04JUN|06JUN|08JUN|09JUN|2019 (better quality version here) (pencil, eraser, paper, rotoscopy; filmstills: the seventh seal {1957, ingmar bergman}, water; quote: gilles deleuze: cinema 1. the movement-image, collage)

Cinema 1 Marks 25 Years in Business this Month!

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GUELPH, ON – Cinema 1 is proud to announce its 25th year in the movie retail business. With over 10,000 titles available at each of its seven locations across Southern Ontario, the small local chain continues to defy the digital streaming trend.

To celebrate this milestone, Cinema 1 will be holding an anniversary sale this month, focusing on films released in 1992 as well as some of the most iconic films of the last 25 years.

“It’s nice to look back at all the titles that we’ve sold in the last 25 years,” says owner Alan McCrae, “Hopefully our customers can get a sense of nostalgia and re-watch some of their old favourites.”

McCrae credits Cinema 1’s selection, prices, and service for its success as traffic and sales continue to increase every year.

“We are a specialty store, so we are able to help customers find a wide range of titles. We have smaller stores staffed with very knowledgeable movie lovers who can help people find what they’re looking for,” McCrae explains.

Then

Back in 1992, when the home entertainment market was mostly saturated with video rental stores, McCrae and Brent Freeman, two local radio station employees, saw an opportunity to tap into the sell-through market.

Cinema 1’s flagship location opened in Stone Road Mall over the August ’92 long weekend, carrying approximately 3000 titles for sale on VHS as well as a small LaserDisc section. The very first film sold was a copy of Hook, just one minute after opening.

“On the first day, I thought that we made the perfect decision, but the next day, we only sold one movie,” McCrae reflects. “Sales weren’t very good for a whole year, actually, so we had to make the decision to either close or reinvest more money and move within the mall.”

Since then, Cinema 1 has opened locations in London, Burlington, Windsor, Cambridge, Hamilton, and Barrie, and has carried a variety of formats over the years – most notably VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K UltraHD Blu-ray.

Now

Over two decades later, with digital streaming services on the rise, Cinema 1 continues to be an asset for movie lovers across all demographics.

“For true movie lovers, ownership is still important,” says McCrae. “It’s not like a streaming service where you’re watching something and it disappears. That copy is yours and you can watch it whenever you want.”

McCrae also notes that picture and sound quality are always going to be a major factor, along with the additional bonus features that are often only available on physical release.

In addition to the 25th anniversary sale, Cinema 1 will be launching a brand new web store in August to provide customers with more information and access to the store’s extensive directory.

 Fathom Events, Cinema 1 and Eagle Rock Entertainment to Bring a Year of Exciting Cinema Concerts to Select U.S. Cinemas

Fathom Events, Cinema 1 and Eagle Rock Entertainment are partnering to present a monthly “Classic Music Series” to be kicked off by legendary Rock and Roll Hall of Famers, Aerosmith. Fans will be blown away by Aerosmith on the big screen for a special one-night concert event on…

Yesterday in class we talked about the "horizon of understanding" and what your hypothesis is. Basically, you what this means is that you have two premises and the connection between those premises is your hypothesis. For instance, in my research I have affect and interactive video and the connections between those is my hypothesis ie. affective interactive video, and what that means. The "horizon of understanding" is the intersections between these bodies of knowledge and how it is not about using Deleuze's affection-image to provide a grid over which to think about interactive video, but to look at how interactive video and affect push towards each other and the affordances of each and how they work together.

This is something that I feel that I am more able to do now after reading some of Adrian's articles on softvideography, because they look at how softvideography is different from hardvideography, or in other words how interactive video is different from cinema. Therefore I can use this to think about affect, and the overlapping points between how Deleuze conceptualises affect and how softvideography is conceptualised.

'The recognition that each track within the work is in fact capable of being an independent entity is a major paradigmatic shift in terms of traditional cinematic practice' 

(Miles, "Softvideography")

This differs greatly from cinematic practice, where 'decisions are singular, as one shot is selected in lieu of another and then inserted into a fixed sequence' (Miles, "Softvideography"). In other words in the softvideographic possibility that each individual video can be connected with numerous other videos each video loses it's reliability on other shots to create sequential meaning. This defines a clear connective point with Deleuze's affection-image due to it's position as an entity, ie. 

'the close-up does not tear away its object from a set of which it would form part, of which it would be part, but on the contrary it abstracts it from all spatio-temporal co-ordinates, that is to say it raises it to the state of Entity' (98, Deleuze)

and

'The affect is entity, that is Power or Quality. It is something expressed: the affect does not exist independently of something which expresses it, although it is completely distinct from it.' (99, Deleuze) 

and

'The affect is independent of all determinate space-time; but it is none the less created in a history which produces it as the expressed and the expression of a space or a time, of an epoch or milieu (this is why the affect is 'new' and new affects are ceaselessly created, notably by the work of art).' (101, Deleuze)

The affect image exists, to some extent, independently of the spatial and temporal coordinates of canonical and sequential narration. For instance, in The Passion of Joan of Arc, her quality of sadness exists as an independent entity of expression, in Dreyer's framing of her face in a close-up, which presents her face against a white non-determined background. This shot presents her sadness in and for itself it presents sadness as separate from what caused that sadness. 

Therefore due to the position of Deleuze's affection-image as single entity, which does not refer explicitly to what determined it or what it will determine it holds a clear connective point to interactive video, which presents videos as single entities, the videos have to exist in and for themselves. In other words the hypothesis of my research because of this connection is that Deleuze's affection-image provides an image which is the most appropriate for interactive video because it expresses a power or quality in and for itself, and therefore due to one of the fundamentals of what constitutes softvideography as differential from cinema is that the video elements of the work remain as independent entities (Miles, "Softvideography")

Cited works:

Miles, Adrian. “Softvideography.” Cybertext Yearbook 2002-2003. Ed. Markku Eskelinen et al. Jyvaskylan: Research Center for Contemporary Culture, 2003. 218–236. . <http://cybertext.hum.jyu.fi/articles/118.pdf>.

I haven't blogged about Cinema 1 and Deleuze for quite a while and I think it about time that I returned to it and kept returning to it and it has been way too long of a break. In continuing my research I really need to focus on affect and Deleuze, as Adrian noted Deleuze and affect is my theory and that everything around it is fluff, well to some extent. I feel that perhaps I have sidetracked a lot and that I really need to focus on what affect is and how to talk about what affect is and therefore will be in a better position to use affect as a framework for my interactive video work.

Ok so I recently, and more importantly finally, finished Cinema 1, which I will probably have to re-read over the semester break because a lot of it I cannot understand and I also haven't summed up all the chapters in this blog. This post is going to focus on the last chapter, which is The Crisis of the Action-Image, I found that this chapter was a lot more clearer than the previous two on the action-image, which I found extremely difficult. This chapter to my understanding leads into Deleuze's second cinema book as it discusses the end of the movement-image, with particular emphasis on American cinema, Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave. What Deleuze contends is that Hitchcock brought the movement-image as far as it could possibly be stretched, and a new image has been born, where the 'sensory-motor links tend to disappear, a whole sensory-motor continuity which forms the essential nature of the action-image vanishes' (217). In other words the links between perception, affection and action are broken because these linkages are seen to be in some sense false because:

'We hardly believe any longer that a global situation can give rise to an action which is capable of modifying it-no more than we believe that an action can force a situation to disclose itself, even partially.'

(211)

Ie. the cinema image changed in terms of the organisation of montage because the realism in that a perception could lead to an action became somewhat unrealistic in that most perceptions aren't realised within the state-of-things, and more prominantly than that the SAS (situation-action-(changed) situation) becomes redundant because it was unrealistic that action could really change a situation.

In my own cinema studies experience watching Godard really reminded me of this chapter where what characters say and does not become actualised but more-or-less remains in the any-space-whatever.

In the development of my precursor project I feel as though through the fragmentation of the narrative there is a displacement of the actual state-of-things, where the contextualisation you are given at the beginning of The Passion of Joan of Arc has been removed and you are left with the emotive repercussions. The affections only belong to faces and the context in which those affections were made no longer exists. This to me suggests this form of image, which Deleuze discusses in this final chapter because the motor-schema has been displaced by pure affections. 

I guess what problemises this for me is that if the affection-image exists within the motor-schema alongside perception and action the placement of it within a fragmented non-linear narrative removes the affection from the action and perception, and leaves these pure affections somewhat outside the schema and within this other image as Deleuze notes within this chapter. Or in other words the multilinearity has allowed for the affection-image to be more pronounced. When Deleuze discusses The Passion of Joan of Arc, he views it within this light:

'It is the anger of the bishop and the martyrdom of Joan; but, all that will be preserved from the roles and situations will be what is needed for the affect to be extracted and to carry out its conjunctions- this 'power' of anger or of ruse, this 'quality' of victim or martyrdom.'

(110)