Matinee

Cinema is more than just the film itself. It is a dispositif that connect two elements: a closed space separated from the everyday world and a screen which allows the audience to come back into contact with the reality they’ve been separated from by way of moving images. Why this withdrawal from the world? And why this reconnection with reality via images? Francesco Casetti (Yale University) attempts to answer these comprehensive theoretical questions in his “Cinema as a Protective Medium” lecture. He thus examines whether cinema can replace how we are exposed to the world via a “mediated immediacy”. This idea of the protection and mediation of modern media is expanded on via an analysis of   Joe Dante’s MATINEE (USA 1993) – an ideal metaphor of our time, as Casetti remarks.
The Cinepoetics Lectures are a series put on by the research group of the same name at the Freie Universität Berlin. (Hannes Wesselkämper)