Meryem Ersoz writes:
"It seems to me that the loss of aura has been "filled in" by the upcoming
generation of students by a love for technology for its own sake...an
excitement about competing visual technologies - laser disk, video, digital
imaging - and what that competition means in terms of democratizing
access to creating visual imagery and the control of its production.
 
I'm not passing judgment on whether this posture is good or bad, as much as
I'm struggling to say that there are generational differences towards
film/cinema v. "other" technologies which seem to be at the heart of this
discussion and which are worth considering. Aesthetic judgment is, after
all, historically produced, . . . "
 
 
 
This is a good point to consider.  Even a well-equipped classroom with a
35 mm. projector will never replace the particular aura of a viewing
experience.  Those who have grown up knowing only shoebox multiplexes will
never know what it was to see even the most mundane of film on a really
*big* screen in an ornate or at least semi-ornate theater with carpets and
ushers and all the rest.  Nor, on the other hand, can a classroom replicate
the amateur screenings in basements and coffeehouses and the like that
fueled the fires of independent filmmakers and critics like Bazin.
 
In a somewhat similar way, we can never recover the knowledge, attitudes and
tastes of the original audience for Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, read
in installments by the fire.  Something is lost in the transition--but
something new is created as well.
 
 
Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)
 
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