Architecture. Music. Sculpture. Painting. Poetry. Dance. Cinema.

When Riciotto Canudo claimed for cinema the status of a new art in 1911, cinema was awash in possibility. It was well on its way to becoming a predominantly narrative art targeting bourgeois audiences; but decades of aesthetic experimentation, technological development, and political aspirations for the new medium still lay ahead. One hundred thirteen years later, cinema persists, but the hopefulness surrounding it has abated. Media conglomerates stymie aesthetic creativity to reduce marketing risk. AI is the new technology monopolizing our attention, hope, and dread. And no one expects political change to come about through cinema. What can students of film hope for? And how are they to cultivate that hope?

One can always hope for good films, which are still being made even if audiences are increasingly atomized. But what about hope for the medium itself, which I’m defining broadly to include television and video? Cinema remains a powerful tool for seeing and self-reflection. I don’t expect it to change the world: I expect it to make me think more self-critically, more precisely, and more creatively. This is not a new hope. The Kino-Eyes—Dziga Vertov, Elizaveta Svilova, Mikhail Kaufman—saw cinema as a kind of prosthetic for the human eye and ear, enabling a coal miner in Donbass, a Dnieper Hydrolelectric Station worker, a steelworker, a textile factory worker, and a film editor to witness one another’s sensory worlds, and their mutual interdependence. The Kino-Eyes used cinema to de-fetishize the commodity. Nicola Chiaromonte claimed the film camera could show us the world “disinfected of consciousness.” Sergei Eisenstein saw cinema as a means of stimulating ecstasy, or pathos—the sensation of being beside oneself, or outside oneself. In Rear Window, that quintessential film about film, Stella (Thelma Ritter) says, “We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.” What the Kino-Eyes, Chiaromonte, Eisenstein, and Hitchcock (via Stella) have in common is an understanding of cinema’s ability to help us transcend our individual ways of seeing. The window may be a metaphor for cinema, but so is the mirror. Cinema can help us do that very hard thing, which is to “get outside [our] own house,” to see ourselves. It’s not easy to use cinema in this way, but I hope it’s possible.

A set of photographs inspiring this brief reflection is Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Theater Series. Sugimoto would go to a theater, open the aperture of his camera at the start of the film and click it closed at the end. You can see the result. The long exposure time permits the erasure of the filmed world by its own light. His glowing screens are the opposite of the utter darkness we sit in for around 45 minutes of a feature-length film, printed on celluloid and projected 24 frames-per-second—the accumulation of fleeting bits of darkness below our threshold of perception. The light depends on the darkness for the world it illuminates to coalesce in a moving image perceptible to the human eye and brain. I’ve always loved the way cinema relies on our blindness to show us something of the world. Blindness and insight. My cinematic hope, then, is not to get so carried away by what I take to be insight that I forget my fundamental blindness.