There is a question, at once classic and modern, that has run through cinema and its criticism (and that gives its title to one of the finest books on cinema ever written, Che cos’è il cinema? by André Bazin). The question, precisely, is that of one who asks what cinema is (has been, will be), who seeks a definition of it, a sense, a possibility. The question has passed from mouth to mouth, from generation to generation, finding ever different answers, accompanying the development of film criticism and film culture.
For some time now this question has been joined by another, more pressing one, only apparently distant from the first: Where is cinema to be found? New subjects pose this question, convinced that the first is by now useless, unnecessary. What matters more is to ask where cinema is going (where we can find it), into what it has transformed itself, into what it has mutated. Yes, because cinema has by now (and it is from this sacrosanct awareness that the new theorists and the new critics set out) definitively left the place of worship to which it belonged for almost a century – the movie theatre, temple of the cinephile liturgy – to spread into every space of life and everyday experience, into every apparatus for the creation and diffusion of images, becoming, definitively, part of a diffused, disseminated and, perhaps, as some stress, dispersed imaginary.
Let us always start, then, from here, from the problem of the end – of cinema, of images, of a certain status of cinematic images? – in order to go beyond it, to try not to think it, or to think it otherwise (for the problem of the end arises, let us remember, always and only within a progressive, linear vision of the history of cinema). One can, however, reverse the argument, and think the present state of cinema as an exemplification of what cinema itself has always been, or has always produced in the world (of images, but not only).
Let us start, then, from a celebrated definition of cinema, that of André S. Labarthe: “Reversals, transfusions, montage: cinema will be vampiric or it will not be at all.” For the celebrated French critic, the phrase is clear and prophetic: cinema took up the aesthetic obsession of the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century: art as a process of the vampirisation of life, cinema as an apparatus that freezes life, re-edits it, recreates it, potentially without end.
This has been cinema’s accursed path, the painful but true way of a gaze that, far from simply telling stories, far from “representing the real” (as though it were obvious what “representing” and “the real” might be), instead gives life to ghosts, even creates them, shows the anguish and the horror of the twentieth century without ever wholly redeeming it (as Godard will say in that terminal and total work which is Histoire(s) du cinéma).

To speak of the “vampiric” dimension of cinema means to rediscover a power of the image that runs through its history probably even before the birth of cinema; it means to place the accent on the seductive character of the image itself, on the disquiet potentially hidden in every body portrayed, in every event eternally frozen in the image itself.
“Cinema is death at work”: the phrase is attributed to Cocteau, and it soon became one of the most enduring slogans of this line running through the history of cinematic images. Cinema works on the paradox of an apparatus that captures life and immobilises it on the screen, condemning those bodies to show themselves virtually without end, to repeat their gestures ever the same, to see themselves eternally young while their real body ages and dies. And it is precisely that instant-movement that reveals the work of death in the cinematic image. Suspending the flow of life even by filming a single gesture, the filmic image displays the flagrant evidence of a life that slips away, of the incessant work of death.
This is the first possible declension of the vampiric dimension of cinema, the one that, as was said above, reveals within the folds of the image (and of the cinematic image in particular, let us insist) its zone of shadow, the incessant work of death. A movement specific to cinema, as Bazin himself reaffirms: “I cannot repeat a single instant of my life, but any one of those instants cinema can repeat tirelessly before me” (Morte ogni pomeriggio). From Cocteau to Bazin, from Godard to Daney and on to Pasolini, many filmmakers have turned their attention to the zone of shadow that cinema creates and with which it has marked its passage through the century just past. A counter-history of cinema, a revelation of the uncanny that every gaze carries with it.
But all this presupposes a “positive” history of cinema, within which the work of the shadow, the vampiric dimension, can take place. Does this positive history of the seventh art exist (or resist)? Let us return, then, to the second question from which we set out: “Where is cinema to be found?” The question can have several interpretations. The most evident, most urgent one starts from the awareness, as was said above, of a disappearance: the end of the centrality of that secular temple which the movie theatre was, for about a century. On this the most refined theories of cinema have long concentrated their attention. The end of collective ritual leads to a desacralisation of cinema, to its transformation into a form of individualised, fragmented, dispersed consumption. But it is precisely from here that we must set out.
If there is a feature common to contemporary cinema, it is precisely its dissemination, its dispersion. When the cinematic image no longer holds within itself alone the universe of movement-images – by now enclosed in the most widely used term – and of a vaguely sociological flavour – of “audiovisual space”, cinema, its expressive power, but also its store of images and forms that helped to shape collective memory and the collective imaginary, scatter into many other forms, are taken up and quoted, edited and re-dubbed, in thousands of commercials, clips and programmes of contemporary neo-television, in the social networks that multiply online, in the fan made films or the remixes that fans enjoy posting, in which the original editing of a sequence is completely upended, re-edited, reassembled. From a certain point of view cinema does not disappear but multiplies as a fragment, a runaway splinter, a homage to that ludic and profaning imaginary that characterises the new cinephilia. The contemporary film spectator, ever less a participant in the collective ritual of the theatre, experiences a new space of enjoyment. He is no longer the James Stewart of La finestra sul cortile, the motionless spectator confined in the nonetheless pleasant situation of the voyeur; he is now the subject who plays with those images, takes them up, transforms them, uses them, rather than merely consuming them.

Here, then, the new declension of the relationship between the cinematic image and the vampire comes into play. The present scene puts on display the reversal of the original movement. The image that vampirises the real is now, at the same time, vampirised, transformed, infected by other images, by the incessant play of evocations that the mediatised world (is it the latest incarnation of the society of the spectacle?) incessantly produces. The vampire has changed form, has changed body.
What, then, are these images? Are they to be regarded as the end of the power of cinema, its reduction to a mere plaything, or is there something more? Every pessimistic vision of the contemporary scene from the cinematic point of view loses sight of a fundamental aspect of the argument we have sketched here. Play is an integral part of every relationship with images, of every power they hold. To forget this means to run the risk that the image cinema creates be placed in an untouchable elsewhere, that it consist of pure light, intangible and unreachable. It also means to think cinema only as an art of the sublime, as something that exceeds every limit, every proportion. The mutation of the vampire does not mark the end of cinema; it attests to its transformation. It reminds us, in any case, that the real of cinema is the very matter of the bodies it films, of the passions it records and multiplies. As Alain Badiou recalls in Del capello e del fango: “If cinema is idea, or the chance visitation of the idea, it is so in the sense in which the old Parmenides, in Plato, demands it of the young Socrates: that he admit, alongside the Good, the Just, the True, the Beautiful, certain Ideas no less ideal, however less seemly: that of the Hair and the Mud.”
The shadow does not disappear but always finds other ways to make its presence felt, even if in the form of play.

Daniele Dottorini teaches Fundamentals of Cinema at the University of Calabria. His publications include: Filmare dall’abisso. Il cinema di James Cameron, (Edizioni ETS, Pisa 2013), Jean Renoir. L’inquietudine del reale, (Ente dello spettacolo, Roma 2007), David Lynch. Il cinema del sentire, (Le Mani Editore, Recco, Genova, 2004).