The Lumière Galaxy

Abstract

At the outset of one of the more celebrated American novels of the second half of the 20 th century, the main character and storyteller declares:[t]he fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carabine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.Many film scholars are certainly familiar with Binx Bolling, the alienated protagonist of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. １ Binx has problems holding onto reality, feeling attached to it, and accordingly producing a memory of past experiences; he prefers the movies, and this preference is the symptom of an estrangement. In the novel, media experienceno matter how joyful and richequals a problematic stance in the world, though this happened a long time ago. Cinema was meeting one of its cyclical crisesoccasionally, Binx visits half-empty movie theatresand movies were still believed to address and maintain some kind of relationship with a referential reality. However, what seemed back then a contradictory attitude to the world and humankind is nowadays a widespread, constitutive, pivotal mode of individual and social existence. Cinema caters to an overall mediated memory while its boundaries and existence grow less certain. Film scholars may rejoice to discover that their students do remember some film scenes from the past. Contemporary cinema's uncertain identity is the starting point of The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Keywords for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015) by Francesco Casetti. By telling two anecdotes, Casetti introduces the reader to basic but paramount questions, echoing André Bazin's pivotal query: what, when, and where is cinema today? Or, in a more encompassing way: how is