Introduction

It has become commonplace to discuss cinema as a phenomenon that has introduced a universally comprehensible and yet deeply contradictory logic to the visible—some even speak of a new “ontology”. So ubiquitous is the moving image in our urban environment that its impact cannot simply be located in individual films, however many canons of cult movies, classics, or masterpieces we choose to construct. By making ‘visible’ much of life past and present, large and small, animate and inanimate, however, cinema has also created new domains of the ‘invisible’—a point that is becoming increasingly important, both positively and negatively, as we worry about our vanishing ‘privacy’ but also as we realize that what is not caught by a camera simply no longer either matters or even exists.

At the same time, key elements of cinematic perception have become internalised also as our modes of cognition and embodied experience, such that the ‘cinema effect’ may be most present where its apparatus and technologies are least perceptible. Cinema's role in transforming the past and historical representation into collective memory is now a matter of intense debate, while its ‘invisible hand’ in our affective life and in our modes of being-in-the-world—our ontologies—has preoccupied both psychoanalysis and philosophy. Likewise, theories of cinematic spectatorship, initially elaborated around class and (immigrant) ethnicity, have been extended to gender, race, and other forms of cultural identity. Broadened to encompass issues of modernity, mass consumption, and metropolitan life, research on spectatorship has also been asking political questions about media citizenship or has been worried about the ethics of performativity, where authenticity is ‘hiding in the light’. As a consequence, cinema as bodily perception, thought, and affect, has moved center stage in film theory, debated by followers of Gilles Deleuze as passionately as by cognitivists, while the increasingly complicated relation between “seeing” and “knowing” is at the conceptual core of much of contemporary video and installation art.