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Gabriele Pedullà’s In Broad Daylight reviewed in Sight & Sound and the Guardian

Tessa Morrison31 July 2012

Gabriele Pedullà’s In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators After the Cinema has been reviewed recently in both the Guardian and international film magazine, Sight & Sound.

In his Non-fiction roundup, the Guardian’s Steven Poole sets the scene:

Going to the cinema used to be the only way you could watch a film. Now you can do it anywhere. Pedullà's interesting little book announces that the age of the cinema theatre as the form's primary "aesthetic device" is over.

Our age, Pedullà fears, has lost touch with the "tragic", and we are reduced to "docile consumers of à la carte emotions".


Chris Darke, writing for Sight & Sound, also discusses the fears Pedullà voices for the modern audience:

The principal post-cinematic technology here remains television, especially the “zapping” enabled by remote control. But it’s the capacities that television and other individual media makes us remote from, even in our supposed ability to control their images, that concern him: the ability to identify with characters, to feel emotional empathy, to exercise imagination as a prerequisite of moral sense...

Because it’s hard to predict the nature of technological change, I suppose it makes a kind of sense to engage with an older set of values – residing in a humanist vision of the purpose of narrative – to see what’s become of them. And in this regard, Pedullà has little doubt: the eye is now liberated to scan competing sources of “low impact catharsis.”

Visit the Guardian to read the review in full. Sight & Sound is not available online.

Filed under: reviews