Scale and the Negotiation of ‘Real’ and ‘Unreal’ Space in the Cinema

Abstract

The question of realism in the cinema has traditionally hinged on either the indexicality of the photographic image and sound (the approach of Andr Bazin) or generic or classical Hollywood conventions that produce an effect of the ‘real’ (characterizing the apparatus theory and so-called ‘Screen theory’ of the 1970s). However, the issue of cinematic scale and its relation to a sense of either the real or the unreal has remained largely unexamined. This is curious because a significant event in the historical emergence of the cinema was the projection of the image – a projection that allowed a larger sized image as well as a transition from the individual spectator of the kinetoscope or optical toy to the community of spectators labelled an audience. And much of the discourse around issues of scale in the early cinema centred around an anxiety about preserving the ‘life-size’ qualities of projected bodies, as though a defence were necessary against the spectacular possibilities of the gigantic image. With cinema and the accomplished projection of the illusion of movement came an increase in abstraction as well as one of scale. Now untouchable, at a distance, the image had the potential to become gigantic, ‘larger than life’. The viewer, who could dominate, manipulate the optical toy or kinetoscope, controlling the speed and timing of its production of movement, became dominated, overwhelmed and dispossessed in relation to an image that seemed to be liberated from the obligation of dimension.