The Geometry of Cinema Events

Title

The Geometry of Cinema Events

Description

The textual center is no longer the focal point of a series of concentric rings. Instead, like the pinhole at a center of an hourglass, [the text] serves as a point of interchange between two "V" shapes, one representing the work of production, the other figuring the process of reception. Beginning as a subset of culture at large, one "V" progressively narrows as the work of film production runs its course, first broadly, with diverse ideas and scripts, sets and rushes, technicians and rewrites, until eventually the work of production has been resolved into a single narrow product: the text. The process of reception then broadens out again, eventually reaching the point where it is indistinguishable from the culture in general. … [T]his hourglass system is entirely reversible. Just as production flows through the text toward reception, so reception regularly influences production.
Each "V" opens out onto an infinite cultural space, containing other cinema events, that eventually bends back around toward the opposite "V". In other words, this Moebius vessel fails to distinguish between inside and outside, though it does have two distinct domains of interchange: the narrow textual isthmus connecting the two "V"s, and the indeterminate peripheral culture which offers any number of avenues of interchange between the open ends of the two "V"s.
Because this new type of geometry does not allow for clear distinctions between inside and outside, between top and bottom, the event that is cinema cannot be identified as privileging one particular aspect of the system. Instead, the cinema event is constituted by a continuing interchange, neither beginning nor ending at any specific point. No fixed trajectory characterizes this interchange, nor is it possible to predict which aspect of the system will influence which other aspect.

Designer

Altman, Rick

Date

1992

Source

Sound Theory, Sound Practice

Bibliographic Citation

Altman, Rick. 1992. Sound Theory, Sound Practice. Routledge. Pages 3-4.

depict things of type

Sequence or Process

Cyclical

is composed of

Circle

has attribute

Arrow

Solid Line

Alternative Title

Culture/Text

Coverage

film

text