Cinema Experience.mp4

Critical Reflection

In completing my short project, which included a video/photo and audio piece, I engaged with both my own and my friend Saverio’s experiences of cinema. The project aimed to respond to the broader prompt: “If the cinema is dead, dying, transforming or disappearing how can it be remembered?” and explore how our personal connections to cinema align with themes such as the ephemerality of cinema-going and the “death” of traditional cinema.

The first challenge I encountered was how to bring out meaningful and reflective responses during the initial recording process. To do this, I developed a set of personal, open-ended questions that helped me and my friend explore our backgrounds and emotional connections to cinema. We delved into how cinema impacted us growing up—what it felt like to sit in a theatre, how certain franchises shaped our imagination, and how our relationships with cinema have changed over time. The questions I used, such as “what is Cinema to you?” and “How did you experience/feel about it growing up?” allowed us to reflect more on the themes of change and loss associated with cinema. Our answers touched on the community aspect of cinema-going or TV/Film experience, the physicality of cinema theatres, and how streaming has altered these experiences.

During the editing process, I faced several challenges. The most significant of these was adjusting audio levels between different recordings, as some sections were noticeably quieter than others. Achieving a balanced audio experience required me to carefully edit individual sound files, adjusting volumes without making them sound too janky and distorted. The visual component of the project included images of a cinema I was close to combined with a movie montage from Youtube.

I meant to reflect on the idea of cinema as something fading from our current landscape. One of the overall themes of our studio, “the ephemerality of cinema-going,” resonated strongly throughout this project. By combining personal reflections with visual and auditory elements, my work grapples with how cinema, as we once knew it, seems to be slipping away. The answers I collected from Saverio and myself reflected this change, from the physical, community nature of going to the cinema to the more convenient on-demand experience of watching films through streaming services. This change embodies the “death” or “transformation” of cinema-going.

The cinema is amazing but it honestly isn’t the same or as impactful as it once was when I experienced the big screen as a kid with the buzz and excitement of a shared community transformed by the story portrayed on the lights.