The Cinematic Dispositif and Its Ghost : Sugimoto’s Theaters

Abstract

This chapter will engage with the work of the artist and photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto in order to reflect on the nature of the cinematic apparatus in the digital era. Sugimoto’s photographic work Theatres consists in a series of photographs of cinema theatres taken by the artist from the 1980s applying a wide-open aperture and an exposure as long as the film itself, capturing de facto an average of 170,000 frames in a single shot. The result is a ‘film in a single frame’, and a profound reflection on the role that time, lights, and the space of the audience play in the cinematic experience. The chapter looks from a cinematic perspective at the regenerative aspect of the photographic medium in its after-shot, a question called by Sugimoto a ‘resurrection’.