Cinema/Film

To ask about cinema is not the same to ask about film. Cinema is the metaphysical idea (of cinema) and not the phenomenological “thing itself.” It is bereft of materiality in its escape into a dream-like immateriality. Cinema is not film. It is the death of film (from the moment darkness settles in, the materials disappear in the dark fabric of an abysmal masking device). Film is not cinema. Film goes up against the grain (but it has no grain) of cinema. It is the rotting flesh made up of bones and other corporal beasts lurking in the dark, suspended in a murky substance. The organic nature of film is the long intestine (umbilical/spinal chord) unwinding and slithering silently behind our backs (our spines), wrapping its infinite coil (or noose?) ever so swiftly around our necks! The death of film is not the death of cinema. Disembodied/disemboweled from an apparent (though not transparent) darkness, film is cut loose from its immaterial bond (its false disappearance, its fake death) and made to roam the world for the first time. Film can do without cinema once and for all. While cinema pretends to be continued…