployed. As soon as it became possible, they tried to control the behavior of the spectators and raise the status of the audience. Nevertheless, it were the nickelodeons that established a standard for national film distribution, and built the base for a broad audience, without which cinematographic exhibition would never have reached its full potential. In 1910, there were around 10.000 movie theatres in the USA. These theatres created a demand for 150 new film rolls every week. [39]

The economic importance of cinema grew continuously, up to a point that it became necessary to control movie reproduction, suppressing audience reactions and commoditizing the projection in order to make it more profitable. This was only achieved by the naturalization of the cinema situation, which came to be considered the essential condition for film watching, and not only one of its modalities. This naturalization provoked the transformation of the exhibition space into a transparent structure. [40] The movie theater denies its own existence, offering a mediatized cultural message (the movie) as if there was no contingent code behind it (the architectural-social-economic complex).

In that sense, it seems that the reluctance of the cinematographic institution in accepting the digitization of the distribution and projection systems is because such a shift would make cinema non-transparent condition clear, rendering obvious the use of the cinema situation as a way to control movie consumption and reproduction. Nevertheless, it would certainly make cinema more like in its first years – or more like live audiovisual performance. The VJing projection system is completely opaque. It leaves deep marks in the projected material. The software used in the projection is more important to define its rhythmic and aesthetical qualities than the collection of visual loops projected – the “projection mechanism” is once again paramount over the “movies”.

Indeed, any minimal action of the audience has much more importance to its experience of the projection than anything the VJ might do. The spatial organization of VJing does not give the projection a privileged place, and creates a very particular relation between the public’s gaze and “cinematographic” experience. It does not try to channel the spectator’s attention to the image: spectator and image, are in continuous movement, meeting each other sporadically in the course of the projection.

We may even say that, in live audiovisual performances, the projection mechanism, the space and the audience itself are in a mobilized virtual condition. [41] The VJing space works as a projection room that, instead of trying to connect the spectator’s gaze and the movie through the cinema situation, let them free to wander, so that they can find each other on their own, in a new form of cinematographic exploration. Image and space, man and machine, swallow each other.

References

[1] Hark: 7.

[2] Costa: 58.

[3] Mauerhofer: 375.

[4] Andrew: 164.

[5] Hark: 2.

[6] Idem: 3.

[7] De Luca: 204.

[8] For example, in newspaper articles like “Digital Projection displeases Specialists”, published in Folha de São Paulo, in 29/12/05.

[9] Idem: 21.

[10] Idem: 149.

[11] This paragraph could also refer to the phonographic industry. Assaulted by digital technologies, the phonographic industry insists on an obsolete economic model, adopting such technologies just to maintain this model.

[12] Hark: 1.

[13] Brackage: 350.

[14] The standardization of the sound system is a good example of this. Gregory Waller says that the invention of sound helped “regulate and perhaps standardize” the whole movie exhibition in the USA (Waller: 175).

[15] Herzog: 54.

[16] Projection made such stability possible. See Gomery: 7.

[17] Machado: 78.

[18] John Fell, in Costa: 54.

[19] Costa: 60.

[20] Mannoni: 450.

[21] About the Lumière brothers’ first cinematographic exhibitions, see Mannoni: 449.

[22] The first film screenings in the USA were actually “exhibitions of Edison’s vitascope” that took place in the Koster & Bial’s Music Hall, in Nova York, 1986 (Musser: 13).

[23] Eberson: 106.

[24] Schiller: 107.

[25] Idem: 107.

[26] Musser: 17.

[27] Idem: 17.

[28] Idem: 17.

[29] Hoffman: 73.

[30] Yet, it is a kind of “movie review” that doesn’t evaluate the film (it does not even name its director or its production company). It just evaluates one of its reproductions. That shows how cinema was still focused in the exhibition, since movies did not exist beyond it.

[31] Boblitz: 138.

[32] Metz: 409.

[33] Merritt: 22.

[34] Machado: 79.

[35] Rosenzweig: 30.

[36] Merritt: 23.

[37] In Rosenzweig: 34.

[38] Idem: 32.

[39] Merritt: 22.

[40] Manovich: 64.

[41] Friedberg: 2.

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