Cinematic Memory as Second Modernity's Arcades

In the age of wired and wireless information everyone can bare whatever one chooses to. Some bare their thoughts, some their bodies, some their possessions. Blogosphere as eBay of the textual equivalent of soundbites provides everyone with his or her fifteen minutes of cyber-fame, microprocessed glamour, and individualized in the extreme image making tools.

The question remains in whose image are the mass- and segment-mediated personas created. If Parisian arcades are created in the image of the modernity itself, its first incarnation, the second modernity may have resuscitated the architectual metaphore of arcades as farce of the post-imperial tragedy of restorationalist France.

Hyper-real shopping malls that resemble at one and the same time arcades, circuses, gardens, and towers remember the tragedy of the trajectory towards the second modernity in terms of erasure that everyday life in de-realized environments places on the farce of its terms. Monumentally white screens of movie houses, incorporated as it where into the shopping-industrial complexes of the revitalized downtowns, go black as the shadows of our manufactured dreams flicker on them into existence the ghosts that haunt places in search of history.

Post-modernity as a proposition that commentators on the second modern moment have essayed to make appears to share in the conceit of modernism that religion is dead. The arrival of post-modernity would be a wish-fulfillment of the world rapidly going down the rabbit-hole of two mirrors looking at one another. Dashed post-modern hopes of transcendence have more in common with farce of repetition than with the tragedy of the end.

The world of immanence that culture parcels out to sell to consumers of mass entertainment and high art alike attempts recollection of what it once was in a flash. At speed of twenty four per second, these abortive attempts add up to the profusion of cinematic memory. Vacillating between tragedy and farce, the memory of cinema provides an unyielding screen onto which to project the collective imaginary.

Words, feelings, and acts escape one single configuration into which the aesthetic judgment on their value would relegate them. As list of credits flowing down to the emptying halls, they demand attention that travels from the everyday towards the documentary.