boredom is always counter-revolutionary

I agree with Mr Lynch on this one, but I really don’t think it’s a case of ‘getting real’. That implies that there is a correct way to watch a film, a correct location and method of screening. Throughout cinema’s short history it has already seen a range of different ways of experiencing films, from the mutoscope to the multiplex, and the technological changes have affected both how films are made and, thereafter, our internalised sensory perception.

The history of cinema is a history of conflicting interests: emergent technology, commercial imperatives and creative ambitions. Film-following-commerce and the primacy of technology is, historically, considerably more ‘real’ than any historically-specific practice of film-viewing or movie-going. Perhaps we’ll soon see films being produced specifically to be experienced via mobile phones (although, it seems, David Lynch won’t be making them). So do we embrace the Benjaminian, liberating potential of mobile phone film watching, anticipating the unknown changes not only to our film watching practices but to our very subjectivity and sensory perception? Or, at some point do we step in and resist an emergent technology in order to preserve what we, nostalgically or otherwise, valorise as a priviledged practice, as the best way to watch a film? I’m with the latter approach, but not without an awareness that practices of cinema are not fixed, although nor is their development a natural one outside of the market.