Page 19 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Introduction 9

our sense of the historical continuum of events is inextricable from our
understanding of the developments in the technology with which those
events were filmed. But if cinema cannot be dislodged by criticism, it can
at least be better understood. This involves, in part, thinking through
the way in which the sense of the here and the now of the political has
been irrevocably transformed by cinema. Cinema was always destined to
leave the planet, to rediscover Earth as the reality of the miraculous. Since
everything has been reinscribed on the shed skin of light that may or may
not be spooled on a reel of film, the question of cinema can no longer be
posed from outside of cinema. There is no authoritative vantage ground
from which a normative judgment could be passed concerning cinema as
such. The question, because it now belongs to cinema, asks, "What can
cinema do?"