A digital cinematic museum of the everyday
A digital cinematic museum of the everyday
复制标题
日常生活的数字电影博物馆
作者:
Schupp J
The everyday–our daily habits and activities–is seldom closely observed as we go about our life. As Jim Jarmusch has noted,‘In a way the most ordinary things are the strangest of all’. 1 This strangeness is one possible result of our paradoxical unfamiliarity with our own everyday, what Georges Perec calls ‘a form of blindness, a mode of anaesthesia’, 2 due to prolonged immersion. The omnipresence of the everyday might be the very factor that renders it invisible. We would, for example, struggle to recall and analyse in any detail the way we ate breakfast this morning, did the laundry yesterday afternoon, or fell asleep last night. Cinema, however, right from the Lumiere brothers’ observations of such banal activities as having breakfast or leaving work, has always been fascinated by the topic. In the words of Siegfried Kracauer,‘It might tentatively be said that films favour life in the form of everyday life’. 3 Through the very act of filming, the unconsciously experienced everyday may be consciously rediscovered and investigated by the eye of the camera, the ears of the microphone and the temporal rhythms of the editing. As Walter Benjamin has written,‘the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions’ and as a result ‘introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulse’. 4 If fiction films offer a profound cinematic treatment of the everyday, Richard Deming notes too that ‘to represent the ordinary is always to be interpreting it through the process of representing it, and to interpret the ordinary is ever to discover it anew’. 5 The filmic collection of the everyday generated by cinema thus provides research note