Beyond the Public Screen

The movie audience typically forms a close mass. The cinema's layout 
delimits the audience's ability to grow. Only those who pay admission can 
join the elite. The darkness disciplines individuals to hide their 
presence. The event takes place on the silver screen; it has no place in 
the darkened theatre. This is what gives the mass direction. Even with 
open-air showings, there is such a strong association of movie with 
enclosed space that the audience feels itself surrounded by an imaginary 
architecture. The theatre produces the audience; the movie is the event 
that discharges this mass.

But the rabble, who are looking for cheap entertainment, manage to escape 
their duty to remain a purely imaginary mass by forming an actual mass 
through antisocial behavior at moments of release. Shouting, loud popcorn 
consumption, physical contact, bottles rolling across the floor, the odor 
of sweat and bare feet - noise drowns out the movie's content. Cinephilic 
and journalistic reception denounces this spurious use of cinema as 
mass-producer, demanding the absence of both other and theatre. It 
advocates inner experience and searches for significance, consuming the 
mass medium as though it were a book. Cinephilia owes its existence to 
the rejection of traditional movie characteristics. "The Ego and Its Own 
Film" is its credo. The cinephile lives on the suggestion of being the 
last viewer, a survivor of the death of film. This corresponds to the 
movie fan's unique habit of sitting through all the credits until the 
lights come on.

Television has settled into the cozy environment of living room and 
bedroom. Due to the honeycombed architecture of privacy, the silver 
screen could be turned into a piece of furniture to prevent all mass 
formation. But the only way to make lonely picture-screen consumption 
bearable was to assure the viewer at home of the presence of many fellow 
watchers. The user had to be convinced at all times that televisual space 
contained a mass with which one could communicate (at least in theory). 
Viewers felt part of this imaginary mass as long as they could imagine 
the others with whom they'd review the shows in the morning. Watching 
something different than everybody else raised serious doubts as to where 
your sympathies lay, or if maybe your tastes weren't too extravagant to 
even be discussed. The private screen owed its existence to the public 
space outside, which guaranteed the existence of fellow viewers. The 
contents of whatever was broadcast were quite irrelevant compared to the 
medium's ability to produce this imaginary mass. The only informative 
aspect of television was, and still is, the expansion of the group of 
participants until, at critical moments, it encompasses the entire world 
population.

We know the public screen from SF movies. In "Blade Runner" or "Until the 
End of the World" it still looks like a billboard with moving pictures on 
it, stuck high up on some skyscraper. "Blade Runner" even features a 
bulky spaceship with an enormous screen hovering over the city. However, 
the screens attract zero attention; they produce no mass. In accordance 
with Orwell's book, "1984" features telescreens everywhere, the 
population forced to react to Big Brother's commercials. This refers to 
the intellectualist fear that, with the introduction of television, the 
new medium would serve a totalizing or levelling function. With the decay 
of public space, the Orwellian city has been dismissed as a disciplining 
factor and replaced by the public screen. The actual mass is caught 
within an architecture replaced by screens, where it is permanently 
overloaded by inescapable untruths. Orwell's presumption was that public 
space could be replaced by television, which would thus effectively 
obliterate the imaginary space of individual emotions and fantasies.

In "The Running Man," guerrillas try to seize the public screen in order 
to liberate the people through alternative news broadcasts. Amidst the 
high-rise buildings, where wealth circulates within communication 
networks, the abandoned population is kept at bay with manipulated news 
footage and lethal game shows. These marginalized masses, subclass of the 
Fourth World, are constantly being brought to discharge through their 
participation as gamblers in the one event allowed to them: the spectacle 
on the screen. Again, there's the implicit notion that the public screen 
can force the actual mass to passive behavior; only not by repressing 
emotions this time, but by maximum stimulation of them.

The nightmares of classical science fiction are based on the fear that 
the public screen has the same disciplining effect on viewers as the 
movie should, according to the cinephile. But since the public screen is 
first of all an enlarged television screen, the mass effects it produces 
ought to be imaginary rather than actual. In fact, they are neither. This 
was proved by the live registration of a concert by David Bowie and his 
Tin Machine in Amsterdam's Paradiso on June 24, 1989. Five hundred meters 
away, on the Museumplein square, a public screen, five by four meters, 
had been erected, while Nescafé, the sponsor, had gathered some 30,000 
spectators through newspaper and aerial advertising. The concert was 
broadcast only to this square. A TV event reserved for those present; no 
further transmission took place.

The program started with a well-known commercial from regular television. 
The show itself was so smoothly and professionally edited that it was 
impossible to tell it from a regular video clip. The masses were overcome 
with the feeling that they were just watching some pop television show; 
all it lacked was the matching homey intimacy. Nor was it compensated for 
by the suggestion of a self-imagined architecture - as with the open-air 
movie showing - since the mass was open by nature: the square was open to 
all, and admission was free.

Even the hope that nightfall would turn the square into a movie theatre 
remained unrewarded. By now, the audience had made an awkward discovery: 
the imaginary mass, always presumed present in TV consumption, was now 
suddenly actually present. Any possible link to viewers elsewhere was 
thus effectively obstructed, as the whole of the viewing public stood 
gathered in front of the screen: Though outside, there remained no 
imaginary Outside, beyond the screened event. The square dwellers were 
nothing but a bunch of disconnected individuals, and they failed to 
arrive at their point of discharge.

While on screen the audience in the Paradiso went berserk, on the 
Museumplein the applause soon petered out completely. The viewing 
experiences of cinema and TV had intermingled and were now mutually 
extinguishing one another. Without warning, Bowie and his musicians 
disappeared from stage ("The artist has left the building") before the 
party had even begun, followed by credit titles and Nescafé commercials. 
Time to bugger off. The main sensation produced by the public screen had 
been that of being taken for a ride.

In the case of the Museumplein, all contact with the event had been cut 
off. The giant screens on stage, which have been used for ages to support 
mega-concerts, political rallies, and conferences, never lose their 
supportive function because the event itself remains visible, even if 
microscopically small in the eyes of the theatre or stadium audience. 
Through them, the close mass of festivalgoers goes into rapture and finds 
its point of discharge. The visible presence of the performer is the 
imaginary factor that brings the screens to life. The public screen alone 
can never launch an event; it would soon fall victim to indifference.

But the mass is not going to give up its inalienable right to the event 
without a fight. Soccer fans, if refused entrance to the stadium - and 
thus forced to watch the game on the public screen as an involuntary mass 
- inevitably turn their boredom into positive energy. The profound awe of 
video technology is rapidly dwindling. The classical intellectualist fear 
of the massifying power of television is checked by the equally classical 
and ancient mass strategy to make room for events, even against all odds: 
"Smash it up!" Here, the pleasure of recreation turns into the 
consumption of facilities.

First to go is the furniture closest at hand. Next in line are actual 
fellow spectators. Presently, slingshots are produced to eliminate each 
pixel one at a time. Paint bombs further brighten the mood, as a cluster 
bomb makes a first breach. This signals the moment to tear down the 
fences and haul down the screen, bringing the mass's full weight to bear. 
The one question in everybody's minds: Do video screens burn? Crackling 
sparks fill the field as the people celebrate their revolution amidst the 
smoldering pictorial ashes.

It is uncertain whether things will ever go that far. Presumably, beams 
will fill the air to project virtual 3-D events almost impossible to 
distinguish from the real. But even these devices can be tracked down and 
eliminated, provided the necessary know-how. The custodians of the 
sedated masses traditionally suppress the universal right to the event by 
means of bread and circuses. The mob's tenacious ability to pirate space 
for its own game techniques forever guarantees the effective dismantling 
of all control strategies. In the end, management always stands between 
the ruins. Should its structures persist - simply because nobody could 
care less about them - it can be trusted to tear them down of its own 
accord.
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