Nolan Gear

Scholars assessing the imaginative contact between literature and early cinema have largely missed the moviegoer, who wanders off or risks getting lost in the dark. Image, close-up, montage, projection: these and other “technical” elements more quickly cohere, appear more self-evidently formal. As David Trotter put it in Cinema and Modernism, our understanding of literature’s relationship to cinema is all too often “committed . . . to argument by analogy.” Within modernist studies, a film-centered formalism has defined many if not most approaches to charting cinema’s influence. Because film and text have such intriguing affinities—they represent through inscription and are experienced syntagmatically—the temptation is to (merely) conceive both as forms of writing, each with respective “techniques” that the other might imitate, annotate, or disavow. Colin MacCabe’s claim that “it is impossible to imagine the form of either Ulysses or The Waste Land without the developments of film editing” is exemplary of this tendency, but newer, more nuanced incarnations proliferate. Against film’s easily fetishized materiality and imitable techniques, movie going is harder to hold onto. It is modal rather than textual, performed rather than inscribed. In deploying moviegoing as a keyword, my intention is to foreground cinema’s peculiar sociality while moderating scholars’ over-reliance on medium specificity, turning from the hypostases of film form to the variegated practices of attendance. As streaming services proliferate, we can more clearly recognize moviegoing as a specific feature of cinema’s cultural and aesthetic history, rather than its only or purest form. Twenty-first-century viewing habits—at home, in our beds, on our laptops—expose moviegoing’s “givenness” to be anything but. Instead of the axiomatic, invisible, essentially unremarkable means through which cinema is/was accessed, moviegoing is better understood as a historically specific, expressive, and altogether strange modality through which cinema is/was performed. Moviegoing requires and produces a constitutive tension between individual and collective experience, promising both solitude and congregation, absorption within assembly. A moviegoing audience literalizes Michael Warner’s claim that a public “unites strangers through participation alone, at least in theory.” Viewers are gathered in temporary, anonymous, but profound intimacy.