Toward a new politics of film watching
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- 2 days ago
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Updated: 23 hours ago
I grew up in the 1990s in a small city in northern Greece, in the strange optimism of an era shaped by European funds and the doom of the arrival of "hungry" immigrants from formerly socialist countries. Our households filled with the symbols of a newly formed middle class, new TV sets, VHS players, Hi-Fi stereos, and soon CD players, all supported by the cheap labor of newly arrived “neighbors.” Cinema, at least in the communal sense, was fading.
In 1998, just a year after the box-office explosion of Titanic, the city’s only cinema, Apollon, closed due to low attendance. It would remain dark for over a decade. Videoclubs, meanwhile, flourished. Their shelves, alphabetized, sun-bleached, endlessly touched, felt like the true cultural heart of the city. The last one finally closed in 2024, five years after Apollon reopened as a multiplex, precisely during the peak of the Avengers franchise.
I became a filmmaker despite, or perhaps because of, this absence of a collective movie-going culture. My cinematic education was not shaped by a big screen but by a letterbox TV and the sound of tape rewinding itself back to the beginning. Who can tell the implications of that loss? Cinema had already been dying in its communal form long before streaming appeared, eroded by VHS and the hypnotic glow of private television channels. Few mourned the cinema’s disappearance. Even fewer fought to keep it alive.
Walter Benjamin’s famous diagnosis feels eerily familiar in retrospect. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), he argued that the reproducibility of images diminishes their “aura”, their unique presence in time and space, their ritualistic grounding. Cinema, in it's era, was both the disease and the cure: while mechanically reproduced, it still required a gathering of bodies in a shared space.
Yet in my 1990s northern Greek town, that ritual collapsed. Cinema migrated from the public square into private living rooms. Films became infinitely rewound fragments. Benjamin would say the aura had not just waned, it had become dispersed across a million screens, breaking the “here and now” into an endless “whenever.”
But something else happened, too. Films, in their VHS form, acquired a different power.
Hito Steyerl, in her essay A Thing Like You and Me, argues that digital (and by extension, analog) images are not ethereal or dematerialized but things: marked, worn, scarred by the histories and infrastructures through which they travel. They bear the bruises of their circulation, compression artifacts, rewinding marks, fingerprints, and the faded colors of overplayed tapes.
For me, VHS was not a degraded copy of a cinematic event; it was the event. It was the object I touched, rewound, borrowed, returned, and handled until the tape’s magnetic surface wore out. The few tapes I owned were precious and kept behind a glass vitrine.
Steyerl’s insight reveals a paradox: while the cinema room gives film aura, the living room gives film objecthood. The image becomes a thing in the world, shaped by hands, devices, and technological constraints.
Cinema thus has power both inside and outside the cinema.
Inside the cinema, film retains its capacity to create a temporary community. A dark room, a large screen, and the synchronized attention of strangers generate an intensity that cannot be reproduced at home. The film becomes an event, a here-and-now that reclaims some of the aura Benjamin feared we would lose.
When Apollon reopened as a multiplex, the communal experience returned but in a new form. It arrived with Marvel’s universe of spectacles, the kind of franchise that thrives on collective affect: cheering, gasping, laughing audiences. Even if this return came through blockbusters, the ritual returned nonetheless.
Cinema’s power inside the cinema is spatial, social, and affective. It is a technology of gathering.
Yet cinema also exerts power far beyond the boundaries of the theater.
As Steyerl reminds us, images become active agents in the world: circulating through devices, data centers, algorithms, televisions, and streaming portals. My generation encountered cinema primarily through these circulating images, damaged, remediated, degraded, paused, studied. In the absence of theaters, films lived in our homes, and our TV schedule magazines.
Even in the age of streaming, the power of this “external cinema” intensifies. When Netflix now absorbs giants like HBO and Warner Bros, it reinforces the force Benjamin warned about: the total integration of the artwork into an exhibition-value economy. In other words, the film becomes less a shared ritual or collective experience, more a fungible item in a global media economy. The “thingness” of film becomes increasingly literal. But it also highlights Steyerl’s point: images become things moved by corporate infrastructures, shaped by platform politics, metadata hierarchies, and global algorithms.
Cinema’s power outside the cinema is material, infrastructural, and political. It is a technology of circulation.
Cinema is not dying. It is multiplying.
And maybe the lesson from my small Greek town is that cinema never needed to survive in one form to persist in another. Its power shifts, relocates, hides in living rooms, reappears in multiplexes, pulses through streaming servers, and flickers on any screen that will have it.
The question is not whether cinema has a future.
The question is how many futures it can hold at once. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935.
Hito Steyerl, “A Thing Like You and Me,” e-flux Journal no. 15, 2010.