The Brooklyn Rail

The history of cinema is closely bound with the history of air-conditioning. Mechanical cooling devices were first developed for industrial settings around 1900, but the commercial form of AC we know today was more or less born at the movies. In 1926, while American department stores, lunchrooms, and offices languished in summer heat, the Tivoli Theatre on Chicago’s South Side pumped chilled air from an innovative refrigeration system in its basement, misting it once an hour with a spritz of perfume.

In a sense, movie theatre executives were just early-adopters of a technology that would soon conquer the nation as a whole. Before the decade’s close, “manufactured weather” would be installed in everything from New York skyscrapers to the US Capitol Building, shifting—as the architectural historian Joseph M. Siry has it—“from a luxury in places of assembly to a semi-necessity.” And yet, in some ways it feels like air conditioning could only have originated at the movies, as if it had always been there, as if there was something primordially necessary about the connection between cinema and climate control.

Screening Fears: On Protective Media (2023) elevates this intuition into a theory. Writings on motion pictures usually emphasize the visual, or how the visual stuff gets into your eyes. If not films then movie stars, projection technology, distribution systems. But for Francesco Casetti, we fundamentally misunderstand what movies are (indeed the book presents something like an ontology, not just of cinema, but of screen media as a whole) if we fail to account for the mechanisms that shelter them from the world at large.

Consider the word “screen” itself. “When we think of a screen,” Casetti writes, “the immediate characteristic that stands out is a perceptual activity.” And yet this association is relatively recent. Until the nineteenth-century, the word (like its European analogues: écran, schermo, Schirm) was used primarily in its sense of a partition, filter, or cover—as in present usage when we talk about a fly screen or a screen pass in football. The word’s “antiquated” meanings might seem detached from our experience of movies or television sets, Casetti argues, but in fact they remain absolutely central to their operation.

He points, in this regard, to the elaborate techniques and technologies which exist to police the threshold of the “screenscape.” As the book narrates its history of screen-media, moving from the phantasmagoria to the smartphone, it dwells on lobbies and antechambers, on the thickness of carpets, on a special sign language developed by ushers for silent mid-movie communication, and on air conditioning. Through all, the message repeats: although screens show us the world, they also operate as part of assemblages which take pains to protect us from it. This is even true of screens at their most seemingly naked. Looking at your phone on the subway is, of course, a means of reaching out to a certain kind of “content.” But it also, by molding your physical posture and narrowing your frame of awareness, acts as a kind of shielding maneuver, a way of blocking out a little attentional niche in an environment which can sometimes feel abrasive, if not outright hostile.

And hostility is key to the story Casetti is trying to tell. “The progressive explosion of the number and kinds of screens throughout the twentieth century,” he argues, is not an instance of modernity’s increasing technological mastery of space and time. Nor is it (at least wholly) the action of an infernal machine for the production and governance of docile bodies. Rather it is a complex response to the “fear of dealing directly with the world,” a fear he conceives as particular to life in modernity. This is a capacious—perhaps a little over-capacious—formulation, embracing everything from the psychoperceptual shocks of urban environments to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, the idea itself has resonance: screens, for Cassetti, are a balm to the shocks and intensities that modernity has visited upon us.

This doesn’t mean that they are simply vehicles for escapism. For once we are inside the cocoon of the “screen-centered situation,” Casetti argues, reality returns to us in tempered forms, as films, TV news, and faces on Zoom. These mediations umpire our commerce with things, and do so largely to our benefit. By manifesting a “bearable and manageable” version of the world, they allow us to come to terms with “all aspects of it, including those that frighten us and those that speak of unexpressed possibilities.” In other words, the process of “screening” is always two-stepped, involving both a separation and a rapprochement. Casetti calls this double action the “Projection/Protection Complex,” arguing its significance “as one of the key mechanisms in the history of modern media.”

There’s a question to be asked about the status of actual screened material here. Cast blanketly as bearers of “the world,” and granted the universal function of reconciling us with reality, the things that appear inside the magic circle of the screenscape seem to lack a basis for meaningful differentiation: Andrei Rublev is Frasier is facetiming your grandma. This is a theory of film without a theory of films. Indeed, even if one takes “mediated reality” to be an adequate description of the sum of possible screened content, it’s not really clear how Cassetti’s definition of screen-media specifies the projected or digital image against any other information-bearing thing we place in front of our face. Novels, newspapers, paintings, and plays all possess screening functions, and their inclusion would necessitate a different historical framework than the one outlined in the book.

Casetti also points to a kind of dialectical instability inherent in the Complex itself. Overprotection breeds insensitivity, defensive enclosures can become echo chambers. The means of protection are always at risk of becoming the tools of further oppression. And yet, ultimately, he’s not a tinfoil-hat culture industry kind of guy. There’s a sanguineness about his conclusions: that mediation is always already part of our world, that—for all its risks and disadvantages—our screeny isolation is a useful tool for negotiating a tough reality. How one reacts to this will depend on how one weighs the violence of the screen’s disciplinary functions against its therapeutic upsides. Personally, I find it hard to imagine life without the technologies that protect me from it. Let he who is without a Netflix account throw the first stone.