3rd Audience

I professed last week (when I mixed up sections) that I am a Barthes fanboy, and this week I want to expand on that claim a little bit by tying in some of the ideas of the participatory and interactive media from lecture today with the discussion of Barthes and Benjamin these past two weeks. I remember distinctly in Walter Benjamin's essay that he claimed that eventually through the media of mechanical reproduction would allow the audience to take the role of producer: "Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into writer" (232). Barthes also would become an advocate of the reader's ability to "write" text, and although we covered his pre-Death of the Author writings last week, his own method of disassembling and reassembling myth (the process of connotation) involves some level of reader creativity instead of absorbent passivity. Thus, it piqued me in today's lecture to hear Philip Rosen discuss how 3rd Cinema was an active event, something made "from the bottom" that got people potentially arrested and involved...well, involvement from the viewer. This is much different than Benjamin's discussion of the bored passivity of the public in his assessment of the film, but I think both Solanas/Getino and Benjamin are concerned with the possible participatory and revolutionary potentials of cinema. Are the writers of 3rd Cinema trying to respond to the commodification of film (the reinscription of aura into the film) by talking about this revolutionary cinema as a possible solution to the failures of Benjamin's visions for machine reproduced film? Is 3rd cinema created by a rebellious audience that refuses to consume 1st and 2nd cinema? Where does that line between producer and audience lie for something like 3rd cinema? Finally, looking at today's YouTube, DIY Video, grassroot media, and other participatory free exchange/information media groups that exist, where does their cinema fall?