The light came from behind

Abstract

The article is proposed from cinephilia to observe the reception of cinema images in the context of their last place of circulation, exhibition, and consumption. First, how does the image turn out to be a trace or mark of a world in constant transformation and degradation, exposed to the gaze of its audience? Then, using the term poor image, it examines the political powers that occur when appropriating them legally or illegally, to broaden their social and cultural scope in their exploitation, exhibition, and consumption. In a third moment, it goes to give an account of how these images, given their conditions of industrial and commercial exploitation, tend to be ruined to acquire formal transformations that express in themselves the socioeconomic order in which they circulate and are exhibited. Finally, these images continue to transform themselves in the memory of their viewers, assuming the same volatility and lability of memory. Cinema thus depends on its context both in production and in the later stages of its chain of exploitation of circulation and exhibition.