The Gulliver effect: screen size, scale and frame, from cinema to mobile phones

The Gulliver effect: screen size, scale and frame, from cinema to mobile phones

in New Review of Film and Television Studies, Volume 20, Issue 3 (2022)

Publication | Table des matières | Critiques

Résumé

The encounter between the cinema image, originally created to be seen on a large screen, and the mobile phone used as screening device, stands as one of the most striking instances of what Erkki Huhtamo calls the ‘Gulliverisation’ of our contemporary environments: “a two-directional optical-cultural ‘mechanism’” that works “against the idea of a common anthropomorphic scale”. In what follows, I focus on the aesthetic impact of the coexistence of images coming from extremes of the representational scale, from the cinema to the monumental projections that typify the contemporary trend in spectacular displays in museums and public spaces, to the tiny screens of our mobile phones. With reference to practices of collecting, archiving and possessive viewing, as well as to the relationship between off- and on-screen space, I suggest that strategies of making strange help us historicize, as well as appreciate the aesthetic complexity such shifts in scale produce.

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Table des matières

• Making strange and the optical unconscious
• Gulliverisation and the collective imaginary
• Miniaturization
• Small screens on big screens
• Conclusion
• Disclosure statement
• Additional information
• Notes
• References

Critiques

• “This important volume from an authoritative international team of authors sheds significant new light on the comparative development of post-war Conservatism in the western world.”
  – Stuart Ball, Professor Emeritus, University of Leicester, UK
• “The rich essays collected in this illuminating volume show that the rise of right-wing politics in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France since the 1970s was a remarkably transnational phenomenon. As they attacked social democracy and cultural pluralism, right-wing movements borrowed ideas, visions, vocabularies, and tactics from each other, adapting them to their own national idioms and using advances in one country to win advances elsewhere. Anyone interested in confronting the problems that have proliferated in the wake the right’s reconfiguration of politics – surging inequality, belligerent ethno-nationalism, worker disempowerment and insecurity, and lost faith in the capacity for democratic self-government – has much to learn about the origins of these problems from this important book.”
  – Joseph A. McCartin, Georgetown University, USA, author of Collision Course