1
“broadcast TV cannot wipe out cinema any more than cinema was able to wipe out theatre.” But every next generation is bigger: theatre is tiny, cinema bigger, TV huge

10
“Sophisticated new technology always seems to provoke a flurry of wild and naive speculation about its effects.”

11f
“The technology alone does not create the use to which it is put: technology is implemented (or, as with most inventions, never implemented) according to the prevailing patterns of use into which it can be fitted, and according to the emerging forms of social organisation with which it can align itself.”

12
“TV lines up with (and inflects) the increasing domestic use of technology, the emphasis on home and family as site of consumption; cinema lined up with (and superseded) public forms of entertainment like vaudeville and music hall, the sites of public enjoyment and of the development of non-religious mass ideologies.”

16
TV & newspapers feed off each other.

24f
“The form of the entertainment film is one reason for the confusion between cinema and broadcast TV. The entertainment film can be broadcast on TV, hence it seems as though there is little real difference between the two media. Two immediate objections can be made to this assumption. First, a film on TV yields a very different experience to its viewer, unless that viewer is able to suspend the sense of watching TV and imagine instead the sense of being in a cinema. Second, it is not possible to show broadcast TV material in a cinema in the way that it is possible to show films on TV. Broadcast TV has developed its own forms, those of the serial and the series, which resist showing in the ‘single work’ form that cinema imposes.”

25f
“Cinema marketing sells two rather distinct things: the single film in its uniqueness and its similarity to other films; and the experience of cinema itself. Cinema and film are both sold at the same point, at the point of sale of an admission ticket. It is not the film that is sold at this point, it is the possibility of viewing a film or films; it is not cinema as an object that is sold, but cinema as an anticipated experience.”

26
“tickets are sold […] on the expectation of pleasure.”
“What is bought in the cinema is the possibility of a pleasurable performance: the performance of a particular film and the performance of cinema itself, both together.”

26f
“Cinema in this way becomes a very precise urban experience, that of the crowd with its sense of belonging and of loneliness. Alternatively, cinema in smaller communities tends to perform a different function when most of the audience are acquainted with each other. Here the entertainment is related to particular characteristics of individuals or of the place itself. The film comes from outside, the cinema belongs to the particular place. However, such group experiences of cinema are becoming more and more rare, and cinema is now characteristically an urban phenomenon, [especially in Britain].”

27
“‘picture palaces’ [are] now the subject of nostalgic photo-books: simple brick shells decorated in bizarre and rich styles, and usually of a massive size to emphasise the grandeur of the cinematic experience.”

28
1920s: “The couple visiting the cinema during this period experienced cinema as an integrated succession of entertainments that went far beyond the simple experience of viewing a film together in a more or less anonymous crowd.”

30
“An idea of the film is widely circulated and promoted, an idea which can be called the ‘narrative image’ of the film, the cinema industry’s anticipatory reply to the question ‘What is this film like?'” => The narrative image is the promise -> the film is the realisation of that promise.
“Payment for a ticket is not an endorsement of a film, nor is it an endorsement of a particular performance of a film in a particular place. It is an endorsement of the narrative image of the film, together with the general sense of the cinematic experience.”
“Cinema demands single films, complete in themselves and distinct from other films.”

37
“The experience offered is one in which an individual film will complete the enigma of the narrative image. The experience of cinema that is offered is one of the public viewing of images with their supporting sounds. These images and sounds, viewed in the particular circumstances of the cinema, produce a particular kind of spectating that is intense and sustained.” Is this any different from TV / home cinema nowadays?

38-61
Ellis uses psychoanalysis to describe the relationship between cinema & viewer? Interesting, but I don’t agree.

38
Cinema is constructed in another time & place => absent from the place in which the viewing takes place => yet it is (very) present.

40
“Commercial cinema, in increasing its scale and scope as far as possible, tries to standardise its audiences to the same kinds of attention to the screen.”
In cinema everybody is alone and in near-darkness => particular kind of mental state: “a concentration of psychic activity into a state of hyper-receptivity”: dream-like, close to sleep => “what is seen is not subject to the usual expectations of plausibility that we apply to everyday life.”

41f
Cinema provokes identification with:

1. apparatus of projection (beam of light from projector = imagined beam of light from spectators’ eyes),
2. narcissistic identification with any figure on screen.

42
“[the] partial suspension of the judging function of the ego [is] necessary for the activities of day-dreaming and the construction of fantasies.” The ghost and the shell are not unified anymore -> one looks at oneself from the outside.

43
“Both dreaming and fantasy deal with fragmented and contradictory representations of figures” (oneself)

45
The spectator is looking at something that doesn’t look back at him = voyeurism.

47
Voyeurism is what constitutes the pleasure & fascination with cinema. I don’t agree, it’s about story.

50
“Gazing is the constitutive activity of cinema. Broadcast TV demands a rather different kind of looking: that of the glance. Gazing at the TV is a sign of intensity of attention that is usually considered slightly inappropriate to the medium.”
“As the conventions for the depiction of reality change, so audiences tend to deride what once was taken as ‘the real’ as being spectacular or a fake.” Perhaps why I don’t like classic films that much?

51
“entertainment cinema has been concerned […] to play between the [spectacle and reality], to make the real spectacular and the spectacle plausible.”

53
“The cinema image is routinely more elaborate and detailed than the TV image.”