The Searchers - Dismantled

Excerpt from "The Searchers-Dismantled", by Ross Gibson, published in Rouge 7, 2005

"...a movie can build up a luminous charge, like some phosphorescent transformer energising the world of space, light, sound and time. The screen is no mere lodgement for the things represented on it. Rather, it is an energy field. And every thing engaged on and by the screen can get transformed so that each thing represented there can be known as no longer a self-contained object but a sensate and inter-connected part of a flowing system of energy. The screen offers pulses of light and movement, after all. Energy.

Irradiated thus, consciousness can alter and expand radically during a movie. I mean all consciousness – of the entire represented world, not just the viewer. The screen receives and generates energy over time. This energy affects every thing it plays upon, every thing represented on the screen and every thing in the auditorium. Such is the allure of cinema: it engrosses us in its force-field; it helps us feel a volatile but coherent world surging through our nervous systems; it transmogrifies us at the core and at the edges of what we think to be our selves."

Click here to read the rest of the piece online at Rouge