Returning to the biggish screen: The moving picture in the age of digital reproduction

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Recently over at Clusterflock, Deron Bauman asks a simple question: "What movie(s) have you seen the most?" As I read over the comments and contributed my own, I was reminded of something I said in this post, specifically the following:

I'd like to argue that we can apply [Walter Benjamin's] concept of aura¹ to the not-so-old days of moviegoing, in which the only way the vast majority of people could see films was at the moviehouse with hundreds of other people. True, scores of copies of these films had to be made, but the audience desirous of seeing a film more than once had no choice but to go to the moviehouse again, in obedience to its--not the audience's--schedule, and then, when its run ended, would most likely never see that film again. Sure: film can endlessly reproduce images of reality; but surely the aura of film [by which I mean more precisely "moviegoing"] lay to a large extent in the fleeting and arbitrary nature of its exhibition. More: each successive viewing of the same film back in those days would itself have been an irreproducible experience. The individual viewer would notice different things each time, think differently about the same things . . . but just as important would be the different composition of the audience each time.

The corollary to that, I say elsewhere in that post, is that our current ability to see films pretty much whenever we want to, and via ever-expanding and ever-more-convenient and portable delivery systems, signifies several fundamental changes in how we experience film now.

Well, okay: in that post, I identify just one fundamental change: that whereas before, the communal space of the moviehouse was part of the experience of movie-going, that communal space has become devalued via the simple fact that it's no longer a prerequisite of . . . well, not "movie-going" any longer (since we no longer have to "go" anywhere, not even away from our computers, to see a film), but "movie-watching." Indeed, I speculate there that movie-going shares in some ways the dynamic of church-going and may, indeed, fill in a secular manner the idea of churchgoing-as-communion (in "communion"'s broadest sense).

[aside: the big program-oriented non-denominational churches are analogous to multiplexes, come to think of it . . . ]

But the Clusterflock question--specifically, its querying of multiple viewings of films--got me to wondering whether the delivery systems for films shape how we regard them. This is something that partly involves saying, "You should really see [name of film] on a biggish screen," but it also involves asking, How do the easy availability of films and all these different delivery systems shape how we perceive certain actors, certain films or, for that matter, the experience of watching films?

I have some hazy ideas about these matters that I hope will assume more definite form when I also have a moment to blog about them.
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¹Discussed here (from "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"):

Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.