The paper discusses pertinent aspects of the screen as a device of framing and re-ordering. Television and video screens introduced in filmic diegesis are attributed three main functions (spatial, temporal, and topical re-ordering) and are related to the relationships Gerard Genette establishes between first-order narrative and metadiegetic levels (1987), as well as to Lars Elleström’s extracommunicational and intracommunicational actual and virtual spheres (2018). The visibility through noise of the televisual and of the video media is theorized based on Sybille Krämer’s media theory (2015) and three pre-digital arthouse films: Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1984), Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996), and Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997).1
Given the present proliferation of profilmic electronic screens in narrative feature films, it is of some interest to examine their role apart from that of denoting objects pertaining to everyday reality. Electronic screens within the European-type filmic diegeses – characterized by adhering to conventions of (hyper)realism, non-hypermediation and character-centered storytelling – in a digital era are used not only as props, but as frames that re-order and aestheticize levels of reality (Odin 2016), while focusing, in a hypnotic manner, the viewers’ attention (Chateau 2016) on traumatic memories related to usually female characters, and consequently to the collectivities they represent in the respective diegetic worlds. These electronic screens force the viewer to constantly shift between the actual cinematic screen conventions and the mental screen (Odin 2016) of smaller formats, training the film viewers for experiences of expanded and fragmented cinema (Gaudreault and Marion 2015).
Detection in contemporary genre films is in the process of being transformed: viewers see less and less of moving, traveling, and active human bodies entering in interaction and exchanging words. Instead, what takes up a significant part of film time is the view of computer screens, with digitally stored and retrieved traces, meaningful for detection, playing the lead role. One result of this type of detection on screen – rather than detection in the streets or on murder scenes – is that detection is (re)presented as a process happening on the human-computer interface. With reference to Lev Manovich the article asks how the “illusion of navigating through virtual spaces” is recreated, when the context of such an illusion is filmic diegesis defined by genre rules (in this case: detection films), where “the virtual spaces of the screen” should have a direct effect on “the real spaces of filmic diegesis”?
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