The Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema

The metaphor of camera as eye is fundamental to both everyday

discussion as well as more academic theories of cinema: it is a
pervasive metaphor through which we understand cinema on several
levels. Christian Quendler’s detailed study of the camera-eye metaphor is
therefore a significant and erudite contribution to scholarship. But, more
than this, Quendler’s study takes a truly interdisciplinary approach to this
metaphor. The Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema is not dogmatic in
limiting itself to one or two theoretical positions; far from it. This book
encompasses a broad array of theoretical approaches – from the
philosophy of mind to art theory, narratology, and gender studies. It
therefore has a potentially wide appeal, not only in film studies, but also
cultural and media studies more generally.
—Warren Buckland, Oxford Brookes University, UK

This book explores the cultural, intellectual, and artistic fascination with
camera-eye metaphors in film culture of the twentieth century. By studying the
very metaphor that cinema lives by, it provides a rich and insightful map of
our understanding of cinema and film styles and shows how cinema shapes
our understanding of the arts and media. As current new media technologies
are attempting to shift the identity of cinema and moving imagery, it is hard to
overstate the importance of this metaphor for our understanding of the
modalities of vision. In what guises does the “camera eye” continue to
survive in media that is called new?

Christian Quendler is Associate Professor in the Department of American

Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. He is the author of From
Romantic Irony to Postmodernist Metafiction and Interfaces of Fiction.

Routledge Advances in Film Studies

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

42 Spaces of the Cinematic Home

Behind the Screen Door
Edited by Eleanor Andrews, Stella Hockenhull, and Fran Pheasant-
Kelly

43 Spectacle in “Classical” Cinemas

Musicality and Historicity in the 1930s
Tom Brown

44 Rashomon Effects
Kurosawa, Rashomon and Their Legacies
Edited by Blair Davis, Robert Anderson and Jan Walls

45 Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art

Cinema Beyond Europe
Nilgün Bayraktar

46 The Other in Contemporary Migrant Cinema

Imagining a New Europe?
Guido Rings

47 Horror Film and Affect

Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership
Xavier Aldana Reyes

48 India’s New Independent Cinema

Rise of the Hybrid
Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram

49 Early Race Filmmaking in America

Edited by Barbara Tepa Lupack

50 Film Text Analysis

New Perspectives on the Analysis of Filmic Meaning
Edited by Janina Wildfeuer and John A. Bateman
51 The Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema
Christian Quendler
The Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema

Christian Quendler
First published 2017
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa

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© 2017 Taylor & Francis

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been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

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ISBN: 978-1-138-91136-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-69273-9 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
For Grace and Tobin
Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Seeing-As
Playing with the Senses
Sensitive Paper and Visual Substance
Mechanical Brains and Electronic Minds
The Organic Camera Eye and Walter Benjamin’s Optical Unconscious
Convergent Theorizing in Jean-Louis Baudry’s Apparatus Theory

2 Seeing Better and Seeing More

Camera and Dispositif
René Descartes and Dziga Vertov on Perfecting Vision
Seeing Better with Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Cartesian Camera Eye
Seeing More with Vertov’s Kino-Eye

3 Seeing and Writing

Dziga Vertov’s Poetic Map of A Sixth Part of the World
The Literary Notebooks of Luigi Pirandello’s Silent Camera Operator
The Sound Image of John Dos Passos’ Camera Eye
Christopher Isherwood’s Camera Eye on Stage and Screen

4 Memory and Traces

A Series of Dated Traces
Margarete Böhme’s The Diary of a Lost One
Filming Diary of a Lost Girl
William Keighley’s Journal of a Crime
Cinema as Paper Formatted in Time
5 Gestures and Figures
Embodied Gestures and Textual Figures
Autopsy and Autography
Cinematic Discovery of the Self
Filmic Bodies and Figures in Narrative Film Theory
Lady in the Lake and La Femme défendue

6 Roles and Models

Personal Cinema as Institution, Medium and Genre
From Psychodrama to Life Models
Animating the Self in Jerome Hill’s Film Portrait
Stan Brakhage’s Metaphors and Art of Vision
The Development of Brakhage’s Camera Consciousness
The Eye Body and the Body Politic in Carolee Schneemann’s Expanded
Cinema
Embodied Expressionism and Living Diary

7 Minds and Screens

Bruce Kawin and Gilles Deleuze on Camera Consciousness
Visionary Agents in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and Bertrand
Tavernier’s Death Watch
Enacted Visions in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
and Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void

8 Retrospective

Bibliography
Index
List of Figures

1.1 Fritz Kahn, “What goes on in our head when we see a car and say ‘car’”
(1939), in Fritz Kahn, Der Mensch gesund und krank II (Zürich: A.
Müller, 1939), 204–5. Courtesy Thilo von Debschitz.
1.2 Conceptual blend of the notion of Walter Benjamin’s optical unconscious.
1.3 Jean-Louis Baudry’s network of homologies.
2.1 Orders and domains in camera-eye and mindscreen notions.
2.2 Subject-object relations ‘refracted’ by dispositif, dispositio and
disposition.
2.3 The convergence model.
2.4 The figure/ground model.
2.6 The camera eye as an attention-shifting device.
2.7 Disanalogous cross-mappings in Vertov’s notion of the kino-eye.
2.8 Opening shot of Man with a Movie Camera.Courtesy Vertov Collection,
Austrian Film Museum, Vienna. Frame Enlargement: Georg Wasner.
3.1 Shooting schedule for A Sixth Part of the World. Courtesy Vertov
Collection, Austrian Film Museum, Vienna.
3.2 “You are sitting in the audience” of A Sixth Part of the World. Courtesy
Austrian Film Museum, Vienna.
3.3 Experimental treatment of Christopher in I Am a Camera.
3.4 Figments of narration in I Am a Camera.
3.5 Christopher’s window of narration.
3.6 Christopher’s window of focalization.
4.1–4.6 Tracing Diary of a Lost Girl.
4.7 Newspaper ad for Journal of a Crime.
5.1 Camera as role-play in Lady in the Lake.
6.1 Disrupting the cinematic space in Meshes of the Afternoon.
6.2 Seeing through the film in Reflections on Black.
6.3 Jerome Hill’s ‘me’ in Film Portrait.
6.4 Jerome Hill’s ‘am’ in Film Portrait.
7.1 Tracey’s memorial vision in Death Watch.
7.2 Roddie’s recorded vision in Death Watch.
7.3 The nurse’s eyes as Jean-Do’s organ of articulation in The Diving Bell
and the Butterfly.
Acknowledgments

I wish to express my gratitude to the friends and colleagues who have helped
me see through this project in various ways. I have greatly profited from all
of the conversations, critical readings and engaging responses. I would
particularly like to thank Sylwia Adam-Ross, Carole Baker, David
Bordwell, Stefan Brandt, Warren Buckland, Rana Choi, Don Crafton, Liz
Czach, Piet Defraeye, Elena del Rio, Thomas Elsaesser, Erwin Feyersinger,
Alla Gadassik, Simon Grote, Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, Vinzenz Hediger,
Adelheid Heftberger, Jim Hodge, Ian Jones, Jagoda Kamola, Barbara
Klinger, Laura Marcus, Michelle Menzies, Helga Mitterbauer, J.J. Murphy,
Kristine Nutting, Alexander Onysko, Thomas Pfau, Julie Rak, Brigitte Rath,
Dan Reynolds, David Rodowick, Anna Sofia Rossholm, Elena Siemens,
David Taylor, Mark Turner, Jennifer Wild, Daniel Winkler, Werner Wolf and
David Womersley.
Much of this work was developed during my two-year stay in Chicago. I
am very grateful to Tom Gunning and Yuri Tsivian for sponsoring my time at
the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago
and to Scott Curtis for inviting me to the Department of
Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University. The faculty and students
of both departments were a tremendous source of inspiration. I am thankful to
the organizers of the Chicago Film Seminar and to Edward Branigan and
Charles Wolfe for kindly inviting me to present my work in progress and for
the continuing dialogue that it sparked. I would also like to thank the
conveners and participants of the Seminar “Scenes in the History of the
Image” at the National Humanities Center and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu
Berlin. I extend my thanks to the Wirth Institute and to the Department of
English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta for the valuable
exchange and being such generous hosts.
I am fortunate to have great colleagues at the University of Innsbruck and
am grateful for their advice and assistance: Tobias Auböck, Monika Datterl,
Sebastian Donat, Doris Eibl, Georg Engel, Roberta Hofer, Mario Klarer,
Cornelia Klecker, Johannes Mahlknecht, Maria Meth, Matthias Mösch,
Ursula Moser, Sabine Schrader, Thomas Schröder, Martin Sexl and Christian
Stenico. I particularly thank Sonja Bahn, Gudrun Grabher and Hilde
Wolfmeyer for their close reading of various versions and parts of the
manuscript. I am grateful to the staff at Routledge, especially to Felisa
Salvago-Keyes, Kathleen Laurentiev and Christina Kowalski.
I cannot forget to thank my family, which has grown over the course of this
project, for their endless support: My parents, Helgard Gruber and Karl
Quendler, my brother and his wife, Michael and Birgitta Quendler, my nieces
and nephew, Hannah, Yannick, Fiona and Romy, my father- and brother-in-
law, Royal and Andrew Carlson. I give my deepest thanks to my wife Grace
Quendler and our son Tobin.
Some parts of this book have appeared elsewhere in modified form.
Chapter One adapts a few paragraphs from my entries to The Routledge
Enyclopedia of Film Theory, ed. Edward Branigan and Warren Buckland
(New York: Routledge, 2014). Chapter Two is a thorough rewriting and
expansion of my essay “Rethinking the Camera Eye: Dispositif and
Subjectivity,” New Review of Film and Television Studies (9.4). The last
part of Chapter Three borrows from my discussion on the various
adaptations of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin in “I Am a
Camera: The Development of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin
across Stage, Screen and Time,” in The Visual Culture of Modernism, ed.
Deborah L. Madsen and Mario Klarer (Tübingen: Narr, 2011). The final
segment of Chapter Seven revises my discussion of The Diving Bell and the
Butterfly as well as Enter the Void that appeared in image & narrative
(15.1) with the title “Subjective Cameras Locked-in and Out-of-Body.”
Introduction

The metaphor of the camera eye is ontological, impervious and utopian. It is,
to appropriate the title of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s best-selling
study, the metaphor cinema lives by. As a mind-as-machine trope, the camera
eye ontologizes the filmic experience by converting it into a mysterious
psycho-mechanical entity.1 Yet, the camera eye is not limited to cinema; it
rather predates and will perhaps outlive film history. Its organic-mechanical
hybridity partakes of an age-old science fiction that our technological
imagination has been living up to. This book explores the cultural,
intellectual, and artistic fascination with camera-eye metaphors in film
culture of the twentieth century. By examining the ontological, transhistorical
and projective scope of camera-eye metaphors, I aim to reconstruct a map of
our understanding of cinema and film styles and of the multifarious ways in
which cinema shapes our understanding of the arts and media.
A metaphor cinema lives by. As a concept and a guiding technique, the
camera eye has served as a poetic metaphor that lies at the core of virtually
every aesthetic movement and film-historical period. Early, classical,
psychoanalytical, Marxist, feminist and cognitive theories of film have
invested in a variety of camera-eye notions. Similarly, classical Hollywood
cinema as well as auteur and avant-garde films have projected a wide array
of camera-eye visions and rationalizations: for example, the defamiliarizing
close-up as seen through George Albert Smith’s Grandma’s Reading Glass
(1900), Dziga Vertov’s kino-eye of the 1920s, the increasingly extensive use
of point-of-view shots in classical Hollywood films such as Rouben
Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Delmer Daves’s Dark
Passage (1947) or Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947), the
autobiographically tainted and remembered visions in French New Wave
movies by directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, or the
retinal ‘closed-eye’ vision in Stan Brakhage’s avant-garde films that imagine
the world as it must appear to the optic nerve.2 Since the metaphor of the
camera eye is a central figure of thought in film history, we need to have a
firm grasp on the conceptual and practical limits of this trope in order to fully
understand film theory and practice or even film studies. As current new
media technologies are attempting to shift the identity of cinema and moving
imagery, it is hard to overstate the importance of this metaphor for our
understanding of the modalities of vision. In what guises, we may ask, does
the ‘camera eye’ continue to survive in media that is called new?
A metaphor that has lived through cinema. As a conceptual metaphor
the camera eye seems impervious to the history of the arts and sciences. Its
origin can be traced back to ancient theories of geometry and it prevails in
the cybernetic engineering of augmented and virtual realities. Both geometry
and current examples of transparent computer displays illustrate processes
that are central to this study: They show how rationalizations of vision
emerge from blending physiological, psychological, conceptual, and
technological models that organize our environment. As David Lindberg
observes, in the Greek world, theories of vision evolved along three fields of
interest: medical and anatomical studies that were concerned with the
physiology and pathology of the eye, philosophy and epistemology that
speculated about the role of vision in constituting a reality and geometry,
which aimed at developing a mathematical model of perspective.3 In part,
this explains why already in antiquity optics could refer either to the study of
vision and light or—in a more restricted sense—the geometrical study of
perspective. Early material or atomistic theories of vision as well as the
theories of Plato and Aristotle fall into the more comprehensive sense of
optics. Yet, the latter sense that understood optics as a mathematical
discipline provided the most influential model of vision.4 In the introductory
definitions of his treatise on Optics, Euclid (ca. 300 BC) translates vision
into a formal symbolic system in which the eye becomes the vertex and the
field of vision a cone that outlines a geometric regime of visibility.5
Geometry did not simply provide an explanatory model to illustrate
optical principles of vision, but was soon viewed as an inherent and natural
feature of vision itself. Both René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm von
Leibniz conceived of seeing as a process of reasoning and reckoning founded
in a kind of natural or innate geometry (“ex geometria quadam omnibus
innata”).6 In surveying and mapping our environment, trigonometric
calculations with lines and angles synthesize the empirical world of
observation with the conceptual world of geometry.7 Such outlines not only
mediate between physiological premises of perception and material
conditions of optics, they also serve as powerful models for organizing
discourse.
In digital imaging technologies, the techniques of the observer and
rationalizations of vision appear to be built into the image itself. Digital
images are synthetic images that virtualize reality by enmeshing the empirical
world with conceptual models. Instead of regarding geometry as an innate
faculty of thought, today cognitive scientists and philosophers argue for a
functional continuity of brain, mind and technology.8 Andy Clark proposed
considering humans “natural-born cyborgs,” whose minds are disposed to
incorporate technological resources. Wearable computers and head-mounted
transparent computer displays have helped to revive the romantic view of
cultural techniques as garments or second skin—metaphors that aim to blend
material and physiological as well as affective and conceptual orders.
Smart glasses superimpose computer-generated visual information on our
vision at a focal depth that ideally aligns it with the focus of our real-world
scene. Whether such glasses employ half-mirrors and prisms or micro LEDs,
the main technical challenge in designing such devices lies in the supple
blending of a looking glass and a display window. The affective and
conceptual ramifications of this blend are wide-ranging. Looking at the
world through an informed display creates a modality of vision that imbues
that actuality of seeing with the extensive knowledge of distributed
databases. Navigating through unknown terrain in this way turns users into
inexperienced experts and charges them with new sets of affects that may
simultaneously evoke feelings of being lost and found. The fusion of
perception and display as well as recording and screening is central to
camera-eye metaphors in cinema. It represents an affective and conceptual
matrix from which diverse filmic practices and conceptions of cinema have
evolved. It also informs the key themes of this book that address the camera
eye’s relation to regimes of sensibilities and conceptions of self, new
emerging practices of seeing and writing, interfaces of mind and memory as
well as body and matter.
A metaphor cinema lives up to. As long as the total fusion of the record
and display is a technological and philosophical ideal, the camera eye
remains a utopian metaphor or a concept that is yet to be grasped. The
German historian Reinhart Koselleck described such concepts
(Erfahrungsstiftungsbegriffe) as pointing beyond themselves by creating
new experiences rather than capturing actual ones.9 On the one hand, a
history of camera-eye metaphors in cinema traces a history of envisioning
and re-inventing cinema. On the other hand, such a history documents how
cinematic experiences encapsulated by the idea of camera-eye vision have
challenged and changed our experience and understanding of ourselves.
A historical study of the camera eye will have to include re-evaluations
and re-appraisals of the metaphor itself that document changing projections,
philosophical stances and intellectual investments. Whereas in film theory
notions of the camera eye have been vital for coming to terms with
psychological and technological aspects of cinematic experience, the
philosophical currency of this metaphor has experienced its ups and downs.
According to Gilbert Ryle’s influential Concept of the Mind (1949), the
camera eye represents a category mistake that illicitly mixes mental and
material domains.10 For younger philosophers such as Mark Johnson and
Ryle’s student Daniel Dennett, the camera eye is a thoughtful or conceptual
metaphor that corroborates an embodied and embedded view of the mind.
Analogical reasoning develops along similarities between our bodily
experience and the environment we live in,11 and generates new meaning by
cross-mapping affects, figures and ideas across different domains.12 The
philosophical imperative to update concepts thus responds to shifting
relations in our environmental networks.13 In What Is Philosophy, Felix
Guattari and Gilles Deleuze define the core program of philosophy as
creating “concepts that are always new.”14 While this minimalist definition
of philosophy retains the traditional objective that the tools of our
understanding must be reliable and prevailing, it also points to the
competitive forces in the market of concepts: “Concepts are not waiting for
us ready-made, like heavenly bodies. There is no heaven for concepts. They
must be invented, fabricated, or rather created and would be nothing without
their creator’s signature.”15 If camera-eye conceptions remain new, it is
through artistic, scientific, and theoretical interventions that reclaim, re-
charge and re-invent this metaphor. The historical persistence of the camera
eye as a guiding and projective concept needs to be read against its historical
actualizations and disciplinary recontextualizations. The variety and
complexity of camera-eye conceptions not only point to the great number of
ontologies critics, scholars and filmmakers have proposed for film, they also
show that making categorical distinctions is highly contested. Arriving at
conceptually reliable categories and theories of film inevitably depends on
situating cinema within socio-cultural and perceptual frames. Aesthetic
questions about the specificity of the cinematic experience need to be
contextualized historically and ethically by asking when and where cinema
is.16 The ontological ground of the camera eye in this sense becomes a
historical site for convergent theorizing as well as ethical and aesthetic
negotiations.
The camera eye has become emblematic of cinematic modernism, which
regards cinema as a hub that connects to a great variety of intellectual
inquiries and aspects of cultural life. At the turn from the nineteenth to the
twentieth century, psychology, theories of art and literature, philosophy,
sociology and cultural theory evolved in mutual exchanges with cinema.17 In
his study Eye of the Century, Francesco Casetti highlights the impact of the
cinematic experience on negotiating a number of differences and opposites
such as partial and total views, mind and machine, or sense and the
sensible.18 Cinema promised a realistic substitute for idealistic speculations
about an omniscient, total or even a God’s eye perspective by offering a
mechanical synthesis of a series of partial views. Cinema also provided a
more refined or complex camera model of the mind. Traditional camera
models that supported a representative theory of perception assumed that
sight gives us a direct intuition of the physical world.19 The elaborate
processes of filmic manipulation between the recording and the projecting of
an image suited the new nineteenth-century paradigm of perception that
acknowledged both the physical and psychological dimensions of vision.20
Inasmuch as the cinema offered a model to negotiate between physical,
mental and virtual realities, it gave a radically new perspective into the
creation of meaning. From today’s point of view, the quest for a film
language, which dominated the rhetoric of film theory for a long time,
appears itself as a lesson in forming concepts from felt senses by abstracting
embodied and embedded gestures into symbolic forms. If the camera eye in
modernism set a model for convergent theorizing, the legacy of this tradition
is felt most strongly in the collaborative efforts of semiotic, psychoanalytic,
phenomenological and cognitive approaches.21
This book builds on and continues the endeavors of modernity research. In
order to understand any conception of vision in modernity, we need to come
to terms with the camera eye, which typifies the mutually constitutive
relationship between mind, body and media. However, any serious
discussion of camera-eye metaphors faces a dilemma that seems impossible
to resolve. On the one hand, notions of the camera eye are culturally
ubiquitous and impervious to film history to the extent that they often become
metonyms of cinematic experiences.22 On the other hand, camera-eye
metaphors surface as powerful tropes in historically specific film-theoretical
interventions. The 1930s and late 1970s generated very distinct
understandings of the camera eye. In the 30s, the camera eye in both literature
and film denotes specific modes of ‘seeing’ and ‘writing,’ whereas
invocations of the camera eye in the 1970s and 80s link this metaphor to
specific ideologically-charged senses of subjectivity. Thus far camera-eye
metaphors have been studied mostly in reference to specific aesthetic
movements, historical periods and theoretical positions. Yet, in order to fully
appreciate the cultural work of such a conceptual metaphor and to trace its
developments within different philosophical traditions, specific or exclusive
camera-eye notions must be studied against broader and popular uses of the
term.
This study approaches this dilemma by focusing on three (kinds of)
‘senses’ that have been projected onto notions of the camera eye and that
have crisscrossed film history in productive ways: The first sense is
conceptual and related to philosophical and epistemological positions.
Camera-eye notions help to identify, demarcate and illustrate basic elements
of cinema. This basic function frequently informs more complex heuristic or
dialectical camera-eye notions that seek to expand the dimensions of vision
and film by aligning the optical realm with emotional, cognitive, ideological,
philosophical and other discourses. The second sense can be described as
gestural, relating to the conventions and mechanisms of perception and
comprehension. Optical mechanisms, such as the law of refraction, offer
schemata or cognitive routines for understanding social and symbolic
realities as well as their underpinning mechanisms and arrangements. The
third and most elaborate sense can be described as generic as it evokes
elaborate social practices and technological formats with sets of routines and
methods. In its alignment with diaristic practices, interpolated formats of
narration and network organization, the camera eye outlines a creative or
constructive model that informs our way of thinking, filmmaking and
theorizing.23
 Camera-eye metaphors respond to these contradictory impulses as they
both confuse and segment the human senses. Recasting the relationship
between sensory and conceptual meanings, camera-eye metaphors not only
play with different modalities of ‘senses,’ they also project and hierarchize
ways, methods, practices, forms, bodies and technologies of sensing.24
Focusing on camera-eye metaphors (in verbal as well as visual
configurations) as a core concept of film culture makes it possible to extend
the historical scope and embrace a greater variety of perspectives that
address perceptual, phenomenal, cognitive, semiotic, narrative,
commemorative, ethical and expressive dimensions of film. More than a
history of a concept or a contribution to the history of ideas, the chapters of
this book attempt to show how film style and media illuminate the
connections between our socio-political environment and our mental states
as embodied, extended and distributed.
Drawing on Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier’s conceptual blending
theory and, more generally, on the field of situated cognition, I will analyze
camera-eye metaphors as increasingly complex ‘blends’ that range from
concept to consciousness. In turn the chapters will deal with the camera eye
as (1) a conceptual metaphor that integrates embodied and abstract meanings,
(2) rationales or poetics that juxtapose ways of seeing with methods of
discourse, (3) intermedial blends of visual and verbal artforms, (4)
ideological formations that connect things and fantasies as well as objects
and memories, (5) social and textual organs that merge body and medium, (6)
a fusion of personal identity and medium specificity and (7) the integration of
mind and media.
Chapter One begins with a literalist reading of the camera-eye metaphor as
adjusting one’s gaze to the optical apparatus of a camera. Such a physical or
figurative alignment of eye and camera may already be conceived of as an act
of engineering, a formative or formal arrangement that frames an experience.
Looking through a camera in this sense means seeing things in ‘the terms and
relations’ of a camera; it involves blending perceptual and conceptual senses
of seeing. Ludwig Wittgenstein used the phrases aspect-seeing and seeing-as
to talk about this fusion of seeing and thinking. For him the recognition of an
aspect creates a new perception, a sense of wonder and astonishment that
may produce new insights. I approach the metaphor of the camera eye as a
play with the senses by linking it to a tradition of nineteenth-century optical
toys such as the thaumatrope and stroboscope. The wondrous effect created
by these devices came with an epistemological lesson. They revealed that the
persisting illusion was an act of perception rather than deception. As these
moving-images seemed to mimic aspects of consciousness, they promised
empirical grounds for the scientific and popular imagination to see one in
terms of the other. Looking at popular, scientific and technological discourses
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I will trace three models of
grounding the camera-eye metaphor. I will discuss William Henry Fox
Talbot’s “sensitive paper” of photography and Wilhelm Kühne’s “visual
substance” of the retina as examples of material camera-eye conceptions.
They can be contrasted to mechanical camera-eye conceptions that ground the
commonality of camera and eye causal relations and processes. Although
theorizing about film and media builds on both scientific and technological
camera-eye metaphors, I will argue that it also creates a new, organic model
of the camera eye, which simultaneously sees the camera as an eye and the
eye as a camera. To illustrate this, I will analyze Walter Benjamin’s notion of
the optical unconscious and the blending of theoretical frameworks in Jean-
Louis Baudry’s apparatus theory.
Chapter Two extends the scope of the camera eye from a conceptual
metaphor to a method of discourse. Leading into this, the first chapter shows
how the alignment of eye and camera can confuse the senses in ways that
shed light on physiological and psychological dispositions. In the second
chapter I examine how the adjustment of camera and eye creates an organ that
projects a discursive order and is dynamically organized by it. The camera
eye thereby becomes a rationale or a poetics that in privileging a specific
way of seeing configures the alignment of medium, discourse and the human
sensorium. I will examine René Descartes’s rationale of “seeing better” and
Dziga Vertov’s poetics of “seeing more” as early modern and modernist
methods of vision and paradigmatic models of rationalizing cinematic vision.
Chapter Three places Vertov’s poetics of the kino-eye within an
intermedial history of film and literature. Although Vertov’s kino-eye is
indebted to romantic and modernist literature, he conceived of the kino-eye
in anti-representational terms and in strong opposition to artistic conventions.
Vertov’s conception of the kino-eye aims to capture an aesthetic experience
of ‘life as it is.’ It is at odds with camera-eye notions that dominate the
second half of the twentieth century and use the metaphor to describe media-
specific representational practices. I follow this shift of the camera eye from
an aesthetic to representational category by examining word-and-image
relations in filmic and literary invocations of the camera eye. In the first part,
I put Vertov’s film A Sixth Part of the World (1926) in a dialogue with Luigi
Pirandello’s The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio (1925) and John Dos
Passos’ U.S.A. (1930–36). The second part compares Christopher
Isherwood’s literary camera eye in Goodbye to Berlin (1939) with its
adaptations for the stage and screen.
If there is one literary genre or writing practice that has had a lasting
impact on both literary and filmic figurations of the camera eye, it is, without
doubt, the diary or notebook. Whereas Chapters Two and Three examine the
diary as provisional and experimental forms of exploring objective realities
and new subjectivities, Chapter Four looks at the diary as an ideological and
narrative format by comparing two films from the classical (silent and sound)
period: Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) and William
Keighley’s Journal of a Crime (1934). The cinematic integration of diary
fiction points to the central paradox of the camera: its ostensible objectivity
and its ability to express subjectivity. Since diaries are material practices of
remembering that conventionally address the self as an imagined other (‘Dear
Diary’), they offer a congenial generic frame for understanding cinema as an
external record or memory trace and as an ideological object of social
fantasies. Following the spirit of New Objectivity (neue Sachlichkeit), in
Pabst’s film, the diary never ceases to be a thing, which upon entering the
public sphere returns the patriarchal fantasies that were projected onto it. In
Keighley’s film, which Warner Brothers originally envisioned as an
American version of Diary of a Lost Girl, this approach is deceptively
undercut by reframing the diary’s authorship. Rather than reflecting the film’s
voyeurism, the diary becomes a cinematic emblem of manipulative, social
control.
Chapters Two to Four focus on the camera eye as a metaphor for
rationalizing cinema as a system of articulation. Seeing through a camera, or
assuming the eye of a camera, becomes a search for a poetics of vision, new
grammars of representational forms or generic formats of experience.
Chapters Five to Seven reverse this perspective by looking at the camera eye
as an organ of articulation and a process of individuation. In the history of
film theory, this ambiguity of the camera eye as a system and an organ of
articulation has striking parallels in the popular notion of film language,
which has come to mean both a quasi-linguistic rationalization of film and a
means of expression that surpasses language altogether by speaking with a
body and directly to a mind. Chapter Five examines filmic gestures and
figures as movements towards organizing a cinematic body that relates to
film as an instrument and a text, respectively. The alignment of camera and
eye becomes the basis for new discoveries of the self as a user of technology.
I discuss such automedial explorations in both film practice and theory by
putting theoretical accounts of narrative agents of film in dialogue with three
films from early, classical and contemporary periods that almost entirely use
point-of-view shots: Cecil Hepworth’s A Day with the Gypsies (1906),
Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947) and Philippe Harel’s Le
femme défendue (1997).
Chapter Six continues to investigate the personal politics of the camera
eye by turning to the aesthetic interventions of the autobiographical film
avant-garde in the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s. Chapter Five considers
personality and impersonality as masks or guises that address the filmic body
by virtue of its organ(s), i.e. the roles and functions the body performs.
Chapter Six examines how avant-garde filmmakers challenged this notion of
personhood. Rather than defining person as a socially defined role, the
personal comes to signify a creative origin and a manifestation of a true self.
I discuss this change in the personal camera eye as a shift from role to model.
Instead of having the camera and actors play a role, filmmakers turned to life
models and employed the camera as a model of the self. My discussion of
works by Jerome Hill, Stan Brakhage and Carolee Schneemann follows
increasingly expansive notions of a personal camera; they reflect on the self
as image, re-experience the self as image, and in a performative attempt to
overcome the distinction between image and image-maker, re-live the self as
image.
Chapter Seven approaches the camera eye as an emergent phenomenon of
consciousness. Camera consciousness is the most extensive elaboration of
the analogy between camera and eye. It builds, or supervenes, on both an
optical model of vision and a memorial model of recorded traces.
Mindscreens process, as it were, perceptual traces as mental images. This
idea of an emerging consciousness provides a powerful model of integration.
It offers a way of synthesizing competing approaches in film theory and a
way of theorizing evolving forms of cinema as Bruce Kawin’s concept of a
mindscreen and Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the time-image attest to.
Analyzing the visionary agents in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) and
Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch (1980), as well as the enacted visions in
Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) and Gaspar
Noé’s Enter the Void (2009), I will argue against the idea of camera
consciousness as a higher form or subsequent stage of cinematic vision.
Instead, I will regard perceptual and mental models as dialectical
counterparts in negotiating the site and limits of consciousness. In all of these
films, the camera eye faces death as if to inquire what cinema is when it
transgresses the ethical, representational, technological and aesthetic
boundaries that define its existence within a certain historical discourse.

Notes

1. For a discussion of mind-as-machine tropes as ontological metaphors,

see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980), 25.
2. Even though camera-eye metaphors pervade all kinds of aesthetic
movements and periods, they have been mostly associated with non-
mainstream cinema. In John Russell Taylor’s portrait of independent
filmmakers of the 1960s, the title Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear (1964)
merely served as a catch phrase for novel expressive qualities in auteur
cinema. See Taylor, Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear: Some Key Film-Makers
of the Sixties (London: Methuen, 1964). On camera-eye notions in avant-
garde cinema see also William C. Wees’s Light Moving in Time: Studies
in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992) and Kaja Silverman’s essay “What Is a Camera?
Or: History in the Field of Vision,” Discourse 15.3 (1993): 3–56.
3. See David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 1–17.
4. Aristotle considered optics the physical branch of mathematics. “While
geometry investigates physical lines but not qua physical, optics
investigates mathematical lines, but qua physical, not qua mathematical,”
in Physics, vol. 2 of The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1962.), 194a.
5. Euclid’s main assumptions are “[t]hat the rectilinear rays proceeding
from the eye diverge indefinitely; […] [t]hat the figure contained by a set
of visual rays is a cone of which the vertex is at the eye and the base at
the surface of the objects seen; [and] [t]hat those things are seen upon
 which visual rays fall and those things are not seen upon which visual
rays do not fall.” English translation quoted in Lindberg, Theories of
Vision, 12.
6. See René Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and
Meteorology (1637), trans. and ed. Paul J. Olscamp (Indianapolis:
Hackett Pub, 2001), 106.
7. See Richard Tobin’s essay “Ancient Perspective and Euclid’s Optics,”
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 53 (1990): 14–41. See
also Colin Murray Turbanye, The Myth of Metaphor (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1970) and Turbayne, Metaphors of
the Mind: The Creative Mind and Its Origins (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 1991).
8. See e.g. Andy Clark’s Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World
Together Again (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998) and Natural-Born
Cyborgs: Minds, Technology and the Future of Human Intelligence
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), as well as Alva Noë’s Out of
Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the
Biology of Consciousness (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009).
9. See Reinhart Koselleck, “On the History of the Concept and the Concept
of History,” in Disseminating German Tradition: The Thyssen Lectures,
ed. Dan Diner and Moshe Zimmermann (Leipzig: Leipziger
Universitätsverlag, 2009), 29–49, here 34.
10. In Malcolm Turvey’s Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist
Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Turvey draws on
Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein to lance a philosophical critique of such
logical fallacies in early and contemporary theories of film.
11. See Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human
Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) as well as
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The
Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York:
Basic Books, 1999).
12. See Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual
Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic
Books, 2002).
13. See Daniel Clement Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little,
Brown and Co., 1991), 455.
14. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 5.
15. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 5.
16. As Malte Hagener has argued, the history of film studies may be read as a
series of inquiries that has shifted from the question of what cinema is to
the questions of when and where cinema is. See Hagener, “Wo ist Film
(heute)? Film/Kino im Zeitalter der Medienimmanenz” in Orte
filmischen Wissens: Filmkultur und Filmvermittlung im Zeitalter
digitaler Netzwerke, ed. Gudrun Sommer, Vinzenz Hediger and Oliver
Fahle (Marburg: Schüren, 2011), 43–57. See also Dudley Andrew, What
Cinema Is!: Bazin’s Quest and Its Charge (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,
2010) and Vinzenz Hediger, “Lost in Space and Found in a Fold: Cinema
and the Irony of Media,” in Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Boundaries
of Cinema, ed. Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg, and Simon Rothöhler
(Wien: Filmmuseum, 2012), 61–77.
17. It is impossible to annotate references to the cinematic matrix of
modernity in a footnote. Here are some of the most important
contributions in the areas of (1) psychology, (2) literature and the other
arts, (3) sociology and cultural studies. Ad (1): Kurt Lewin was one
pioneer who integrated film in psychological research. Notably, Hugo
von Münsterberg’s Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York:
Appleton, 1916), which ranks among the first book-length theories of
film, emerged from the field of applied psychology. Ad (2): Vachel
Lindsay’s The Art of the Moving Picture (1915/1922) (New York:
Modern Library, 2000), which is often referred to as the first book-length
film theory in English, represents an idiosyncratic approach to theorizing
film in analogy to literary and classical art theories. Anton Kaes’s
anthology Kino-Debatte: Texte zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Film
1909–1929 (München: Niemeyer, 1978) represents an invaluable source
of early criticism on the relationship between film and literature as well
as other artforms. Literary studies and art history were also vital in
establishing film studies as an academic subject. Early efforts can be
credited to the collaborative efforts of the art historian Erwin Panofsky
and of Robert Gessner, who in 1960 served as the first president of the
Society of Cinematologists, which later became the Society of Cinema
and Media Studies. On the development of cinema as an academic
discipline in the U.S. see Dana Polan’s Scenes of Instruction: The
Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007); on the interrelations between art history and cinema see
Dudley Andrew’s The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of
Photography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997) and Angela
Dalle Vacche’s anthology The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and
Art History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003).; on
Panofsky see Thomas Y. Levin’s Cinema as Symbolic Form: Panofsky’s
Film Theory (Budapest: Collegium Budapest/Institute for Advanced
Study, 1996). Ad (3): The most influential sociological approaches to the
study of cinema and the impact of film on sociological and cultural
analyses can be found in the work of Georg Simmel and his student Béla
Balázs as well as in the aesthetic theory developed by proponents of the
Frankfurt School such as Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and
Theodor Adorno. See David Frisby’s Fragments of Modernity:
Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986), Daniel Fritsch’s Georg Simmel im
Kino: Die Soziologie des frühen Films und das Abenteuer der Moderne
(Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2009), Miriam Hansen’s Cinema and
Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W.
Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), Richard
Allen’s “The Aesthetic Experience of Modernity: Benjamin, Adorno and
Contemporary Film Theory,” New German Critique 40 (1987): 225–40
and Gertrud Koch’s Siegfried Kracauer zur Einführung (Hamburg:
Junius, 2012). On cinema and the diverse facets of modernity see also
Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz’s Cinema and the Invention of
Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), Miriam
Hansen’s Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), Tom Gunning’s “Cinema
of Attractions: Early Cinema, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” Wide
Angle 3 (1986): 56–62, Ann Friedberg’s Window Shopping: Cinema and
the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993),
Charles Musser’s The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to
1907 (New York: Scribner, 1990), Lauren Rabinovitz’ For the Love of
Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), Thomas Elsaesser’s
“Cinema—The Irresponsible Signifier or the Gamble with History: Film
Theory and Cinema Theory,” New German Critique 40 (1987): 65–89
 and his recent essay “Modernity: The Troubled Trope,” in The Visual
Culture of Modernism, ed. Deborah L. Madsen and Mario Klarer
(Tübingen: Narr Verlag, 2011), 21–40.
18. See Francesco Casetti, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience,
Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
19. See Turbayne, Metaphors of the Mind, 97.
20. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and
Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: The MIT Press,
1990).
21. In the two volumes of Cinema, The Movement-Image and The Time-
Image, Deleuze reconstructs Peirce’s semiotics into a philosophy of
cinema that follows the logic of sensations from perceptual to conceptual
signs. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
The main references for phenomenological and cognitive approaches to
embodied theory of film are Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A
Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1992); and Torben Grodal, Embodied Visions: Evolution,
Emotion, Culture and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
22. See, for example Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener’s discussion of
the camera eye in their book Film Theory: An Introduction through the
Senses (New York: Routledge, 2010).
23. The connection between film and philosophy is deeper than the mutual
implication of theory and practice. Inasmuch as practices depart from
some sort of theoretical assumption or intentional kernel, theories call for
real or virtual spaces where they can be intuited or realized. While
analytical approaches favor a rigorous dichotomy between theory
(‘seeing’ as thinking and knowing) and practice (‘seeing’ as intuiting and
presenting), film philosophy reflects on the very interdependence of
conception and intuition. Cinema as a way of thinking is a prominent
concern in early aesthetic theories and philosophies of film such as Béla
Balázs’ Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films (1924)
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), or Rudolf Harms’s Philosophie des Films:
Seine ästhetischen und metaphysischen Grundlagen (1926) (Hamburg:
Meiner Verlag, 2009). In the wake of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema and in
response to neo-formalistic rejections of “grand theorizing,” film and
media philosophy has experienced a dramatic rise in interest in recent
 decades. See e.g. Richard Allen and Murray Smith’s anthology Film
Theory and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), Mary M.
Litch, Philosophy through Film (New York: Routledge, 2002), Daniel
Frampton, Filmosophy (London: Wallflower, 2006), Mark Hansen, New
Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006), John
Mullarkey, Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and Robert Sinnerbrink, New
Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (London: Continuum, 2011). See
also David Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2007), which offers a new reading of Stanley Cavell’s
film philosophy The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film
(New York: Viking Press, 1971), and Rodowick, Elegy for Theory
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).
24. In this respect, camera-eye metaphors may feed into both ocularist and
antiocularist currents, which Martin Jay has traced throughout modern
philosophy. He discerns an intellectual tradition in twentieth-century
French theory that distrusts the epistemological powers of vision, and in
some respects extends the romantic critique of the Enlightenment. Among
the antiocularist thinkers Jay includes are Henri Bergson, Jean-Paul
Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and
Emmanuel Levinas. Not only have theoretical conceptions and artistic
figures of the camera contributed to both ocular and antiocular traditions,
they can also be seen to complicate the very distinction. To Dziga Vertov
and Stan Brakhage the camera eye is a means of poeticizing reality. Both
draw on the antiocular discourse of romantics to affirm a radical
ocularism. Conversely, Pudovkin’s affirmation of Cartesian optics would
place him in the ocular tradition. However, his rationale of film montage
as a quasi-linguistic form of exposition could also be interpreted as
antiocuclar or render this distinction impractical altogether. The paradox
is intricately connected with a metaphoric range attributed to vision,
which for Jay already implies a form of denigration since it addresses
vision as something else. Curiously, Jay discerns in Wittgenstein’s notion
of seeing-as an antiocularist attitude, even though, as I will discuss in the
next chapter, Wittgenstein’s phenomenological account of the way
perception and cognition interface would place him in an ocular
tradition. See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), 14.
1 Seeing-As

There are long rhetorical and philosophical traditions that demand metaphors
and media to be clear and transparent. Even though—or because—for most
philosophers and rhetoricians metaphors and media are fundamental to
language and thought, they are routinely suspected of obfuscating reality and
confusing the mind. The metaphor of the camera eye is not an exception; it has
been celebrated and denounced as a metaphor that enlightens and illudes the
mind.1 As a metaphor that relates vision (in optical, physiological or
psychological senses) to bodies and machines, the camera eye illustrates well
an issue that has vexed theories of metaphors since Aristotle: Apparently, a
metaphor can itself only be described in metaphorical terms. This curious
phenomenon seems to underscore the importance of metaphors for organizing
structures of analogous (e.g. ‘the eye is a camera’) and disanalogous relations
(e.g. ‘no man is an island, entire to himself’) that are paradigmatic of human
understanding. Strictly speaking, camera-eye metaphors do not tell us anything
about cameras and eyes or the knowledge fields associated with them. Yet,
they can persuasively show how meaning and thought develop from embodied
simulations that involve perception, object manipulation and bodily
movement.2 In this sense, the philosophical truth of metaphors lies in
establishing congruent relations across different domains of cognitive and
experiential domains. Mark Johnson puts it in practical terms: “From this
perspective, truth is a matter of how our body-based understanding of a
sentence fits, or fails to fit, our body-based understanding of a situation.”3
This chapter approaches the camera eye as an instrument of alignment. I
propose looking at the physical and figurative alignment of camera and eye as
the formal and formative arrangements of a subject matter for a specific
purpose.4 ‘Form’ in this context relates to a specific function or a mode of
being in which a subject matter is recognized.5 Aligning eye and camera can
be seen as a basic form of engineering mind and matter. The metaphor of the
camera eye becomes useful and thoughtful when it formally organizes its
content in a meaningful way. At the core of the camera-eye metaphor is a play
with the senses, or more precisely a playful confusion of ‘sensory’ and
‘conceptual’ senses. I will introduce the interrelation of embodied and
abstract senses by drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of aspect seeing
or seeing-as before tracing such productive (con-)fusions of sense across
technological and physiological uses of camera-eye metaphors in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While productive exchanges between
technological and physiological uses of the camera eye were instrumental in
the development of film theory, I argue that film theory only emerged when
these two camera-eye notions were synthesized. I will discuss Walter
Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious that develops a synthetic
camera-eye conception and sets the model for the convergent theorizing that
characterizes Jean-Louis Baudry’s apparatus theory.

Playing with the Senses

Many definitions and descriptions of metaphor rely on visual images and acts
of perception. Wittgenstein addressed this relationship by introducing the term
“seeing-as” or, more generally, “aspect seeing” to describe a moment of
visual consciousness.6 When looking for something or when looking at
something for its particular mode of appearance, we shift to an aspect of
seeing that frames our experience. For instance, the experience of seeing may
be framed as a search when we are looking for something that we cannot see,
or as a discovery when we see something we have not seen before. Yet,
aspect-seeing is not necessarily motivated by intentions as we find our gaze
captivated by aspects of our sight and our perception guided by interpretative
frames. For Wittgenstein, the ability to shift between different aspects of
seeing allows us to distinguish between seeing and thinking and to account for
its fusion in processes of comprehension. Aspect-seeing allows us to hold
multiple views of the same thing. Without this ability, he argues, there would
be merely a descriptive apprehension of things.7
Central to aspect-seeing, Wittgenstein notes, is a sense of wonder.8 The
integration of (aspects of) seeing and (conceptual) meaning is characterized
by an experience of astonishment. When an aspect emerges or, as Wittgenstein
puts it, “flashes up,” a new perception is created.9 What is perceived is not an
external trait or the characteristic of an object, but a (new) relation of this
object among other objects. Seeing-as in this sense means seeing things in
relations, according to rules and conventions that organize our views.10 If the
rhetorical power of metaphor results from the sound and accurate alignment of
embodied and conceptual senses, the philosophical insight of metaphors lies
in the very processes of blending embodied and conceptual meanings.
Wittgenstein sometimes refers to the fusion of perceptual and conceptual
frames as the original language game of perception. René Descartes calls this
mixing of perceptual and intellectual senses (or the sensible and the
meaningful) a habitual perversion of the order of nature.11 For him this
analogy between perceptual and rational senses is a makeshift solution in
order to address things of which there is no positive knowledge.12 Throughout
this book I will be concerned with what happens when we avert our gaze from
projected and moving images and our wondrous experience turns into a
theoretical discourse or an artistic vision. What happens when the play with
the senses extends to a conceptual play and consolidates into a language game
with its own emerging rules of formal alignment?
The prehistory of this question can be found in Laurent Mannoni’s
monumental study The Great Art of Light and Shadow. In this archaeology of
cinema, Mannoni outlines a history of how optical toys are transformed into
scientific tools. He compiles eleven chapters spread out over three parts
before, in the forth part, he turns to the canonical patrons of cinematography:
Jules Janssen, Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. The first part
is entitled, quite poetically, “The Dreams of the Eye” and surveys a variety of
image-projection devices that, like the camera obscura and the magic lantern,
were developed in the seventeenth century. The two subsequent parts, headed
“Triumphant Illusions” and “The Pencil of Nature,” trace the development of
moving slides in the eighteenth century and the invention of photography in the
nineteenth century.
In his introduction to the English translation of The Great Art of Light and
Shadow, Tom Gunning reflects on the governing themes and the trajectory
suggested by the section headings, which place projected-image and moving-
image technologies in a long tradition where magic and trickery mix with
science and precise craftsmanship. Drawing on Jonathan Crary’s discussion
of optical devices in Techniques of the Observer, Gunning posits a crucial
difference between the illusion conveyed by projection devices of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the display of motion in nineteenth-
century optical toys such as the thaumatrope, anorthoscope, phenakistoscope
or stroboscope:
 The projected images of the original magic lantern amazed viewers
because in some sense they did not know whether to take them for
substance or shadow, image or reality. Careful observation and familiarity
with the projection techniques could dispel these illusions, revealing them
as figures merely composed of light and shadow. But in the optical toys of
the nineteenth century (and we could add here Crary’s main example of the
stereoscope), the illusion of motion was no longer based on credulity: the
viewer actually saw the images superimposed or the succession of
motions or the illusion of three-dimensionality. In other words, the senses
themselves were fooled; even understanding the nature of the device could
not dispel the illusions.13

Like Crary, Gunning associates these optical toys with an epistemological

turn. The human body itself is invested as a perceptual device and optical
devices become models of perception or even human consciousness. Gunning
characterizes this turn by distinguishing between two senses of illusion, which
for him also serve as a phenomenological difference between projected and
moving images. On the one hand, there is the sense of deception or ignorance
of whether an image is material or a figment of light. Thus, posed as an
ontological question, illusion seems to be merely a matter of enlightenment
(“careful observation and familiarity”). On the other hand, stereoscopy or
moving images evoke a kind of illusion that lingers on and does not seem to
resolve. They create a spectacle of continuous amazement and lend
themselves to illustrating ‘scientifically’ what seems cognitively inaccessible.
It is an illusion that does not simply relate to the nature of the things depicted
but to the physiological and psychological premises of our perception. The
optical impression of motion and depth is not an act of deception that is to be
seen through. The image’s wondrous effect rather seems to mimic an aspect of
consciousness; it makes us see the images as having depth or motion. The
effect points to the camera and eye as the non-human and human producers of
the image. In aligning camera and eye, the image thereby creates a common
ground for exploring conscious phenomena in terms of non-conscious events.
We can also say it offers a conceptual basis for explaining consciousness (in a
non-tautological way).14 In playing with our senses, moving images create a
linkage that enables us to explore images as mental models or explain them in
terms of human physiology.
 Gunning’s distinction between illusions that diminish with the viewer’s
increasing familiarity and knowledge, on the one hand, and illusions that
refuse to be dispelled, on the other, can be mapped onto the scientific
controversy between empiricist and nativist theories of vision of the
nineteenth century. The perception of depth in stereoscopic images became the
testing ground for rivaling approaches of the physicist Hermann von
Helmholtz and physiologist Ewald Hering. While Helmholtz contended that
the perception of depth was a mental phenomenon acquired through
experience, Hering regarded it as an effect predisposed by the physiology of
the human eye.
As imaging technologies become gauges for physiological and
psychological dimensions of seeing, the camera eye emerges as shorthand for
this dichotomy and sometimes even as an imaginary solution for overcoming
it.15 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson describe metaphors like the camera eye
as ontological metaphors. Like notions of the mind as a machine, such
metaphors view “events, activities, emotions, ideas, etc., as entities and
substances.”16 While this appears to be a valid general observation, it is
important to examine more closely the ontological work performed by the
camera eye. What are the specific modes, processes and forms of
metaphorical ontologizing?
Camera-eye metaphors are bi-directional; they can be viewed under
anthropomorphic or mechanomorphic aspects. The camera eye may tell us
something about the eye or visual perception in terms of the optical apparatus
of a camera. Or, it may work as a mechanomorphic figure that draws on
principles of human vision to illustrate how a camera or film works. In yet
another sense, both anthropomorphic and mechanomorphic aspects can be
seen to build upon each other. When Johannes Kepler wondered if human
vision occurred like light forming an image in a camera obscura, he
transferred vision to a scientific and technical domain. His assumption came
with the promise of new interrelations and the lure that perception may be
measurable and computable like geometrical forms. Probing and questioning
the scientific perfection of nature, Descartes fantasized about a better nature
that would have made the human eye as long as a telescope.
By inviting us to shift aspects of seeing, the camera eye lends itself to a
dialectical reasoning. Rather than confining itself to defining one thing in
terms of another, it underscores the dynamic constitution of experience and
knowledge. The camera eye is a prime example to illustrate embodied,
extended and situated processes of cognition.17 Kepler’s and Descartes’s
recourse to the camera obscura and the telescope illustrates this.18 The
camera eye dissects and reconstructs the human body by mapping across (and
projecting from) bodily and technological domains: human visual perception
and the visual apparatus of the camera. These two domains or mental spaces
inform a wide range of metaphorical extensions and metonymical
compressions, which make camera-eye figures a particularly economic and
efficient way of organizing thought. The camera eye denotes more than simply
an organ or mechanism of seeing; it can function metonymically for an entire
affective, cognitive or social apparatus. It can also assimilate and incorporate
a variety of technical and scientific fantasies. As I will discuss below,
photographic and scientific uses of the camera eye imagined a pencil of nature
writing with the photochemical precision of light or the idea of a visual
substance as a physiological link between body and mind.
Metaphorical exchanges in camera-eye conceptions are situated and
sensitive to the specific needs and requirements of their contexts of use. The
metaphorical grounding or ontologizing performed by the camera eye may take
on a variety of forms. The essentialist or substantial form privileged by Lakoff
and Johnson is but one form of grounding events, activities, emotions and
ideas. In a dynamic view of camera-eye metaphors, ontological forms may be
seen as the result of dialectical exchanges that revolve around three poles or
centers: (1) a subjective pole that involves scales of sensitivity, (2) an
objective pole that exploits physical and mechanical principles of reflection,
as well as (3) a synthetic or computational pole that combines subjective and
objective processes in arithmetical or organic interpretations.19 Camera-eye
metaphors create conceptual networks that interrelate these centers. In what
follows I will trace interrelations by looking at material, mechanical and
organic conceptions of photographic and cinematic camera-eye conceptions in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Sensitive Paper and Visual Substance

William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of negative-positive photography,

provides a prototypical example in his first scientific account of photography,
which in 1839 he presented as a type of drawing facilitated by light. Talbot
explains “photogenic drawing” in both subjective and objective terms.
Photogenic drawing blends the subjective art of sketching with an objective
delineation of things, a fusion that reportedly fooled his contemporaries, who
judging from a little distance claim “that it was evidently no picture but the
piece of lace itself.”20 On his first ventures into field photography he reports
that he “obtained very perfect but extremely small pictures; such as without
great stretch of imagination might be supposed to be the work of some
Lilliputian artist.”21 The image of the lilliputian triggers a subjective frame
for understanding photography. It relates specifically to Talbot’s experiments
with what he calls “Sensitive Paper.”22 Alternatively, he proposes viewing
photography as a kind of reflexive objectivity according to which objects
picture themselves,23 a process primarily associated with the camera
obscura.
The metaphor that reconciles both subjective and objective stances towards
photography is “the pencil of nature,” a metaphor that attributes nature a tool.
Or rather, as Talbot puts it, photography allows “Nature [to] substitute her
own inimitable pencil, for the imperfect, tedious and almost hopeless attempt
of copying a subject so intricate.”24 The pencil of nature writes according to
the laws of nature; it follows, as it were, the grammar of “natural chemistry”
(an expression that resonates with Kepler’s and Descartes’s notion of natural
geometry) and produces in a few seconds what “would take the most skillful
artist days or weeks of labour to trace or to copy.”25 The pencil of nature
illustrates well how our technological imagination enmeshes scientific frames
with folk psychology. Talbot’s account of photography situates his scientific
discovery within a wide range of socio-cultural frames that include issues of
labor, photography’s usefulness in improving artistic practices and perfecting
scientific methods as well as its impact on revising experiences and beliefs
that are taken for granted or considered universal.
The “natural magic” of “fixing a shadow” on light-sensitive paper
becomes both an instrument and a media-historical frame of reference for new
neuro-physiological theories of vision in the 1870s and 80s. Following Franz
Christian Boll’s discovery of light-sensitive pigments in the retina, the so-
called visual purple, Wilhelm Kühne devised a method of photographing
patterns of bleached pigment in living eyes. Kühne’s optographic experiments
were publicized widely and found great resonance in the popular imagination
of the eye as a photographic camera. Optography inspired many science
fiction and crimes stories in which forensic scientists attempt to glimpse at the
retinal image of a murderer in the eyes of the victim. Notably, Kühne
expressed some reservations in his comparison of the eye with the camera. He
concluded his research report by arguing that “[t]he retina, so long as it is
maintained in its natural connections with this epithelium, resembles not so
much a photographic plate as a whole photographic workshop, in which the
operator, by bringing in new sensitive material, is always renewing the plates,
and at the same time washing out the old image.”26 In order to conceive of the
eye as a technological apparatus, photography needs to be ‘re-envisioned’ as
a serial photography that approximates a cinematic principle. Kühne here
articulates a technological desire, which—only a few years later—would be
fueled by Eadward Muybridge’s serial photography and Étienne-Jules
Marey’s chronophotography. Photography so far offers only an insufficient
model for comprehending the eye.
The discovery of visual purple was celebrated as a scientific sensation.
For the first time a purely physiological process affected by light could be
observed and studied in the retina. However, the actual results of its scientific
analysis remained modest and its conclusions were at times dubious. The
discovery of visual purple was soon integrated into fervent debates between
Hering’s nativist and Helmhotz’s empirical theories of vision. As R. Steven
Turner shows in his book-length study on this controversy, the light-sensitive
visual purple led followers of both camps to bold and lofty speculations.27
Kühne himself soon abandoned the hope that the light-sensitive purple color
in the retina would reveal a substance directly related to the act of vision.
Further tests showed that visual purple could not be detected in the fovea and
appeared to be fully absent in the retina of some animals. When the
physiologist Michael Foster, who was sympathetic to Hering’s nativist stance
on vision, published the English translation of Kühne’s On the
Photochemistry of the Retina and on Visual Purple in 1878, the notion of the
visual purple as a visual substance could no longer be scientifically
maintained. Yet, Foster programmatically held on to the idea of the visual
purple as a conceptual metaphor, imagining it as a psycho-physiological
interface that mediates between objective stimuli and subjective experience.
As a dualistic entity, this visual substance would “bridge over the gap
between the waves of the luminous ether and the waves of the visual nervous
impulses.”28 Or, in a paraphrase of Hering’s theory of vision, Foster
contended that
 the hypothesis of a visual substance (or visual substances) […] [can]
bring visual (and by analogy other specific) sensations into the same
category as ordinary nervous impulses and even muscular contractions
(we might perhaps go so far as to say as protoplasmic molecular
movements in general), and thus open up the way by which the phenomena
of a visual sensation, a nervous impulse, the act of secretion, and a
muscular spasm may be made to illustrate each other.29

Foster turns the “premature delusions”30 brought about by the visual purple
into a prospective scientific vision.
As camera-eye notions often serve as a conceptual shorthand or makeshift
solutions to questions for which we have only vague answers, their rhetoric is
frequently driven by deficits. Cinematic terms such as ‘zoom lenses,’ ‘moving
spotlights’ and ‘close-ups’ are common in the scientific jargon of psychology
and the cognitive sciences.31 Vision here stands in for a variety of faculties
and cognitive processes (e.g. seeing is giving attention). In this blend the
‘camera’ holds the place for a known or unknown mechanism supporting these
faculties or processes (directing one’s attention works like spotlighting,
camera movement or a zoom lens). Whereas for Kühne the comparison
between the eye and the camera highlighted the superiority of the eye in the
rapid processing of visual stimuli, early theories of film sometimes explained
the illusion of moving images by a deficit or sluggishness of the brain.

Mechanical Brains and Electronic Minds

Long after the rejection of theories that explained the perception of continuous
movement and apparent motion by a delay in retinal processing had been
rejected, this mechanism that became known as “the persistence of vision”
remained powerful in the popular imagination and film theories.32 Frederick
A. Talbot’s Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked (1912) offers
an early example:

The eye is in itself a wonderful camera. The imprint of an object is

received upon a nervous membrane which is called retina. This is
connected with the brain, where the actual conception of the impression is
formed, by the optic nerve. The picture therefore is photographed in the
 eye and transmitted from that point to the brain. Now a certain period of
time must elapse in the conveyance of this picture from the retina along the
optic nerve to the brain, in the same manner that an electric current
flowing through a wire, or water passing through a pipe, must take a
certain amount of time to travel from one point to another, although the
movement may be so rapid that the time occupied on the journey is
reduced to an infinitesimal point and might be considered instantaneous.
When the picture reaches the brain a further length of time is required to
bring about its construction, for the brain is something like a photographic
plate, and the picture requires developing. In this respect the brain is
somewhat sluggish, for when it has formulated the picture imprinted on the
eye, it will retain that picture even after the reality has disappeared from
sight.33

In this elaborate description organic and mental processes are blended with
mechanical and electric events. They all emphasize the notion of delay, which
is fundamental and enables the fusion of images from which mental motion
pictures are seen to emerge. Thus persistence of vision, which Talbot views
as the key principle of the cinematic apparatus, becomes a general mechanism
for understanding a multiplicity of so-called backstage processes of cognition
(itself a metaphor that invokes a theatrical medium of display to refer to what
is unknown or ‘speculative,’ but nevertheless visually staged). The persuasive
power of Talbot’s description results from (erroneously) identifying the
physiological effect of the afterimage as a single cinematic mechanism, which
in its multiplication constructs an entire model of consciousness.
In the 1920s and 30s the German illustrator Fritz Kahn sparked the popular
scientific imagination by depicting human physiology as scientific
laboratories and industrial machines. In his large-sized design What goes on
in our head when we see a car and say ‘car,’ Kahn blends perceptual and
cognitive processes with the human-scale scenario of a film production
(Figure 1.1). Much of the appeal in Kahn’s illustration comes from tracing
individual processes of the human organism within a panoramic scene. In
following the car from its manifestation as a visual stimulus to its articulation
as a verbal sound image, the viewers assemble the human mind and sensorium
as a cinematic orchestra of the senses.
Figure 1.1 Fritz Kahn, “What goes on in our head when we see a car and say
‘car’” (1939), in Fritz Kahn, Der Mensch gesund und krank II
(Zürich: A. Müller, 1939), 204–5. Courtesy Thilo von Debschitz.

Kahn updates what Daniel Dennett calls the Cartesian theater, a hidden
center in the mind where all information is channeled and supervised by an
agent of conscious control such as a homunculus.34 Some thirty years later, the
Bell Series documentary Gateways to the Mind: The Story of the Human
Senses (1958) compared the mind to the control headquarters of a TV studio.
In this documentary, the TV studio is not only emblematic of the mind as a
network, television also provides a congenial frame of reference for the
scientific discoveries presented in the documentary. Gateways to the Mind
features the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, who—from his treatment of
epileptic patients—observed that the electric stimulation of certain areas in
the brain could trigger distinct memories in the patient’s mind. Penfield was
convinced that all we experience (our entire ‘stream of consciousness’) is
faithfully recorded like events on a filmstrip and lies dormant until activated
by an electric impulse.35 While notions of sensitive paper or visual substance
compress by projecting subjective and objective poles or physiological and
psychological aspects onto one material form, mechanical principles such as
the blending of images caused by temporal delay help to extend the scope of
the camera-eye metaphor. We could also say that the alignment or cross-
mapping of different realms in these camera-eye conceptions arranges the
subject matter under different aspects that reveal material and mechanical
forms of interrelations.
Another aspect of this metaphor sees the alignment between the camera and
eye in terms of its orientation or aim. Such a view examines the relationship
between the camera and eye as coupling between organism and environment.
Notably, for Kühne the comparison was only viable if both eye and
photography were examined in their respective living contexts: the epithelium
and the workshop. About a hundred years later, the visual scientist Robert
Boynton echoed Kühne’s caveat by objecting to the camera-eye analogy on
instrumental and intentional grounds: “Cameras must be aimed by someone;
the eye is part of a grand scheme which does its own aiming.”36 The eye’s
organic involvement with other physiological and mental processes is
precisely what motivated others to conceive of the link between mind and
instrument in organic and ecological terms. In response to Boynton, the film
scholar William Wees suggests conceptualizing the camera in terms of an
analogous “grand scheme” that entails the entire cinematic apparatus:

The camera’s “grand scheme” includes taking in the light (shooting),

converting the light to images on film (developing), arranging the images
in a meaningful order (editing), reproducing that order in combination
with all other visual effects (printing), and reconverting the images into a
“light flux” (projecting), from which the viewer’s own visual system
constructs the cinematic image. The original “light flux” entering the
camera goes through a series of interactions and transformations, so that
the light emerging from the projector will take on the shapes and rhythms
imposed by the total filmmaking apparatus (in which the filmmaker plays
an important though not necessarily the chief role). Only in this extended
sense can one properly call the cinematic image a representation of what
the camera “sees.”37
While Boynton’s grand scheme culminates in the intentionality of a human
agent, Wees’s grand scheme downplays the role of human agents that are
implicated in the various processes of filmmaking (e.g. shooting, editing,
printing and projecting). We can picture his grand filmmaking scheme as the
inverse case of Kahn’s representation of the mind (see Figure 1.1), where
work is distributed among a number of homunculi operating different
machines. Boynton regards the camera as operated by the grand scheme of
human intentionality, whereas for Wees intentionality appears to be
(organically) implicated in the grand scheme of the filmic apparatus.

The Organic Camera Eye and Walter Benjamin’s Optical

Unconscious

Organic alignments of camera and eye complicate the metaphorical exchanges

between the two domains as human and non-human aspects are simultaneously
(in a synthesized form) seen in terms of their other. An imagistic effect, the
‘flashing up’ of a new aspect stipulates the search for exploring between
photographic or cinematic mechanisms and consciousness. Images, as we
have seen, are instrumental for such investigation. But what if the images
themselves become instruments of investigation? Rather than signaling a
comparative frame in terms of which a phenomenon is described, the
metaphor of the camera eye in this case serves as a relay or interface that
performs rational operations. The image in synthetic camera-eye conception
advances to models of thinking and theorizing. This computational and
modeling aspect seems evident in digital imaging technologies. As digital
images are based by arithmetic operations, they can be helpful for intuiting the
emergence of these modeling and computational uses of images.
However, such operational conceptions of the image may also surface
within a media-theoretical perspective concerned with image-functions and
our relationship with images. I want to illustrate this by reviewing Walter
Benjamin’s film-theoretical model of the optical unconscious within a neuro-
scientific model of the metaphor. In the history of film theory, Benjamin’s
notion of the optical unconscious marks an important extension from an
instrumental view of cinema that projects new forms of visibility and thereby
makes manifest what escapes the unaided eye and the conscious mind to a
conception of cinematic consciousness. Recent developments in functional
imaging technologies have made it possible to visually identify discrete
mental acts as neural activations in distinct areas of the brain. Such
spectacular neuroscientific findings are fascinating examples that highlight the
heuristic value of images in mediating between the physical structure of the
brain and the psychological dynamics of the mind. Philosophers of the mind
and advocators of embodied cognition routinely draw on such neuroimagistic
evidence to corroborate their theories and develop conceptual models of
sense making.38 In their essay “The Brain’s Concept,” Vittorio Gallese and
George Lakoff describe mental image schemas as functional clusters of
neurons activated in different areas of the brain.39 In The Way We Think,
Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner draw on such neurolinguistic insights to
diagram a model of what they refer to as conceptual blending. They view the
construction of metaphors as processes of ‘mapping’ and ‘projecting’ that
create conceptual networks analogous to connectionist models of neural
architectures in the brain.
Fauconnier and Turner envision blending theory as a cognitive rhetorical
theory that combines classical rhetoric and neuroscientific insights. This
makes their theory itself paradigmatic of the mind’s extensive capacity to
draw on increasingly complex bodies of material and conceptual resources.
By refashioning classical rhetoric in terms of neuroscientific theorems, their
theory becomes a persuasive example of philosophical and economic
imperative to update our tools of thoughts and generate concepts that are, as
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari put it, “always new.”40 Fauconnier and
Turner are particularly indebted to cognitive linguistics and theories of
metaphor that view language, metaphorical thinking and analogy as rooted in
our bodily experience. They follow George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s
conviction that “our conceptual systems draw largely upon the commonalities
of our bodies and the environments we live in.”41
The modeling character of scientific images in Fauconnier and Turner may
be described as embodied conceptual interfaces. In film studies, this use of
images has a long tradition that is manifest in film-theoretical preoccupations
of correlating formal features of moving images with aspects of human
physiological and psychological dispositions. This tradition can be traced
back to experimental aesthetics developed in the late-nineteenth century and
finds a contemporary philosophical articulation in Deleuze’s cinematic
description of thought as movement.
In coming to terms with the new medium film, early critics and filmmakers
have variously combined theories of art and literature with psychological and
linguistic theories. While some theorists such as Vachel Lindsay and Rudolf
von Arnheim focused largely on art-historical and literary frames of
reference, others like Hugo von Münsterberg and Victor Freeburg combined
aesthetic theories with insights from late-nineteenth century experimental
psychology. Rejecting interart analogies, constructivist Soviet film theories of
the 1920s blended more abstract linguistic frames with insights from
behavioral psychology. There is also a strong tradition of theorizing aesthetic
experience in relation to history of technology that includes critics and
philosophers such as Béla Balázs, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin.
Or, to give a more recent, structuralist example, the French critic Christian
Metz later supplemented his semiotic theory of film with a psychoanalytical
framework. In contemporary film theory, comprehensive phenomenological
and cognitive approaches towards an embodied study of film have been put
forth by Vivian Sobchack and Torben Grodal. Taking up Francisco Varela’s
proposition of combining neurophysiological and phenomenological insights,
Adriano D’Aloia has outlined the challanges for neurophemomenolgy of
cinema.42
Film, like media in general, can be understood as an instrument that extends
the scope of our senses and facilitates increasingly complex mental
operations. Media also offer ways of understanding ourselves by blending
vague notions of the self with those of the self as a user and beneficiary of
technology. For this purpose, we may distinguish three functional descriptions
of cinematic images that deal with (1) film as an instrument of recording, (2)
film as a model for understanding phenomena and processes to which we have
no direct access; and (3) filmic notions of the self.
Film as an instrument of recording concerns the material medium that holds
in place what cannot be held in the mind and thereby supports a variety of
mental operations, ranging from measuring to memorializing. The cognitive
anthropologist Edwin Hutchins introduced the term “material anchors” for
perceived patterns in physical structures that “enable more complex reasoning
processes than would be possible otherwise.”43 Perceiving a line of people
as a queue, recognizing constellations by projecting figures onto celestial
bodies, or reading watches, compasses, sundials and gauges are all
conceptual blends that draw on physical structures. These material anchors
increase the stability of conceptual representations.44 By holding information
in place, they release the mind or make room for new kinds of mental
operations. Cognition in this sense appears to be distributed between the mind
and the material world.
Benjamin’s idea of the optical unconscious draws on this kind of
interaction by relating the viewer’s experience to specific features (“material
anchors”) of cinema’s photographic base. In “The Work of Art in the Age of
Its Technological Reproducibility” he uses this metaphor to describe a filmic
aspect of seeing new structural relations. The effects of cinematic techniques,
such as the close-up or slow and accelerated motion that reveal hidden or
unseen phenomena, shed light on “entirely new structures of matter.”45

Figure 1.2 Conceptual blend of the notion of Walter Benjamin’s optical

unconscious.

In Fauconnier and Turner’s model of conceptual integration, the blend

“optical unconscious” can be schematized as emerging from cross-mapping
elements between two conceptual input spaces: the physical regime of optics
and the psychological domain of the unconscious (see Figure 1.2). The links
between input spaces, which in this case are largely established through
disanalogies (visible and manifest vs. hidden and latent; physical vs. mental),
are organized by a generic space (something like ‘filmic reception’ or
‘perception of cinematic images’) that describes the shared structure of the
input spaces. The emergent structure of the blend arises from selectively
projecting elements of both input spaces into a blended space. The blend
develops in three ways, which Turner and Fauconnier refer to as composition,
completion and elaboration.46 Composition creates new relations that were
not available in either of the input spaces. The unconscious becomes manifest
and physical phenomena become mental events. Completion draws on a vast
amount of background knowledge. In making sense of the blend we bring in
familiar and related frames. Elaboration can support this process of
comprehension by imaginatively modifying the blend as we ‘run’ through its
network, consciously and unconsciously.47
Benjamin corroborates the disanalogous relations between the optical and
the unconscious (completion) by situating a ‘mechanical camera’ and an
‘organic eye’ within the respective scenarios of communication and
perception (elaboration): Running the blend within a frame of perception, he
stresses the disanalogous relation between camera and eye: “Clearly, it is
another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye. ‘Other’
above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives
way to a space informed by the unconscious.”48 However, when he addresses
the transactional or communicative frame, Benjamin promotes an analogy
between the “work performed” (generic space) by a “camera” (input space 1)
and the work of “psychoanalysis” (input space 2): “It is through the camera
that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the
instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”49
Since psychoanalysis can refer to both a therapeutic practice of doctors as
well as the place where patients engage in dialogue disentangled from the
social constraints of everyday life, this double meaning may serve as a
convenient guide for Benjamin’s elaboration of the social and political
functions. What complements the notion of film as an analytical technique of
discovery of one’s place in the world is the idea of cinema as an institutional
place, a social “room for play” (“Spielraum”) and for coming to terms with
the challenges posed by modern technology:50 Benjamin uses play in the
anthropological sense of a joyful activity of experimentation and exploration.
Playing, we can try out or learn new things and we may also experience other
aspects of ourselves. For him film lies in a long tradition of cultural
technology, which has its origins in play, “where, by an unconscious ruse,
human beings first began to distance themselves from nature.”51 In this sense
film can help us in a playful manner to accommodate to an increasingly
technological culture: “The function of film is to train human beings in the
apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose
role in their lives is expanding almost daily” (italics in the original).52 Still
other elaborations of the blend may bring out new possible relations between
memory and media. As Miriam Hansen observes, we are outsourcing our
memories to technology: “[T]he memory mobilized by the optical unconscious
differs from any form of premeditated, discursive remembering or
reminiscing; it belongs to the side of Proust’s mémoire involontaire or the
Surrealists’ exercises in ‘profane illumination’ (and thus by implication to the
realm of psychoanalysis).”53 The optical unconscious in this reading becomes
emblematic of the modernist approach to artistic invention and intentionality.
It invites us to rethink our notions of subject-object relations: “a whole field
of surprising correspondences between animate and inanimate nature is
opened up, wherein even things encounter us in the structures of frail
intersubjectivity.”54
From such conceptions of film as an instrument of scientific, critical and
aesthetic techniques for implementing cognitive operations through
technological management it is only a short step to appropriating these
mechanisms of manipulation as conceptual inputs for film-theoretical models.
For example, Benjamin draws attention to intricate connections between the
optical unconscious and the instinctual unconscious. In this blend the “diverse
aspects of reality captured by film [that] lie outside only the normal spectrum
of sense impressions” are mapped across impressions of reality encountered
in psychosis, hallucinations and dreams.55

Convergent Theorizing in Jean-Louis Baudry’s Apparatus

Theory
This rationale of blending apparent analogous relations between the cinema
and the mind within a generic framework of psychoanalytic diagnoses became
an influential method in apparatus theory of the 1970s. Since psychoanalysis
is interested in symbolic transpositions from non-representational and pre-
conceptual domains (e.g. bodily impulses and emotions), its film-theoretical
application promises either an alternative to or an extension of purely
linguistic or semiotic theories of cinema. In the 1970s Baudry published two
essays that became the founding texts for apparatus theory. The first article,
“Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” was published
in Cinéthique in 1970; the second, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological
Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema,” appeared five years
later in Communications.56 The two essays orchestrate a critique of media
that challenges the view of technology as ideologically neutral. Baudry attacks
the doctrine of neutrality by showing how the cinematic apparatus is invested
with desire and premised on social values and assumptions.57
Like Benjamin’s idea of the optical unconscious, Baudry’s reflection on the
cinematic apparatus combines its instrumental and modeling functions: On the
one hand, he investigates the role technology performs in the organization of
social systems and institutions. On the other hand, he examines cinema’s deep
connections with the basic psychical apparatus. The former addresses the
cinematic apparatus as a material and a social medium; in the latter theory, the
apparatus serves as a node between the neural and the mental or, by extension,
body and mind. Another way of describing this twofold alignment of the
apparatus is to say that, in realizing our desires, it forges a link to our intrinsic
drive structure, whereas in producing truth it establishes a network within our
body of knowledge and belief. This makes the cinematic apparatus a
privileged site for analyzing the interdependence of truth and desire, or
knowledge and ideology. Baudry’s terminology acknowledges these different
dimensions of the apparatus by distinguishing between sub- and
superstructure: “l’apareil de base,” the mechanisms performed in recording,
editing and projecting a film, and the “dispositif,” the arrangement of the
screening situation that informs the viewer.
For Baudry, the cinematic apparatus is conceived of as a juncture in a
network of psychosocial relations. Its heuristic value as a node or threshold is
that it allows us to conceptualize relations that cut across dualistic or binary
structures such as body and mind, subject and object, technology and culture
or conscious and unconscious. In this methodological regard, Baudry’s
apparatus comes close to Michel Foucault’s use of the term, which I will
discuss at the beginning of the next chapter. Apparatus theory generates a
powerful model that can align a host of different theoretical frameworks. In
the spirit of contemporary poststructuralism, Baudry challenges the immanent
conception of meaning in structuralist semiotics. He draws on psychoanalysis
and theories of ideology in order to explore the backstage operations in the
production and reception of motion pictures.
Baudry’s aim is to disclose the processes that transform ‘objective reality’
into the finished product of a film. When the transformational processes elude
the viewer, the apparatus seems to have performed a kind of magic or, in the
terminology of Louis Pierre Althusser, it generates an ideological effect. By
the same token, if the transformations are transparent and permit insight, the
apparatus creates an effect of knowledge. Ideological effects merely project
the illusion of transparency by manipulating our relation to the represented
object.58 For instance, by inviting us to identify with a perspective implied in
a representation, the represented world appears as the seamless continuation
or extension of our ‘real world’ experience. In this sense, cinema’s power of
illusion results not so much from the imitation of an authentic reality (‘what
we see’) as from the simulation of a ‘realistic’ perception or point of view
(‘how we see’).
Baudry outlines three moments of transformation, which he links to the
operations of the camera, projector and screen. The camera mediates between
decoupage, the breakdown of scenes based on a written scenario, and
montage, the editing of the camera’s recording. While the former draws on
language as the signifying raw material, the latter operates in the visual
regime of the image. Projector and screen frame the transformations of the
film from a material product into a performative event, a transformation that is
connected to cinema’s economy of exchange and use values (correlating the
price of admission—a measure of labor and capital—with the pleasure of the
experience).
The ideological effect of the cinematic apparatus is that it conveys
continuity and equivalence where there is discontinuity and disparity. While
the impression of reality on the screen seems to return the light absorbed by
the camera, it actually involves a number of exchanges across domains that
are irreducible to one another (see levels 1 and 2 in Figure 1.3). Whereas the
effect of knowledge is attained through dissection and differentiation,
ideology works to efface differences and contradictions. Baudry illustrates
this by drawing attention to homologous relations between narrative continuity
and the cinematic image (levels 3 and 5). The film projection negates the
differences between individual frames. By turning these differences into
relations, film projection creates an illusion of continuous movement and
time. Both narratives and moving images involve transformations where
integral elements are displaced (replaced) by their relations: the entanglement
of places, characters and events into narratives with vectors of motion and
time in moving images. The latter evolves from a technical level (level 6), of
which the viewer is largely unaware unless the projector breaks down; the
former can be described as the semiotic result of editing (level 4). The first is
unconscious, technical and material with no inherent meaning; the other
pertains to consciousness and assigned meaning.

Figure 1.3 Jean-Louis Baudry’s network of homologies.

Since continuity is a common feature of technological and semiotic levels

(i.e. each level replaces the one below by installing a new form of continuity),
the term offers a conceptual bridge with which to speculate about the
ideological biases of films predisposed by the apparatus. One inference, often
applied to the critical analysis of continuity editing in classical Hollywood
cinema, maintains that the ideological effect is most powerful when cinematic
and narrative continuity affirm each other.59 We may illustrate this with a
comparison of medieval paintings where unities of time and space are often
subordinated to unities of meaning, e.g. when the same storyspace features an
important character on a larger scale than others and at different moments in
time. In such paintings the representations of the social order clash with
perceptual parameters of the world (level 1). Similarly, the spatio-temporal
orientation does not create a homogeneous diegetic space (level 4). In cinema,
however, continuity editing can create the illusion of a continuous storyspace.
Social hierarchies among characters and values may be represented
effectively in ways that conform to standards of perceptual realism.
According to Baudry, the ideological effect of such techniques is that
symbolic and social orders appear simply as perceptual orders of time and
space. He does not advocate a causal model of technological determinism.
But how can we qualify the relationship between cinematic and narrative
continuity? Baudry describes it as an “‘organic’ unity” using a chemical
metaphor: “the ‘subject’ is put forth, liberated (in the sense that a chemical
reaction liberates a substance).”60
Baudry’s model of interrelation draws on organic chemistry, which since
its inception in the nineteenth century has become a popular frame of
reference for re-thinking dualistic structures. Organic chemistry challenged
the dualist theory of earlier electrochemical approaches, which regarded
electricity as the basic principle of organization and interactions. Positively
and negatively charged compounds not only attract each other but they can
also switch partners. This elementary model of mechanical combination and
exchange was revised by discoveries in organic chemistry. Scientists were
able to synthesize organic substances from seemingly inorganic compounds
and they showed how substances of the same elementary composition and
molecular weight can have different properties. Thus, a key insight of organic
chemistry was that a compositional analysis of elements alone cannot account
for the properties of a substance since these properties also depend on
arrangement and structure (or what chemists today refer to as constitution,
configuration and conformation). The importance of organization and
arrangement as constructive forces informs Baudry’s view of art history,
which is not simply the contingent product of a technological and artistic
evolution (i.e. the effect of material conditions and a mechanical principle).
Rather, for him, cinema is the result of a positive feedback mechanism and the
organic chain reactions between technological constraints and an organization
principle that is driven by “the wish to construct a simulation machine
capable of offering the subject perceptions which are really representations
mistaken for perceptions.”61
Where does this desire for the confusion of perceptions and representations
come from? Following Althusser, Baudry bases his ideological critique of the
cinematic apparatus in Lacan’s psychoanalytical model of subjectivity, where
this confusion is central to psychogenesis, i.e. to the development and
structure of the psychical apparatus. Baudry compares the construction of a
transcendental subject to Lacan’s theory of identity formation. The former
describes an ideal or idealized subject that can be reconstructed from the
implicit position of view in the ‘artificial perspective,’ which since the
Renaissance has dominated the Western ideology of art. The latter refers to
what Lacan called the mirror stage. Between the age of six and eighteen
months children develop a unified image of their body and a sense of self by
proxy with their mirror images, i.e. they position themselves by intuiting the
positionality of their mirrored image. For Baudry, the cinematic apparatus
involves a similar process of identification by situating the viewer at the
imaginary center of the projection of its perceptions. This primary process of
identification, which empowers the viewer with attributes of the camera and
projector, is complemented by a secondary process of identification: the
viewer’s empathic relation with the characters on the screen.62
The psychoanalytic framework of apparatus theory supports Baudry’s
materialist rebuttal of the tradition of idealist film theories, which he in
particular identifies with François Cohen-Séat and André Bazin. While he
invokes Marx as a reminder that “there is often a truth hidden from or in
idealism that belongs to materialism,”63 he cites Freud to remind us that the
work of philosophy and rational discourse rests upon the thrust and
imperatives of the unconscious; just like Plato’s cave allegory can be read as
a reconfiguration that serves to rationalize and disguise the maternal womb.
Baudry adds a further analogy to his series of homologies. He compares the
discrete and discontinuous images that feed the projector to the discontinuous
and fragmentary characteristics of the unconscious, which are evident in
dreams, hysterical discourse or slips of the tongue, but tend to be suppressed
on higher levels of consciousness and signification. Transformations of the
apparatus are not merely changes in modality like transcriptions or
adaptations, but the reconstruction of a “mechanical model […] of a system of
writing constituted by a material base and a counter system (ideology,
idealism) which uses this system while also concealing it.”64 Baudry’s
analogy to the psychoanalytical model of the unconscious runs transversal to
the homologies discussed thus far (see the second column in Figure 1.3). By
theorizing relations across homologous levels, Baudry proposes a link
between the cinema’s technological base and its ideological disposition.
Psychoanalysis thereby serves as a model of semiosis that accounts for the
emergence of meaning as a transformation from no-sense to non-sense to
sense.
As this analogy between cinema and psyche represents a kind of master
paradigm promising insights into hidden layers and modes of production,
Baudry’s theory depends on the conclusiveness of this analogy.65 How do we
know whether this analogy is a correct interpretation of symptoms and not
itself the construction of a fantasy? Put in psychoanalytical terms, if it were
merely the construction of a spectator or theorist, it would undercut the
‘intersubjective’ engagement with the film. An unduly programmatic
application merely reproduces a given body of knowledge but fails to reach
the film’s truth.66
Baudry seems to be aware of this problem when he phrases his boldest
theses cautiously as questions. As a thorough analyst, he reviews a long
history of optical models of the mind before he wonders whether this
conspicuous obsession supports a reversed reading of the model: namely,
explaining the cinematic apparatus as a reconstruction of the psychical
apparatus. Reading the mind-as-optical-apparatus analogy in the opposite way
raises important questions about the status of the model in both film theory and
psychoanalysis. If cinema performs and perfects what in philosophy and
psychoanalysis has been described in terms of projection and mirroring, does
that mean cinema becomes its own psychoanalytical model? As Charles
Altman observed, the operations performed by the cinematic apparatus are
themselves based on an imaginary unity between cinema and optical models
in psychoanalysis. This caveat invites historical and aesthetic differentiations
that include the status of the soundtrack, other forms of cinema and media, and
the impact of alternative viewing situations.
Since the application of optical models of the psyche to the study of cinema
also implies the transference of psychoanalytical methods and heuristics, we
may ask how the discipline of film studies will benefit from this. As Baudry
observes, Freud uses optical metaphors to describe the relation between the
physical and psychical apparatus. Mental items, Freud points out, “must never
be regarded as localized in organic elements of the nervous system but rather,
as one might say, between them, where resistances and facilitations
[Bahnungen] provide the corresponding correlates. Everything that can be an
object of our internal perception is virtual, like the image produced in a
telescope by the passage of light-rays.”67
While Freud repeatedly lamented the imperfection of this optical analogy
as it shows “our complete ignorance of the dynamic nature of the mental
processes,”68 Baudry welcomes this conceptual gap because he sees in it a
great potential for cinema to elaborate the basic optical model (which is, of
course, different from closing the gap). Like Freud’s theory of the
unconscious, the notion of a cinematic apparatus thereby becomes a way of
re-thinking problems of the body-mind dualism and its socio-political and
philosophical ramifications.
How are the pathways that shape theories of identity and sexual difference
prefigured in a politics of the body? Again Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams
can serve as a blueprint: “It is highly probable that all complicated machinery
and apparatus occurring in dreams stand for the genitals (and as a rule male
ones).”69 As a vehicle of desire, the cinematic apparatus, like Lacan’s mirror,
serves as an imaginary site for the origins of sexual identity. While feminist
critics like Mary Ann Doane and Joan Copjec proposed female versions of
such an anthropomorphic apparatus, Constance Penley, in her critique of
Baudry’s apparatus as a “bachelor machine,” argued for a theory that retains
the question of sexual difference as an open play of fantasy.70
In a more general sense, the cinematic apparatus can be conceived of as a
virtual space where synaptic links are mapped onto semantic ones. Deleuze’s
formula “the brain is the screen” implies this juncture or superimposition of
perceptual and material facts. While cinema has been invoked as the
paradigmatic medium, the model may be extended to other technologies of
virtualization (e.g. new media) and to cultural techniques utilizing different
operations and strategies of identity formation. Systems theory has offered
perhaps the most abstract model, where the mind’s censoring mechanism aims
at establishing continuity and identity by explaining this mechanism as
principles of self-reference, self-organization and autopoiesis.71
Extending Benjamin’s synthetic model of camera eye to the model of
convergent theorizing, Baudry’s apparatus theory breaks down the vast
complex of human subjectivity into cognitively manageable packages and
thereby promises insight into what we identify as characteristics of human
consciousness. Films synthesize basic sensory modalities (such as sight,
sound, taste, smell, touch as well as our perception as a mobile body) into a
unified cinematic experience. Films serve as instruments that direct and
manage attention (they ‘point’ and ‘remember’). Films create their own
internal relations, generating ‘organic’ or autopoetic systems. They offer us
diverse perspectives and facilitate alternative interpretations. When they
illude and engross us, they can make us forget ourselves as if we were
sleeping, or make us aware that we are dreaming and desiring. In refracting
all these dimensions of consciousness, cinema may instill the suspicion that
the self too is a composite, the (temporary, convenient, strategic) blend of an
expansive network. It is in this assumption that the network model of blending
theory seems to converge with Deleuze’s conception of the dispositif and the
idea of “machinic thinking.”72
Notes

1. See Mark Johnson, “Metaphor in the Philosophical Tradition,” in

Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, ed. Mark Johnson
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 3–47. See also,
Richard Tobin, “Ancient Perspective and Euclid’s Optics,” Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institute 53 (1990): 14–41; and Malcolm
Turvey, “Can the Camera See? Mimesis in Man with a Movie Camera,”
October 89 (1999): 25–50.
2. See Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human
Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
3. Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, 195.
4. As I am dealing with the camera eye as a conceptual metaphor, I am
considering it primarily as a feature of the mind. Charles J. Forceville and
Eduardo Urios-Aparisi recently proposed the term “multimodal
metaphors” to highlight the fact that conceptual metaphors can be
expressed in a variety of verbal and non-verbal ways. See Forceville and
Urios-Aparisi, Multimodal Metaphor (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009).
5. For the philosopher Martin Heidegger this “serviceability is a basic trait
from out of which these kinds of beings look at us—that is, flash at us and
thereby presence and so be the things they are.” Heidegger, Off the Beaten
Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 10.
6. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bemerkungen über die Philosphie der
Psychologie, Letzte Schriften über die Philosophie der Psychologie, in
vol. 7/1 of Ludwig Wittgenstein Werkausgabe, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe,
G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman (Frankfurt a. M.: Surhkamp, 1994),
88: “Erst durch das Phänomen des Wechsels des Aspekts scheint der
Aspekt vom übrigen Sehen abgelö8;st zu werden. Es ist, als könnte man
nach der Erfahrung des Aspektwechsels sagen: ‘Es gab also da einen
Aspekt!’”
7. See Wittgenstein, Bemerkungen über die Philosphie der Psychologie,
298: “Wenn nicht der Wechsel des Aspekts vorläge, so gäbe es nur
Auffassung, nicht ein so oder so sehen.”
8. See Wittgenstein, Bemerkungen über die Philosphie der Psychologie,
303–4.
 9. See Wittgenstein, Bemerkungen über die Philosophie der Psychologie,
415.
10. See Wittgenstein, Bemerkungen über die Philosophie der Psychologie,
417–18: “was ich im Aspekt, im Aufleuchten wahrnehme, ist nicht eine
Eigenschaft des Objekts, sondern eine Relation zwischen Ihm und anderen
Objekten.”
11. See Réne Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641) in The
Meditations, and Selections from the Principles, of René Descartes,
trans. and ed. John Veitch and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (La Salle: The Open
Court Publishing, 1966), 97.
12. This premise of Descartes’s Meditations of a First Philosophy (1641)
had powerful ramifications. According to Giorgio Agamben’s
philosophical etymology of the idea of the dispositif, the conceptual
fusion of sensuous experience and mental states corresponds to what
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel calls positivity, signifying a given that is
neither natural nor rational, but merely exists. See also Jean-Luc Marion,
In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and
Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 1–30.
13. Tom Gunning, introduction to The Great Art of Light and Shadow:
Archaeology of the Cinema, by Laurent Mannoni (Exeter: University of
Exeter Press, 2000), xxxvi–xxxvii.
14. See Daniel C. Dennett: “Only a theory that explained conscious events in
terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness at all,”
Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1991), 454.
15. See Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, 117.
16. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980), 25.
17. The so-called extended mind thesis was presented in 1998 by Andy Clark
and David Chalmers in “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58 (1998): 10–
23. See also Richard Menary’s anthology The Extended Mind,
(Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2010); and Daniel M. Wegner’s analysis of
“the group mind” in his essay “Transactive Memory: A Contemporary
Analysis of the Group Mind,” in Theories of Group Behavior, ed. B.
Mullen and G. R. Goethals (New York: Springer, 1986), 550–82.
18. See Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind
and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
19. I am drawing on and slightly modifying Sean Cubitt’s triadic framework of
dialectics outlined in The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual
Technologies from Prints to Pixels (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014),
267.
20. William Henry Fox Talbot, “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic
Drawing, or, the Process by which Natural Objects May Be Made to
Delineate Themselves without the Aid of the Artist’s Pencil” (1839), in
Photography: Essays and Images, ed. Beaumont Newhall (New York:
The Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 23–31, here 24.
21. Talbot, “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing,” 28.
22. Talbot, “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing,” 27.
23. In the summer of 1835, Talbot attempted various photographs of his
country house: “And this building I believe to be the first that was ever yet
known to have drawn its own picture,” “Some Account of the Art of
Photogenic Drawing,” 28.
24. Talbot, “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing,” 27. See also
Talbot’s first book on photography The Pencil of Nature (1844), ed.
Beaumont Newhall (New York: Da Capo Press, 1969).
25. Talbot, “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing,” 24.
26. Wilhelm Kühne, On the Photochemistry of the Retina and on Visual
Purple, trans. Michael Foster (London: MacMilan, 1878), 12.
27. See R. Steven Turner, In the Eye’s Mind: Vision and the Helmholtz-
Hering Controversy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 206–
11.
28. Michael Foster, preface to On the Photochemistry of the Retina and on
Visual Purple (London: MacMillan, 1878), vi.
29. Foster, preface, vii.
30. Foster, preface, vi.
31. See A.H.C. Van der Heijden, “Attention,” in A Companion to Cognitive
Science, ed. William Bechtel and George Graham (Oxford: Blackwell,
1998), 121–28.
32. See Barbara and Joseph Anderson’s articles “Motion Perception in
Motion Pictures,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis
and Stephen Heath (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 76–95 and “The
Myth of Persistence of Vision Revisited,” Journal of Film and Video 45.1
(1993): 3–12. See also Bill Nichols and Susan J. Lederman, “Flicker and
 Motion in Film,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and
Stephen Heath (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 96–105.
33. Frederick A. Talbot, Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked
(Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1912), 4.
34. See Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown
and Co., 1991), 39 and passim. See also Margaret A. Boden, Mind as
Machine: A History of Cognitive Science (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006) and Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory: A History of
Ideas about the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
35. On Penfield’s theory of memory see Alison Winter’s excellent study
Memory: Fragments of a Modern History (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2012), 75–102.
36. Robert M. Boynton, “The Visual System: Environmental Information,” in
vol. 1 of Handbook of Perception, ed. Edward C. Carterette and Morton
P. Friedman (New York: Academic Press, 1974), 290.
37. William C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics
of Avant-Garde Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992),
26.
38. See e.g. Johnson, The Meaning of the Body; Don Tucker, Mind from
Body: Experience from Neural Structure (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007); and Varela Francisco, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch,
The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience.
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996).
39. Vittorio Gallese and George Lakoff, “The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of
the Sensory-Motor System in Conceptual Knowledge,” Cognitive
Neuropsychology 22.3–4 (2005): 455–79.
40. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy, 5.
41. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 6.
42. See Francisco Varela, “Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy
for the hard problem,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 3 (1996): 330–
49; and Adriano D’Aloia, “The Intangible Ground: A
Neurophenomenology of the Film Experience.” Necsus 1.2 (2012): 219–
39.
43. Edwin Hutchins, “Material Anchors for Conceptual Blends,” Journal of
Pragmatics 37 (2005): 1562.
44. It is important to note that Hutchins reserves the term “material anchor”
for non-representational phenomena. In contrast to symbols, which denote
an arbitrary relation to things, “the material structure only provides a
perceptual identity of the physical form as distinct from other physical
forms,” Hutchins “Material Anchors for Conceptual Blends,” 1572.
45. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility,” in vol. 3 of Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed.
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2002), 117.
46. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the
Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 42–44.
47. Robert G. Ryder has suggested a further elaboration and expansion by
blending the optical unconscious with the notions of an acoustical
unconscious. See Ryder, “Walter Benjamin’s Shell-Shock: Sounding the
Acoustical Unconscious,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 5.2
(2007): 135–55.
48. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 117.
49. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 117.
50. On the implications of Benjamin’s notion of Spielraum see Miriam
Hansen’s essay, “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,”
Canadian Journal of Film Studies 13.1 (2004): 2–27.
51. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 207.
52. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 108.
53. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent
Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 110.
54. Jürgen Habermas, “Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism: The
Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin,” New German Critique 17 (1979):
59.
55. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 118.
56. Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic
Apparatus,” and “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the
Impression of Reality in Cinema” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed.
Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 286–98 and
299–318.
57. Jean-Louis Comolli emphasized this point in his essays “Machines of the
Visible” (1971), in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and
 Stephen Heath (London: Macmillan, 1980), 121–43 and “Technique and
Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field” (1971), in Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986), 421–43.
58. Althusser defines ideology as “a ‘representation’ of the imaginary
relationship of individuals to the real conditions of existence,” “Ideology
and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)”
(1970), in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster
(London: New Left Books, 1971), 109.
59. See Raymond Bellour’s analysis of The Big Sleep in “The Obvious and
the Code” (1973), Screen 15.4 (1975): 7–17.
60. Baudry, “Ideological Effects,” 295 and 291.
61. Baudry, “The Apparatus,” 315.
62. See Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the
Cinema (1977) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
63. Baudry, “The Apparatus,” 302.
64. Baudry, “Ideological Effects,” 291.
65. Noël Carroll’s critique of apparatus theory in Mystifying Movies: Fads
and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1988) focuses on the legitimacy of this analogy. For a
criticism of Carroll’s position see Warren Buckland’s review “Critique of
Poor Reason: Warren Buckland Reviews Mystifying Movies: Fads and
Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory,” Screen 30.5 (1989): 80–103.
66. Charles Altman discusses these problems in applying psychoanalytic
theory under the headings of “incomplete,” “programmatic” and
“imaginary” discourses of analogy in his essay “Psychoanalysis and
Cinema: The Imaginary Discourse” (1970), vol. 2 of Movies and
Methods: An Anthology, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1985), 517–31.
67. Freud continues the analogy as follows: “But we are justified in assuming
the existence of the systems (which are not in any way psychical entities
themselves and can never be accessible to our psychical perception) like
the lenses of the telescope, which cast the image. And, if we pursue this
analogy, we may compare the censorship between the two systems to the
refraction which takes place when a ray of light passes into a new
medium,” The Interpretation of Dreams (1901), vol. 5 of The Standard
 Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and
trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 611.
68. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism: An Outline of Psycho-Analysis
(1939), vol. 23 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth
Press, 1964), 97.
69. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 356.
70. Constance Penley, “Feminism, Film Theory and the Bachelor Machines,”
in The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 56–60.
71. For a discussion of Freud’s optical model of the mind in media theory, see
Thomas Elsaesser, “Freud as Media Theorist: Mystic Writing-Pads and
the Matter of Memory,” Screen 50.1 (2009): 100–113.”
72. See esp. Alistair Welchman, “Machinic Thinking,” in Deleuze and
Philosophy: The Difference Engineer, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson (London:
Routledge, 1997), 211–29.
2 Seeing Better and Seeing More

In a historical sense, the fusion of camera and eye can be interpreted as a

modern expression of the age-old philosophical dream of returning to an
original unity. Only this time the return promises the entrance into a cybernetic
paradise that is entirely the creation of a human engineer. If the camera, which
stands in for the medial dispositif, and the eye, which stands in for the human
perceptual and cognitive disposition, are united, then their horizons seem to
converge into a single screen, which in ‘outlining’ the discourse that is
projected onto it may be likened to the rhetorical notion of the dispositio (see
Figure 2.1). In this interpretation, the discourse displayed on the screen
appears to be the product of a single unitary force. The mind as a screen is a
powerful and equally flawed explanatory analogy that expresses this desire.
Turning the screen into a twofold site of encoding and decoding resolves the
complications of thinking about discourse as co-determined by structures of
the dispositif and receptive dispositions. In this chapter I revisit the
relationship between dispositif and subjectivity by examining how the figures
of the camera eye align regimes of visibility with discursive regimes. The
figure of the camera eye represents an interface in the twofold meaning of
sense: On the one hand, it refers to what is sensible and mediated by the
human sensorium as well as perceptual technologies; on the other hand, sense
is understood as a basic unit of shared meaning. The camera eye rationalizes
vision and encodes light by transforming regimes of visibility into discursive
regimes.
How are orders of discourse informed by regimes of light? How are they
accommodated by genres and practices of use that shape a cultural habitus?
Since camera-eye conceptions are geared towards calibrating media and
senses, analyzing them sheds light on these questions. Taking up Joachim
Paech’s suggestion of thinking about dispositif in a conceptual triad with the
rhetorical notion of the dispositio and the psychological category of
disposition,1 I will discuss how regimes of visibility organized by a dispositif
can be seen to encroach upon discursive regimes either to construct or
deconstruct classical notions of subjectivity. To illustrate this, my examples
will come from historical extremes, the beginnings of a philosophy on the
subject in the early modern period of the sixteenth century and the radical way
of re-thinking subjectivity during the modernist period in the twentieth century.
I will suggest a dialogic exchange between René Descartes’s “Means of
Perfecting Vision” which he discusses in the seventh discourse of his treatise
on Optics (published together with his Discourse on Method in 1637) and
Dziga Vertov’s ideas on the forever perfectible kino-eye, which he propagated
in the 1920s in numerous manifestos and filmic works.

Figure 2.1 Orders and domains in camera-eye and mindscreen notions.

Improving upon vision in these cases involves a transformation of seeing

that introduces new grammars, rationales and imperatives of vision.
Reviewing visual technologies, both Descartes and Vertov revise the nature of
seeing in ways that transform the spatial and temporal parameters of
perception. Both Descartes’s telescope and Vertov’s camera are described as
instruments that manage location and administer memory or knowledge. These
arrangements of the situative and cognitive positions orient the viewer
towards specific imperatives of seeing that gesture towards their own
methods of discourse. Descartes’s preference for ‘seeing better’ became a
dominant model in cinematic vision, which I will discuss with reference to
Vsevolod Pudovkin. Vertov’s ‘seeing more’ provides provisional and
revisionist model, which treats the subject and object of seeing as yet to be
constructed or questions their certainty.
Camera and Dispositif

In retrospect the camera eye appears like a relict of a bygone modernity, a

time long before the indifferentiation of human and technological organs in the
digital matrix. The camera eye has become above all an emblem of cinematic
modernism.2 Modernist invocations of the camera are often paradoxical. They
emerge as vanishing points where a number of opposites converge: the
objective and the subjective, the real and the imaginary, the conscious and the
unconscious, the organic and the mechanical, the inside and the outside, the
private and the public, the pure visibility of the spectacle and the ordering
principle of narrative (or, as Jacques Rancière puts it in Film Fables, opsis
and mythos).3
If the camera eye served as a means to re-negotiate such oppositions, it may
be tempting to conclude that in a post-humanist and post-cinematic age, the
conjunction between camera and eye or between camera and man has become
obsolete. What can the old prosthesis of the camera eye still show us today?4
Not only do film scholars apply the label ‘camera’ for moving images that
were made without a camera but, as Edward Branigan argues in Projecting a
Camera (2006), notions of the camera are themselves projections generated
within specific film-theoretical language games. While a camera may be
perceived as a mechanical device used to record an event that lies ‘outside’
the world represented on a screen, its signification is bound to “the formal
and informal languages we use to see it.”5 Parsing a century of film theory,
Branigan surveys a catalogue of camera conceptions that range from material
definitions of the camera as an origin of sensory display to semiotic and
cognitive labels or shorthand descriptions for viewing hypotheses. Notions of
the camera cut across profilmic and postfilmic understandings that invoke
cameras as pointing devices and narrative agents. A camera may be ‘seen’ to
express mental and bodily states or encode mechanisms of the unconscious.
Branigan’s study on camera conceptions examines what happens in film theory
after a camera has done its magic. While camera work typically precedes the
projection of a film, it is the viewer’s reception that projects a camera. By
addressing the viewer’s or critic’s projections, Branigan draws attention to
the complex processes of aligning media-generated spaces with the language
games that seek to conceptualize these spaces.
The two sides of the camera and its polyvalence as a theoretical concept
have interesting parallels to the philosophical and methodological
implications of the concept of dispositif that gained currency in the wake of
Michel Foucault’s writing in the 1970s.6 Philosophically, Foucault’s
conception of the term responds to the demands of a theory of immanence. Not
unlike Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of the rhizome, the notion of
the dispositif belongs to a tradition of twentieth-century philosophy that
theorizes the limits or premises of knowledge without assuming a meta-stance
or committing teleological fallacies. Rather than seek an encompassing
principle, the dispositif approaches the ‘outside’ of knowledge in the
intervening spaces of networks. In “What Is an Apparatus?” Giorgio Agamben
has offered an intellectual genealogy that links Foucault’s notion of the
dispositif to the theological legacy of the Christian church. He traces the
dispositif back to the Greek notion of the term oikonomia, which between the
second and the sixth century came to signify a division in God as being and
praxis: “nature and essence, on the one hand, and the operation through which
He administers and governs the created world on the other.”7 Refusing to
ground operations of the mind in an essence or metaphysical cause, twentieth-
century philosophers such as Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger have
variously criticized substantial conceptions of being, by emphasizing the
being as a process or attributing a subjective agency of operational
mechanisms. Cybernetic philosophy of the 1940s and 1950s represents
another influential approach to deconstructing the subject as an autonomous
agent. Deleuze and Guattari’s reflections on ‘machinic thinking’ in Anti-
Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980) bring together both
philosophical traditions.8
Methodologically, Foucault views the heuristic power of the dispositif in
its translinguistic application as a “thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble
consisting of discourse, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory ideas,
decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical,
moral and philanthropic propositions.”9 Defined in functional and relational
terms, the dispositif can help to conceptualize relations that cut across
oppositions and interdependent structures such as the subject and the object,
body and mind, form and medium.10 In his interpretation of Foucault, Deleuze
describes dispositifs as:

neither subjects nor objects, but regimes which must be defined from the
point of view of the visible and from the point of view of that which can
be enunciated, with the drifting, transformations and mutations which this
 will imply. And in every apparatus [dispositif] the lines break through
thresholds, according to which they might have been seen as aesthetic,
scientific, political, and so on.11

Thus, conceived as an “in-between,” the dispositif mediates between the

world of objects (including the material support structure of the dispositif)
and informs the space that extends between the subject and the object. This
functional definition implies that the specific historical or cultural
configuration of the dispositif can only be resolved as relations to the
physical or material world. Put differently, the space shaped by the dispositif
is an engineered space. As a threshold of information it defines the relation
between subject and object as regimes of what can be seen and expressed.
This is why the dispositif always involves a process of objectification and, as
Foucault and Deleuze stress, subject formation.
Foucault and Deleuze use the term dispositif to describe all kinds of
discursive and non-discursive formations: As a dispositif can generate
discourse formations which in turn may serve as a dispositif for other
discourses, we can imagine all kinds of mix-ups and entanglements. Since I
am particularly interested in the interrelations between media, discourses and
genres or cultural practices of use, I want to take up a distinction made by
Joachim Paech, which helps to bring out some of these complexities. Paech
has criticized Deleuze’s definition of the dispositif for conflating the spaces
construed by media with the dimensions gauged by discourse. Rather than
viewing media and discourses as exhausting themselves in a series of
entanglements and mix-ups, Paech proposes distinguishing between medium
and discourse as different places or orders of subject formation. For this
reason, he reserves the concept of the dispositif for the place where media
arrange elements. He considers the dispositif in a conceptual triad with the
rhetorical notion of the dispositio and the aesthetic-psychological concept of
disposition. The dispositif refers to a space of interaction and communication
organized by media assemblies where things become visible and virtually
available to be identified discursively. The dispositio refers to an intentional
ordering of things in discourse in order to achieve a certain persuasive effect.
Dispositio may be described as a model of coherence, as a logic or grammar
that structures an argument. It is the proper method of discourse championed
by Descartes: It begins by delimiting, defining and outlining the subject matter
of discourse. Or, to be precise, it is the rhetorical application of the
dispositio; it is an outline, map or model transformed into discourse. Thus
prominent places where the dispositio manifests itself are in the segmentation
of discourse and the network of the critical apparatus, including diagrams and
illustrations—in short, all elements that point to the figuration of writing. (In
illustrating the ordering of discourse in the medial space of the dispositif, I
have modeled the diagrams on the principle of refraction, which provides the
backbone for Descartes’s Optics.)12
Paech describes the dispositio as co-determined by dispositif and
disposition, the cognitive and affective attitudes and beliefs that inform
behavior. Disposition may be considered a virtual system of knowledge in
contrast to the actual manifestations of knowledge engendered by this system.
This understanding of disposition faces a problem that is analogous to the
division between being and praxis that, for Agamben, lies at the heart of the
concept of the dispositif. Ludwig Wittgenstein draws attention to this analogy
when he emphasizes the operational sense in our conceptions of disposition.13
He describes disposition as a state of mind that is more like the “state of a
mental apparatus (perhaps the brain) by means of which we explain the
manifestations of that knowledge.” Yet, he adds, “there are objections to
speaking of a state of mind here, inasmuch as there ought to be two different
criteria for such a state: a knowledge of the construction of the apparatus,
quite apart from what it does.”14 Genres and conventional practices of media
that inform a cultural habitus can thus be seen to emerge recursively from
blending principles or mechanisms of discourse and understanding.15
To illustrate this, we may place the dispositif in a series with the dispositio
and disposition. Together they structure the intervening spaces where
intentionality as the flow between the subject and the object is refracted (see
Figure 2.2). Traditionally, the relation between subject and object is
represented as some sort of equation where identity and truth are seen as
successful or satisfying correlations. The dispositif projects a discursive
order of things that seems congruent with the order of things organized by the
hierarchy of our senses. In this model congruence means that each point in the
object correlates to one point in the subject, which, as I will show in my
discussion of Descartes, is the classical premise of obtaining a clear focus on
the object.
Figure 2.2 Subject-object relations ‘refracted’ by dispositif, dispositio and
disposition.

There are many ways of establishing correlations between dispositif and

disposition and whether we find them successful or satisfactory depends to a
large extent on the appeal of the discourse that organizes the correlations. One
way of doing this is to conceive of a convergent evolution as the biochemist
and Nobel prize winner George Wald proposed in accounting for the
resemblances between the camera and the eye:

Of all the instruments made by man, none resembles a part of his body
more than the camera does the eye. Yet this is not by design. A camera is
no more a copy of an eye than the wing of a bird is a copy of that of an
insect. Each is the product of an independent evolution; and if this has
brought the camera and the eye together, it is not because one has
mimicked the other, but because both have had to meet the same problems,
and have frequently done so in the same way. This is the type of
phenomenon that biologists call convergent evolution, yet peculiar in that
the one evolution is organic, the other technological.16

For Wald the frame of reference that organizes the convergence of camera and
eye is the biological model of evolution. Biology subsumes technology.
Although biological frames of reference were common in early histories of
film that compared the development of film to the growth and decline of a
biological organism, such versions of film history have been refuted by later
generations of scholars as overdetermined and teleological.17 Yet, we can find
similar kinds of reasoning whenever orders of the dispositif and orders of the
disposition seem to converge. The organizing constraints of convergences may
be ontological or idealistic as in the case of Bazin’s myth of a total cinema, or
the constraints may be founded upon ideological grounds as in Jean-Louis
Baudry’s apparatus theory, or embedded in a psychoanalytical framework as
in the later works of Christian Metz. Notwithstanding the differences between
these film-theoretical approaches, they all aim at blending aspects of the
cinematic dispositif and the viewer’s disposition in order to make the filmic
discourse determined by one unitary force (see Figure 2.3).

Figure 2.3 The convergence model.

Another way of looking at the tripartite model of dispositif, dispositio and

disposition is to consider how these medial, discursive and mental frames
shape the experience of the subject and the object. Terminologies in
phenomenology and media theory offer an interesting point of intersection in
what they refer to as resolution: High resolution means the medium is
transparent and the delimiting lines between subject and object are precise.18
In Figure 2.2 this is suggested by having each point in the object correlate
with a point in the subject. Translucent or opaque states can be considered
low resolutions that diffuse one-to-one correlations between subject and
object. However, we may arrive at a different idea of resolution if we invert
the figure-and-ground relation. If we focus on the intervening spaces
organized by the dispositif, dispositio and disposition, the subject and object
turn into a fuzzy background and what emerges in high resolution are the
figures of motion or a flow between subject and object (see Figure 2.4).

Figure 2.4 The figure/ground model.

René Descartes and Dziga Vertov on Perfecting Vision

In order to illustrate the consequences of this figure-ground inversion for

conceptions of media, discourse and subjectivity, I want to propose an
unlikely conjunction between Descartes’s theory of vision modeled on the
camera obscura and Vertov’s futurist vision of the kino-eye. Rather than
suggest an evolutionary logic between Descartes’s metaphysical investment in
the camera obscura and Vertov’s futurist celebration of the kino-eye, I will
consider their conceptions of visual technologies as two paradigmatic
approaches towards a theory of subjectivity.
Both Descartes and Vertov approach perceptual technologies as scientific
instruments where vision becomes synonymous with the production of truth.
As Jonathan Crary observes, the camera obscura does not simply provide a
model for human vision but, more importantly, a new model for consciousness
and subjectivity.19 The camera obscura is the place of a twofold reflection:
the observation of empirical phenomena and the reflective introspection of
observation. This double reflection makes the camera obscura an ideal
metaphor for human consciousness. In this model the mind becomes a
sensitive screen, upon which impulses are impressed and reflected. However,
in contrast to a projection screen, the reflection is not returned to the world
but thrown into a deeper recess where it appears for the second time. In
classical logic this superimposition of the second reflection (‘I see’) onto the
first reflection (‘image’) constitutes a minimal definition of consciousness.20
The diagram thereby reveals a basic principle of theorizing about
consciousness. Affirming consciousness is a matter of establishing
homologous relations across different levels. As I have discussed in the
previous chapter, Baudry’s apparatus theory is particularly powerful in
establishing relations across material and ideational levels.
Descartes’s illustration of the perception of distance blends an anatomical
depiction of an eye with a geometric model of a camera obscura and an
embedded figural reading of the diagram by staging a spectator (see Figure
2.5). Object, image and perception are thus aligned in a parallel fashion.21
The shaded field delimits the space where the ‘retinal image’ becomes a
‘conceptual image.’ It provides a common background for both the first
(‘optical’) and second (‘cognitive’) reflections. When viewed against the
white background, the shaded field outlines an interface that includes the
‘inner body’ of the eye, which is linked to the nervous system, and the mind
represented by the head of the homunculus. It excludes the body of the
homunculus from the shoulder downwards (representing perhaps the body of
the mind).
As a site where relations between the outside world and the observing self
are negotiated, the camera obscura can be read as a figuration of subjectivity.
It serves as a laboratory where the laws of nature interface with the human or
man-made laws of physics, mathematics and logic. It is not surprising that the
camera obscura has also become a popular refuge for the Baconian project of
the mastery of nature.
Figure 2.5 Diagram from Descartes’s discourse on Optics.
 In Optics, Descartes’s application of the law of refraction not only helps to
account for principles of human vision, it also enables him to point to certain
shortcomings in the provisions that nature has made. The conclusions
Descartes draws from these insights have extensive ramifications. While
human vision, insofar as it is a product of nature, cannot be improved;
technologically aided vision is perfectible. Technology not only allows human
beings to see ‘more’ and ‘better,’ it also fundamentally changes the function of
seeing altogether. As Neil M. Ribe puts it, the ultimate role of Cartesian
optics is “to ‘raise’ the eye from an instrument of self-preservation to one of
scientific knowledge.”22 Descartes himself has described this transformation
as a habitual perversion of the order of nature:

I have been accustomed to pervert the order of nature, because these

perceptions of the sense, although given me by nature merely to signify to
my mind what things are beneficial and hurtful to the composite whole of
which it is a part, and being sufficiently clear and distinct for that purpose,
are nevertheless used by me as infallible rules by which to determine
immediately the essence of the bodies that exist out of me, of which they
can of course afford me only the most obscure and confused knowledge.23

Descartes’s misuse of sensory perception for scientific purposes invokes the

human perceptual disposition as a model and method (dispositio) of scientific
reasoning. This cross-mapping of a perceptual frame of mind and scientific
rationale is organized by the optical principle of refraction. Descartes’s
discourse “Of the Means of Perfecting Vision” thereby also becomes a
discourse on the proper (or transparent) alignment of the medial, mental and
rhetorical orders.
Although scientific endeavors remain committed to revealing the principles
of nature, they also point to a scientific decoupling from nature in order to
make room for an engineered world. Within Descartes’s first philosophy this
shift is marked as a division of the sensible that becomes manifest in two
kinds of sensing or seeing: an ethical or moral seeing that is preoccupied with
beneficial or harmful aspects in the actual or situated living and a scientific
form of seeing that is concerned with the production of knowledge. It is
important to understand this production of knowledge not exclusively in
philosophical terms but to include its technical and industrial aspects. While
Descartes’s Optics is often read as a scientific illustration of his philosophy
of mind, it is also a technical compendium and a work of management science
that outlines principles of lens grinding and manufacturing that are based on
well-defined labor divisions.24
In this we find a striking parallel to Vertov’s vision of the kino-eye. While
the radical detachment of the kino-eye from ‘natural’ or human frames of
perception seems diametrically opposed to Descartes, Vertov’s kino-eye also
builds on a scientific approach and is accompanied by a rationalization of the
film production process. Inspired by constructivism and futurism, Vertov
developed the idea of the kino-eye together with his wife Elizaveta Svilova
and his brother Mikhail Kaufman and promoted it in a number of
programmatic writings and filmic works. Shifting the emphasis from artistic
intention to creative organization, Vertov called for a grounding of lofty
enthusiasm, in which poetic vision is paired with the fieldwork of the
surveyor. Vertov argued that in order to turn “poetic surveys” into “films on
man’s behavior […] under natural conditions […] we must leave our ivory
tower to do preliminary work.”25 For Vertov this implied a basic rationale of
the film production process: “the proper distribution of forces, organization of
the location, [and] the proper use of machines.”26
In contrast to Sergei Eisenstein, Vertov conceived of the kino-eye above all
as a scientific project. For Vertov, the language of the kino-eye is one of
higher mathematics and its ultimate goal is the production of truth. In an article
on “The Birth of the Kino-Eye” dated 1924, he notes: “Not kino-eye for its
own sake, but truth through the means and possibilities of the film-eye, i.e.
kinopravda [‘film-truth’].”27 As an instrument of scientific knowledge, the
kino-eye subsumes virtually all existent cinematic techniques and inventions.
Geared toward discovering “regularities in the accidental” and exploring the
“laws that govern the chaos of life,” the kino-eye resorts to microscopic,
telescopic and x-ray vision; it operates on remote control and shows things in
slow or accelerated motion; and it introduces mathematical and psychological
principles to its editing method. Vertov’s enthusiasm for the camera as a
metaphor for seeing is based on an idea of technological perfectibility: “We
cannot improve the making of our eyes, but we can endlessly perfect the
camera.”28
Set against this common concern of exploring visual technologies as
instruments of scientific knowledge, I will now take a closer look at their
respective ideas on perfecting vision, their implied notions of subjectivity and
their relations to medium and discourse. How do the place and order of the
dispositif facilitate transparency or high resolution? What kind of discursive
order is modeled on this transparency? The first question addresses
inferences made between the media dispositif and the human disposition. It is
concerned with the linkage or continuity through which media become
extensions of the senses. The second question will deal with the distinction of
‘seeing better’ and ‘seeing more’ as a cultural hierarchy of practices of seeing
and their embodiment in genres and discourse types.

Seeing Better with Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Cartesian Camera

Eye

Descartes begins his discourse “Of the Means of Perfecting Vision” by

suggesting that (in principle) improvements can be made in three relations: the
objects seen, “the internal organs which receive the impulses of these objects,
and the external organs, which dispose these impulses to be received as they
ought.”29 Descartes has little to say about the objects of vision and explicitly
brackets internal organs from his discussion. Since we cannot change the
objects themselves, their treatment becomes simply a question of mise-en-
scène: “[W]e can bring them closer or put them at a distance, and increase or
diminish the light which illuminates them.”30 He has even less to say about
internal organs, meaning the nervous system and the brain. Even if it were
possible to improve or modify them, he argues, such an endeavor would be a
concern of medicine and is thus irrelevant for his subject matter. This leaves
Descartes with the external organs, which include, quite remarkably, both “the
transparent parts of the eye, as well as all the other bodies that we can place
between the eye and the object.”31
Descartes considers four conditions or provisions for perfecting sight. The
first one may be called ‘clear focus’: Rays that reach the optic nerve in the
retina should correspond (as far as possible) to a single point in the object.
The rays should not be altered in the intervening space between the object and
the eye so as to avoid diffusion, distortion and obscurity and to guarantee a
distinct resemblance between the object and the image. The second condition
concerns the ‘size’ or ‘resolution’ of the image. It should be ‘large’ in the
sense that its lineaments or lines can be easily discerned. The third provision
regards ‘image brightness’ in relation to its impact on the optic nerves.
Finally, Descartes considers the angle or field of vision: We should see as
many objects as possible “at a single glance.”32
With the notable exception of the last provision, Descartes maintains,
nature—although it presumably “has done all that is possible”—falls short of
perfection.33 For instance, near- and farsightedness are imperfections of clear
focus that result from the limited range of curving and changing the body of the
eye. Yet, they are imperfections that can be amended by applying the law of
refraction. In the case of the second condition, image size, Descartes
(underestimating the role of refraction) erroneously views this deficiency
mainly as a matter of the size of the eye, i.e. the distance between the retina
and the point of intersection of the rays. For Descartes the best way to magnify
images is to increase the distance between this point of intersection and the
retina by extending the natural eye with a long tube filled with water: his
prototype of the telescope. Since Descartes considers the outer body of the
eye and optical lens part of the same category, this extension is almost a
natural process: “Sight will take place in the same way as if Nature had made
the eye longer than it is by the entire length of this tube.”34 Ribe, in this
context, suggests that “Descartes has the natural eye ‘give birth’ to a
telescope.”35
Descartes adds little to the issue of image brightness. He considers three
methods of adjusting the brightness of an image. The first one is to place
cloudy objects or veils between the eyes and the objects of observation, or to
use additional sources of light (gathered by means of mirrors or burning
glass). Since this option is only available for accessible objects, Descartes
also discusses widening and narrowing the aperture as means of adjusting
image brightness in telescopes. As a third way of improving the brightness of
vision, he mentions training to look at extremely bright objects or to discern
objects in the dark but immediately excludes such practices from his
reflections: “these things belong rather to medicine, whose purpose is to
remedy the deficiencies of sight through the correction of natural organs, than
to Optics, whose purpose is only to minister to the same deficiencies through
the application of other organs that are artificial.”36 As pointed out in
Descartes’s diagram (Figure 2.5), for him the nexus between artificial and
natural organs is the outer body. It is along the outlines of the shaded field that
the optical lens and the outer body of the eye form a homogeneous threshold,
where the law of nature coincides with the law of refraction.
 As mentioned before, the only condition where Descartes cannot find a way
to improve nature is the field or angle of vision. However, for him the
convenience of ‘seeing more’ is only of relative importance. In fact, it
conflicts with the imperative of seeing distinctly: ‘seeing more,’ Descartes
argues, “is principally useful only in order to ascertain toward what direction
we must subsequently turn our eyes in order to look at the one among them
which we will wish to consider better.”37 It is for this finding function that the
provision of ‘seeing more’ is included in Descartes’s description of the three-
barreled telescope: “as these telescopes make objects appear larger, they let
us see less of them at one glance—it is even necessary, besides this, to join
the most perfect telescopes to some others of less strength, through the aid of
which we can, as if by degrees, come to know the location of the object that
these more perfect ones can make us perceive.”38 The telescope in this sense
not only perfects vision but reconciles—at least serially—‘seeing more’ and
‘seeing better’ as two aspects of seeing, which Descartes considers mutually
incompatible in unaided vision. Descartes’s subordinate integration of ‘seeing
more’ and ‘seeing better’ on principles of selection and distinction has been a
key source for a long tradition of thinking about cinema. Vsevolod Pudovkin
is an early important theoretician in point, who had a strong impact on later
generations of film scholars.
Similar to Descartes’s subsumption of the lens and the outer body of the eye
as one category, Pudovkin equates the camera’s lens with the viewer’s eye:
“The camera lens is the viewer’s eye. It is the director’s responsibility to
make the viewer a good or bad observer.”39 His metaphor of the camera eye
builds on a series of analogies that relate visual perception and
comprehension to aspects of cinematography and montage. If we examine
Pudovkin’s analogy as a conceptual blend, the camera and the eye become
counterparts that are connected by a common finding or focusing function (see
Figure 2.6). Like many theorists of classical film theory, Pudovkin cross-maps
the camera and the eye by exporting the notion of ‘human attention’ from the
input frame ‘eye’ to the input frame ‘camera.’ This analogical projection that
regards the use of the camera as an act of attention involves two interesting
compressions in both input frames.
In the input frame ‘eye,’ the mental process of attention blends with the
physiological process of eye movement. Shifting attention is understood as a
change in the temporal or spatial focus of an observation and as analogous to
a movement that proceeds from “first cursory glances” to “intense, searching
gazes.”40 Pudovkin describes this process as follows:

An observer following something inevitably shifts his attention from place

to place, at one moment recording a particular detail, at another linking it
to the general course of events. As a result, an attentive observer obtains a
clear and distinct impression that does not omit a single characteristic
detail but concentrates only on the essentials and is not diverted by things
that are superfluous or uncharacteristic.41

Figure 2.6 The camera eye as an attention-shifting device.

This blending of the eye’s gaze with the mind’s gaze, as it were, under the
premises of conceptual and argumentative clarity has a long rhetorical and
philosophical tradition. Pudovkin’s description of the attentive observer
recalls Descartes’s well-known definition of “clear and distinct” perceptions,
which he regards as the basis of certain indubitable judgments: “I call
perception ‘clear’ when it is present and accessible to the attentive mind—
just as we say that we see something clearly when it is present to the eye’s
gaze and stimulates it with a sufficient degree of strength and accessibility.”42
Drawing on this common metaphor of understanding-as-seeing, Pudovkin
conceives of the camera as an attention-shifting device. As illustrated in
Figure 2.6. eye movement and shifts of attention in the input frame ‘eye’ are
mapped across shot types or camera movements and the selective principle of
montage in the input frame ‘camera.’ Notably, the filmmaker’s use of the
camera is not only instrumental in controlling the viewer’s attention; the sense
of the camera also extends to the dimension of editing (mirroring the
compression of eye movement and attention in the input frame ‘eye’): “[T]he
essence of correct montage,” Pudovkin concludes, “is the correct management
of the viewer’s attention.”43 In this analogical reasoning, references to
psychological conditions of perception serve a double purpose. The
psychological frame provides a scientific base for principles of montage as
much as it corroborates the primacy of montage as the very essence of
cinema.44
By means of montage, Pudovkin argues, the filmmaker can use the camera
“to force the viewer not merely to see but also to examine the phenomenon
being filmed.”45 The ‘perception’ of the camera eye in this sense is a synthetic
product premeditated by the filmmaker’s observations and editing skills. In
contrast to normal human observation, the camera eye does not record casual
gazes, orienting scans or distracted glances. Rather, it “emancipates the
viewer from the unnecessary work of removing what is superfluous from his
field of vision.”46 There are also other advantages the camera imparts on the
film viewer. Pudovkin describes the camera eye as relentlessly inquisitive,
penetrating incessantly “into the very thick of life.”47 Because the camera can
cross distances, assume perspectives and reach out to objects in ways that are
impossible for the average viewer, it intensifies observation and constructs a
“most acute observer” or ideal viewer.48
 The sense of the camera shifts from a passive recording device to a means
of active observation. For Pudovkin, montage charges the camera with life
and transforms it from a stationary observer into an active mediating agent,
whose ‘behavior’ reveals a particular attitude to the object filmed. The
camera may assume the position of a character and record what this character
‘sees’ and, by inference, ‘feels.’ Translated into narratological terms,
Pudovkin’s camera eye oscillates between focalizing and narrating functions.
He illustrates this intersubjective quality of cinematic exposition by
contrasting it with the purely scientific use of cameras to document
experiments. A scientific film record [kinoprotokol] shows a continuous
reality to which informed specialists respond by transposing themselves to the
perceptual context of the experiment. In a cinematic exposition of scientific
experiments, however, the placement of the camera and the arrangement of the
shots respond to a hypothetical observer modeled on an average viewer.49
Like Descartes’s diagrammatic account of vision in Figure 2.5, which blends
geometric, anatomical and cognitive aspects of vision, Pudovkin’s camera eye
constructs a meta-viewer that combines a number of viewers and gazes. On
the one hand, the way the camera makes the viewer see is based on the
director’s intentions. On the other hand, the camera eye constructs an ideal
viewer based on the scientific principle of comprehension.
While the cross-mapping between the input spaces of the camera and the
eye is premised on what he considers psychological conditions of perception,
the organizing principle of Pudovkin’s camera-eye blend is modeled on the
notion of textual coherence. It is the organizing frame that links the “work of
the lens in time and space”50 with both psychological aspects of perception
and scientific principles of observation. As a device that controls the
viewer’s attention, the camera partakes in the system of montage, which
Pudovkin describes as “a strictly regulated process and the rules that
condition correct observation.”51 Montage, in turn, is invoked as the cinematic
equivalent of the expositional mode in a scientific essay:

Just as a scholar preparing an article setting out the course and results of
his research carefully plans and constructs it, discarding what is
superfluous and leaving in what is essential, sometimes dwelling on a
characteristic detail and sometimes confining himself to general
observations, so too the film-maker in the process of montage exposition
 must retain the viewer’s attention in the appropriate manner and thus
imbue his work with the necessary credibility.52

Like expositional writing, cinematic exposition combines principles of

selection and combination and strives to make a cogent and persuasive
argument. In The Film Director and Film Material, Pudovkin explicates this,
suggesting that “[m]ontage, like living language, uses words—whole pieces of
exposed film—and sentences—combinations of these pieces.”53 Coherent
vision and clarity are inferred as imperative generic aspects for considering
the camera eye as an integral element of cinematic exposition. The
metonymical chain of ‘eye,’ ‘observation’ and ‘scientific exposition’ informs
a correlating chain of camera, montage and cinematic exposition. As a result
of this synthesis, technology is treated as the product of a simple reflection
that suppresses a series of refractions and multiple reflections. Technology is
either rendered transparent or treated as an object that is fully determined by
its grammar of use.

Seeing More with Vertov’s Kino-Eye

This imperative of seeing better and its conception of technology differ
radically from what goes on in procedures of experimental arrangements that
identify objects approximately through loops of positive and negative
feedback (which is facilitated by the built-in homing function of the three-
barreled telescope). Here technology is recognized as a subject-object
relation. The subjectivity and objectivity are distributed over the intervening
space that is organized by the medium, the discourse and the recipient’s
disposition (see Figure 2.4). As an expression of desire, the medium becomes
a vehicle for the objective part of our subjectivity. An early reformulation of
metaphysics and classical logic that introduces technology and engineering as
the excluded third can be found in Gotthard Günther’s cybernetic philosophy.
Günther argues that if figures of fantasy and imagination are expressions of
consciousness in the form of intentions or actions directed inwardly, then
technology are outward manifestations of consciousness.54 Or as Günther put
it later, “technology is the only historical form in which volition can express
itself in a generally binding form.”55
 Such a reflexive definition of technology can help us understand Vertov’s
curious affirmation of the camera’s subjectivity.56 In contrast to Pudovkin’s
analogical conception of the camera eye, Vertov’s notion of the kino-eye
builds on a series of disanalogies that postulate the superiority of the
“mechanical eye” of the camera over the human eye. While human perception
is selective and geared towards recognizing schematic patterns, the recording
of the camera is indiscriminative of the objects being filmed and thus more apt
to explore “the chaos of visual phenomena that fills the space.”57 While the
range of human vision is limited and bound to the human body, the camera
facilitates microscopic, telescopic and x-ray visions; it can operate by remote
control and show things in slow or accelerated motion. The kino-eye becomes
“that which the eye does not see.”58 Its horizon is virtual and sustained by the
“possibility of making the invisible visible, the unclear clear, the hidden
manifest, the disguised overt, the acted non-acted; making falsehood into
truth.”59 The kino-eye embraces all cinematic techniques and inventions that
help to discover the unknown faces of things. In contrast to the human eye, it is
forever perfectible.
As Malcolm Turvey observes, Vertov’s kino-eye involves something of a
paradox in that the metaphorical exchanges between camera and eye are based
“more on difference and alterity rather than resemblance.”60 Vertov’s kino-eye
involves a dialectic that complicates Pudovkin’s model of the camera eye in
several ways. The patterns of resemblance that have guided the cross-
mapping in Pudovkin’s camera-eye blend serve as a background against
which a number of dissimilarities are displayed. While Pudovkin’s camera
eye evolves largely through analogies, Vertov’s kino-eye is built on a series of
disanalogies (see Figure 2.7).
Figure 2.7 Disanalogous cross-mappings in Vertov’s notion of the kino-eye.

As a result of such disanalogous cross-mappings, the objectives of Vertov’s

kino-eye differ radically from those of Pudovkin’s camera eye. Instead of
emulating human vision as a model of comprehension, Vertov’s kino-eye seeks
to advance human vision and to grasp what the human mind cannot fathom. It
is in this goal to probe the ‘laws of chaos’ that the dialectic and paradoxical
conception of the kino-eye become particularly manifest. Even though the
kino-eye builds on the human faculty of perception to match patterns (see D4
in Figure 2.7), it supersedes human vision because it is not regulated by
‘selective filters’ of human perception (D3 in Figure 2.7). While this
predisposes the kino-eye to comprehend chaos in its ‘own disorderly terms,’
its paradoxical objective is to gain insight into the ‘order’ or ‘lawfulness’ of
chaos.
The kino-eye explores the limits of experiencing otherness simultaneously
as self (order) and other (chaos) by reversing the instrumental setup of camera
and eye. Whereas in Pudovkin’s camera eye the director makes the viewer
see, in Vertov’s kino-eye the viewer surrenders to the “will” of the camera. In
Vertov’s manifesto “The Council of Three,” the affirmation of the kino-eye
culminates in a point of self-affirmation, which is mimicked by a conspicuous
pronominal shift from the filmmakers’ first person plural to the first person of
the kino-eye:
 I make the viewer see in the manner best suited to my presentation of this
or that visual phenomenon. The eye submits to the will of the camera and
is directed by it to those successive points of the action that, most
succinctly and vividly, bring the film phrase to the height or depth of
resolution.61

This passage on the kino-eye illustrates well the state of in-betweenness

attributed to the dispositif. It blends subject and object as well as being and
praxis. It is at once actual and virtual in that the actual performance of the
kino-eye aims at exhausting its virtue or full potential. The kino-eye assumes a
hybrid identity in that it signifies both a theory of film and its application.
Vertov stresses these meta-implications by equating the kino-eye not only with
film analysis but also with a theory of movement along with a theory of how
all things are related on the screen.62 The ambiguous state of the kino-eye as
neither subject nor object is expressed effectively in its act of self-
affirmation, an imaginative leap that projects the deictic center onto the kino-
eye itself. In this deictic projection the notions of the camera as a technique of
visibility (to record and present visual phenomena) and as a means of
expression (that generates ‘film phrases’) blend with a human scale scenario
of actual language use.
The paramount goal of the kino-eye as an instrument of scientific
knowledge is kinesthetic resolution, which we can correlate to Descartes’s
imperative of a clear and distinct vision. Yet, while Descartes’s imperative is
geared towards ascertaining an autonomous object, Vertov’s resolution is best
described as the visceral effect that results from calibrating technology to the
chaos of life. Through this explorative process, Vertov argues in his scenario
of Man with a Movie Camera, “Life’s chaos gradually becomes clear […]
Nothing is accidental. Everything is explicable and governed by law.”63
However, Vertov saw himself more as a poet than as a theorist and he is never
precise about what exactly makes up the resolution of a film phrase. Yet, this
poetic vagueness seems almost programmatic. His notions of phrase and
resolution blend many conceptual domains combining musical, linguistic,
literary, scientific, kinesthetic and mathematical frames of reference. In a
Deleuzian sense, the kino-eye represents a threshold where different kinds of
discourse break and diffuse. While this obscures traditional patterns of
coherence, it affords us with different figures or lines of coherence.
 Vertov’s idea of resolution is linked to his ‘theory of intervals,’ which
became a recurrent concern throughout his writings of the 1920s.64 His
notions of ‘phrase’ and ‘resolution’ and his theory of intervals share musical
connotations. While ‘phrase’ further extends to language and writing,
‘resolution’ refers both to kinesthesia and music. We can think of Vertov’s
notion of film language as a gradual process of abstracting natural languages.
In this process, music and his theory of intervals play a crucial mediating role.
Music as the most abstract art forges a link to prosodic properties of language
and poetry.65 Vertov’s theory of intervals may be compared to a kind of
information theory. It is an odd form of applied mathematics that maps musical
structures across kinesthetic patterns and principles of perception.
Intervals organize the order and duration of shots in the montage of a film
phrase by correlating a number of visual parameters. In his Paris lecture
“From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye” Vertov lists the relations of shot scales, the
interaction of camera-angles, movements within frames, and relations
between recording speeds as the most important parameters.66 Not unlike
Pudovkin’s principles of montage, the aim of organizing a film with reference
to the theory of the interval is to intensify the viewing experience. However,
for Pudovkin intensification results from turning the viewing process into an
ideal form of observation, i.e. by selecting and combining elements in such a
way that their order coheres to the dispositio of scientific discourse. For
Vertov, increased kinesthetic resolution is geared towards exciting the
sensory-motor experience of the film viewer. The order of elements in
Vertov’s film phrase is not modeled on a preconceived discursive order in the
sense of a pre-established synthesis of dispositif and disposition guided by a
persuasive purpose. The persuasive power of Vertov’s film phrase is to be
discovered in the resolution of a pattern that emerges from foregrounding the
structures of the dispositif, dispositio and disposition. The kino-eye promotes
an extension of the regime of the visible and sayable by combining all kinds of
visual technologies and expressive forms. It outlines film discourse by
scientific, musical and verbal models. And it aims at discarding instilled
habits of human embodied perception:

The mechanical eye, the camera, rejecting the human eye as crib sheet,
gropes its way through the chaos of visual events, letting itself be drawn
or repelled by movement, probing, as it goes, the path of its own
movement. It experiments, distending time, dissecting movement, or, in
 contrary fashion, absorbing time within itself, swallowing years, thus
schematizing processes of long duration inaccessible to the normal eye.67

The kino-eye, it seems, ‘learns’ by adapting possibilities of the cinematic

apparatus to conditions of the visual world it records. The perfectibility of the
camera, which, on the one hand, is opposed to the imperfect human eye, is, on
the other hand, mapped across with the human ability to learn. The kino-eye
gains insights into the chaos of movement by emulating the very movements
and gestures of the visual world, assuming, as it were, their point of view:

Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility, I am in constant

motion, I draw near, then away from objects, I crawl under, I climb onto
them. I move apace with the muzzle of a galloping horse, I plunge full
speed into a crowd, I outstrip running soldiers, I fall on my back, I ascend
with an airplane, I plunge and soar together with plunging and soaring
bodies. Now I, a camera, fling myself along their resultant, maneuvering
in the chaos of movement, recording movement, starting with movements
composed of the most complex combinations.68

This kind of mimetic or emulative learning of the kino-eye becomes the

trajectory for training the perceptual sensibilities of the cameraman or ‘kinok-
pilot,’ as he commends himself to the camera’s experiments in space. The
roles of the cameraman and the director in this process are somewhat
ambiguous as they are at once fully at the service of the camera and the
strategic brain that ‘controls,’ ‘directs,’ ‘observes,’ and ‘gauges’ the
recordings and presentation of the camera.69 The relation between camera and
cameraman is seen as correlative and dialectical: By submitting himself to the
‘will’ of the camera, the cameraman liberates the camera from the
shortcomings of embodied human perception, which—in turn—engenders a
presentation of life that brings out new and startling aspects of reality. In other
words, the prosthetic function of the camera as an explorative device blends
with an elaborate scenario of mutual emancipation, in which the camera vis-à-
vis the cameraman is seen as a co-operative agent.
It is also in this context that we can place the generic framing of Vertov’s
Man with a Movie Camera as fragments or ‘extracts from the of cameraman.’
The revival of the diary and memoirs as a literary form at the beginning of the
twentieth century provide an important historical context, which in the 1920s
Viktor Shklovsky both theorized (in Theory of Prose, 1929) and practiced (in
his memoirs A Sentimental Journey, 1923). Vasily Rozanov’s experimental
journals Solitaria (1912) and Fallen Leaves (1913 and 1915), which explore
a new literary form through a polyphonic clash of a variety of genres, offered
Vertov a literary model of reconciling accounts of personal everyday
experiences with political and journalistic writing.70 From the perspective of
genetic criticism, the connection between camera work and diary writing may
be traced back to the practice of reporting on the dailies.71 In the next chapter
I will look more closely at the diary as a literary counter discourse of a
cameraman taking revenge on commercial mainstream cinema, which finds an
early satirical treatment in Luigi Pirandello’s The Notebooks of Serafino
Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator (1925). Conversely, John Dos Passos’
trilogy U.S.A. (1930–36) and Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin
(1939) are well-known examples that, inspired by Vertov’s Man with a
Movie Camera, explore ‘camera vision’ as a literary mode of
autobiographical writing.
Besides the historical intertext, there are also general aspects that bring
journal and memoir writing into the generic proximity of the kino-eye as film
and writing. As journals and diaries come only with a minimal set of generic
constraints, they can be easily adapted to the heterogeneous discursive regime
of the kino-eye. More importantly, the journal is by definition a work in
progress. If progress is understood in a positive sense, the journal may
generate a narrative of learning. This is particularly true of Mikhail
Kaufman’s expectations of the movie as he envisioned it as a kind of ABC of
film writing, a primer or methodological aid for beginners.72 We may also
look at the notebook of Man with a Movie Camera in terms of Lev Vygotsky’s
notion of a zone of proximal development. In this sense, the generic frame of
the journal accommodates an intervening space that is both subjective and
objective.73 It is like Vertov’s kinopravda, expressive both of the external
reality of life’s chaos and internal impressions of an ordinary eye. The journal
also generates what Gérard Genette calls interpolated narration, a complex
form of narration that combines simultaneous reporting and reporting after the
fact. Interpolated presentation not only approximates a fusion of perception
and communication, it also allows for all kinds of positive and negative
feedback loops and thus opens up a realm of interaction in the broadest sense.
In Man with a Movie Camera this applies not only to the interaction
between man and camera, but also to the process of filmmaking and its
exhibition. In an interview about its reception in Berlin in 1929, Vertov
described the film as developing along three intersecting lines:

(1) ‘life as it is in reality’ on the screen, (2) ‘life as it is in reality’ on the

strip of film, (3) simply: ‘life as it is in reality’ […] By annihilating the
boundaries between spectators and spectacle and by making the process
of film production visible to the viewer Man with a Movie Camera
navigates life’s chaos.74

This breaking down of boundaries between spectators and spectacle is

illustrated in the framing sequences of the film. The prologue of the film
presents the theater not only as space for animation but as an animated space.
Before a sparks ignites the projection signaling the orchestra’s entrance, we
see the chairs in the auditorium unfold by themselves.
The epilogue of the movie provides a one-minute synopsis of the film and
can be described as a thumbnail version of what Vertov called “an organized
memo of the ordinary eye’s impressions.”75 Thematically and formally, the
epilogue brings together recording, editing and perception, which can
illustrate the spaces of the dispositif, dispositio and disposition. The
synthesis builds upon three shot/reverse-shot sequences: one between the
audience and the projected film, another between the cameraman and the
visual phenomena he records and the third between the editor and the
filmstrips on her cutting table. Camera and cameraman find rapprochement in
the observation of movement, the editing responds to the synthesis of
mechanical and human eye by cutting along the emergent patterns of this
synthesis. The visceral effect the editing has on the audience can be seen as a
response to what may be thought of as the body of the image.76
Experiencing the body of the image through the visceral effects of
filmmaking represents a counterpart to Descartes’s division of body and mind.
As I have argued throughout this chapter, the body in Descartes’s dualism has
an exclusive and inclusive side. On the one hand, the body of the mind
appears to be excluded in the representation of the homunculus; on the other
hand, through a conceptual unity of lens and vitreous, the body extends to the
materiality of instruments. In contrast to this idea, the visceral appeal of the
kino-eye conceives of a linkage between camera and eye along the ‘inner
organs.’ In its experimental alignment of medial and dispositional structures,
the kino-eye generates a discursive order that is radically at odds with
Descartes’s method of discourse and classical notions of subjectivity.
Vertov’s kino-eye inverts the figure-ground relations on which Descartes’s
model is based. It builds on, or responds to, preconceived similarities
between camera and eye. These similarities provide a backdrop for the
disanalogies from which the kino-eye evolves. For Vertov the differences
between camera and eye serve as an incitement for learning. Yet, the
Cartesian model too involves a practice of learning that goes beyond
ingrained habits of perception. Descartes has described this practice as a
habitual misuse of sensory perception. Notably for him this transformation of
a ‘natural’ disposition is a preliminary premise, which, like the subjective
and objective vanishing points in the kino-eye model (see Figure 2.4), may be
located at the edges of the diagram. Thus, rather than considering the two
models as exclusive alternatives, we can look at them as challenges for a
framework that manages to reconcile them.
One vital challenge raised by filmmakers and critics during the first
decades of the twentieth century was to conceive of technological imagination
as analogous to or as an extension of poetic imagination. In Vertov’s
technological imagination scientific and poetic methods converge in a
common experimental setup. Walter Benjamin has conceptualized this new
relation between art and technology by distinguishing between first and
second technologies: “The results of the first technology are valid once and
for all […]. The results of the second technology are wholly provisional (it
operates by means of experiments and endlessly varied test procedures).”77
Descartes’s Optics, in which the experiment mainly serves as an appendix and
practical proof of nature’s laws, represents an example of what Benjamin
calls first technology; Vertov’s kino-eye would be an example of Benjamin’s
second technology. While Benjamin identifies the goal of the first technology
with the Baconian ideal of mastering nature, he describes the second
technology as aiming “at an interplay between nature and humanity.”78
Descartes’s and Vertov’s programs of perfecting vision can be compared to
the alchemic vision of creating a homunculus. In Descartes’s philosophy,
symptoms of such aspirations may be found in his conviction that the goal of
science is to master nature. In following Francis Bacon’s idea that to master
nature means to obey it, Descartes seems closer to the spirit of classical
alchemists who hoped to optimize and accelerate the forces of nature by
setting up the model conditions of a laboratory: “Towards the effecting of
works, all that man can do is to put together or put asunder natural bodies. The
rest is done by nature.”79 By contrast, Vertov’s kino-eye appears to be already
the product of cybernetic engineering. The kino-eye and the creations it
produces are built entirely in a specially designed system of interaction: “I am
kino-eye, I create a man more perfect than Adam, I create thousands of
different people in accordance with preliminary blueprints and diagrams of
different kinds.”80
Figure 2.8 Opening shot of Man with a Movie Camera. Courtesy Vertov
Collection, Austrian Film Museum, Vienna. Frame Enlargement:
Georg Wasner.

We can think of this change of figure-ground relations as the man in the

camera turned inside out. To illustrate this, we may compare the arrangement
of a camera obscura to Vertov’s famous shot of the cameraman on top of an
enormous camera (see Figure 2.8). Instead of tracing the rear projection
inside the camera, the cameraman follows reality through a viewer, which can
be considered an approximation of the records taken by the camera. The
artist’s move from the inside to the outside of the camera creates an entirely
different (post-humanist?) situation. As in the camera obscura, Vertov’s shot
stages a doubling of the camera dispositif that illustrates how reality can be
decoded in representational terms. If we understand the enormous camera, on
which Mikhail Kaufman mounts his camera as emblematic of the entire social
apparatus that organizes reality, then his camera appears to be a particularly
suitable instrument for exploring organizational principles of social reality as
they seem to share the same technological build. While in Descartes’s
rationale instruments that perfect our vision operate as if produced by nature,
in Vertov’s understanding reality is already conceived of in technological
terms.

Notes
1. See Joachim Paech, “Überlegungen zum Dispositiv als Theorie medialer
Topik,” in Der kinomatographische Apparat, ed. R. F. Riesinger
(Münster: Nodus, 2003), 175–94.
2. See e.g. Francesco Casetti, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience,
Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Michael
North, Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Jacques Rancière, Film
Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (New York: Berg, 2006).
3. Rancière, Film Fables, 2–9.
4. See William Brown, “Man without a Movie Camera—Movies without
Men: Towards a Posthumanist Cinema?,” in Film Theory and
Contemporary Hollywood Movies, ed. Warren Buckland (New York:
Routledge, 2009), 66–85.
5. Edward Branigan, Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film
Theory (New York: Routledge, 2006), 18.
6. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the two sides also play a crucial
role in the convergent theorizing of Jean-Louis Baudry’s apparatus theory.
7. Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus: and Other Essays, trans. David
Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009),
 11. For a critique of Agamben’s genealogy see Matteo Pasquinelli, “What
an Apparatus Is Not: On the Archeology of the Norm in Foucault,
Canguilhem and Goldstein,” Parrhesia 22 (2015), 78–89.
8. Alistair Welchman, “Machinic Thinking,” in Deleuze and Philosophy:
The Difference Engineer, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson (London: Routledge,
1997), 211–29.
9. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other
Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books,
1980), 194.
10. Hugues Peeters and Philippe Charlier. “Contributions à une théorie du
dispositif,” Hermès 25 (1999): 15–23.
11. Gilles Deleuze, “What Is a Dispositif?,” in Michel Foucault,
Philosopher, ed. T. J. Armstrong (New York: Routledge, 1992), 160.
12. On the visual resemblances of these diagrams to illustrations of Lacan’s
“scopic registers” and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological chiasms see
John Mullarkey’s chapter on “Thinking in Diagrams,” in Post-Continental
Philosophy: An Outline (New York: Continuum, 2006).
13. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M.
Anscombe, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 149.
14. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 149–50.
15. As Peach observes, Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus mediates
between both symbolic forms and the disposition in the system of
internalized patterns. Joachim Paech, “Überlegungen zum Dispositiv als
Theorie medialer Topik,” 187n54.
16. George Wald, “Eye and Camera,” Scientific American 1883 (1950): 32.
17. David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1997), 13–26.
18. See Pierre Le Morvan, “Intentionality: Transparent, Translucent, and
Opaque,” Journal of Philosophical Research 30 (2005): 283–302.
19. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 25–67.
20. See Gotthard Günther, Das Bewußtsein der Maschinen: Eine Metaphysik
der Kybernetik (Baden-Baden: AGIS, 1957).
21. On Descartes’s problem with refracting and multiplying images see Sean
Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005), 52–61.
22. Neil M. Ribe, “Cartesian Optics and the Mastery of Nature,” Isis 88.1
(1997): 60.
23. René Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641) in The
Meditations, and Selections from the Principles, of René Descartes,
trans. and ed. John Veitch and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (La Salle: The Open
Court Publishing, 1966), 97.
24. Ribe has aptly described this process as the replacement of “nature’s
unconscious making with a new, rational artisanship under the direction of
the Cartesian mind,” “Cartesian Optics,” 60.
25. Dziga Vertov, “On the Organization of a Creative Laboratory” (1936), in
Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 137.
26. Vertov, “On the Organization of a Creative Laboratory,” 138.
27. Dziga Vertov, “The Birth of the Kino-Eye” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of
Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984), 41.
28. Dziga Vertov, “The Council of Three” (1923), in Kino-Eye: The Writings
of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), 15.
29. René Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and
Meteorology (1637), trans. and ed. Paul J. Olscamp (Indianapolis:
Hackett Pub, 2001), 114.
30. Descartes, Discourse on Method, 114.
31. Descartes, Discourse on Method, 114.
32. Descartes, Discourse on Method, 115.
33. Descartes, Discourse on Method, 115.
34. Descartes, Discourse on Method, 120.
35. Ribe, “Cartesian Optics,” 54–55.
36. Descartes, Discourse on Method, 126.
37. Descartes, Discourse on Method, 125.
38. Descartes, Discourse on Method, 156.
39. Vsevolod Pudovkin, “The Montage of a Scientific Film” (1925), in
Vsevolod Pudovkin: Selected Essays, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (New
York: Seagull Books, 2006), 16.
40. See Vsevolod Pudovkin, The Film Director and Film Material (1926), in
Vsevolod Pudovkin: Selected Essays, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (New
York: Seagull Books, 2006), 73.
41. Pudovkin, “The Montage of a Scientific Film,” 16.
42. René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy (1644), in The Philosophical
Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and
Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 177–
291, 207–8. For a critique of this objective in the field of analytic
philosophy and film analysis see Branigan, Projecting a Camera, 1–18.
43. Pudovkin, “The Montage of a Scientific Film,” 16.
44. The foundational study for naturalizing film with reference to a
psychological framework comes from Hugo Münsterberg, who considered
film as an objectivation of human consciousness. Echoing Pudovkin’s
assertion that montage is the essence of cinema, theorists have above all
linked editing to a perceptual realism in film. Paradigmatic of this view is
Ernest Lindgren’s theoretical conception of editing in the The Art of Film
(1948): “The fundamental psychological justification of editing as a
method of representing the physical world around us lies in the fact that it
reproduces this mental process in which one visual image follows another
as our attention is drawn to this point and to that in our surroundings. In so
far as the film is photographic and reproduces movement, it can give us a
life-like semblance of what we see; in so far as it employs editing, it can
exactly reproduce the manner in which we normally see it,” Lindgren,
The Art of the Film: An Introduction to Film Appreciation (New York:
Macmillan, 1963), 62.
45. Pudovkin, The Film Director and Film Material, 67.
46. Pudovkin, The Film Director and Film Material, 73–74.
47. Pudovkin, The Film Director and Film Material, 72.
48. Pudovkin, The Film Director and Film Material, 73.
49. See Pudovkin, “The Montage of a Scientific Film,” 17.
50. Pudovkin, “The Montage of a Scientific Film,” 18.
51. Pudovkin, “The Montage of a Scientific Film,” 16.
52. Pudovkin, “The Montage of a Scientific Film,” 16.
53. Pudovkin, The Film Director and Film Material, 78.
54. Günther, Das Bewußtsein der Maschinen, 67.
55. Gotthard Günther, “Identität, Gegenidentität und Negativsprache” (1979),
vordenker (March 2000),
http://www.vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/gunther_ identitaet.pdf (my
translation).
56. For a critique of Vertov’s kino-eye from a perspective of analytical
philosophy that argues for a strictly instrumental conception of media, see
Malcolm Turvey, “Can the Camera See? Mimesis in Man with a Movie
Camera,” October 89 (1999): 25–50.
57. Vertov, “The Council of Three,” 15.
58. Vertov, “The Birth of the Kino-Eye,” 41.
59. Vertov, “The Birth of the Kino-Eye,” 41.
60. Turvey, “Can the Camera See?” 31.
61. Vertov, “The Council of Three,” 16.
62. Vertov, “The Birth of the Kino-Eye,” 40.
63. Dziga Vertov, “The Man with a Movie Camera (A Visual Symphony)” in
Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 287.
64. Vlada Petrić, Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera:
A Cinematic Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
65. See also Mikhail Kaufman’s reflection on film language in “Film
Analysis” (1931), in Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties,
ed. Yuri Tsivian (Udine: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004) 391, where
he regards the ‘language’ of music, rather than natural, verbal languages,
as a model for film language.
66. Dziga Vertov, “From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye” in Kino-Eye: The Writings
of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984) 85–92, 90–91.
67. Vertov, “The Council of Three,” 19.
68. Vertov, “The Council of Three,” 17.
69. See Vertov, “The Council of Three,” 19.
70. Anna Lisa Crone, Rozanov and the End of Literature: Polyphony and the
Dissolution of Genre in Solitaria and Fallen Leaves (Würzburg: Jal
Verlag, 1978).
71. See e.g. Stephen Bottomore’s essay, “‘Weather Cloudy No Sun’ - Filming
in Britain for the Edison Company in 1913: From Charles Brabin’s
Diary,” Film History 15.4 (2003): 403–35.
72. Yuri Tsivian, “Dziga Vertov and His Times,” in Lines of Resistance:
Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, ed. Yuri Tsivian (Udine: Le Giornate del
Cinema Muto, 2004), 25.
73. In her documentary Reassemblage (1983), Trinh T. Minh-ha applies this
idea of the filmmaker as a subject-in-process in the context of
ethnogragphy. She criticizes the methods of anthropological discourse and
a Cartesian certainty about the boundaries between subject and object.
Trinh refuses to speak about or define Senegalese culture. Instead, she
proposes to approximate her subject matter by “speaking nearby.” At the
core of this representational approach is what Trinh calls a “reflexive
interval”: “It is the place in which the play within the textual frame is a
play on this very frame, hence on the borderlines of the textual and extra-
textual, where a positioning within constantly incurs the risk of de-
positioning, and where the work, never freed from historical and socio-
political contexts nor entirely subjected to them, can only be itself by
constantly risking being no-thing,” Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Documentary Is/Not
a Name,” October 52 (1990), 96.
74. Dziga Vertov, “Was Your Film Understood in Berlin?: An Interview with
Dziga Vertov,” in Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties,
ed. Yuri Tsivian (Pordenone: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004), 366–
67.
75. Vertov, “The Council of Three,” 19.
76. On the visceral approximation between the act of observing and the event
observed, see Vlada Petrić, Constructivism in Film: The Man with the
Movie Camera: A Cinematic Analysis (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1987), 139–48.
77. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility,” in vol. 3 of Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed.
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2002), 107.
78. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 107.
79. Francis Bacon, The New Organon; or, True Directions Concerning the
Interpretation of Nature (1620), vol. 4 of The Works of Francis Bacon,
ed. James Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, (New York: Garrett
Press, 1968), 47.
80. Vertov, “The Council of Three,” 19. See also Günther, “Homunkulus und
Robot,” in Das Bewußtsein der Maschinen: Eine Metaphysik der
Kybernetik (Baden-Baden: AGIS, 1957), 167–73.
3 Seeing and Writing

Throughout his life Dziga Vertov conceived of cinema as various kinds of

poetry: a poetry of science, a poetry of space, a poetry of everyday life and,
above all, a poetry of facts.1 As we have seen in the previous chapter, poetry
for Vertov became a synoptic way of fusing science, art and all aspects of
cultural life. Rather than consider poetry an outdated literary genre,
hopelessly out of touch with modern life and science, he approached poetry as
a principle of life underlying both art and science. Influenced by the
constructivist spirit of the Soviet avant-garde, he radically expanded the
meaning and scope of poetry. Poetry advances to a master frame that shapes
Vertov’s outlook on life; for him it was both a theoretical framework and an
artistic practice. As poetry is concerned with prosodic and rhythmic aspects
of language, it could serve as a general model of formal construction,
applicable not only to poetry and film but virtually to all kinds of artistic and
non-artistic practices. At the same time, poetry is invoked as an alternative to
narrative and argumentative modes of representation. By applying poetic
principles of composition to non-artistic material, Vertov challenged
established notions about documentary and narrative fiction film.
Vertov’s notion of the kino-eye is closely linked to this reconceptualization
of poetry: From its very inception, the kino-eye is an intermedial and
interdiscursive product that seeks to redraw the boundaries between art and
science. In the previous chapter, I presented Vertov’s kino-eye as a way of
“seeing more” and an explorative and provisional poetic that reconciles
theory and practice through experimental methodologies. This chapter locates
Vertov’s kino-eye within a historical poetics of the camera eye as an
intermedial figure of writing that explores the dynamic relations between
words and images by unpacking and remapping basic assumptions about the
arts and media, fiction and narrative.
The camera eye in this sense is best understood as an artistic dispositif that
views cinema as an extension of poetry. If poetry allows us to review
language aesthetically, i.e. experience language use in a way that is extracted
from ordinary situational constraints, cinema promises an aesthetic experience
of ‘life as it is.’ This aesthetic notion of the camera eye runs transversally to
conceptualizations of the camera eye as media-specific forms of
representations, which begin to dominate narrative theories in the second half
of the twentieth century. While aesthetic conceptions of the camera eye target
the political and ethical dimension of art by situating it in relation to non-
artistic practices, representational uses of the camera eye focus on similarities
and differences of media specific representational practices. For instance, in
narrative theories of literature, “camera” and “camera eye” have come to
denote scenic forms of presentations that focus on descriptive and perceptual
information as if they were filtered by a mechanical, immobile or passive
recording device.2
In his pioneering study Fiction and the Camera Eye, Alan Spiegel
identifies four representational characteristics of film that modern literary
fiction emulates: adventitiousness (“random and unforeseen details of
personality and situation”), anatomization (“detailed information about how
animated things and beings look when they move through time and space”),
depthlessness (“the subject’s purely structural, geometric, and material
properties”) and montage (“the arrangement of photographed perspectives.”)3
He considers these features “not only essential to any understanding of camera
and film manners but equally essential to any understanding of analogous
visual procedures in the modern novel.”4 Notably, Spiegel’s categories are
extrapolated from Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. They are
already the result of an intermedial exchange that leaves us with a literary
view of cinema. Thus, while representational camera-eye conceptions operate
within established maps of representational regimes, aesthetic camera-eye
conceptions challenge the order of such representational maps.
In what follows I want to trace a shift from an aesthetic to a
representational understanding of the camera eye by following this metaphor
across two sets of intermedial exchanges. The first part of this chapter reads
Vertov’s filmic poem A Sixth Part of the World as a political and a cinematic
map. Framing the kino-eye as a poetry of facts not only raises questions about
the indexical and symbolic value of the filmic image, it also invokes poetry as
an alternative method of discourse to fictional narratives and documentary
arguments. Vertov maps the opposition between word and image onto the
opposition of ideas and emotions. The literary camera-eye notions in Luigi
Pirandello’s and John Dos Passos’ works complicate this correlation by
contrasting the silence of the filmic image (which in Pirandello’s The
Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio epitomizes the dehumanizing machinery of
cinema) with the bodily resonances of the spoken word. The second part
follows Christopher Isherwood’s autobiographical camera eye in Goodbye to
Berlin through the theatrical and filmic adaptations by the playwright John van
Druten and the screenwriter John Collier. The three versions of Isherwood’s
Berlin story form a transmedial circle of artistic interpretation and subsequent
re-framings of the camera eye that bring out historical changes in cinematic
conceptions of word-and-image relations.

Dziga Vertov’s Poetic Map of A Sixth Part of the World

Vertov’s poetic vision of cinema seems paradoxical. In his radical opposition

to artificial plots and dramatic conventions of aesthetic illusion, Vertov
envisions the kino-eye as an artistic practice beyond the realm of art. The
kino-eye follows the revolutionary spirit of the Soviet avant-garde and its
radical approaches to re-constructing, re-naming and re-mapping art cinema.
Conceiving of the kino-eye as a poetry of facts not only refers to the material
and factual basis of the filmic record but also advocates a kinetic method of
composition that seeks to project a cinematic view and experience of life. In
this Vertov was strongly influenced by the futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky
and his experiments with prosodic and rhythmic elements of spoken
discourse.5 Placing his own filmic work in line with the poet, Vertov
describes Mayakovsky’s poetry as kino-eye: “The unity of form and content
which dominates folk art is equally striking in Mayakovsky’s poetry. Since I
have been working in the field of poetic documentary cinema, both
Mayakovsky’s poetry and folk songs have had an enormous influence on me.”6
Another important and widely acknowledged influence on Vertov comes from
Walt Whitman’s romantic idea of a lived poetry and his macroscopic vision of
capturing and expressing an organic network of society through rhythmic
litanies.7 Like Mayakovsky, Whitman was committed to creating a poetic
rhythm and idiom that was founded in the everyday life of common people.
Whitman may have also inspired Vertov to see cinema as a new poetic form
that reconciles science and politics. For Whitman the creation of America as
the New World was a three dimensional (or ‘trinitarian’) process that
involved political, scientific, and imaginative forms of world-making. In
order to become a creative imaginative force that is “really alive and
substantial,” poetry needs to abandon convention and align with modern
image-making techniques. Writing in the wake of Eadweard Muybridge’s and
Thomas Eakins’ serial photography, Whitman contended that “a modern
image-making creation is indispensable to fuse and express the modern
political and scientific creations—and then the trinity will be complete.”8
A Sixth Part of the World (Šestaja čast’ mira, 1926) is Vertov’s most
ambitious attempt to show how such a fusion of science, political ideology
and poetry could be accomplished on the screen. Boosted by an extensive
promotional campaign, A Sixth Part of the World became Vertov’s cinematic
breakthrough. However, the enormous production costs of the film also
terminated his career with Sovkino. A Sixth Part of the World is best
described as a cinematic map, an act of filmic cartography that outlines what
cannot yet be ascertained. It is a cinematic map in which the exploration of the
USSR as a “real living body, a single organism” converges with an
exploration of cinema itself.9
A Sixth Part of the World recalls Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and his claim
in the preface that the United States is “essentially the greatest poem.”10 Like
Whitman, Vertov offers a decentralized, non-hierarchical view of the nation
that is held together by the rhythm of lyrical lists and litanies. A Sixth Part of
the World has no identifiable center. In contrast to his later films The
Eleventh Year or Man with a Movie Camera, references to urban centers are
rare. In ethnographic and geographic collages, the film telescopes the border
of the USSR, showing us sheep being bathed in the sea and a river, a Dagestan
riding his horse through a village, reindeers in Taiga, Huskies in the Tundra, a
boat crossing the Pechora river and another one in the ocean. It cuts from the
Kremlin to the Chinese border, from the Matochkin Shar to a pan across
Bukhara, from Novorossiisk to a split frame that combines a tracking shot of a
street in Leningrad and an aerial view of the city.
In place of a center there are medial and formal networks of relations.
Constructing an embodied and lived experience of the USSR, the film blends
field cinematography and poetry as underlying medial and discursive orders.
In a shooting plan for the production of the film, Vertov shows how the kino-
eye serves as a principle of the film’s creative organization and its artistic
realization (see Figure 3.1). In this diagrammatic schedule, Vertov maps the
names of the shooting locales around the word ‘kino-eye,’ which figures as
their interrelating center, illustrating both a principle of creative organization
and aesthetic realization. The kino-eye internalizes the Soviet Union’s
external frontiers. It modernizes the cartographic and literary efforts of
national idealism that aim at transforming the political confines into ‘natural’
boundaries of the lived land.

Figure 3.1 Shooting schedule for A Sixth Part of the World. Courtesy Vertov
Collection, Austrian Film Museum, Vienna.

This is particularly manifest in the film’s heavy use of intertitles, which

underscores the film’s agenda to animate and flesh-out the political concept of
the USSR. It would be tempting to compare the intertitles in the film to
inscriptions on maps. However, the intertitles do not simply work as captions
that reveal geographic and ethnographic information about images that would
be otherwise difficult to place; the intertitles structure the film and orchestrate
the rhythm of individual segments.
The repetition of syntactic phrases helps to divide the film into six parts,
which programmatically construe the ‘social organism’ of the USSR by
building up layers of personal, ethnographic, geographic, economic, religious
and political relations. The first part introduces the camera eye in the first
person singular. The recurring phrase “I see” is soon put into relation with a
second person-pronoun, addressing people from all over the country as well
as the very audience of the film (see Figure 3.2).
Figure 3.2 “You are sitting in the audience” of A Sixth Part of the World.
Courtesy Austrian Film Museum, Vienna.

The third part lists geographical extensions (“From the Kremlin/to the
border with China” or “from the golden eagle perched on the hand of a
Kirghiz/to the terns perched on the rocks of the Arctic Ocean”) along with
personal possessive relations depicting “your factories/your plants/your
oil/your cotton/your sheep […].”11 The fourth part combines these two types
of relations by showing how “export goods are moved along all the roads of
the Soviet land.” The fifth and sixth parts contrast the social and religious
diversity of the country with its unitary socialist vision. Appropriating a
speech by Stalin, the final segment envisions the true autonomy of “a full-
fledged Socialist society” through a form of second-order engineering: “we
want to produce by our own means/not only the tractors but also the machines
that produce the tractors.”
While the intertitles explicate the overall conceptual argument of the film,
they also perform it on smaller level. The rhythmic montage of words and
images enacts the film’s impetus to charge concept with embodied meaning. In
a promotional booklet for the film, Izmail Urazov states that instead of
following a plot, viewers will sense their emotions growing: “[Y]ou feel
yourself becoming more and more enthralled by the unfolding concept of ‘a
sixth part of the world,’ being thrown onto the screen.”12
This immersive moment epitomizes Vertov’s idea of an absolute cinema,
which he describes in a series of fusions: As in Man with a Movie Camera, A
Sixth Part of the World programmatically resolves the distinction between the
viewers and participants of the film. Vertov goes so far as to claim that “this
film has, strictly speaking, no ‘viewers’ within the borders of the USSR, since
all the working people of the USSR (130–140 millions of them) are not
viewers but participants of the film.”13 Applying the same logic, Vertov even
contends that the film has neither supporters nor opponents as both sides
participate in the film. A Sixth Part of the World not only marks a definite
victory over enacted drama and staged cinema, it also resolves the very
distinction between ideology and reality. Vertov calls the film a “Soviet
cinema record” that captures both its “revolutionary ideological content” and
the actual state of the world.14 In creating a cinematic experience of the
world, the kino-eye transcends generic frames of expectations: “Whether it is
a newsreel, a comedy, an artistic hit-film, A Sixth Part of the World is
somewhere beyond the boundaries of these definitions; it is already the next
stage after the concept of ‘cinema’ itself.”15 A Sixth Part of the World is
indeed a post-cinematic event if by post-cinematic we understand the
deconstruction and remapping of established notions of cinema.
For Vertov’s supporters, A Sixth Part of the World revolutionized cinema
because it dealt with non-fictional material in a way that conformed to editing
strategies of neither the narrative fiction film nor the newsreel. The filmmaker
Vitaly Zhemchuzny, who sympathized with the avant-garde of the LEF (Left
Front of the Arts), saw in Vertov’s seemingly random montage the beginning
of a new kind of “cinematic phrase-making,” which in its lack of “respect for
the film fact, the film document,” challenges the generic confines of the
newsreel film.16 Vertov’s supporters carefully avoided notions of art by
describing his film as “cinematic phrase-making” and an “emotional hit film.”
For Vertov’s critics these phrases identified defining features of dramatic
fiction films. The film critic and Vertov’s personal adversary Ippolit Sokolov
argued that Vertov merely applied fictional editing strategies to newsreel
material and thereby transformed facts into symbols that appealed mainly to
emotions but lacked the “calm and coherent clarification and intensification of
concepts” of a scientific film.17 According to Sokolov, “the quick and
unexpected succession of ‘chance’ associations” in Vertov’s montage
distorted and falsified the facts.18
Between two camps, critics such as Victor Shklovsky and Grigory
Boltiansky assumed a middle ground. Shklovsky disagreed with the kinocs
refutation of art, nonetheless praised Vertov’s works for their instructive
lesson on principles of artistic construction. He saw in Vertov’s renouncement
of plot an erroneous confusion that equates the plotted film with the narrative
film and considers narrative films as derivative of literary fiction. Punning on
the pseudonym Dziga Vertov, which translates as ‘spinning top,’ Shklovsky
described Vertov’s orientation towards a factual base of cinema as a circular
movement that took him back to art cinema.

Dziga Vertov has turned around 370 degrees; that is to say, he has turned
around in a circle twice, and ended up only 10 degrees away from where
he started. His paths have coincided with the paths of art cinema. But the
intentions of Dziga Vertov are extraordinarily fruitful, and in the future
those who shoot real newsreel, who show the latitude and longitude of the
place and day of filming, who shoot real fields, will owe their ideas to the
ideas of a man who passed this way, Dziga Vertov.19

As an intermedial figure of writing the camera eye becomes a trope of re-

inventing cinema. In what follows I want to retrace this spiraling movement of
Vertov’s kino-eye within the context of literary camera-eye notions that
predate and follow Vertov’s conception of the kino-eye: Pirandello’s The
Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio and Dos Passos’ U.S.A. In A Sixth Part of the
World, Vertov draws on the opposition between word and image in order to
map out and subvert the distinction between conceptual and emotional
meanings. Pirandello and Dos Passos complicate this correlation by
contrasting the silence of the filmic image with the resonances of the spoken
word.

The Literary Notebooks of Luigi Pirandello’s Silent Camera

Operator
Pirandello’s The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, which first appeared in
serial publication between 1915 and 1916, represents one of the earliest
literary examples and the first novel to reflect on cinema.20 In his notebooks
the eponymous hero finds a venue to express the dissatisfaction and
humiliation he experiences during his work for an Italian film company. By
keeping a journal at night, Gubbio seeks to remedy the deprivations of
emotion, thought and memory his daily work entails. He regards his notebooks
as a form of retaliation and protest against what he describes as the
enslavement of humans by the “soul-eating” machinery of the camera: “I
satisfy, by writing, a need to let off steam which is overpowering. I get rid of
my professional impassivity, and avenge myself as well; and with myself
avenge ever so many others, condemned like myself to be nothing more than a
hand that turns a handle.”21
Like the kinoks, Gubbio seeks an escape from the capitalist enslavement of
humans by machines. Yet, while Vertov promotes a liberation of cinema from
the overpowering influence of literature through a new synthesis between man
and machine, in The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio writing becomes a refuge
from the mechanical dehumanization that cinema inflicts on the arts and
mankind. According to Gubbio, the cinematograph not only estranges its
operator, who under this “mask of impassivity” ceases to exist as he becomes
part of the equipment, it also alienates the actors from themselves and their
art.22 In a passage that inspired Walter Benjamin’s essay on “The Work of Art
in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility” Gubbio put it as follows:23

Here they feel as though they were in exile. In exile, not only from the
stage, but also in a sense from themselves. Because their action, the live
action of their live bodies, there, on the screen of the cinematograph, no
longer exists: it is their image alone, caught in a moment, in a gesture, an
expression, that flickers and disappears. They are confusedly aware, with
 a maddening, indefinable sense of emptiness, that their bodies are so to
speak subtracted, suppressed, deprived of their reality, of breath, of voice,
of the sound that they make in moving about, to become only a dumb image
which quivers for a moment on the screen and disappears, in silence, in an
instant, like an insubstantial phantom, the play of illusion upon a dingy
sheet of cloth.24

Benjamin, who knew the novel only in parts and in a French translation, read
Gubbio’s reflections as a more or less straightforward comment on
Pirandello’s view of the contemporary crisis in theater. However, the novel’s
pervasive irony makes it difficult to pinpoint the exact target of Pirandello’s
cultural critique.25 Underlying the novel’s overt critique of the flourishing film
industry is a general critique of the state of literature and the arts in general.
Literature and film do not so much compete with each other as rather, the
antagonism between literature and film is exploited to overcome narrative
literary conventions. The novel is less a commentary on the competitive
relationship between literature and film than an attempt to overcome literary
conventions. If Vertov’s kino-eye aimed at taking film to a post-cinema stage,
Pirandello’s protagonist sets out to explore a post-literary existence. As in
Man with the Movie Camera, the journal serves as a format to develop a
counter-discourse from a position that is free of artistic, generic constraints
and at a remove from social repercussions of public communication. Notably,
Gubbio becomes most active and articulate and his speech most animated
when he is freed from his social and professional obligations. It is along the
lines of the solitary diarist that new forms of expression are sought out.
This becomes particularly manifest in a series of re-evaluations of the
“inanimate silence” that defines Gubbio as a cameraman.26 As an epitome of
de-humanization, the cameraman’s “inanimate silence” is given a surprising
twist when he becomes aware of his (undeclared and unrequited) feelings for
Signorina Luisetta, the daughter of the film company’s scriptwriter. Gubbio
feels transformed and begins to reassess his “non-existence” through the eyes
of his beloved:

Now she was beginning to be aware that for these other people and also
for herself (in a vague way) I was not, properly speaking, a person. She
began to feel that my person was not necessary; but that my presence there
 had the necessity of a thing, which she as yet did not understand; and that I
remained silent for that reason.27

Re-imagining his silence from her perspective as a source of mystery, Gubbio

discovers a new facet to his silence, which is reminiscent of Maurice
Maeterlinck’s famous meditation on silence as a prerequisite for true
understanding and love. Maeterlinck described silence as “our most
inviolable sanctuary”28 that grounds us with the profoundest existential
emotions of love, fear and loss. His concept of silence became a key source
for symbolist strategies of boosting the artistic prestige of cinema. It proved
particularly influential for early approaches to theorizing silent film as a
language of the soul.29 Gubbio, it seems, now seizes “inanimate silence” as a
way of empathy, which would also connect him to Luisetta:

If you knew how I feel, at certain moments, my inanimate silence! And I

revel in the mystery that is exhaled by this silence for such as are capable
of remarking it. I should like never to speak at all; to receive everyone and
everything in this silence of mine, every tear, every smile; not to provide,
myself, an echo to the smile; I could not; not to wipe away, myself, the
tear; I should not know how; but so that all might find in me, not only for
their griefs but also and even more for their joys, a tender pity that would
make us brothers if only for a moment.30

Ironically, Gubbio’s resolution to be silent merely increases his desire to

speak. His intention to receive everyone and everything masks only thinly his
desire to be received. His journal becomes a surrogate for communication and
his explanations and psychological analyses are a surrogate for his lived
experience: “Life is not explained; it is lived,”31 Gubbio writes, as he
confesses the delusions he had about his silence: “I would rather not say it to
myself, I would rather not understand it myself either. But no, I am no longer a
thing, and this silence of mine is no longer an inanimate silence. I wished to
draw other people’s attention to this silence, but now I suffer from it myself,
so keenly.”32 The more he craves attention, the more his silence isolates him.
Finally, the heartbroken Gubbio resolves to keep his countenance and resume
his “function as the impassive manipulator of a photographic machine.”33 Yet,
his final acceptance and affirmation of his professional silence are tainted
with cynicism: “I have found salvation, I alone, in my silence, with my
silence, which has made me thus—according to the standard of the times—
perfect.”34
Gubbio’s changing attitudes towards his professional impassivity and his
manifold attempts at coming to terms with this silence turn the novel into an
ironic Bildungsroman of the mechanical age. Gubbio inculcates the emotional
and social behavior appropriate for a cameraman. Camerawork becomes an
aesthetic outlook on life and a strategy to deal with its vicissitudes. He learns
how to disentangle himself from the melodrama that is projected from the
screen on reality by assuming the attitude of a cameraman: “life is what it is;
and in the sense that I give to my profession, I intend to go on as I am—alone,
mute and impassive.”35
As in Man with a Movie Camera, life and cinema ultimately come together
in an affirmation of “life as it is.” Yet, the sarcastic and cynical tone of
Gubbio’s notebooks cannot be more different from the manifestos of the
kinoks. Pirandello’s irony is double-crossed. His critique of dehumanization
and enslavement is cast in animalistic metaphors of futurism and the quasi-
Nietzschean affirmation of the mechanical regime of the camera is tainted with
nostalgia for the old arts.36 Notwithstanding these differences, the camera in
both The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio and Vertov’s fragments from a
cameraman’s notebook promote an aesthetic (or poetic) frame for habituating
new ways of seeing, experiencing and fashioning oneself.

The Sound Image of John Dos Passos’ Camera Eye

John Dos Passos’ camera-eye sections in his U.S.A. trilogy and Isherwood’s
notion of the camera eye in Goodbye to Berlin can be seen in this tradition of
understanding the camera eye. The camera eyes in both novels are
autobiographical quests for a new sense of identity and history that reconciles
them with their social and political environments. Even though the idea of the
camera eye is linked to storytelling acts, the camera does not stand for a
specific mode of narration. It rather serves as a description for the process
and the means of writing and self-expression.37 As an intermedial metaphor
the camera eye becomes a (provisional) description for a new
autobiographical style. Dos Passos’ camera-eye sections are exemplary of
this development as they trace the change of the first-person narrator from a
passive observer to an active participant, whose personal and individual
perceptions become increasingly political and socially aware.38 The
development of the camera eye is framed by the montage of four different
strains of narration including narrative fiction, biography, newspaper
clippings and autobiography. As Carol Shloss points out, the narrative
technique of cutting across different formats of narration comes close to
Vertov’s compositional structure.39 We may think of these four narrative
strains in analogy to the three intersecting lines of “life as it is” on the screen,
the strip of film and in reality. Shloss suggests reading the rapidly alternating
sections in U.S.A. in terms of Vertov’s “theory of the interval.” Dos Passos,
Shloss argues, “took from Vertov the idea of the interval, the thought that the
space between fragments could invite participation, that the film-
maker/writer/technician’s job was to edit, to provide the juxtaposition of
information that, when assembled in the viewing/reading, would lead to a
recognition of the importance of each unit within the whole.”40 Dos Passos’
project in U.S.A. in this sense can be described as bringing out the height and
depth of the American idiom, transposing, as it were, Vertov’s visual
resolution to the aural and verbal. In his prologue to the trilogy, Dos Passos
writes that “mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people.”41 In the scenario
presented in the prologue, he depicts a young Whitmanesque figure walking in
solitude:

Only the ears busy to catch the speech are not alone; the ears are caught
tight, linked tight by the tendrils of phrased words, the turn of a joke, the
singsong fade of a story, the gruff fall of a sentence; linking tendrils of
speech twine through the city blocks, spread over pavements, grow out
along broad parked avenues, speed with the trucks leaving on their long
night runs over roaring highways, whisper down sandy byroads past
wornout farms, joining up cities and fillingstations, roundhouses,
steamboats, planes groping along airways; words call out on mountain
pastures, drift slow down rivers widening to the sea and the hushed
beaches.42

If A Sixth Part of the World attempts to be a modernist Russian version of

Leaves of Grass, Dos Passos revisits Whitman through Vertov’s kino-eye. It is
the sound of speech rather than its meaning that connects the writer with the
concrete reality of urban life and even its expansive networks or
transportation beyond the city. What makes reading U.S.A. difficult is that
there are no synopses and cross-references. The segmentation of the novel
does not impose a sense of coherence; nor does it allow us to hear better. It
rather follows the course and prosody of speech itself. The resolution of the
literary camera eye lies in “the tendrils of phrased words.”43 Speech in U.S.A.
never becomes abstract language but is taken from actual instances of use as if
to flesh out social and material reality.
Dos Passos links the sound image of speech to the visceral appeal of
modernist visual culture. In a portrait of the German-American artist George
Grosz, Dos Passos claims a paradigmatic change in the visual habits among
Americans of his generation: “From being a wordminded [sic] people, we are
becoming an eyeminded [sic] people.”44 His parents, Dos Passos claims,
were still likely to “enjoy a view from a hill” within a literary frame
“remembering a line of verse or a passage from Sir Walter Scott, before they
got any real impulse from the optic nerve.”45 In the first decade of the
twentieth century, Dos Passos argues, this began to change with the paintings
of Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris as well as with display
advertising and movies. He corroborates his reading of high- and low-culture
phenomena as symptoms of this epistemic change by drawing upon common
tenets in theories of vision and behaviorist assumptions of developmental
psychology. However, his account is above all a personal testimony based on
what he calls “reminiscences of one pair of eyes.”46 Grosz played a decisive
role in his visual literacy. When he first encountered Grosz’s satirical
drawings after World War I, Dos Passos found them “a brilliant new
weapon”: “Looking at his work was a release from hatred, like hearing a
well-imagined and properly balanced string of cusswords.”47 Dos Passos’
comparison to sound rather than sense underscores the effect of visual purity
the images had on him: “Their impression is not verbal; (you don’t look at the
picture and have it suggest a title and then have the title give you a feeling) but
through the eye direct, by the invention of ways of seeing.”48
How do these new and immediate ways of seeing arise? For Dos Passos
the answer is almost tautological. They come from or, rather, are experiments
in the visual arts. In order “to perceive new aspects and arrangements of
evolving consciousness,” he points out, it is necessary to break up the
processes and patterns that are ingrained in “the heavy apparatus of the
mind.”49 We may still ask, what are the mechanisms at work in such
experimental designs? How do we attain such pure visual regimes? In the
remainder of this chapter I will approach these questions by taking up the cues
Dos Passos has put in parentheses: “you don’t look at the picture and have it
suggest a title and then have the title give you a feeling”—the feedback loops
between visual and verbal figurations in the processing of pictures, words and
feelings. I will do so with consideration of two adaptations of Christopher
Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin (1939): John van Druten’s stage play I
Am a Camera (1951) and John Collier’s film adaptation of this play, directed
by Henry Cornelius in 1955.50 Isherwood’s portrayal of social decadence in
1930s Berlin not only represents a literary equivalent to Grosz’s drawings of
the time,51 the novel also became famous for its autobiographical style of
fiction that—like Dos Passos’ trilogy U.S.A. (1930–36)—introduces the
metaphor of the camera eye as a literary transposition of a new visual
language:52

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.
Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the
kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed,
carefully printed, fixed.53

The camera eye’s ‘paradoxical’ awareness of its postfilmic state already

points to a notion of a camera eye whose perceptual and expressive
sensibilities are still in the making. The camera stands in for both the process
and the result of the storytelling act. This is also alluded to in the concluding
paragraph of the novel, which complements its beginning quoted above:

I catch sight of my face in the mirror of a shop, and am horrified to see that
I am smiling. You can’t help smiling, in such beautiful weather. The trams
are going up and down the Kleiststrasse, just as usual. They, and the
people on the pavement, and the tea-cosy dome of the Nollendorfplatz
station have an air of curious familiarity, of striking resemblance to
something one remembers as normal and pleasant in the past—like a very
good photograph.54

While the novel starts with the metaphor of the camera as an act of passive
recording where the observer—like a voyeur peering into a window—has no
place in the scene, the novel ends with images that relate to the development,
printing and projection of what is becoming the narrator’s memory. Although
his feelings and his mirror image appear at odds with each other, just like the
familiarity of the city assumes the air of its photographed copy, they come
together in the narrator’s last scenic snapshot.
Following the literary camera eye in Goodbye to Berlin through its
subsequent adaptations for the stage and the screen we can trace an
intermedial feedback loop that re-introduces the camera eye as a cinematic
figure of narration. The novel’s history of versions helps to trace a historical
narrative of the development of modernist conceptions of word-and-image
relations in late modernism.

Christopher Isherwood’s Camera Eye on Stage and Screen

Van Druten’s play premiered in New York on November 28, 1951. In
attendance were both the playwright and the novelist, who, during the play,
were pacing backstage in opposite directions.55 It nevertheless remains
unclear exactly how much Isherwood contributed to the play. In an interview
he stated that “[t]he play was entirely conceived and written by van Druten,
but I did have a chance to say my opinion of it later.”56 Notably, the one line
that Isherwood confirmed to have contributed addresses the camera trope at
the end of the play: “The camera’s taken all its pictures, and now it’s going
away to develop them.”57 Though a prolific screenwriter, Isherwood was not
involved in the film’s production. He met with Henry Cornelius and expressed
an interest in developing a script but was tied to other film commitments at the
time.58 The evolution of Goodbye to Berlin on stage and screen seemed to
move further away from its author’s control. Yet within each developmental
stage, in the transition from one medium to the other, there are moments of
creative negotiations and opportunities for authoritative interventions. Just as
Isherwood was happy to discuss the play with van Druten before it went into
production, van Druten prefaced the publication of the stage play with his
experience and advice before leaving “the CAMERA to the new director as
its film developer.”59 With the film’s release some three years later,
Isherwood’s metaphor of the camera came full circle. It also completed what
may be described as a transmedial process of artistic interpretations, bringing
about new sets of media-specific assumptions concerning literature and film.
In what follows, I will trace these assumptions in their respective dramatic
and cinematic versions and conclude by historically reviewing them.
 Van Druten characterizes the play as somewhere between literary fiction
and narrative feature film. He begins his preface by defending the play against
critics who missed a classical dramatic arc in the play. Van Druten found the
lack of neat dramatic resolutions in the literary basis an irresistible challenge.
Isherwood’s autobiographical fiction constitutes a form of writing that, like a
diary, is caught up with and against life; it awaits or refuses development.
This appeared congenial to van Druten’s modernist vision of a theater that
attempts to transgress the boundaries of life and stage:

To finish any story, other than by death, is to lie about life. A marriage is a
temporary curtain, at best, promising another play about what it was like
for those people to be married to each other. And even death, unless all
the major characters are killed, as in Hamlet, is an ending only for the
character who dies.60

At the same time, he refers to cinema and TV as important influences that

helped to break up familiar plot patterns by shifting the emphasis on character.
In a similar way, Isherwood considered character a powerful antidote to the
artificial orders imposed by plot:

The great vice of the professional (one might almost say the
representational) theater is neatness: the danger that you tie up the whole
thing too neatly, that it adds up like a sum and is balanced, and there’s
something about it, a kind of coldness and artificiality in consequence.
What rescues this is character.61

Both van Druten and Isherwood highlighted this point with reference to the
unanimous praise Julie Harris received for her performance as Sally
Bowles.62 Complementary to Sally Bowles is the character of Christopher,
whom van Druten calls “almost a feed part” that should be played unselfishly
and “with a true valuation of it as a commentator and observer.”63
In contrast to the first-person narrator of the novel, the theatrical
Christopher is a character amongst others. The play resolves the hierarchical
relationship between the telling of the story and the story told by staging them
as adjacent relations. Instead of a hierarchy of narrative levels, the play
presents us with a heteronomy of narrative voices or modes of writing. The
opening scene illustrates this by showing us Christopher in search of his
literary voice as he revises his own text:

CHRISTOPHER:: (Reading aloud.) “In the last few days, there has been
a lot of Nazi rioting in the streets, here in Berlin. They are getting
bolder, more arrogant.” (He stops.) No, that’s all wrong. (He
crumples the page and throws it aside.) That’s not the right way
to start. It’s sheer journalism. I must explain who it is who is
telling all this—a typical beachcomber of the big city. He comes
to Berlin for the week-end, stays on, runs out of money, starts
giving English lessons. Now he sits in a rented room, waiting for
something to happen—something that will help him understand
what his life is all about. (Rises, pouring beer into a glass, and
sits on end of table.) When Lord Tennyson wanted to write a
poem, they say he used to put himself into a mystic trance by just
repeating his own name. Alfred Tennyson. Christopher
Isherwood. Christopher Isherwood. Christopher Isherwood. I
like the sound of my name. “Alone among the writers of his
generation, Christopher Isherwood can be said to have achieved
true greatness.” (Drinks.) Shut up, idiot. The only book I ever
published got five reviews, all bad, and sold two hundred and
thirty-three copies to date. And I haven’t even started this new
one, though I’ve been here six months already. (Sits at the table
again.) Well, you’re going to start now, this minute. You’re not
leaving this chair until you do. Write “Chapter One.” (Does so.)
Good. Now begin. Create something. Anything. (He writes, then
reads.) “I am a camera, with its shutter open, quite passive. Some
day all of this will have to be developed, carefully printed,
fixed.” (The lights come up on the room. There is a knock on the
door.). Who’s that?
SCHNEIDER:: (Off.) It is I, Herr Issyvoo.
CHRISTOPHER:: Come in, Fräulein (Schneider comes in, she is a large,
bosomy, German woman, and carries a lace tea-cloth […]).64

Christopher’s comments on his own text prefigure his role as observer and
commentator that he assumes throughout the play. In a sense, his ‘dialogic’
relationship with his writing is almost like the relationship he has with the
play’s other characters. The opening soliloquy recalls a theatrical space that
Isherwood has described as a box: “a place of imprisonment in which the
audience is shut up with the actors. The effects are created by means of
claustrophobia: you can’t get out.”65 Acting out the roles of the author and the
critic, as well as the writer and the reader, in a conversation with himself,
Christopher creates a necessarily claustrophobic atmosphere. We are privy to
a conversation to which we do not belong and bear witness to what we
perhaps never cared to know about a writer’s workmanship. More
importantly, we identify Christopher not only in different roles but also as a
role on a par with our own as audience.
For Isherwood, the theatrical situation, with its basis in a common physical
reality shared across the stage and auditorium, is an essential feature that
distinguishes the theater from cinema. His shorthand for this difference is “the
theater is a box; the cinema is a window.”66 While “box” stresses a sense of
confinement, heightened tension and excitement that result from the co-
presence of actors and spectators, the metaphor of the window foregrounds
the effect of detachment produced by its telemechanism:

The cinema to me is a window—a magic window which you look out of.
You may look into the far world and see events enormously distant in time
and place, and you may look over vast areas of landscape, as in extreme
long shots, or again you may enjoy a closeness of observation which is
quite impossible on the stage.67

Isherwood’s description of the cinema as a window draws on the traditional

notion of film as a medium of display. Its main virtue lies in its presentational
mode that seems to eliminate spatial and temporal gaps between the event and
its representation. The camera as a projector is what moves the viewer closer
to the characters. In speaking the magic words “I am a camera,” Christopher
overcomes his writer’s block and moves the play from the present to the past.
According to the theater model of the box, this means that the past enters the
stage. Notably, the stage version omits the reference to the window that
frames the narrator’s view in the opening of the novel. In contrast to the
narrator-as-camera in Goodbye to Berlin, whose snapshots are to be
imagined as gradually developing, the actor-as-camera in I Am a Camera
reframes this process as a dialogic relation in the expository scene. The film
version complicates this dialogue by making it an integral part of the filmic
composition. The filmic image becomes itself a polyphonic and ironic
expression that combines different perspectives and snapshots.
In the critical reception this aspect was largely drowned out by the
censorship debate that the film set off. While the film was originally planned
as a Hollywood production, it soon became clear that the treatment was too
risqué. The film rights were acquired by an English production company,
which released the film in the U.S. through the Distributors Corporation of
America. Although Cornelius eliminated many predictably problematic
elements, the film was denied a code seal by the Motion Picture Association
because it contained “racy dialogue, a discussion of abortion and portrayed
promiscuity without punishment.”68 Critics who saw the film as an
improvement on the play tended to be those who had already condemned it.69
For critics who disliked the movie the comparison between the play and the
film was often beside the point:

Whatever it was—if anything—that John van Druten was attempting to say

in his stage play ‘I Am a Camera’ is not apparent in the film […]. The
movie version is no more than a series of snap-shots of an amoral and
eccentric dame, flinging about in a frenzied, farcical fashion in the gloom
of pre-Hitler Berlin.70

For this New York Times critic the film was merely a “Bohemian bedroom
farce” that downplayed the story’s historical relevance. The charge of
depoliticizing the historical situation was also generally shared by more
sympathetic reviewers and confirmed the overall tendency towards comedy
that had already been criticized in the play.71 While one reviewer argued that
the film had “in some aspects an edge on the original through the camera’s
mobility,” he criticized omissions in Collier’s screenplay that would have
placed the eccentric behavior of the heroine against a richer background.72
While the movie was still in production, Cornelius promised the
uncensored, notoriously licentious Berlin of the 1930s. To create this
atmosphere of social decadence and political corruption he commissioned
Grosz for the set and costume design of the film.73 His designs, however, fell
short of the expectations and lacked the vivacity of his earlier work.74
Cornelius’ efforts to reconstruct this critical perspective of the 1930s, that
was at once subjective and satirically detached, were lost on his reviewers,
who found the setting and minor characters shallow and burlesque. For
example, consider the party scene in which a hung-over Christopher is being
tossed around by a crazy bunch of experimental psychologists (see Figure
3.3).
Some critics celebrated it as a fantastic and comic set piece while others
rejected it as causing itself a hangover.75 Yet none of the critics related the
surreal atmosphere of this scene to the conspicuous double-framing of
Christopher’s perspective at the beginning of the film. Curiously enough,
Cornelius’ search for a cinematic equivalent of Isherwood’s literary camera
eye seems to clash with the author’s ideas about film as an art form where—in
contrast to the stage—image and movement take primacy over language and
speech.76
Figure 3.3 Experimental treatment of Christopher in I Am a Camera.

The tension results from what appears to be a rather straightforward

transposition that adds another framing narrative to van Druten’s play in order
to illustrate the double function of the camera eye as a recording device and a
means of critical detachment. The film begins with a hand-held camera shot
that, tilting from feet to head, closes in on the character Christopher
Isherwood as he is walking down a sidewalk towards the camera. The
movement of the camera and the actor are in perfect synchronicity with the
first-person voice-over. When he completes his first sentence, “My name is
Christopher Isherwood,” the camera panning upwards centers on him as he
stops before crossing the street. We then follow Christopher to a party thrown
by his publisher where, as he will find out later, Sally Bowles’s memoirs are
presented. Meanwhile, the voice-over continues his introduction:

I’d like to think that I need say no more. But perhaps I’d better add: I am a
novelist, comfortably off, set in my ways, a confirmed bachelor.
Sentimental melodies have a profound and moving effect on me (see
Figure 3.4). They seem to go to my stomach. They make me feel that
maybe I have missed something in life. Unfortunately, I can’t always miss
the literary cocktail parties to which I am invited by my publisher. They
always stave these things when they are trying to promote the more
dubious items on their list. A gaggle of female journalists was an evidence
from which I gathered that some lady’s murky memoirs was [sic] being
foisted on the public. The more worthless the book, the more they need
noise and alcohol to launch it. However, it’s only civil on such occasions
to know at least the name of the unfortunate author. I could hardly believe
my eyes … [on-screen voice] Sally Bowles.
Figure 3.4 Figments of narration in I Am a Camera.

The shots accompanying the voice-over are replete with the kind of word-
and-image relationships that displeased critics. Christopher’s sober self-
characterization as a modern man with a low tolerance for sentimentality is
illustrated by showing a street musician playing on a piano that is mounted on
a drawbar trailer. His tune evidently makes Christopher take a stomach pill
(see Figure 3.4). When the voice-over mentions his obligation to attend his
publisher’s literary event, we see Christopher inspecting the display case at
the entrance of the publishing house. Inside, at the party, his discovery that
Sally Bowles is the author of the featured memoir is followed by a close-up
of the book.
The beginning of the film stands in stark contrast to Isherwood’s own theory
of film, which owes much to Soviet montage theory and the critical
interventions that in the wake of sound film favored a dialectic (or even
antithetical) relationship between word and image. Contrasting the differences
in the use of language on stage and screen, Isherwood reiterated this position
in his lectures at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The example he
gives to illustrate his point comes rather close to the voice-over narration in I
Am a Camera:

It’s not just that, on the screen, you have to have less dialogue than you can
afford to have in the theater. It’s that the words spoken on the screen
should have an entirely different relation to the image. […] The sound in
film should always be, as it were, balanced against the image and not go
with it. […] On the stage, it’s really quite difficult—and for people in the
back almost impossible—to see the finer niceties of gesture and business
between two people, and these often have to be backed up by dialogue.
On the screen this kind of thing becomes absolutely ludicrous, and never
more so than when, as if becoming very fashionable nowadays, a stretch
of silent film is backed by a spoken narration. “I felt blue that morning. I
didn’t know what was the matter with me. I took a tram, I went out to the
park, I looked at the ducks. Stupid creatures, I thought. Their life is as dull
as mine.” Every bit of this narration is absolutely unnecessary. And yet we
see film after film in which, by God, the hero gets out of bed, looks blue,
looks like he doesn’t know what’s the matter with him, goes downstairs,
takes the trolley car and rides out to the park, sits down, sees the ducks.
The whole thing is photographed, and yet this voice goes yakking on as
though contributing to the situation, and of course it isn’t in the least. This
is one of the things that you have to learn when you write for the film—
you have to try your best to somehow oppose the words and the image.77

For Isherwood, the image must resist being simply an illustration of the word.
Filmic techniques such as the close-up allow us to see more clearly and make
quick inferences. The audience’s increasing familiarity with these techniques
makes it superfluous to explain through language what images can convey
more effectively. The contrapuntal use of sound and image not only aims at
generating a synaesthetic surplus of meaning, it also seeks to avoid a verbal
dominance over the image.
Does this mean that the movie adaptation of Isherwood’s own work is an
example of such “ludicrous” and “absolutely unnecessary” approaches to
voice-over narration that became “fashionable” in the late 1950s? Such
accusations merit a closer look at the “ludicrous” and “absolutely
unnecessary” elements of the film in relation to Isherwood’s notion of the
literary camera eye as well as his ideas about theater and cinema. And given
the significant period of time that passed between the publication of Goodbye
to Berlin and its adaptations for stage and screen, it is also useful to re-
evaluate what “fashionable” means in the context of film history.
To be sure, Cornelius’ beginning does not exactly match Isherwood’s
example. In both cases, voice-over narration dominates the filmic images and
frames the temporal aspect of the image. Yet, while in Isherwood’s caricature
of a redundant voice-over the narration consists of a series of singular actions
and states, the voice-over narration in I Am a Camera relates almost
exclusively to general states and habitual events: the protagonist’s name, his
profession and marital status, his emotional disposition to sentimental
melodies, his regular attendance at literary parties and his experiential rule of
assessing the quality of books at such parties.
In fact, the degree of narrativity of the voice-over is rather low and it is
quite remarkable how much expositional information is matched against a
short and continuous string of visual action—even if this entails carting a
piano into the street (see Figure 3.4). The well-placed street musician is
certainly the most ludicrous gimmick in the opening scene, if ludicrous is
meant to describe a self-reflexive jest. The pianist is an almost surreal
appearance. With stoic mime he turns to Christopher and watches him take the
pill as if he could read his mind. Or is the pianist himself a figment of
Christopher’s thoughts, a visual stunt of the voice-over narrator? This
narrative play also resonates on the sound level. Not only could he pass as a
cinema pianist of the silent era, his tune, which on the verbal cue “sentimental
melodies” fades in well before the pianist comes into the frame, may initially
be perceived as non-diegetic music. In a sense, the pianist’s “intrusion” into
the frame can be compared to the verbal obtrusion of a redundant voice-over
on “a stretch of a silent film” that Isherwood lamented in his lecture.
The voice-over is only seemingly redundant. Rather, it exploits the overt
similarities between verbal and visual information to reframe the filmic image
as a sustained difference: a memorial mode presentation that combines an
imagistic presence with a verbal record. Like the stance of critical detachment
implied in Isherwood’s notion of the camera eye, it must not be mistaken for a
neutral position. In Cornelius’ film the camera eye is only thinly disguised as
a “bachelor machine”—to borrow Constance Penley’s phrase for the
ideological suppression of sexual differences of the cinematic apparatus.78
Christopher’s introduction of himself as a “confirmed bachelor” is both a
euphemism of his homosexuality and his commitment to non-conformity. It
provides an important cue for interpreting Christopher’s character, which in
the film version is prominently placed as an initial framing but remains
implicit in the stage play. A film critic stated that the character Isherwood is
not so easily understood “unless one takes the obvious inference.”79 A few
years earlier, a critic reviewing the play failed to make this inference: “These
two [Christopher and Sally] become devoted friends but are afraid to admit
they are in love, for love would give meaning to their lives. They, and
particularly the girl, prefer to drift.”80
If I Am a Camera is illustrative of those unnecessary voice-over narrations
that had become so fashionable, then this fad for obtrusive voice-overs needs
to be seen as a playful approach to this convention that provides a new twist
on the well-rehearsed debates between the verbal and the visual towards the
end of the classical Hollywood era.81 In the opening sequence the traditional
pairing of the visual with the descriptive, on the one hand, and the verbal with
the narrative, on the other hand, is reversed.82 At the same time boundaries
between the external objective reality and internal mental realities are
blurred; or rather, they are reconfigured into a relationship of adjacency. The
pianist as a conspicuous symbol of Christopher’s troubled relationship with
canned sentimentality has a sonic counterpart in the use of sound as a means of
focalization at the end of the expositional voice-over. When Christopher looks
at Sally’s book, her unmistakable laughter fades in. Since she is celebrating
with journalists in the other room, we may process her laughter as part of
Christopher’s perceptual focus or interpret it as his sonic memory triggered
by his reading her name.
This ambiguous use of sounds and the montage or juxtaposition of voices
that belong to different levels is characteristic of the film’s obsession with
interlocking narrative levels. When Christopher arrives at the party and is
welcomed by his friends, we hear both the voice-over of Christopher as
narrator and—albeit muted—the conversation that, as a character, he is
engaged in. Rather than viewing “a stretch of silent film backed up with
narration,” we become aware of different diegetic levels of sound and are
invited to interpret images belonging to different realms of reality. In the stage
play, the different communicative frames (the author’s search for a voice and
perspective, the narrator’s stance on his story and his engagement as a
character) all seem to be written into one scene and space. The film version
disentangles and rearranges these levels in a serial fashion that allows for a
greater spatio-temporal mobility. While the (extra-diegetic) voice-over
introducing Christopher gives way to his (diegetic) voice talking with a friend
at the party, the communicative exchanges are neatly separated. His
conversation at the party, in turn, frames another storytelling situation. Asked
about his acquaintance with Sally, Christopher walks to a window and begins
his story about her (see Figure 3.5). A cross-dissolve takes us back to Berlin
in the year 1931 and we see the young Isherwood standing at a window with a
glass of beer (see Figure 3.6).
Figure 3.5 Christopher’s window of narration.
Figure 3.6 Christopher’s window of focalization.

This scene not only matches the previous storytelling frame, it also
reintroduces the window as a perceptual metaphor for Christopher’s camera-
eye vision. The matching frames of Christopher staring out of the window at
the cocktail party and in his room in Berlin align with two different narrative
frames respectively. In the first scene, he gazes off into a remote and empty
space. This window provides a storytelling frame of his remembered vision.
In the second case, the window serves as a frame of focalization. As he
witnesses Nazis harassing a Jewish man, the window screen becomes a
device of emotional detachment. Both frames are combined as stylistic
registers throughout the film. Rather than viewing Christopher’s story as a
conventional flashback, the double window-frame draws attention to the
active and passive dimensions of perception and memory. Things present or
past are at once found and construed. As in Isherwood’s novel, the film’s
approach to the metaphor of the camera revolves around this passive-active
dichotomy.
Similarly, the doubling of visual and auditory information is geared
towards an aesthetic that teases out differences in what seems similar. In the
film this creates something of a paradox. While Isherwood’s novel aspires to
be photographic from the moment of its creative conception, its development
and projection on the film screen not only involve two stages of adaptation but
also end up twice framed. The film contains a record of its own history of
media versions. This palimpsestuous layering of versions is not an unusual
transmedial phenomenon in adaptation practices. In the film I Am a Camera it
contributes to exploring the cinematic quality of Isherwood’s literary use of
the camera eye, foregrounding differences between modes of representation
that—within a specific historical and aesthetic framework—are considered
analogous. This aesthetic of intermedial difference comes close to what
André Bazin describes as a “dialectic between creation and fidelity,” that
crosses the conventions of translation and adaptation with “the most insidious
kind of fidelity.”83
The double framing and the twofold windowing in I Am a Camera are like
explications or paraphrases of what is contained in synthetic intermedial
figures such as the literary camera eye or its filmic equivalent, the camera-pen
(as conceived of by the French critic and filmmaker Alexandre Astruc).84 In
this context, camera and pen are not reduced to media-specific metonyms that
stand in for representational modes of showing and telling. Instead of
hypostasizing the camera eye into representational form or assigning it to a
specific mode of narrative mediation, the camera eye impels the viewer to
fuse Christopher’s window of narration (see Figure 3.5) and his window of
focalization (see Figure 3.6).85 I Am a Camera is not bound to an outdated
literalist paradigm. On the contrary, it re-addresses established conventions of
adaptation in the wider context of word-and-image relations. It brings together
many discursive threads that inform the modernist camera-eye vision on the
relations between self and other, real and imaginary, inside and outside, past
and present. Yet, the film also reconstructs this vision from a late modernist
perspective and as such offers an instructive link not only to writerly notions
of personal filmmaking in auteur cinema but also notions of the camera eye as
a personalized mask of perspective or literary personae, which I will discuss
in Chapter Five.

Notes
1. See also Vlada Petrić, Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie
Camera: A Cinematic Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1987), 25–35.
2. For a critique of narratological conceptions of the camera eye in literary
theories, see my essay “The Conceptual Integration of Intermediality:
Literary and Cinematic Camera-Eye Narratives,” in Blending and the
Study of Narrative, ed. Ralf Schneider and Marcus Hartner (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 2012), 199–227.
3. Alan Spiegel, Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in
Film and the Modern Novel (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1976), 87–89.
4. Spiegel, Fiction and the Camera Eye, 87.
5. See also Petrić, Constructivism in Film, 25–35.
6. Dziga Vertov, “More about Mayakovsky” qtd. in Petrić, Constructivism in
Film, 35.
7. See esp. Ben Singer, “Connoisseurs of Chaos: Whitman, Vertov and the
‘Poetic Survey,’” Literature/Film Quarterly 14 (1987): 247–58.
8. Walt Whitman, “Preface, 1872, to ‘As A Strong Bird on Pinions Free,’” in
vol. 2 of Prose Works 1892, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: Univ. Press,
1964), 461.
9. Izmail Urazov, “A Sixth Part of the World” (1926), in Lines of
Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, ed. Yuri Tsivian (Pordenone:
Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004), 184–87, 185.
10. Walt Whitman, “Preface, 1855, to first issue of ‘Leaves of Grass,’” in vol.
2 of Prose Works 1892, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: Univ. Press, 1964),
434.
11. The intertitles follow T.S. Naivist’s translation reprinted in Tsivian, Lines
of Resistance, 187–93.
12. Urazov, “A Sixth Part of the World,” 186.
13. Dziga Vertov, “A Sixth Part of the World (A Conversation with Dziga
Vertov),” in Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, ed. Yuri
Tsivian (Pordenone: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004), 182.
14. Vertov, “A Sixth Part of the World (A Conversation with Dziga Vertov),”
182.
15. Vertov, “A Sixth Part of the World (A Conversation with Dziga Vertov),”
182.
16. Vitaly Zhemchuzny, “A Sixth Part of the World,” in Lines of Resistance:
Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, ed. Yuri Tsivian (Pordenone: Le Giornate
del Cinema Muto, 2004), 199.
17. Ippolit Sokolov, “On the Film A Sixth Part of the World,” in Lines of
Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, ed. Yuri Tsivian (Pordenone:
Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004), 233.
18. Sokolov, “On the Film A Sixth Part of the World,” 233.
19. Victor Shklovsky, “On the Fact That Plot Is a Constructive Principle, Not
One from Daily Life,” in Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the
Twenties, ed. Yuri Tsivian (Pordenone: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto,
2004), 269.
20. The novel first appeared in serial and book form under the title Si Gira
(1915 and 1916). In 1925 the book was republished as Quaderni di
Serafino Gubbio, operatore (Si gira), ed. Giulio Ferroni (Firenze: Giunti,
1994). English translations have retained both titles (in varying orders).
All English quotations come from the following edition: Luigi Pirandello,
The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, or Shoot!, trans. C. K. Scott-
Moncrieff (Sawtry, UK: Dedalus, 1990).
21. Pirandello, Shoot!, 8.
22. Pirandello, Shoot!, 86.
23. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility,” in vol. 3 of Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed.
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2002), 112.
24. Pirandello, Shoot!, 105–6.
25. See Michael Rössner, “Serafino Gubbio oder die Ironie im Zeitalter der
technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in Luigi Pirandello, Die
Aufzeichnungen des Kameramanns Serafino Gubbio, trans. Michael
Rössner (Mindelheim: Sachon Verlag, 1980), 260–67. For Sabine
 Schrader the ambiguity of Pirandello’s irony points to a more general
media crisis that goes beyond the competitive relationship between
literature and film. See Schrader, ‘Si gira!’ Literatur und Film in der
Stummfilmzeit Italiens (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007).
26. This silence, which in the Italian original takes its predicate from the
“thing” (“silenzio di cosa”) is itself ironic as it subverts the common tenet
of early film criticism, namely that cinema animates and
anthropomorphizes things. See Pirandello, Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio,
83, 132, 176 and 191. The phrase “inanimate silence” marks various
stages in Gubbio’s life as a cameraman; see Pirandello, Shoot!, 140, 225,
308 and 334.
27. Pirandello, Shoot!, 138.
28. Maurice Maeterlinck, “Silence,” in The Treasure of the Humble, trans.
Alfred Sutro (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1914), 12.
29. See e.g. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s essay “Über die Pantomime,” in Prosa,
vol. 3 of Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Gesammelte Werke, ed. Herbert
Steiner (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1952), 46–50 and Hanns Sachs’s
psychoanalytic approach outlined in his “Film Psychology” (1928), in
Close Up, 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne
Friedberg, and Laura Marcus (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1998), 250–54. On Hofmannsthal’s reflections on silent film as a critique
of language and general aspects of word-image relation in the early
literary reception of cinema see Anton Kaes, “The Debate about Cinema,”
New German Critique 40.3 (1987): 7–33, 23–28.
30. Pirandello, Shoot!, 140.
31. Pirandello, Shoot!, 224.
32. Pirandello, Shoot!, 225.
33. Pirandello, Shoot!, 266.
34. Pirandello, Shoot!, 333.
35. Pirandello, Shoot!, 334.
36. On nostalgia as a distinguishing feature in Pirandello’s and Vertov’s
cameramen see Francesco Casetti, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience,
Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 92.
37. See Stephen Hock’s Bazinian reading of Dos Passos’ camera-eye section
in “ ‘Stories Told Sideways out of the Big Mouth’: John Dos Passos’s
Bazinian Camera,” Literature/Film Quarterly 33.1 (2005): 20–27.
38. Townsend Ludington has summarized the development of the camera-eye
sections as Dos Passos’ “gradual assimilation into a world beyond the
shelter of his self-conscious imagination. The more he could find his place
in that world, the less of a separate, subjective life was there to portray,”
Ludington, “The Ordering of the Camera Eye in U.S.A.” American
Literature 49.3 (1977): 444. See also James N. Westerhoven,
“Autobiographical Elements in the Camera Eye,” American Literature
48.3 (1976): 340–64; Stephen Hock, “‘Stories Told Sideways out of the
Big Mouth’: John Dos Passos’s Bazinian Camera.” Literature/Film
Quarterly 33.1 (2005): 20–27; and Michael North, Camera Works:
Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 140–63.
39. Carol Shloss, In Visible Light: Photography and the American Writer:
1840–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
40. Shloss, In Visible Light, 158–9.
41. John Dos Passos, U.S.A. (1930–36) (New York: Library of America,
1996), 2.
42. Dos Passos, U.S.A., 2.
43. Dos Passos, U.S.A., 2.
44. John Dos Passos, “Introductory Comment: Satire as a Way of Seeing,” in
George Grosz, Interregnum (New York: The Black Sun Press, 1936), 10.
45. Dos Passos, “Satire as a Way of Seeing,” 10.
46. Dos Passos, “Satire as a Way of Seeing,” 9.
47. Dos Passos, “Satire as a Way of Seeing,” 15.
48. Dos Passos, “Satire as a Way of Seeing,” 16.
49. Dos Passos, “Satire as a Way of Seeing,” 19.
50. In her insightful book Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, Kamilla Elliott
outlines an approach to adaptations that considers visual and verbal
dichotomies in their specific historical conceptions. See Elliott,
Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003).
51. The connections between Isherwood and Grosz are showcased in Frank
Whitford’s edition of Goodbye to Berlin (1975), illustrated with selected
drawings by Grosz. See Whitford, The Berlin of George Grosz:
Drawings, Watercolors and Prints 1912–1930 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1997). On Grosz’s influence on Dos Passos’ camera-eye
 conception see Townsend Ludington, “John Dos Passos, 1896–1970:
Modernist Recorder of the American Scene,” Virginia Quarterly Review
72.4 (1996): 565–72 and also Michael Spindler, “John Dos Passos and
the Visual Arts,” Journal of American Studies 15.3 (1981): 391–405.
52. On the significance of language and style in connection with the metaphor
of the camera eye and the autobiographical format see also Alan Wilde,
“Language and Surface: Isherwood and the Thirties,” Contemporary
Literature 16.4 (1975): 478–91.
53. Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (London: Random House,
2004), 9.
54. Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, 255–56.
55. Christopher Isherwood, “A Writer and the Theater,” in Isherwood on
Writing, ed. James J. Berg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2007), 84–98.
56. Harvey Breit, “Talk with Mr. Isherwood,” New York Times, December 16,
1951, 217.
57. John van Druten, I Am a Camera: A Play in Three Acts (New York:
Random House, 1952), 84.
58. Stephen Watts, “On Shooting a ‘Camera,’” New York Times, January 23,
1955, X5.
59. Van Druten, I Am a Camera, 8.
60. Van Druten, I Am a Camera, 5. See also Isherwood’s ideas on modern
theater in “A Writer and the Theater.”
61. Isherwood, “A Writer and the Theater,” 90.
62. Even critics who dismissed the play highlighted Harris’ acting, for which
she received the Donaldson Award for Best Actress in the 1951–52
season, the same year the New York Drama Critics’ Circle awarded the
play the Critics’ Choice Award. See, for example, John Chapman, “New
Van Druten Play Falters,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 30, 1951,
B11.
63. Van Druten, I Am a Camera, 7.
64. Van Druten, I Am a Camera, 9–10.
65. Isherwood, “A Writer and the Theater,” 91.
66. Christopher Isherwood, “Lecture Notes: A Writer and the Film,” in
Isherwood on Writing, ed. James J. Berg (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007), 229.
67. Christopher Isherwood, “A Writer and the Films,” in Isherwood on
Writing, ed. James J. Berg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2007), 99–113, 100.
68. Thomas M. Pryor, “‘Camera’ Ruling to Be Appealed,” New York Times,
July 29, 1955, 9. On the discussion of censorship criteria in connection
with the film release see also Bosley Crowther’s articles, “The Anomaly
of a Code,” New York Times, August 14, 1955, X1, and “Film Code Shift
Asked,” New York Times, August 18, 1955, 17.
69. Mae Tinee, “Film of ‘I Am a Camera’ Is a Bit Overdone,” Chicago Daily
Tribune, November 15, 1955, B7.
70. Bosley Crowther, “Screen: ‘I Am a Camera,’” New York Times, August 9,
1955, 29.
71. When asked about alterations made in the film, Julie Harris said that the
play showed a more sordid picture of Berlin “full of degenerated, drab
people.” The quote appears in Philip K. Scheuer, “Julie Has a Field Day
but Film Stirs Furor,” Los Angeles Times, August 28, 1955, D1.
72. Richard L. Coe, “A Perky Pup; A Deft Julie,” The Washington Post and
Times Herald, September 28, 1955, 28.
73. “Grosz Is a ‘Camera,’” New York Times, July 24, 1955, SM 12.
74. Grosz took on this work upon his return to Germany, after he had been
living in the U.S. for more than twenty years. By that time he had also
emphatically distanced himself from his earlier political and satirical
work. As Whitford suggests, Grosz had “long since grown weary of his
popular reputation as the most accurate chronicler of decadent Berlin. He
accepted the commission only for the sake of money.” The quote appears
in Whitford, The Berlin of George Grosz, 1.
75. See R. H. Gardner, “Of Stage and Screen,” The Sun, November 21, 1955,
10 and Tinee, “Film of ‘I Am a Camera’ Is a Bit Overdone.”
76. Isherwood, “A Writer and the Films,” 100–101.
77. Isherwood, “A Writer and the Films,” 106–7.
78. Constance Penley, “Feminism, Film Theory, and the Bachelor Machines,”
in The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 56–80.
79. Gardner, “Of Stage and Screen,” 10.
80. Chapman, “New Van Druten Play Falters,” B11.
81. See also the chapter “Irony in Voice-Over Films” in Sarah Kozloff’s study
on Invisible Storytellers. Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over
Narration in American Fiction Film (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988).
82. An ironic expositional beginning that does not reverse these traditional
correlations can be found in Billy Wilder’s lesser-known movie Love in
the Afternoon (1957) with Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn and Maurice
Chevalier. Here Chevalier’s voice-over introduces Paris as the city of
love. The movie opens with the camera pulling back from a wall of
pictures that show well-known sites of the city. The camera then pans to
the right exposing a couple engrossed in a kiss while being showered by a
street-cleaning car. Although this shot compares to the conspicuous mise-
en-scene of Figure 3.4, the successive shots depicting the great variety of
locales Paris offers for lovers have no narrative continuity, but
subserviently align with the list of places and people given by the voice-
over. This montage of people kissing becomes a cinematic homage to
Paris’ sexually explicit comedies. Setting the story in distant Paris was
probably also a way to get around censorship. Wilder seems to poke fun at
Lubitsch’s movies. Chevalier’s voice-over appears almost as a parody of
Wilder himself in the 1930s.
83. André Bazin, “Le Journal d’un curé de campagne and the Stylistics of
Robert Bresson” (1951), in What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray, vol. 1
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 142 and 126. See also
Bazin, “In Defense of Mixed Cinema” (1952), in What Is Cinema?, trans.
Hugh Gray, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 53–
75.
84. Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo”
(1948), in The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks, ed. Peter Graham
and Ginette Vincendeau (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 31–36.
85. For a review and critique of media-specific biases in narratological uses
of the camera eye see Christian Quendler, “The Conceptual Integration of
Intermediality,” in Blending and the Study of Narrative, edited by Ralf
Schneider and Marcus Hartner (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 199–227.
4 Memory and Traces

As camera-eye metaphors have been invoked to signify new and alternative

ways of seeing and writing, they have generated new visions of remembering.
Unearthing the technological and material basis of everyday perception,
Vertov’s kino-eye dreams of a memo that organizes the daily chaos of
sensations received by an ordinary eye. Uncovering unseen aspects of cultural
life, Benjamin’s optical unconscious promises to capture the involuntary
aspects of social memory and collected records. As an instrument of recorded
or remembered vision, the camera eye functions like a mental screen. Who or
what is the subject of such remembering and minding? Besides general mental
descriptions of cinema as illustrating psychological processes or expressing
spiritual aspects of the human psyche, two complementary (but not mutually
exclusive) ideas of camera consciousness have dominated film theory: the
‘false consciousness’ instilled by ideological effects of the cinematic
apparatus and the ‘central consciousness’ of the auteur.1 In both cases
consciousness refers to an extended cognitive system that views film
technology as co-opted by a set of norms and beliefs or the singular skill of
filmmaker. Accordingly, the image appears as an ideological fantasy or vision
of an aesthetic persona. Images of a mindscreen are traces that forge a link
between the past experiences and present recollections, mediating between
external physical and internal mental realities.
The idea of cinema as remembered vision blends two distinct notions of the
image that parallel two conceptions of traces developed in theories of mind
and memory. The idea of an image as the duplicate of a thing or a
representation that resembles an original can be contrasted to original images
conceived in artistic or imaginative processes. Whereas the former is
premised on the notion of resemblance, the latter is identified by relations of
alterity that mark its creative process and context of formation.2 Similarly, the
notion of a memory trace is invested with a productive ambiguity. On the one
hand, traces may be understood as imprints or impressions that form images
and representations of past experiences. Or, they can be thought of as a
constructive force, an underlying disposition that allows us to form memories.
Metaphors that invoke the camera eye as a site of remembered vision exploit
these ambiguous notions of images and traces and thereby create yet another
indeterminacy about the location of filmic memories and the actual site where
these memories are ‘screened’ or ‘minded.’
In this chapter, I approach the idea of the camera eye as a mindscreen or
remembered vision by examining the intermedial integration of diary fiction in
two social dramas of the classical period of silent and sound cinema: Georg
Wilhelm Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen, 1929) and
William Keighley’s Journal of a Crime (1934). This chapter continues to
explore the formative role of diaries as a description of the cinematic
dispositif that defines the regime of what can be seen and said. In contrast to
the previous chapter, which addressed the diary as a compositional format
and an autobiographical practice, my discussion here focuses on the diary as a
genre of narrative fiction. I aim to show how the generic frame of diary fiction
helped to shape new subjective modalities of cinema. Diary fictions stage
manifold crossovers between the internal realms of introspection and the
social world of communication. In diaries the external, social world becomes
an internal world of personal intimations. As a material practice of
remembering, diaries externalize and project notions of the self and others.
Material and formal aspects of the diary become the tangible resources for an
imaginary dialogue with the social world. Finally, diary fictions are culturally
embedded practices where the transgression of private and public boundaries
is socially sanctioned. This makes the experience of reading diary fiction not
only a moment of imaginary recollection and vicarious re-enactment, but also
a dispositif of intervention and control, where social norms and values are
negotiated and contested.
The cinematic integration of diary fiction raises a number of questions
about cinema as a surrogate site of remembering. Since filming a diary
involves re-enacting its process of composition and reception, the filmed
already presents a ‘minded’ and ‘mediated’ syntheses, in which external
memory traces, ‘the entries in a diary,’ have been re-called and reconstructed
through film as a narrative medium film. If the diary as a document and artifact
provides a material basis for projecting and constructing the diarist’s identity,
what documentary and material status will be attributed to the cinematic
apparatus of the filmed diary? Related to this question is the issue of the
camera’s subjective alignment. If diaries create transactive realms in which
the conception of the self evolves in a dialogue with an imaginary other, what
position will the camera assume?
I want to address these questions in a historical narrative of cultural
reception and remediation that follows Margarete Böhme’s diary novel
Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (1905, translated into English as The Diary of a
Lost One in 1908) from Pabst’s adaptation in 1929 to Warner Brothers’
attempt at the European social drama in Keighley’s Journal of a Crime
(1934). Instead of viewing Pabst’s film as a literary adaptation, I will discuss
the film as a response to the novel’s cultural reception. Pabst critiques and
exploits diary fiction as a social and moral institution. If the sentimental diary
novel puts a private drama of female introspectiveness on public display,
Pabst’s diary film captures the voyeuristic and sadistic fantasy underpinning
the public’s interest in such dramas. His engagement with the diary as an
object of male fantasy stands in productive contrast to Keighley’s Journal of
a Crime, an extraordinary but lesser known film that combines European
literary, filmic and dramatic influences and adapts them for American
audiences and the newly introduced Motion Picture Production Code.
Whereas in Pabst’s film the diary as object is turned into an image that can be
read, in Keighley’s Journal of a Crime, the diary engages in a complicit
relationship with the cinematic apparatus. It is no longer a symbolic object of
an encoded fantasy but a format of imagination that constructs and controls
this fantasy. Comparing the two films I want to illustrate a historical shift from
objective to subjective approaches in appropriating the diary as a social
format of introspection. The films can illustrate two modes of reading memory
images that undermine the ostensible neutrality or objectivity of the camera.

A Series of Dated Traces

What are the deep conceptual affinities that connect diaries and film? In the
most general sense, diaries and films are both material-based practices of
managing memory. By holding records in place and in stable forms, they
allow for new experiences of time. For Philippe Lejeune the development of
the personal journal between the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century is
intricately connected to time management devices such as clocks, watches and
non-cyclical forms of calendars. This organization of records in time is what
links practices of the diary to a vectorization of time, a sense of progress and
irreversible time.3 For Lejeune, this forging of an existential link with time
defines the diary:

a diary is a series of dated traces [série de traces datées]. The date is

essential. The trace is usually writing, but it can be an image, an object, or
a relic. An isolated dated trace is a memorial rather than a diary: the diary
begins when traces in a series attempt to capture the movement of time
rather than freeze it around a source event.4

Although writing would appear to be the most common form of recording, his
definition is conveniently media-unspecific and lends itself to illustrating the
structural similarities between diary praxis, on the one hand, and serial
photography and cinematography, on the other.5 Lejeune’s minimal definition
of the diary and its abstraction from social and biographical contexts seems to
match cinema’s own early history of self-definition. In his essay “Vitagraphic
Time,” Garrett Stewart regards the biographic scope in the names of early
film companies and technologies (such as Vitagraph, Mutoscope or Biograph)
as short-lived misnomers that were soon to be replaced by the general term
movies “as a hedge against recognized serial fixity.”6 Lejeune’s minimalist
definition of the diary as a series of dated traces can be applied to filmic
record in general, which also contains traces that come with a time stamp.
Diaries also construct what Gérard Genette calls “interpolated narration,” a
complex form of storytelling that combines simultaneous narration and
reporting after the fact.7 Notably, film viewers often think of films in a strange
interpolated present tense, making a presence out of their past experience
viewing a film.
Regarding writing, photographic images and things indiscriminately as
traces is likely to provoke objections from film scholars and analytical
philosophers. For Kendall Walton and Gregory Currie, traces are “in a sense
independent of belief” and therefore quite distinct from pictorial or verbal
testimonies.8 In contrast to written texts and paintings, traces are created by
objects. Our relations to such objects are not filtered or marred by intentions
but appear to be somewhat transparent. This straightforward connection
between object and trace further qualifies the trace as the effect of a past
event. In other words, traces do not relate to hypothetical, imaginary or future
events or, as Currie argues, traces cannot be intrinsically misleading. Whereas
Currie’s argument follows a clear-headed analytical logic, his account of the
affective impact of traces contains a curious passage:

Traces of things bear particularly direct relations to those things: things

leave their traces on other things. Possessing a photograph, death mask, or
footprint of someone seems to put me in a relation to that person that a
handmade image never can.9

It seems that closeness or immediacy to the material is impressive in a

physical and a psychological sense. We can relate this closeness and
immediacy to the physical properties of the trace and the intentional scope of
its mediation, respectively.
In the case of written documents, the direct availability of material
evidence can lead us to include physical aspects in our interpretation. We
routinely attribute meaning to the format and material organization of a diary
or investigate handwriting as ‘psychic fingerprints.’10 As Lejeune remarks, it
was only in the nineteenth century that individual and personal writing
practices emerged from collective writing practices, which did not permit
such a psychology of handwriting styles. The diarists, he claims, “were the
first to lend significance to their handwriting.”11 In a similar way, by having
each entry correspond to the chronology of a person’s life, diaries enforce
mapping one’s life onto the format of the book. Not unlike the annual rings of a
tree, diarists often view completed pages and books as correlations
representative of lives lived.
Lejeune’s emphasis on trace in conjunction with a dated series
distinguishes between diary and autobiography as well as fictional forms.
Traces evoke a sense of presence, which is usually the presence of a past
event. Lejeune relates this sense of presence above all to the moment of
writing or the act of enunciation. This is why the date assumes such
importance in his definition: “setting the date off at the top of the page to
indicate the time of writing is a crucial gesture, one that separates the
enunciator from his narration and paves the way for the personalization of the
subject matter.”12 Dating a trace of a diary does several things: It marks the
diary entry as a space of enunciation (or, as Lejeune puts it, it signals “an
entry into a space of dialogue”) and it documents as well as certifies the
‘presence’ of that space.13
 Signaling and legitimizing a speech act can be part of both fictional and
non-fictional practices. What sets the diary off as “antifiction” is its principle
of seriality. In contrast to autobiography or fiction, the diary does not make a
pact with a reader but with time. In keeping a diary, Lejeune is convinced that
one makes a “mystical alliance with time.”14 Writing for time in this sense not
only means writing in the present but also writing in the face of what is
unknown and unpredictable, which is why Lejeune contrasts the diary with
literary fiction: “An imaginary reconstruction of the present could only be
viewed and experienced as a lie, or insanity, and would be difficult to keep
up over time.”15 Lejeune’s categorical exclusion of fictional and
communicative realms aims at distinguishing the protean genre of the diary
from other fictional and non-fictional genres. However, it is also an
idealization made at the expense of psychological and psychoanalytical
complexities. In diaries, the projections of self and others are often embedded
in communicative scenarios that address an imaginary or real other. The line
between self-reflection and communication, like the one between performing
and acting, is frequently tenuous and intricate.
Fictional diaries create what Lejeune (in allusion to Roland Barthes’s
“effets de réel”) calls “effets de journal”: “Fiction uses homeopathic doses
of the features of the diary that distinguish it most from conventional
narration.”16 Editing and dramatic streamlining endow diaries with a sense of
coherence and closure. Since diaries are susceptible to all kinds of framings
they may be seen as part of an experimental set-up, a project or study
conducted over time. Fictional diaries often begin as a response to a problem
or a moment of existential crisis, a plot convention that is also common in
autobiographies and epistolary novels. Adolescent diary fiction of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries often places itself within the spiritual
tradition of keeping diaries as a form of self-care. In many diary novels, the
journal is introduced as a confirmation gift to girls and young women,
coinciding with their sexual self-awakening.17 While the beginning of a diary
is often marked and commented upon, the closure of a diary seems to pose
more difficulties. Editorial fictions offer the most convenient solutions
especially when they claim to publish a diary posthumously. Alternatively, if a
diary is framed as an experiment or a therapeutic means to manage an
existential crisis, success or failure suggest themselves as denouement. More
radically open and perhaps more ‘realistic’ endings that are brought about by
neglect, interruption or disenchantment are less common.18
 Staging a diary as fiction and re-editing/writing a personal diary for the
public come with a lure that can compensate for the ‘writerly’ aspects of
diaries. Readers may enjoy reading something that in some sense was not
intended for them and their curiosity could make such texts more ‘readable.’19
Again, this crisscrossing of the intentional and the non-intentional has both
important aesthetic and ethical ramifications. Aesthetically, the diary
amplifies its expressive scope: It is at the same time the diarist’s testimony
and the editor’s means of communication. In ethical terms, it may compromise
readers, implicating them in acts of indiscretion and transgression. By setting
up a double-frame of private and public communication, diary novels lend
themselves well to probing the lines between these two realms. The duplicity
of the frame implies that this line may be tested from either side. Diary
fictions may be subversive or critical of social norms by giving voices to
sentiments unheard of in public arenas or they may serve as a means of social
control that introduce norms of behavior into a realm of private intuition.
This is particularly true of diary appropriations in sentimental fiction and
drama. The kind of diary that had the biggest impact on this tradition and
which continues to inform literary and filmic diary fiction is the protestant or
pietistic journal, which became a standard spiritual practice among Puritan
circles in the mid-seventeenth century. A major shift in this practice can be
observed towards the end of the next century when introverted secular
journals exceeded religious ones. Self-analysis and vigilant self-observation
were less directed towards attaining certain virtues as the diary became more
and more a vehicle of self-expression.20

Margarete Böhme’s The Diary of a Lost One

Diary fiction resembles something of a litmus test that indicates changes in the
social function of literature and sheds light on historical negotiations of what
can be publicly said and shown. A case in point is the revival of this genre
among women writers preoccupied with specific problems women faced in
society at the cusp of the 20th century. Inspired by the feminist movements of
the 1890s, this trend was particularly strong in Germany, where a great
number of diary novels took up issues related to pregnancy, marriage, divorce
and prostitution (often also in this order) as well as women’s education and
career opportunities.21 The kind of diary novel that emerged from the German
Frauenroman movement can be contrasted with another popular type of diary
novel preoccupied with feminine psychology. In diary fictions of authors such
as Marcel Prévost or Peter Nansen, a male diarist often offers a psychological
portrait of his wife or daughter.22 Although it is above all the lure of a first-
hand personal account that compelled the cinematic imagination, both types of
diary fiction proved influential for envisioning a diaristic format of the
cinematic apparatus.
Margarete Böhme’s The Diary of a Lost One (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen,
1905) was the most successful diary novel published at the beginning of the
twentieth century.23 When Georg Wilhelm Pabst turned to the novel for his
movie with Louise Brooks in 1929, the book had already been translated into
fourteen languages and had sold 1.2 million copies. Soon after the novel was
published, it was adapted for the stage and in 1918 Richard Oswald first
adapted the story for a motion picture. By that time the book had already gone
into 330 printings. The novel and its ensuing adaptations caused much uproar
and generated heated debates in the popular press and among intellectuals.
Like the novel, the play and both film adaptations were decried for
pornography, tried in court and led to crises in censorship.24 Arno Bammé
aptly summarized the reception of the novel as a cultural event that captured
the attention of even those who were normally preoccupied with the higher
things of life.25
At the heart of the many controversies about The Diary of a Lost One was
the question of its alleged authenticity, which not only helped to emphasize the
social relevance of the story but also provided a moral disclaimer for
publishing this shocking and sensational story. At the age of fourteen,
Thymian, an apothecary’s daughter, discovers that two of her father’s
housekeepers had been sent away because they were expecting his children.
Meinert, her father’s assistant, uses this news on Thymian to sexually take
advantage of her. Thymian gets pregnant but refuses to marry Meinert. When
she is sent away to a reformatory, the downward spiral into a life of
prostitution begins. Whereas some reviewers regarded the diary form as “the
calculated effect of a literary device rather than an actual diary,”26 others
argued that the story must be true because such a detailed account of
prostitution could not be the product of Böhme’s poetic imagination.27 For a
long time Böhme’s The Diary of a Lost One was considered at least partially
true. Lorna Martens still suggests that “the work could almost be taken for a
real diary except at the end, when Thymian falls into the cliché role of the
noble ‘prostitute.’ ”28
The novel came with a number of paratextual and intratextual framings that
claimed the truthfulness of the story. Declarations of the diary’s authenticity
appeared in newspapers and magazines along with facsimiles from the
allegedly original manuscript. In several diary entries, Thymian also alludes
to the author Böhme: She writes about her friend Grete, a novelist to whom
she promises her diary when she dies.29 To reinforce claims of authenticity,
Böhme went so far as to forego the authorship rights. In the preface she
explains that her publisher convinced her to abandon her original plans of
writing a novel based on Thymian’s journal and make only small revisions to
the actual document, thus censoring those passages that are “absolutely
inappropriate for publication.”30
As many critics have pointed out, The Diary of a Lost One is a well-
wrought and dramatic story with considerable literary qualities.31 It offers
moving and suspenseful reading and—adding to the dramatic coherence of the
story—it develops a number of themes throughout its entries. One theme that
is particularly relevant to the literary appropriation of diary forms as a
trajectory of identity and my discussion of Pabst’s film adaptation relates to
the communicative function of the diary. Thymian receives the diary as a
confirmation gift and in using it she not only discovers her own voice but also
her gift as a storyteller and writer.32 The diary becomes her main source of
relief and joy during her dire days at the reformatory and it assumes the
conventional role of a secret confidant and a surrogate for true and honest
exchanges:33

Dear Book! I wish you were a real person. I talk to you as I do to nobody
else in the world. You are my only friend; I have no secrets from you, you
know me as I am. You are my Father-Confessor. You take in all that I say
to you so mutely and so meekly—and what things have I not said to you!
Oh, do speak to me, do advise me, do tell me what I ought to do!34

She imagines the diary as an intimate friend with a soul and—because it is

silent and patient like paper—it has greater wisdom than most people.35 Her
projection of an imagined beloved other alternates with Thymian’s
identification with the traces of her life in the notebook. We can describe
these two aspects in the diary’s form of address as the desire to discover
oneself in the unknown other. Although the notebook promises a sense of unity
and narrative identity, Thymian is acutely aware that eventually life and
record do not match. In an entry appropriately dated November, the
completion of a notebook triggers both a memento mori and an awareness that
the diary cannot capture her life:

You and I, my little Book, are both falling into the sere, the yellow leaf.
Your leaves are coming to an end, and so is my life; but as I’m afraid we
can’t make it coincide exactly, I am going to get a refill for you! Well,
well! You haven’t learnt much that’s good about me. I read you right
through the afternoon and felt as if I was living it all over again. I should
like to have written more than I have, but I never had simultaneously the
time and the inclination to set everything down.36

As personal records for oneself, diaries oscillate between notions of the self
and an imaginary other. In this twofold process of projection, physical aspects
of the diary are frequently introduced to the writer’s imagination. The diary
thereby serves as a dispositif in a double sense: While it organizes the writing
on a basic formal level, it also endows the writer’s imagination with a sense
of materiality (an ‘imagined material reality’). In this sense, the drama of a
diary builds on exchanges between its social practices, its material
configurations and the private world of imagination the writer appropriates.
In Thymian’s case, the diary as a spiritual practice of self-care is only
partly successful since it cannot make up for the protective love of her absent
mother. Thymian is also painfully aware that the best feature of the diary, its
patient and confidential silence, is also its shortcoming. While the diary
brings relief and joy, these feelings are experienced in moments of social
seclusion. In the conventional world of melodrama, individual practices of
self-care are only fruitful if there is some sort of meaningful reconciliation
with the social world. In Böhme’s novel the first step in this direction is made
when Thymian opens up to the doctor, to whom she shows her diary. As this is
a novel of social protest, a full reconciliation lies beyond the novel’s scope.
Notably, Thymian’s later work as a charity lady lasts only for a short time. It
is the final editorial/fictional act of publishing the diary that is the novel’s
boldest attempt toward a reconciliation of social injustice.
As Böhme’s novel shows, the diary as a literary form exceeds its use as a
venue of self-exploration in several ways. Thymian’s diary documents not
only her process of self-education outside official educational institutions; it
also traces her career as a storyteller for the cause of women’s rights and
sexual reform. The diary provides an effective format to stage the intricacies
and tensions between private and social worlds. Critical in this literary
exploration is the editorial fiction that frames the diary. Böhme’s preface both
affirms and obscures the real status of the diary. This also poses an interesting
challenge for films: How can one chart a film’s navigation between the
editorial frame and the diarist’s perspective? If diaries oscillate between
notions of self and an imagined or desired reader, with which can or should
the filmic image align?

Filming Diary of a Lost Girl

What do readers see when they read a book? In the case of Böhme’s novel one
could point to film adaptations of Richard Oswald and Georg Wilhelm Pabst,
which appeared in 1918 and 1929, respectively. As Bammé points out, the
novel’s success resulted not so much from what it actually depicted as from
what it left to the imagination.37 The Diary of a Lost One contains neither
explicit details nor lurid descriptions. It falls short of creating a romantic or
exotic image of Berlin’s underworld. Yet the milieu and subject matter had
enough sensational lure to trigger erotic fantasies. Oswald’s and Pabst’s
movies build on this reception. Their interpretations are charged with the
erotic appeal critics attributed to the novel. In 1947 Siegfried Kracauer
described Böhme’s The Diary of a Lost One as “a well-known novel, the
popularity of which among the philistines of the past generation rested upon
the slightly pornographic frankness with which it recounted the private life of
some prostitutes from a morally elevated point of view.”38 His
characterization is closer to the furor the novel caused than it is true of the
novel itself.
Since Oswald’s film Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen is lost, we can only
speculate on the basis of the reviews, censorship files and title cards along
with his second Böhme adaptation Dida Ibsens Geschichte (1918, The Story
of Dida Ibsen), which was written as a sequel to The Diary of a Lost One.
Along with Anders als die Andern (1918/1919, Different from the Others),
the two parts of Prostitution (both 1919) and the four parts of Es werde Licht
(all between 1916 and 1918, Let there be Light), Oswald’s Böhme
adaptations represent his major contribution to the genre of Aufklärungsfilme,
which—during a brief censorship-free period after the war—explored a new
scope for the film industry by addressing social taboos. Oswald repeatedly
defended his films against objections of obscenity and pornography and even
threatened to sue anyone who claimed that his films were obscene. In an
article with the title “Zensur oder Selbstsucht” (“Censorship or Egomania”)
he insists on the artistic and emancipatory merit of his films and sharply sets
them apart from artless and obscene films with sexual and erotic content.
Oswald argues that the critical reception of cinema is still ignorant of the
advanced and differentiated development of film into a variety of artforms.

Whereas the art value of novels or plays is rigorously distinguished from

pulp fiction and everyone is cautious not to deliver a judgment before
reading the novel or watching the play, in film criticism everything is
always lumped together. Such conscienceless verdicts that impress the
public due to the name or newspaper that publishes their attacks harm the
film industry endlessly and throw cinema back to where it was years
ago.39

Böhme’s diary novel must have appeared as an obvious choice to meet the
expectations of this genre. However, after a press screening in May 1918, the
release of the film was prohibited until the end of the war. Seven months later
the film was shown to adult audiences only and without the prologue, which
covered the five weeks prior to Thymian’s confirmation and offered insight
into her father’s negligent education. It contained a party scene at her father’s
house with a touring theater group. In this scene, Thymian, having had some
wine, jumps onto the table and yells, “I am a pudding. Eat me!” As this detail
shows and as some reviewers acknowledged, Oswald attempted to depict the
entire span of Thymian’s vicissitudinous life.
Pabst’s version took greater liberties in condensing the novel’s story. His
adaptation ends with Thymian’s visit to the reformatory’s board meeting
where she confronts her former tormentors and takes on the guardianship of an
unruly girl. The dramatic ending underscores Pabst’s critique of bourgeois
decadence. While Pabst followed a contemporary fad of glorifying street life
and prostitution as an ideological counter model to the political regime, Diary
of a Lost Girl marks an important move towards the new realism inspired by
the aesthetic of the new objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit). What kind of reality
does the film depict? Despite its title, psychological realism is virtually
absent in Diary of a Lost Girl. Neither camera work, editing nor Louise
Brooks’s acting offers much ground to identify with Thymian. Pabst does not
ask his viewers to imaginatively put themselves in Thymian’s place. Instead,
he speaks from within the popular imagination that followed the novel’s
reception. In other words, Pabst turns the diary against himself and the
viewer. Instead of framing an introspective account of a lost one, his diary
offers a reading that exposes the double morality, voyeurism and sadism of
which both the director and viewers have become complicit.40
This shift in perspective redefines the grounds of the film’s realism.41 An
insightful review in the Hamburger 8-Uhr Abendblatt describes Pabst’s
adaptation as a movement from actual reality to a higher or perhaps deeper
reality. Comparing the film to the novel, the reviewer argues, does not do
justice to the film:

The film has its own face. It is a face, a dream-face. Here everything is
unreal to the degree that a higher reality emerges. […] The story that is
told is the story they all tell and that no one believes. However, we also
believe that the ‘lost ones’ themselves believe in their stories. Thus the
film narrates the diary—we see it as a confirmation gift; we continuously
see how the lost one takes notes so nothing is lost—thus the film narrates
the diary in a completely authentic way.42

The authenticity of the diary results from its commonplace. Or, as another
reviewer echoed: “No problems of the soul. No psychological intrigues. No
literary subterfuge. Not even a case study, but rather a case study of a
thousand cases.”43 Diary of a Lost Girl does not offer personal insights; its
reduction to the formulaic elements turns it into a mirror of dominant male
fantasies that this story has become associated with. This idea of the diary as
a voyeuristic stage already prominently featured in the advertising of
Oswald’s film, which shows a scantily clad Thymian hunched over and
kneeling on an open bed-sized diary. In the film poster to Pabst’s version a
naked Louise Brooks steps out between the sheets of an oversized red
notebook.
The diary provides a master trope for the film’s structure of enunciation and
its voyeuristic disposition. Its pervasive presence as an object during the first
part of the film reveals how this voyeurism is indeed the true subject matter
that drives the plot. The diary represents what Italo Calvino calls a “magic
object” or rather, what I have described elsewhere as a “magic script.”44 It
changes from a physical object among others into an expressive symbol that
orients the subjectivity of the narrative as a focalizing figure. Pabst
appropriates a representational strategy of the new realism that Béla Balázs
has called to “cross section” […]. In Berthold Viertel’s Die Abenteuer eine
Zehnmarkscheins (The Adventures of the Ten-Mark Note, 1926), for which
Balázs wrote the script, the film follows the exchanges of a bill which links
the protagonist’s story with the wider texture of social life. While cross-
section films usually resort to public and social infrastructures such as money,
electricity and transportation networks, or rely on natural phenomena and life
circles, Pabst inverts this pattern turning a personal diary into an object that
intersects with different spheres of private and public life.
Figures 4.1–4.2 Tracing Diary of a Lost Girl.
Figures 4.3–4.4 Tracing Diary of a Lost Girl.
Figures 4.5–4.6 Tracing Diary of a Lost Girl.

The film begins with a close-up of the (veiled) diary as Thymian’s Aunt
Frida gift-wraps it (see Figure 4.1). However, she soon drops it when she
overhears that the housekeeper Elisabeth has become pregnant by her father. A
few moments later, we see Thymian stumbling over the parcel when she tries
to run after the housekeeper (see Figure 4.2). She picks up the gift and asks
Meinert why Elisabeth had to depart so hastily on her confirmation day.
Meinert then makes his first advancement toward Thymian and promises to
explain everything to her the same night. In the next scene the diary is finally
revealed. Frida then notices that the diary has already fallen into Thymian’s
hands. She takes the parcel, unwraps it and, somewhat awkwardly, hands it
back to Thymian (see Figure 4.3).
From the very beginning of the film the diary is thrown into a network of
actions that will lead to Thymian’s downfall: her father’s extramarital affair
that brings about the suicide of Thymian’s beloved housekeeper, the villainous
seducer Meinert and her absent mother. Aunt Frida’s attempts to make up for
Thymian’s mother fall short, just like her presentation of the gift comes too
late. The premature delivery and delayed presentation of the present are
symbolic of Thymian’s story; in finding out the truth about Elisabeth’s
departure, she loses her own innocence and suffers abuse. Rather than serve
as a secret confidant or a spiritual means of Protestant self-scrutiny, the diary
passes through a number of hands, tracing and registering the stages of her
downfall.45
The first entry of the diary is already a transgressive violation that turns the
notebook into a secret channel of communication (see Figure 4.4). At
Thymian’s confirmation party Meinert seizes the diary. While the count
Osdorff’s son gives her a necklace with a golden heart, Meinert leaves her the
message to meet him in the pharmacy at 11:30 that night. When Thymian takes
back her diary and reads the entry, she appears to be at once defiant of
Meinert’s transgression and confused by this intrigue. The same night,
Elisabeth’s drowned body is found. Thymian faints upon hearing this and falls
into a feverish sleep. When her aunt brings up the dinner to her room she
moves the diary from the bedside table onto her bed (see Figure 4.5).
Touching the diary in her restless sleep, Thymian is reminded of her
rendezvous with Meinert. In the pharmacy she is seduced and drugged by
Meinert, who carries her back to her room, removing the diary from her bed
as he lays her down (see Figure 4.6).
Meinert’s violation ensues another one. In order to find out who has
fathered Thymian’s unborn child, the new housekeeper breaks open her diary.
The scene concludes Thymian’s double betrayal by Meinert and her family.
Her stay at the reform school marks a turning point in her development. It
includes another symbolic diary scene that nicely complements the beginning
of the film. Defending her diary against the school governess, Thymian throws
it across the room. Again the diary passes through many hands, but this time it
is protected by the solidarity among the inmates. The diary’s escape from the
hands of the governess foreshadows Thymian’s escape from the institution.
Once Thymian has run away from the reformatory with her friend Erika, the
diary’s visual presence decreases. When Erika and Thymian part ways, Erika
writes the address of the brothel where she is staying in Thymian’s diary.
Later Thymian shows the diary to a sausage vendor in order to get directions
to the brothel. At this point the diary literally goes public. At the brothel we
see the diary for the last time. Thymian holds it closely to her chest but lets go
of it when Erika and the other girls start to dress her in an elegant evening
gown.
The disappearance of the diary marks Thymian’s transition from the
bourgeois world to the decadent street life of Berlin. The diary and brothel
come to represent social institutions that relate to each other like inverted
mirrors. The diary fails to offer Thymian moral guidance and emotional
safeguard. Instead it literally records the shortcomings and transgressions of
the familial and educational authorities in her life. By contrast, the brothel, the
obvious place of sexual deviance and social transgression, becomes
Thymian’s second family. The replacement of the diary by the brothel as a
new venue of cinematic voyeurism also completes Pabst’s lesson in cinematic
literacy. Rather than framing a psychological perspective, the diary
allegorizes Thymian’s fall. In contrast to the expressive aesthetics of the
melodrama, it does not subjectivize the narrative space. Rather, it objectivizes
Thymian’s subjectivity by turning the diary into a projection site of male
fantasy. The diary symbolizes what cannot be shown on the screen and
encodes the film’s metaphorical vision that asks the viewer to see the film as
a diary. Pabst’s objectivizing approach eradicates Thymian’s subjectivity. The
diary here is not a practice of self-care and a medium of self-expression. The
diary, like the filmic apparatus, becomes a site where the sadistic mechanism
of social life is revealed.

William Keighley’s Journal of a Crime

Diary of a Lost Girl followed Pabst’s move to the United States in 1933.
While waiting for his first assignment for Warner Brothers, he was offered to
direct a film which would later be released as Journal of a Crime (1934).
Warner Brothers envisioned the film as an American version of Diary of a
Lost Girl; they intended it both as a psychological study of the uncanny depth
of the mind and as a social study of women’s precarious position in society.
Pabst not only declined, he even went public and told Variety that the script
was “too ordinary and similar to other pictures and he couldn’t afford to
bother with it.”46 The project was passed on to William Keighley, who was
later slated to co-direct Pabst’s only American film, A Modern Hero (1934).
Journal of a Crime follows the contemporary fad for social problem films
that probe the tenuous line between socio-moral analysis and sensationalist
entertainment.47 The film also represents an interesting case where European
filmic and theatrical influences are reconciled and adapted for an American
audience. Although reviews were largely favorable of its stars Ruth
Chatterton and Adolphe Menjou, the film was not a great success and has not
gained much acclaim ever since. Most critics found the many twists and turns
in the plot of this backstage drama too hard to swallow.
Agonized by the fear of losing her playwright husband Paul Moliet
(Menjou) to a love affair with an actress, Françoise (Chatterton) shoots the
mistress during a theater rehearsal. While she manages to leave the theater
unnoticed, a bank robber escaping into the theater is arrested and charged
with Françoise’s murder. Paul, however, discovers his own gun in a water
bucket backstage and understands that his wife killed his mistress. When he
confronts Françoise she admits to the crime but refuses to leave him or
confess to the police. The film then portrays the next months of the estranged
couple showing Françoise’s deteriorating mental and physical condition.
After a nervous breakdown she finally decides to turn herself in. However, on
her way to the police station, she saves a boy from a speeding truck and is hit
in the process. Miraculously surviving the accident, she now suffers from
post-traumatic amnesia. In losing her memory, Françoise regains her
innocence—at least for Paul, who falls in love with her again. He takes her to
a villa outside of Paris, where the film ends with Paul teaching Françoise the
names for sun and sea.
A critic writing for the New York Times called the movie “neither a plain
murder story nor a fancy psychological study, but a pale and vaguely idiotic
hybrid” and surmised that the ending was “less a matter of design at the outset
than the result of leaping from cliché to cliché in search of a way out.”48
Implausible as it may seem, the ending was premeditated. The film is in fact a
remake of the French movie Une vie perdue, which was released only six
months before Journal of a Crime.49 It was directed by Raymond Rouleau
and based on a scenario by Jacques Deval, who may have drawn on his
medical background and his war experiences when writing the ending. In
Journal of a Crime the doctor explains Françoise’s amnesia with reference to
the so-called war neurosis (névrose de guerre), which was observed during
the First World War and provided an early model for studying trauma theory.50
While Journal of a Crime is an adaptation of Deval’s scenario, it adopts
the format of the diary modeled on Böhme’s novel. Deval’s plays were
considered a lighter variant of modern French theater, where serious moments
of social and psychological analysis are often set in an exuberant atmosphere,
which made his plays more marketable on Broadway than the work of other
French dramatists that were experimental in style and somber in tone.51 In
contrast to Pabst’s diary film, Journal of a Crime was not met with vehement
objections from critics and censors.52 The administrators of the Motion
Picture Code treated it rather benevolently.53 This may have been the result of
fortunate timing as rigorous enforcement began only shortly after the film’s
release. A main reason for the lenient judgment was certainly the crime and
punishment plot of the story.54 Although neither Françoise nor her complicit
husband face jurisdiction, and Costelli is guillotined for a crime he did not
commit, the film invokes a higher sense of justice that comes precariously
close to the problem of self-administered justice addressed in the film’s
trailer: “Has a wife the right to take the law into her own hands when society
fails to protect her?” Costelli finds atonement in redeeming Françoise, and
Paul pays for his betrayal by staying with his wife, whose amnesia is itself
compared to both death and catharsis.
The diary frame plays a critical role in this respect for it both amplifies the
lure of the sensationalist murder and disarms objections to moral
transgression. Strictly speaking, the film plays with two frames of
expectations that are triggered by the diary. On the one hand, the journal
promises an uncensored view into the troubled soul of a jealous wife. On the
other hand, it presents a psychological study from a detached, participant
observer-like perspective. As this second frame corresponds to what Martens
describes as a ‘male’ model of diary fiction, it is interesting to note that an
announcement in Variety argued that the film would equally appeal to women
and men: “Singularly rich in material for women audiences, it is at the same
time a man’s picture and except for children should get the support of the
masses.”55 Virtually all reviewers discuss the film with reference to the
second frame: Journal of a Crime is a “psychological study of a sensitive
woman,”56 “showing the psychological reactions of the wife as the husband
subjects her to a more or less silent treatment.”57
 This reception contrasts with the expectations raised by the film’s
commercial promotion. A newspaper ad promised “page after flaming page
ripped from the tear-stained diary of a woman’s guilty soul!” and shows
thumbnail previews of her diary (see Figure 4.7). Similarly, the theatrical
trailer opened with the close-up of a black notebook superimposed with the
words “The Diary of My Life.” We then see Chatterton breaking down in
agony after composing the following entry: “My husband saw that woman
again tonight. She is stealing him from me. He is my life. I cannot let him go.
Yet there is no man-made law to protect me. Tonight I am going to do a
desperate thing.”
Although the dates of the ad and trailer are hopelessly inconsistent with the
ones given in the movie, the beginning of the film also suggests that the diary
presents Françoise’s remembered vision. As the insert before the establishing
shot suggests, the remembered vision represents the ‘signified’ of the diary’s
imagined entries. A blank page, dated February 28, dissolves into a skyline of
Paris at dusk. We then see the corner of an alley. A dog crosses the path of
two workers carrying the backdrop for a revue through the back entrance of a
theater, a fresco which itself shows demons carrying naked women towards a
background of flames. As the camera pans between dog and stagehands, we
catch a glimpse of Françoise, who is hiding in a corner waiting for her
unfaithful husband to come out. Watching her spying on Paul and Odette,
viewers are led to assume that her perspective aligns with the diary that
frames the movie (which is a default rather than a stringent interpretation).
She is the first character introduced. Her situation calls for the viewer’s
sympathy. And as she overhears Odette demanding Paul to leave his wife, she
is also the best-informed character in this scene.
Figure 4.7 Newspaper ad for Journal of a Crime.
 This impression is supported by a scene later that same night. Paul has
already come home and retired to bed after fending off his wife’s
advancement by claiming a headache. Françoise watches him check on his gun
in the drawer of his bedside table and then sits down to write but immediately
breaks down in despair. The scenes of the next day, however, bring doubts to
this obvious interpretation. The first shot of the morning is a letter insert, in
which Françoise explains that she left early to run the errands for the dinner
party. The film then cuts across between Paul’s stage rehearsal and the bank
robbery until the storylines converge with Costelli’s arrest in the theater. It is
difficult to integrate these scenes within the frame of the diary penned by
Françoise. It seems impossible to do so after Paul has discovered his own
pistol backstage and the distribution of information among the characters
shifts to Paul’s advantage. If the idea of the diary is maintained as the film’s
global narrative metaphor, then its alignment with Paul seems more likely.58
At last, the next insert, which shows the first handwritten entry, leaves no
doubt that the audience has been misled and the images of Françoise’s diary
are sensationalist forgeries. It is Paul who keeps the diary. Below the typed
date “April 27,” Paul notes: “62nd Day. Over two months have passed.
Françoise still maintains her outward inhuman calm. I can only wait and
hope.” Journal of a Crime refrains from using voice-over narration, which at
that time was not yet common in classical Hollywood films and which would,
of course, immediately give away the diarist’s identity. In contrast to the
inserts in Pabst’s silent film (which are also fewer in number), typefaces and
handwriting styles play a crucial role in the film’s aesthetic of the insert
advocating a different kind of visual reading. (Viewers may indeed match
Paul’s handwriting against an earlier insert of Françoise’s letter and examine
it as ‘psycho-aesthetic fingerprints.’)

Cinema as Paper Formatted in Time

There is a conspicuous redundancy of temporal markers in the insert of Paul’s
entry. Although these markers point to the same moment in time, they evoke
different senses of time. We may read “April 27” as an indication of a
historical time or story time, whereas “62nd Day” refers to the diarist’s
analytical endeavor to monitor Françoise’s resistances. We can think of this as
plot time as it filters significant events of her ‘medical history.’ While “62nd
Day” implies a sense of duration, the idea of an experienced time that is
measured in emotions is strongest in Paul’s reference to the time that has
passed since the murder. As these different senses of time converge in the
insert, the diary becomes a conceptual metaphor that organizes the
interrelations between filmic, discursive and experiential orders. As a figure
of written and literary storytelling the journal is juxtaposed with filmic
techniques of narration, which it complements and complicates. It serves as an
ordering device that indicates the passing of time and frames scenes within
different acts of enunciation.
The misleading cues about the journal’s penmanship demonstrate the
differences between the diary and classical film narration, which can be
particularly productive in experimenting with narrative perspective and
focalization. While diaries are usually written in a first-person perspective
with a stable center of focalization, continuous subjective camera and
consistent focalization are exceptions in classical film narratives. Thus, on the
one hand, the diary is imposed as a unifying narrative frame and a governing
trajectory for the plot; on the other hand, tensions and incompatibilities
between diaristic and filmic scenarios of narration are exploited creatively
for new narrative possibilities or thrown back to the audience, who may or
may not re-frame them in a meaningful way.
The recourse to the datebook format is an interesting example in point. It
helps to suppress the diarist’s identity and feigns to tell the story from the
perspective of a murderess. In contrast to the notebook, which does not imply
a model of writing, the datebook “‘formats’ the writing space according to the
supposed rhythm of time.”59 The temporal grid afforded by the datebook is
congenial to the silent analytic method to which Paul patiently subjects
Françoise. Towards the end of the film, we find a medical illustration that is
comparable to Paul’s meticulous psychological study. When Françoise is
hospitalized after her accident, the duration of her convalescence is
represented by the superimposition of an animated fever curve over a close-
up of her face.
Such vectorizations of time, which help to trace and study the development
of her mental and physical health, are in a mystical alliance with both Paul’s
treatment and the film itself. As paper formatted in time, the journal provides
a metaphor for the cinematic apparatus. It stands in for both the source of the
story and the material anchor of its screening. Since the journal as a material
artifact blends with our conception of narrative identity (whether we address
the paper in our writing or write our name on its cover), it ‘personalizes’ the
cinematic apparatus. The title sequence begins with the close-up of a diary,
which in contrast to the trailer has only the word ‘diary’ imprinted in black
letter typeface on its cover. When the book is opened, the cast is introduced
through emblematic shots on the initial pages until the first dated page
dissolves into the opening shot. If the opening in Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl,
showing the girl’s aunt wrapping the diary as a present, is characteristic of the
way the diary is embedded on the level of the story, then the integration of the
diary in the opening credits of William Keighley’s movie foreshadows the
diary’s narrative and psychologizing function.
As a narrative master trope the figure of the journal is highly elusive. It
extends across non-diegetic and diegetic levels. It fools the viewer’s
reception but then offers an analytic commentary on the events. On one
occasion the diary even becomes a means of communication between the
estranged couple. When Françoise tells her husband that she will travel to
Italy, he responds with disinterest and cynicism. In his journal Paul notes: “At
the luncheon she told me she was going away. She does not know that
disappointment in store for her. No matter how far she goes, she cannot
escape herself. I wish I could feel pity for her.” When Françoise comes across
the diary and reads this entry, she crosses out the last sentence and adds that
she is staying. Such violations of privacy are quite common in diary as well
as epistolary fiction. Since diaries are often metonymic of the writer’s soul,
such breaches can be symbolic of the diarist’s sexual or moral integrity. In
Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl, the note Meinert leaves in Thymian’s diary
anticipates her moral downfall. In Journal of a Crime, however, the
misappropriation of the diary as a means of interpersonal exchange takes a
very different course. The diary becomes a venue for therapeutic processes,
where her conflicting impulses and desires are acknowledged. Françoise’s
denial of Paul’s lack of pity (who himself expresses this lack in the form of a
desire) is positively recorded. In deciding to stay she taints her wish for being
loved with an act of spite.
Françoise’s editorial intervention raises the question of the intersubjective
dimension of the diary. Since the film frustrates the promise of showing the
personal account of a cheated wife gone murderess, the attention and
expectations shift to the husband’s analytic and emphatic sensibilities. This
shift works in lieu of an editorial figure, which in epistolary and diary novels
conventionally claims the truthfulness of the material or serves as a moral
arbiter of good taste, asserting the public value of private writings.60 In
Journal of a Crime this function is contained within the diary itself. Thus we
may ask what happens to the female subjectivity when it is reframed by a
sensitive husband who exerts his control with the calm and professional
composure of a psychologist.
There are two symmetrically arranged scenes in the film that nicely
illustrate both Françoise’s psychological development and the film’s
development as a journal that attempts increasingly ‘closer readings’ of her
troubled mind. They are both party scenes in which Françoise is seated among
a group of people. The rather striking cinematography underscores the
symmetry of these two scenes. The first scene is a dinner party hosted by the
couple on the day Françoise killed Odette, which begins immediately after
Françoise’s confession to Paul. As the talk about a recent love crime starts up
the conversation, the camera—following a servant refilling the glasses—pans
from one guest to the next. It begins with the three guests sitting to Paul’s left,
then pans across Françoise and the three guests sitting to her left. The camera
completes the circle with a close-up on Paul, who looks directly into the
camera or, as it were, at his wife sitting opposite of him. While the shot
begins as an establishing shot motivated by the action of the servant, it
changes its subjective register and ends as a point-of-view shot of Françoise.
The second party scene occurs about two months later in the story during
the celebration of the one hundredth performance of Paul’s play. Françoise
arrives late and Paul meets her halfway to find her a seat among his friends
and colleagues. A close-up of Françoise at the table is followed by a series of
point-of-view shots that show the director of the play (George Barbier), a
woman and Paul raising their glasses to salute Françoise. Their images are all
blurred. The camera cuts back to Françoise sipping on her glass and glancing
at Paul. In the next point-of-view shot, his face gradually comes into focus.
The difference between the two scenes can be described in terms of
deception and delusion. In the first scene the viewer is spun into a deceptive
play with internal and external focalization. What appears to be a perspective
detached from all the characters in the room paradoxically becomes
Françoise’s point of view. This ambivalence reflects the film’s initial play
with the diarist’s identity, as much as it captures the diarist in the face of his
subject. Paul’s interrogative look into the camera is sorrowful and baffled, yet
determined. Deceiving also describes the role Françoise plays with great
confidence and conviction throughout the dinner party. Although she is
exposed to an uncomfortable debate on the moral justice of so-called crimes
of passion, Françoise feels in control of the situation and even defends her
own case by presenting it as a thinly disguised hypothetical example:

a woman … or a man … may have a deeper motive than jealousy or even

love. A human being could kill because she herself has first been killed.
Before she kills the other two, the victim and her accomplice, must have
killed her soul, murdered it … a soul that murders in its turn.

By contrast, in the second scene Françoise has become the victim of her own
deception. There is little ambiguity in interpreting the subjective values of the
individual shots. Instead of a ‘deceptive’ camera pan that sets out to confuse
the viewer, the point-of-view shots that render Françoise’s confused state and
vision are distinctly set off from their counter-shots.
In both scenes, Paul becomes a focal point. When the 360-degree pan
finally rests on Paul’s inquisitive gaze, we recuperate our spatial sense of
orientation (and by extension the overall interpretive frame for the film).
Similarly, at the theater party, Paul remains Françoise’s last reliable reference
point of reality in her increasingly delusional vision that blurs past and
present. The sight of a bucket (which briefly reveals the target emblem on an
empty packet of Lucky Strikes) triggers a delusional re-enactment in
Françoise. As she stares at the empty stage, she sees the murder scene being
replayed. This time, however, her point of view is from where her husband
had seen the murder. Françoise’s vision is not her memory but a delusional
recreation from what must be ambiguously described as Paul’s point of view.
If we view this scene through Paul’s journal that frames the film, her vision
becomes the product of Paul’s analytical imagination. As if the analyst were
always right, it is impossible to distinguish between her delusion and his
imagination. The same is true for the montage sequence of Françoise’s dream
on the night before Costelli’s execution. Like a surreal trailer, the dream
sequence offers a synopsis of the entire film through a collage of images and
sounds that (like the fever curve in a later sickbed scene) are superimposed
onto a close-up of her face. The dreamlike compression of the story highlights
the interlocking pattern of emblematic figures such as gun, scissors, bucket,
pen, dog, which (at times rather heavy-handedly) structure and connect the
sequences of the film. Dream work and diary writing join forces in finding
significant patterns of making sense. The emblematic figures become chiffres,
or signposts of the film’s relational network and its underlying structures of
signification, for which a popularized psychoanalytic frame provides a model
or reception. In fact, the dream sequence can be viewed as a rather
programmatic illustration of the processes of condensation, displacement and
symbolization, which Thierry Kuntzel describes in his psychoanalytic film
semiotics.61 As in Françoise’s delusional vision, the dream sequence brings
out new or previously unseen takes. A great example of symbolic
displacement and condensation is a shot that shows Odette’s dog, which Paul
has taken on after her death, drinking from a bucket of water.62
Journal of a Crime also stages a challenge all analogies between dream
and screen inevitably face. While dreams transform daily impressions of the
dreamer, films usually do not immediately relate to spectators’ personal
experiences. On the one hand, the montage sequence comes closest to a
sustained representation of Françoise’s subjective experience; on the other
hand, it is mainly built on previously shown scenes associated with Paul’s
diary. In this sense, the dream sequence somewhat resembles a ‘remembered
film’ that replicates the overall structure, its key motifs and themes with minor
but significant variations.63 The dream sequence fills the gaps of previous
scenes (e.g. it shows how the pistol is thrown in the bucket) and it
reconstructs the murder from Françoise’s perspective. While this is perhaps
the boldest move in representing the subjective experience of a murderess, it
is also significantly removed from reality and multiply framed as Françoise’s
dream reconstructed by her husband. Interestingly, while in some areas the
release of the film was approved upon the condition that some aspects in the
bank robbery scene were deleted, no objections were made to the first-person
shooting scene in the dream sequence.
The two-fold framing of the dream sequence and the ambivalent frame of
diary expectations illustrate both formal and social preoccupations in gauging
the virtue of film as a medium of shared subjectivity. The playful exchanges
between Paul’s and Françoise’s respective perspectives may be seen as part
of an intersubjective negotiation between the husband psychologist and his
wife, the patient. Yet, there is also something deeply unsettling about Journal
of a Crime. The plot of the film and its appropriation of the diary as a
dispositif of control curtail the very effort of working towards a shared
ethical understanding of reality. Although Françoise finally recognizes the full
moral repercussions of her crime and shares the social and moral imperatives
as part of her subjective truth, this insight is only given a short life; or, it is cut
short by the truck that runs her over. Female subjectivity is for the most part
portrayed through manifestations of the unconscious such as her psychotic
delusion during the theater party or her delirious dream.
Despite the radical emancipatory claims put forth in the promotion of the
film, female subjectivity is for the most part reduced to manifestations of the
unconscious. The final twist, the happy ending of the film, adds a new and
even more disquieting meaning to the journal. The diary not only serves as an
allegory of the cinematic dispositif and as a venue for Paul’s analytic and
therapeutic work, we can also imagine how it provides the material basis for
re-constructing Françoise’s memory. The diary finally becomes hers just like
the movie becomes the viewer’s memory. In this respect, Journal of a Crime,
like Diary of a Lost Girl, explores film as a medium of shared subjectivity. In
this process the diary operates as a site for negotiating social and moral
preoccupations.
Diary of a Lost Girl invites the viewer to read the diary as a symbolic
object: It presents the diary as a metonymic allegory of Thymian’s fate. While
the diary symbolizes Thymian’s life, it retains its existence as an object in the
story; thus encapsulating basic instructions for reading the cinematic reality.
At the same time, the diary encodes the filmic image as an object of
voyeurism. It exposes the ideological fantasy of diary novels as
institutionalized voyeurism, which cinema is about to replace. In Journal of a
Crime this ideological fantasy becomes part of the narrative game. Turning the
diary into a conceptual metaphor of filmic narration, it is less an object or a
trace that triggers an imagined memory but a dispositif of constructing
memories.
Viewed against these two figurations of the diary in classical cinema,
auteurist appropriation as a format of filmic writing adds a critical twist by
projecting impossible diaries. Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest is
an exemplary and intricate case in point. Whereas the diary offers a figuration
of the cinematic dispositif as a material and spiritual practice of writing, the
film transgresses and subverts this frame by promoting cinematography as a
writerly vision of writing that is not conceivably within the format of a
written diary. At one point, we see and hear the priest interrupting and
reminding himself write down an insight (“Au réveil… mon Dieu, il faut que
je l’écrive”). Although the entire film is framed as a diary, the priest’s
interjection ‘immanently transcends’ this frame.64 Taking inspiration from
Bresson, Hong San-soo’s Night and Day (2007) disrupts the chronological
and documentary claims of the diaristic frame by introducing a vertical
dimension that mediated by painting marks a deceptive reality of dreams,
fantasy and betrayal.
As a parody of both auteur and avant-garde cinema, Jim McBride’s film
David Holzman’s Diary (1968) presents a filmic diary of psychological and
physical disintegration. Following Godard’s famous bon mot (from Le Petit
soldat [1963]) that “film is truth 24x a second,” the film diarist David
fetishizes the camera as a clairvoyant medium that promises to bestow
meaningfulness to his existential crisis. McBride’s narrative is almost the
exact opposite of the critical and the emancipatory role the camera assumes in
the biographical fiction of Christopher Isherwood and John Dos Passos.
David’s camera fails him. Abandoned by his girlfriend because of his
obsessive filming, he eventually loses his camera equipment. The final entry
is made in a penny arcade, where he records his narrative on a dual disc for
50 cents and takes pictures of himself in a photo booth for 25 cents. How the
photographs and his voice recording end up on the film is not explained. The
paradoxical ending mocks the stability and reliability of the medium that
claims of authenticity in diary fiction conventionally imply. The relationship
between the diarist and his medium appears to be reversed. David does not
gain insight from his diary. His interrogation of the camera brings out
revelations that are lost on him as he becomes the medium on which cinema
seems to imprint its memory. More than just a parody of the veritistic fad in
avant-garde and documentary filmmaking, David Holzman’s Diary survives
as an artistic document that brings together a variety of experimental
approaches and techniques that surged in the American avant-garde of the
1960s.65

Notes
1. Mental descriptions of cinema include a variety of positions. Cinema can
be seen to externalize and illustrate psychological processes, as Hugo
Münsterberg contented. Conversely, Jean Epstein insisted that an inherent
spiritual dimension of cinema was a precondition for cinema as art. On
his conception of photogenie in Epstein, see “Senses I (b)” (1921), in vol.
1 of French Film Theory and Criticism: 1907–1937, ed. Richard Abel
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 241–46. For Edward
Branigan the recognition of mental cameras is an example of
Wittgenstein’s aspect-seeing. Accordingly, mental aspects of the camera
 arise “because all of our mental abilities are applied when we look, not
just our ability to see basic shapes, color, depth, and motion on the
screen.” See Branigan, Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film
Theory (New York: Routledge, 2006), 206. As a metonym of artistic
vision, a filmmaker’s camera becomes a convenient label for claiming
authorial intentions. See esp. Bruce Kawin’s Mindscreen: Bergman,
Godard, and First-Person Film (Rochester: Dalkey Archive, 2006).
2. On this distinction between two image-functions or kinds of ‘imageness’
see Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott
(London: Verso, 2007), 6: “‘Image’ […] refers to two things. There is the
simple relationship that produces likeness of an original: not necessarily
its faithful copy, but simply what suffices to stand in for it. And there is the
interplay of operations that produces what we call art: or precisely an
alteration of resemblance.”
3. Philippe Lejeune describes this vectorization of time as follows: “[T]he
mechanical clock, invented in the early fourteenth century and gradually
miniaturized so that from the seventeenth century on, each individual could
measure his own time; and the annual calendar, which replaced the
perpetual calendar in 1650 and transformed time into an irreversible and
dynamic process. So entries are laid out in temporal order, and purport to
recapture or evoke the continuity of time by coming one after another,”
Lejeune, On Diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak (Honolulu,
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), 178.
4. Lejeune, On Diary, 179.
5. Lejeune’s comments on the uses of film and photography for diaries are
relatively sparse. See e.g. his Signes de vie. Le Pacte autobiographique
2 (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 66–67, and Philippe Lejeune and Catherine
Bogaert, Le Journal intime. Histoire et anthologie (Paris: Édition
Textuel, 2006), 220–24.
6. Garret Stewart, “Vitagraphic Time,” Biography 29.1 (2006): 159–92.
7. See Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans.
Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 216–23.
8. Kendall Walton quoted in Gregory Currie, “Visible Traces: Documentary
and the Contents of Photographs,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 57.3 (1999): 286.
9. Currie, “Visible Traces,” 289.
10. Lejeune claims that “diaries lost three quarters of their meaning once they
were put in print,” On Diary, 286. On the material and medial
environment see his article “The Diary on the Computer” in On Diary,
280–98.
11. Lejeune, On Diary, 286. On the relationship between autobiography,
education and cursive handwriting scripts see Friedrich Kittler’s
Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1990), 84: “To develop handwriting formed as out of one mold means to
produce individuals.” On the relationship between technology and
handwriting see Sonja Neefs’s study Imprint and Trace: Handwriting in
the Age of Technology (London: Reaktion Books, 2010).
12. Lejeune, On Diary, 80.
13. Lejeune, On Diary, 80.
14. Lejeune, On Diary, 204.
15. Lejeune, On Diary, 202.
16. Lejeune, On Diary, 207.
17. See Lorna Martens, The Diary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), 173–182.
18. See “How Do Diaries End?” in Lejeune, On Diary, 175–86. Examples of
literary diaries that end abruptly can be found in romantic fiction such as
Clemens Brentano’s Godwi oder das steinerne Bild der Mutter (1801), a
novel that celebrates fragmentary forms of writing.
19. Lejeune, On Diary, 227.
20. Martens, The Diary Novel, 55–56.
21. See Katharina Gerstenberger, Truth to Tell: German Women’s
Autobiographies and Turn-of-the-Century Culture (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2000).
22. Martens, The Diary Novel, 173–75.
23. Arno Bammé empirical and sociological monograph provides the most
informative study of Böhme’s work. See Bammé, Margarete Böhme: Die
Erfolgsschriftstellerin aus Husum (München: Profil, 1994).
24. The debate on the novel and Böhme’s presence in the literary scene ended
with the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s. While an appeal to
withdraw the novel from publication in 1933 was rejected, Böhme
disappeared from the literary calendar in 1937/38. See Bammé,
Margarete Böhme, 4.
25. See Bammé, Margarete Böhme, 49.
26. Neues Wiener Tagblatt October 8, 1905 quoted in Bammé, Margarete
Böhme, 20 (my translation).
27. See Bammé, Margarete Böhme, 16–37.
28. Martens, The Diary Novel, 179.
29. Margarete Böhme, Tagebuch einer Verlorenen. Von einer Toten
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 139 and 142.
30. Böhme, Tagebuch, 7 (my translation). In the foreword to the American
translation published three years later, the critical reception of the book in
Germany was included as additional evidence of the diary’s authenticity:
“The publication of the Diary in Germany called forth a redundance [sic]
of criticism. It was condemned, by some superficial minds, for its
frankness; but it has been equally praised by the large majority of
thoughtful readers who recognize in this wonderful human document a
work which must exert a vast influence through the great moral lesson it
conveys,” Margarete Böhme, The Diary of a Lost One, trans. Ethel
Colburn Mayne (New York: The Hudson Press, 1908), 5.
31. See Bammé, Margarete Böhme, 37–50 and 111–267 for an extensive
discussion and a rich documentation of the novel’s reception.
32. See the beginning of the second entry in Böhme, Tagebuch einer
Verlorenen, 18. Much later in the novel, her talent as a writer is confirmed
by a doctor, whom she allows to read in the diary. See Böhme, Tagebuch
einer Verlorenen, 151.
33. See Böhme, The Diary of a Lost One, 89: “Decidedly, at one time I
should never have dreamed that writing in Aunt Pohn’s confirmation-
present would some day prove my only joy and solace, and that even that
would be a sort of forbidden fruit.”
34. Böhme, The Diary of a Lost One, 89.
35. See Böhme, Tagebuch, 131 and 173.
36. Böhme, The Diary of a Lost One, 271.
37. See Bammé, Margarete Böhme, 89–90.
38. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of
the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 179.
Kracauer saw little artistic merit in the film’s literary source; he
associates the film with the social criticism of Frank Wedekind, whose
 play Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box) Pabst had previously
adapted.
39. Richard Oswald, “Zensur oder Selbstsucht,” Film-Courier, July 3, 1919,
n. pag. (my translation).
40. Heide Schlüpmann argues that instead of revealing an external world, the
film presents “the internal one of moral standards” as an empirical reality.
Schlüpmann, “The Brothel as an Arcadian Space? Diary of a Lost Girl
(1929),” in The Films of G. W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema, ed.
Eric Rentschler (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 86.
41. Slavoy Žižek compared this shift to the parallax object, in which an
epistemological shift in the viewer’s position corresponds to an
ontological change in the object itself. See Žižek, The Parallax View
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006), 17.
42. Hamburger 8-Uhr Abendblatt, November 11, 1929, quoted in Bammé,
Margarete Böhme, 48 (my translation).
43. “Betz,” Film, October 19, 1929, quoted in Hans-Michael Bock, “Georg
Wilhelm Pabst: Documenting a Life and Career,” in The Films of G. W.
Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema, ed. Eric Rentschler (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1990), 222.
44. Italo Calvino, Saggi: 1945–1985 (Milano: Mondadori, 1995), 658, and
Christian Quendler, Interfaces of Fiction: Initial Framings in the
American Novel 1970–1900 (Vienna: Braumüller, 2010), 105–108 and
143–44.
45. As an intimate place of introspection the modern diary served as a means
“to fix the reflections of life that pass through the mirror of my woman’s
thought,” as the diarist in Marcelle Tinayre’s Madeleine au miroir (1912)
puts it, quoted in Martens, The Diary Novel, 173. The diary also assumed
the role of a prudent confidant for confessions that were too dangerous to
share with a friend. Lorna Martens has described the practice of keeping a
diary among middle-class women at the turn of the century as “the modern
form of the Catholic confessional and Protestant self-scrutiny,” The Diary
Novel, 173.
46. “Pabst Tells ‘Em,” Variety, November 7, 1993, 20. Pabst’s rejection was
part of a larger conflict with Warner Brothers after his arrival in the U.S.
See Jan-Christopher Horak, “G. W. Pabst in Hollywood or Every Modern
Hero Deserves a Mother,” Film History 1.1 (1987): 53–63.
47. In a report to Will H. Hays, James Wingate commented on the increase of
work this trend generated for the administrators of the code: “[T]he Social
Problem pictures naturally present our most serious difficulties at the
present moment, it has meant a continuous round of conferences with one
studio after another,” James Wingate to Will H. Hays, November 25,
1933, Journal of a Crime, Production Code Administration Files,
Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,
Beverly Hills, California.
48. “Murder Backstage,” New York Times, April 28, 1934, 11.
49. In contrast to Journal of a Crime, Une vie perdue was described as a
“plausible and well conducted drama that from the beginning is charged
with heightened emotion and that reaches its resolution through a series of
‘dramatic adventures’ that are perfectly well aligned.” See François
Rouville, “Cinéma: du bon et du mauvais,” L’Opinion, September 23,
1933, 14 (my translation).
50. See Sigmund Freud, “Introduction to Psychoanalysis and the War
Neurosis” (1919), in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey,
vol. 17 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis,
1958), 205–10.
51. In the U.S. Deval became best known for his play Tovaritch (adapted by
Robert Sherwood in 1936). See Clark L. Keating, “French Plays in New
York, 1919–1944: The New York Times View,” The Modern Language
Journal 43.3 (1959): 122–26, and Mary E. Sharp, “Le Théatre de Jacques
Deval,” The French Review 12.6 (1939): 469–75.
52. The Catholic Legion of Decency, founded in 1933 in order to purify
cinema and protect the innocent youth, listed Journal of a Crime among
the films banned from the members of its Detroit organization (as reported
in the Daily Motion Picture, May 14, 1934). On the role of the Legion of
Decency during the initial phase of the Code administration see Gregory
D. Black, “Hollywood Censored: The Production Code Administration
and the Hollywood Film Industry, 1930–1940,” Film History 3.3 (1989):
167–89.
53. For its first theatrical release in New York in 1934 the only elimination
was a pan shot of a revue backdrop at the beginning of the film, a fresco
that shows nude figures in an infernal orgy, Breen to Warner, January 16,
1934, Journal of a Crime, Production Code Administration Files,
 Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,
Beverly Hills, California. In other territories, esp. Ontario and Quebec, a
few more objections were made to the bank robber scene and some
dialogue scenes.
54. This is also how James Wingate described the script in his report to Hays:
“One new manuscript was submitted: JOURNAL OF A CRIME (Warner
Bros.) is an interesting study of crime and punishment, based on a French
play, dealing with a wife who shoots the woman who is trying to take her
husband away from her,” Wingate to Hays, November 25, 1933, Journal
of a Crime, Production Code Administration Files, Margaret Herrick
Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills,
California.
55. “Journal of a Crime,” Variety, January 5, 1934.
56. “Dramatic Story Screened,” Los Angeles Times, April 13, 1934, 12.
57. “Ruth Chatterton in ‘Journal of a Crime’ with Adolphe Menjou,” The Film
Daily, February 24, 1934, 3.
58. Historically, the clash between frames of perspective suggested by the
film’s paratexts and beginning on the one hand and the focalization of the
rest of the film on the other represents a rather peculiar case. While
misleading cues about the mystery are typically tolerated in trailers and
are conventional in beginnings, misleading genre markers are
counterproductive. See Vinzenz Hediger, Verführung zum Film: Der
amerikanische Kinotrailer seit 1912 (Marburg: Schüren, 2001), 27. The
question whether viewers should invoke a male or female diarist is as
much a question of genre as it is part of the film’s mystery. Restraining and
reframing the voice of a murderess is, of course, also a matter of social
control and censorship.
59. Lejeune, On Diary, 177.
60. It is of course possible to replace the figure of a literary editor with a
filmic editor. Yet, such an intermedial transposition comes with a number
of self-reflexive questions about the filmic medium that may undermine the
illusion of the filmic image as the ‘pure’ signified of writing.
61. See Thierry Kuntzel, “The Film Work,” Enclitic 2.1 (1978): 38–61 and
Kuntzel, “The Film Work, 2,” Camera Obscura 5 (1980): 7–68.
62. Odette’s dog also displaces the wandering stray dog shown in the opening
establishing shot of the film. The dissonance between the stray dog and the
 connotations of loyalty are central to Deval’s symbolism. A dog is also
featured on the film poster of Une Vie Perdue.
63. See Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion, 2004).
64. See Christian Quendler, “‘Mon Dieu, il faut que je l’écrive!’
Cinematography as the Difference between Writing, Speaking and Seeing
in Robert Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de campagne,” Word & Image
31.4 (2015): 473–89.
65. For a discussion of direct and indirect references to avant-garde films and
filmmakers in David Holzman’s Diary, see Scott MacDonald’s interview
with McBride in Critical Cinema 4: Interviews with Independent
Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 184 and
187–88.
5 Gestures and Figures

To regard the camera eye as an organ means to view the human body and
visual apparatus of the camera in a functional alignment. We can approach this
process of organ formation by examining the (new) forms of meaningful
behavior or gestures this arrangement creates. Or, we may approach the
process by identifying the organized character or figure that emerges from this
behavior. The camera eye comes to denote both process and product, a way of
seeing and the ‘viewer’ or viewing organism this way of seeing creates.
In Chapter Two I discussed this process of formation in the light of visual
language. The dream of a camera eye to encode the visible world as a
language is accompanied by a personal narrative of re-discovering oneself in
this new filmic language. Vertov’s kino-eye projects a language that rejects
representational conventions of art and seeks to directly record the organic
relations of society. Almost diametrically opposed to this poetry of facts,
Pirandello’s symbolist invocation of the camera eye imagines a silent
language of the soul. Dos Passos’ literary transcription of the camera eye
appeals to the visceral dimension of the image and finds in the cadences of
speech a sonic equivalent to trace an embodied language of U.S. culture and
history. The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, U.S.A. and Goodbye to Berlin
can be read as modernist Bildungsromane that fuse the autobiographical
narrative with a story of media (re-)formation. The writer’s and filmmaker’s
submission to the mechanical regime camera is rewarded by the prospects of
a language that incorporates and codifies its users.
As Bernard Stiegler has argued in response to Jacques Derrida’s
grammatology, the grammatization of experience involves the subject’s
individuation.1 Again, Vertov’s kino-eye can provide a paradigmatic example.
The poetics of the kino-eye is over-determined by musical, literary, linguistic
and scientific frames. As an experiment in cinematic phrase-making, the kino-
eye projects a grammatization of the filmic experience that goes beyond
Eisenstein’s ideogrammatic and Pudovkin’s psychological conceptions of
montage. Vertov’s theory of intervals projects a visual grammar that instills
new habits of perception and aesthetic sensibilities. Based on differences
rather than similarities between human and camera vision, the kino-eye
emphasizes the specific receptive dispositions of the kino-eye as a new organ
of articulation that culminates in the fantasy of creating “a man more perfect
than Adam.”2
By shifting from grammatological investigations to organological concerns,
intermedial politics that locate film within a system of the arts become
personal politics of gesturing and figuring a body. As signifying practices,
gestures and figures go beneath and beyond traditional notions of language
understood as a set of discrete, stable and reproducible units.3 They address
an ambiguity characteristic of the early notions of film language.4 On the one
hand, cinema was invoked as a symbolic system, a hieroglyphic script or
visual esperanto that is understood by all nationalities, social and ethnic
classes. On the other hand, film language resists formal symbolism; it goes
beyond conventional and shared meaning introducing unconscious forms of
making sense into the realm of visibility.
In the context of cinematic organology, the metaphor of the camera eye fuses
two modes of representation: a primary mode grounded in the embodied
meaning of gestures and a secondary mode of figural and symbolic
displacements. As Vivian Sobchack observes, the visual, kinetic and gestural
discourse of cinema blends topographical with autobiographical explorations,
combining perceptual orientation in the world with the construction of
orienting authority: “At the cinema, we see seeing writing itself. We hear
speaking listening to and recording itself. We see action emplotting itself.”5
In the history of film theory the projection of a unified filmic body can be
traced along the successful and unsuccessful integration of filmic gestures of
seeing and writing. In this chapter, I want to review this process by comparing
the ways early cinema introduces the camera as a vicarious agent of
witnessing and testifying to later figural invocations of the camera as a human
body in classical and contemporary cinema. Like the metaphor of the camera
eye, filmic gestures of seeing and writing are bi-directional in that they offer
both a description of user and medium. I propose to call these gestures
autopsy and autography, suggesting a double reading of the prefix ‘auto’ as
referring to the human self and the cinematic apparatus.6
Filmic embodiments are gestural and figural projections that mediate the
relationship between organic and non-organic domains as well as sensory and
conceptual levels of meaning. As a conceptual metaphor, the camera eye
draws on the body or the mechanism of the camera as an explicatory frame, in
terms of the way human or camera vision is understood. Conceptual
metaphors can be seen as building blocks that project important premises for
abstracted models; they come with a hermeneutic imperative of
accommodating them in logically consistent frameworks. The persuasive and
heuristic power of such metaphors depends on the congruence between
conceptual and sensory meanings.7
The technological transformation of our perceptual engagement appears as
genuine or authentic when the immanent meaning derived from sensory forms
is congruent with the conceptual meaning encoded in symbolic forms. Given
the experiential disparity between cinematic and unaided vision, it is easier to
accommodate this difference as a difference, by introducing hermeneutic
frames. The filmic figuration of a diegetic camera that presents the film as
found footage or as a filmic recording of someone present at the scenes of
action, or the staging of cinematic apparatus that frames the film as a
cinematic production appear less problematic than staging the film as the
immediate perception of a single human character. This chapter focuses on
films that belong to the last scenario of assuming the gestures and figures of an
individual human body. As Sobchack remarks, “the difficulty of inscribing an
autobiography of visual experience through the instrumentality of a false
body” explains why such cinematic endeavors are rather seldom.8 However,
rather than discuss such films as failures or illicit appropriations of the human
body, I want to discuss them as historical moments that show particularly how
cinematic re-imaginations of the human body accompany re-
conceptualizations of cinema and its position in the media landscape. My case
studies are taken from early and classical periods as well as contemporary
independent film; they examine the filmic body as phantasmal experience,
institutional role-play and its exploitation as an instrument of auteurism.

Embodied Gestures and Textual Figures

Gestures and figures can be seen as complementary movements towards

organizing a cinematic body. They can be seen as complementary modes of
signifying. Whereas gestures ground the symbolic interaction in the neuro-
muscular activity of a body, figures can be seen as textual incarnations of such
interactions, disembodied roles that guide the film’s pragmatic realization. In
his phenomenological approach to Gestures, Vilém Flusser warns against
regarding gestures simply as expressive or symptomatic phenomena that are to
be decoded within an existing framework of interpretation.9 Instead, he
proposes to view gestures as a signifying practice that fleshes out meaning yet
to be discovered. Cutting across intentional and non-intentional meanings,
gestures defy the linear or causal logic of codification. Flusser acknowledges
this by defining a gesture as a “movement of the body or of a tool attached
with the body, for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation.”10
Gestures invite us to interpret bodily movements in reflexive ways. They are
expressive movements of which we have become aware. This makes them
susceptible to emblematic and symbolic abstraction and entrenches them with
ambiguity. Tears may indicate an emotional state or articulate a mood and they
may do both at the same time. Through gestures we discover the body as a
medium of articulation. Acting upon reactions, a gesture turns the body into an
interface that sends and receives. When placed within a comprehensive
system of signifying practices, gestures assume a middle ground. The may be
located between formal languages that resort to abstract and symbolic ways of
manipulating meaning and percepts or sense-based forms of making
meaning.11
While gestures entangle the body in a discourse, figures are discursive
gestures that point beyond discourse, addressing interactional and social
aspects of communication. Figures in the context of this chapter refer to
projections of social and embodied agents that emerge from filmic texts. Both
gestures and figures are characterized by chiastic movements that fold and
unfold. Cutting across different modes and orders of discourse, the semiosis
of gestures and figures evolves from splitting signifiers. Gestures mold the
body into signs, figures that push the discourse towards action. One could also
say that gestures exploit the body as a medium of articulation, whereas figures
function as discursive substitutions of a body. They contribute to what
Francesco Casetti has described as the film’s self-construction or self-
offering, the presentation or staging of its own act of articulation.12 While the
gesturing body becomes a form of designation that points and extends, figures
of discourse project a textual body that points to a social space of
communication.13
The idea of cinema as gesture surpasses language, going beneath
conventional and shared meanings, introducing hidden and unconscious
meanings into the realm of visibility. As Walter Benjamin suggests, cinema
can help to reveal an optical unconscious by making aspects visible that lie
outside the social realm of communication but within the realm of tacit and
unconscious sociality of inarticulate worries, secretive scheming, forbidding
longing, etc. It offers room-for-play to apprehend, analyze and inhabit new
modes of expressions and articulations that surpass the realm of logic and
verbal communication by speaking directly to the body and the nervous
system.14
In classical film theory, Belá Balázs has offered an elaborate theory of film
as gesture that can be situated in this tradition of aesthetic theory. His defense
of film as art comes with a rejection of the idea of film as ideogrammatic
conception of film. For Balázs, transforming or codifying film into a symbolic
script deprives film of its artistic potential:

The film can evoke thoughts in the spectator, but must not project on to the
screen ready-made thought-symbols, ideograms which have definite,
known conventional meanings, like a question mark or exclamation point,
a cross or a swastika; for these would be merely a primitive picture-
writing, hieroglyphs, that would be less convenient than our alphabet and
certainly not art.15

Balázs’s appraisal of film as art helps him to theorize cinema simply in

representational terms. While Vertov’s attack on art was targeted at
representational conventions of art that would obstruct the true social and
epistemological potential of film, Balázs affirms the artistic character of art
for similar motives. For him the close-up was at the heart of cinema as a new
gestural art. He regarded the close-up as a kind of micro-expressionist
laboratory where in showing the intimate face of all living gestures the
deepest layers of the soul are revealed:

The now developing art of facial expression and gesture will bring just as
many submerged contents to the surface. Although these human
experiences are not rational, conceptual contents, they are nevertheless
neither vague nor blurred, but as clear and unequivocal as is music. Thus
the inner man, too, will become visible.16

According to Balázs, the technique of the close-up engendered new ways of

seeing that invigorated and transformed conventions of artistic representations
at a time when soliloquies in stage plays seemed to have fallen out of taste as
a rather contrived or unnatural device. He discerned in the close-up a new
kind of soliloquy that situated the human body into a new set of revelatory
relations.

Now the film has brought us the silent soliloquy, in which a face can speak
with the subtlest shades of meaning without appearing unnatural and
arousing the distaste of the spectators. In this silent monologue the solitary
human soul can find a tongue more candid and uninhibited than in any
spoken soliloquy, for it speaks instinctively, subconsciously. The language
of the face cannot be suppressed or controlled.17

The notion of the silent soliloquy illustrates well the interrelations of ethical,
representational and aesthetic regimes. Mapping the close-up against the
representational convention of the theatrical soliloquy, Balázs highlights the
ethical dimension of the filmic image, its truthfulness and originality. The
close-up conveys genuine expressions; its natural presentation transports the
viewer into its immediate situational context. Cinema, Balázs contends,
carries the audience inside the picture, introducing it to an uncensored stream
of human expressivity.18 The medium film thereby becomes a vehicle of self-
reflection that brings to the surface and materializes aspects of the human
spirit. This transformation lies at the core of the aesthetic regime, in which the
silent language of things is put up against the coded language of images.19 The
silent soliloquy here emerges as a figure that reverses the hierarchy of writing
and speech while offering a verbal description of the image. More importantly
it extends cinema’s regime of articulation by including an unconscious range
of expressivity. Balázs’s idea of a film speech already implies a cinematic
organism. In what follows, I want to examine notions of filmic seeing and
writing in early cinema that work towards an organic integration of self and
medium.

Autopsy and Autography

Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser introduced the term automediality to address
the dynamic constitution of identity through media practices.20 As Foucault
has argued in Technologies of the Self, self-reflection inevitably involves a
medium of reflection through which the self becomes available as a subject of
exploration.21 In the first decades of cinema, the question of what it means to
‘see’ and ‘write’ with a camera pervades countless stories featuring not only
cameramen and photographers but also all kinds of investigators and
detectives. I will refer to such reflexive gestures as acts of autopsy and
autography. They can be minimally defined as personal acts of witnessing and
recording that resonate with reflexive meanings or ‘self-view’ or
introspection and affirming one’s identity or ‘underwriting.’ Viewed within a
framework of automediality, the prefix ‘auto’ assumes a productive ambiguity
that juxtaposes the sense of self with the mechanical automatism of the
camera.
I want to introduce autopsy and autography by addressing their
representational, ethical and aesthetic implications. I will situate these terms
in relation to what Jacques Rancière has referred to as the ethical,
representational and aesthetic regimes of art.22 The ethical regime concerns
the social function of art. Ethics is understood here in a pragmatic sense that
focuses less on norms of good ethical behavior than on the subject’s situation
in a scene that is described in ethical terms. Accordingly, the ethical
dimension of images and media can be described in values that qualify their
social uses and effects (e.g. diverting vs. instructive or harmful vs.
beneficial). The representational dimension refers to the means and
techniques of artistic expression as a repertoire of formal conventions, which
Rancière relates back to the ancient meaning of art as a craft. By contrast, the
aesthetic regime is understood in a distinctly modern sense. It describes a
realm of reflection and intervention where representational conventions and
ethical values are suspended, interrogated and negotiated. Whereas autopsy
charges experience with claims of authenticity, autography endows an act or a
production with a sense of authority. The ethical bearings of autopsy and
autography result from the sense of authenticity and authority that they connote.
Both autopsy and autography specify an ethical subject that is situated and
liable with all its moral implications.
The assertion of having witnessed something with one’s own eyes situates
the observer in the immediate context with the observed. The emphasis on the
situational context in acts of autopsy can be associated with certain
representational conventions. As an important trope in travel literature, the
autopsy principle does not only focus on detailed descriptions of objects or
events observed, it also includes minute descriptions of the observer’s
personal circumstances, his or her thoughts and habits.23 Whereas the claims
of authenticity in autopsy deal primarily with the witnessing experience,
autography asserts authenticity by claiming authority over the production and
representation of the experiential content. The autograph quite literally
vouchsafes for the authenticity of an expression and its author. Autography
extends its literal meaning when it promises to trace something about the
writer or the writing that is irreplaceable and individual. Just like writing can
stand in for the writer, style can become a signature for the author.
When considered as a mode of production, autography can be related to
Nelson Goodman’s distinction between autographic and allographic arts,
which he explicitly introduced without implications “concerning the
individuality of expression demanded by or attainable in these arts.”24
However, since I am interested in the mutual descriptions of the artwork as a
material product and process and the person of the artist, Goodman’s concept
of autography can be helpful in this respect. He uses these terms to determine
which features of an artwork are constitutive and which are merely contingent.
Whereas autographic arts like painting come with the proclamation of
singularity and genuineness (which qualifies even the most exact duplication
as a fake), allographic arts, like music or architecture, seem resistant to such
forgeries. Differences in the performance of a musical work do not falsify the
aesthetic genuineness of a musical composition but are rather incidental to its
actualization during a performance:

Initially, perhaps, all arts are autographic. Where the works are transitory,
as in singing and reciting, or require many persons for their production, as
in architecture and symphonic music, a notation may be devised in order
to transcend the limitations of time and the individual.25

Goodman speculates whether the “institution of a notational system [could]

transform painting or etching from an autographic to an allographic art.”26 In
this regard, cinema’s aesthetic challenge is to turn the allographic aspects
associated with film technology into an autographic practice. For David
Rodowick, film falls in between the distinction of allographic and autographic
arts. Rodowick cautions against viewing Goodman’s distinction as part of an
aesthetic argument, “since the criteria of signature and uniqueness are the
grounds neither for valuing nor for defining the specificity of forms.” Yet, at
the same time, he maintains that the distinction helps “defining the aesthetic
nature of creative acts.”27 The ambivalence is itself significant since it
reveals how the heterogeneous power of the aesthetic regime encroaches on
the representational domain and may subvert the order of institutionalized
modes of production.
The shift or conversion from other (allo) to self (auto) characterizes the
aesthetic implications of autopsy and autography. The aesthetic ramifications
of autopsy surface in the medical use of the term as post-mortem examination.
Autopsy can be defined as reflection on living and being in the face of death.28
Or, substituting the transcendental concept of death, filmic autopsy can be
understood as reflecting on being in the light of inanimate mechanical objects
and routines that interrupt and displace the experiential stream of
consciousness.
In psychoanalytical terms, autopsy and autography can be seen as imaginary
and symbolic responses to bearing witness or authoring the real, which in
Lacan’s triadic system of imaginary, symbolic and real orders assume the
transcendental realm of ‘pure’ things that cannot be grasped by the mind.
Accordingly, autopsy is linked to the specular regime of the imaginary order,
where the sense of self emerges from the perceived assimilation of the
camera’s vision. Experiencing the percepts of the camera as a more or less
alienating counterpart, the self identifies the camera as a ‘me.’ This
objectification of the subject’s gaze takes on the form of a self-revelation in
the face of an ‘other.’ The vicarious vision that shows what the world looks
like in our absences, comes with the promise of revealing things in
themselves. However, as Slavoj Žižek remarks, this paradoxical promise
manifests itself first as “libidinal terror” before it gets rationalized as
“epistemological failure.”29 Charging the camera with the free-floating desire
of seeing (oneself) as an other (would see one) implies the severance of
vision from human co-ordinates of the body. Autography represents a
complementary movement that seeks to incorporate the act of seeing by
envisioning a writerly figure within the symbolic order. Reviewing seeing as
writing and constructing a writer as the basis of such writing, autography
figuratively re-embodies the disembodied gaze by ‘reading’ the gaze as a
trace or signature of an author.
In the Biograph short A Search for Evidence (1903) the (re-)framing of the
eye-witnessing act can illustrate the relationship between autopsy and
autography. A series of point-of-view shots—framed by a keyhole mask—
reveal the private interiors of people living in a hotel. By displaying a
partially obstructed view and outlining what curtails the view, the mask
symbolizes the ‘real’ as a blind spot or blind area in the field of vision that
defines the subjective view. The keyhole mask objectifies the subject’s view
by representing the material conditions upon which the subjective constitution
of the image depends. The mask externalizes or represents the material
conditions of seeing. As Žižek points out, the reference to “materialism means
that the reality I see is never ‘whole’—not because a large part of it eludes
me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which indicates my inclusion
in it.”30 The external material limitations imposed on the view thereby
become metonyms for the physiological and psychological premises of human
vision.
The keyhole mask marks and encloses partial views of reality. The first
view shows a young man in a nightgown pacing up and down the room as he
tries to lull a baby to sleep. The second depicts a man stumbling over a chair
in an attempt to light a ceiling lamp. The third witnesses a doctor attending the
sickbed of a young girl. In the fourth room, we see a party of men playing
cards and drinking wine. In the fifth, a woman is getting ready for bed. These
glimpses into the lives of others are framed and held together by shots that
show a male detective leading a woman through a corridor in search of her
unfaithful husband, who is eventually revealed in the final, sixth point-of-view
shot. After the wife confirms the identity of her husband, the detective bullies
his way into the room and the film ends with a violent scene, in which the
detective and the husband hold back the enraged wife.
In this intrusion and exposure of private lives, the detective performs an
authoritative role as he guides the woman through a series of moving vignettes
of everyday life. The detective personifies moral authority that frames and
legitimizes a series of voyeuristic glimpses into the private lives of others. As
an allegory of the symbolic order, he comes to represent the autographic act.
His guidance draws attention to the mediated quality of this eye-witnessing
act. He also serves as a vehicle that accounts for the representational
dimension. He figuratively embodies the pointing device of the camera, which
is complemented by the keyhole masks that mark the detective’s and the
woman’s gazes. In this sense, the role of the detective combines the function
of a male guardian and a projectionist. He may serve as an allegory for the
cinematic apparatus that controls and enables women to see for themselves
spectacles to which they previously had no access.31
Such a meta-cinematic reading interprets the story in terms of a scene that
cannot be represented since it refers to the symbolic order that constitutes
cinema as a social medium of perception. The gaze shared between the
detective and the woman becomes a place where social ethics and libidinal
forces intersect in the form of an ideological fantasy that allows us to become
voyeurs in the name of the law.32 The final and climactic scene elaborates on
this fantasy by casting the detective in an ambivalent role of someone who
enforces justice and exerts violent revenge.
Complementing the allegorical representation of cinema in A Search for
Evidence, there are a large number of films that stage the two-part act of
filming and screening as the work of a silent observer and an incorruptible
witness. As Tom Gunning points out, in early cinema the camera often played
an “essential role as the mute yet unassailable witness of a crime.”33 In many
early films, such as Falsely Accused (1908) or Zimgor vs. Nick Carter
(1912), the camera delivers the hard and fast evidence that rights the wrong or
—as in Getting Evidence (1906) and The Story the Biograph Told (1904)—
exposes sexual transgressions and betrayal. In The Story the Biograph Told,
the role of the detective is replaced by a mischievous office boy who secretly
sets up a camera to film his boss kissing his secretary. The affair is exposed
when the movie is shown in the theater. As a consequence, the boss is
appointed a male secretary in place of his mistress. Even though the camera
may act like a human agent, it cannot be held liable. A cinematic record can
be appropriated for purposes that seem legitimate even if the recording
involves devious practices. The auto-mechanism of the camera offers a
double benefit. Not only does it eliminate a human bias in observing, it can
also reveal what lies beyond the intentions of the observed subject. As
Gunning points out, “[i]n most cases, the camera takes the culprit’s photo
when he is caught unawares. Therefore, like Holmes’s keenly perceived
trifles, the camera captures the guilty one in a moment of unconscious self-
betrayal.”34

Cinematic Discovery of the Self

The cinematic discovery of the self relies on its paradoxical recognition by

the image that reverses the orthodox understanding of an active subject and a
passive object. A remarkable early film to illustrate this is A Day with the
Gypsies (1906), directed by Cecil Hepworth for Gaston Quiribet. Combining
panoramic tracking shots with the exotic lure of social tourism, A Day with
the Gypsies introduces an intriguing variation to the popular genre of the
phantom ride. It moves the camera from the interior a vehicle to the inside of a
human body. It is one of the earliest existent films to use a subjective camera
throughout the entire film, and it is a fascinating example of translating the
ideal of travelogue autopsy and a picturesque panorama into a new form of
cinematic subjectivity. If the immersive effect of phantom rides creates an
experience of dissolution between the self and the world, the phantomized
body in A Day with the Gypsies reflects on the very disparity between the
human body and its filmic incarnation.35
The film begins with a title card that reads, “Early one morning I
discovered some gipsies [sic] preparing for the road.” The first shot opens
rather inconspicuously with a tableau of three gypsies that is strongly
embedded in compositional conventions of the genre: It shows an old woman
standing, an elderly man sitting and a young man lying on the ground. Soon,
however, we notice that their attitudes change as they start to look grimly into
the camera. Although a first-person perspective has been introduced by the
intertitle, the effect of this shot is quite startling. The intrusion that disrupts the
gypsies’ idle morning repose is first displayed on their faces. As we start to
read their faces we recognize that a camera—or, the fact that they are being
looked at—causes this disruption. The viewer’s ‘identification’ with the
camera is less an immersive effect than a sudden recognition of being
implicated by the image. Of course, the viewing subject is already to some
degree inscribed into the iconography of the image. However, the presence of
a human being implied by the returned gaze provokes a shift in the viewer’s
observational perspective: The viewing subject is not merely seeing but seen
and the viewed object as the object is not merely seen but seeing. In mediating
this relationship between subject and object, the camera takes on a phantom-
persona, the shape of a human body that is at once self and other.
In order to persuade the gypsies to let him spend the day with them, the
camera-persona offers the old woman some money. We see an empty hand
reaching towards the camera and a hand filled with money withdrawing from
the camera’s off-space. At noon, their caravan approaches a small village
where they stop for refreshments. Panoramic shots filmed sideways give way
to shots of streets and houses filmed from the front of the caravan. When the
gypsies jump out of the caravan to buy drinks, an intertitle reminds us of the
subjective camera: “Although I remained in the caravan I was not forgotten.”
Mirroring the previous money transaction, we then see a young woman
offering a mug to the camera. The last interaction of this kind occurs at the end
of the film. After we have seen the gypsies set up their camp and dance by
their campfire, the first-person protagonist decides to have his palm read.
Framed in a close-up, the old woman starts reading his hand before an
intertitle ends the film with the fortune teller’s words: “You have got a lucky
face.” This final twist of having the fortune teller read the face of the ‘camera’
represents the inverse of the opening shot, in which reading the gypsies’ faces
reveal the presence of the protagonist’s gaze. Playing with the idea of total
reversibility of viewer and image becomes a fantasy of being fully
recognized; it is a fantasy of attaining one’s complete objectification as a
reward for submitting to the image. As the face is not shown but left to be
construed by the viewer’s imagination, the film ends with a synoptic reminder
of its strange attraction: the visual re-experience of oneself as a cinematic
other in the face of cultural otherness.
The autographic act of verifying the true nature of the face and representing
the vicarious vision as the unified experience of a single human being is
pushed over to written language. The intertitles, which are all written in
preterit form, place the scenes within a temporal itinerary. They mark
temporal and spatial gaps, set the pace and rhythm of the story, offer a
commentary on what is shown and provide a rationale for the montage. It is
characteristic of this time between 1904 and 1907 that the narrative import of
intertitles is rather modest.36
Apart from framing the spectacular transactions with the camera, the main
narrative function of the intertitles is to set the times of the respective scenes.
This has to do with the fact that the main syntagmatic juxtaposition of shots
draws on well-established genres of the panoramic picture and the chase
movie. The historical past used throughout the intertitles puts the two
narrative modes in relief: the scenic presentation of the filmic images and the
verbal narrative. The tensions that result from the different narrative and
temporal modes in the verbal and visual information reflect the challenge of
reconciling acts of seeing within a unified discourse. Although the two
gestures of autopsy and autography surfaced prominently in the first decades
of cinema, they rarely appear as unified or systematic visions of self and
medium. The narrative identity of cinema that emerged during the transitional
period from 1907 to 1915 shows one way of reconciling self and medium
within a representational framework of narrative conventions.37
 A Day with the Gypsies is illustrative of a historical development in filmic
narration before the emergence of what Tom Gunning calls the narrator-
system, where the narrative function is no longer exterior to the filmic image
(such as the explanations of a film lecturer or intertitles projected on behalf of
a film lecturer) but develops from the relation among the filmic images and
their juxtaposition on the screen. In D. W. Griffith and the Origins of
American Narrative Film, Gunning describes the narrator-system as “one
particular synthesis of filmic discourse occurring in the general move to a
cinema of narrative integration.”38

Filmic Bodies and Figures in Narrative Film Theory

As a temporal form of identity, narrative identity has been invoked as a
primary basis for figural projections of a camera. Just like the use of language
transforms the body into an organ of articulation, the formation of a filmic
system of narration can be seen to organize the body that makes up film
technology. In other words, the body is always understood in terms of its
functions or organs.39 In Casetti’s communicative model of filmic exchanges,
the body functions as “the support and reserve of a role.”40 The fact that the
sender and receiver have bodies provides a basic commonality, a shared body
of implicit knowledge, behaviors and expectations for the roles and symbolic
exchanges performed by the film. For Casetti, role and body refer to the
symbolic dimension of films as textual configurations and their pragmatic
reality as acts of communication. Texts mediate this dualism by embodying a
dialogic partner at the edge of the text, “where the signs give way to life” and
by projecting “a silhouette which the text creates within the interior of its own
limits, on the page, canvas, or screen.”41 In Casetti’s framework, the body
does not refer to “a purely ‘empirical’ reality,”42 but to its function in
sustaining the symbolic performance:

[A] body facing a role is like a photographic plate that reveals an image’s
precise contours, and at the same time freezes the movement into a
canonical pose. The body is like a surface that becomes engraved and
brings action to a standstill. But the body is also a ‘reserve.’ The plate is
also a palimpsest whose superimposed inscriptions bear the traces of
preceding inscriptions, each trace serving as an occasion of memory.43
Gunning’s narrator-system posits the filmic narrator in this sense of a
filmically embodied narrator, a figural description for the origin of narrative
meaning, a system of formal techniques and an institutional mode of reception.
His narrative theory is grounded in a semiotics of production in which the
narrative discourse refers back to a narrator as an original context and a
specific mode of (historical) production. Gunning views the narrative
discourse of film as evolving along three levels, the mise-en-scène or the
staging of a profilmic event, the mise-en-cadre or cinematography and the
editing process, which following André Gaudreault, he refers to as as mise-
en-chain.44 The act of narrating, as Gunning puts it, “is dependent on the
traces of telling that exist in the text.”45 In other words, the objective of this
theory is to look for slight or implicit “traces.”
For Gunning this personalization of narration underscores the intentional
dimension—the purposive design—of films and “the way they function within
history and society.”46 Since the manipulations of a filmic discourse “reveal
the hand of the narrator,”47 this discourse can be seen to embody the narrator
in the negative metaphorical sense described above: “Because film’s
narrative discourse represents the actual text of film—its existence as a series
of filmic images—no narrative film can exist except through its narrative
discourse. It logically follows that every narrative film has a filmic narrator
embodied by this discourse.”48 The cinematically embodied narrator replaces
or works on behalf of the entity that in an oral storytelling mode would be a
flesh-and-blood narrator.
Much of Gunning’s defense of the narrator depends on an extensive meaning
and scope of embodiment. The narrator embodied by the filmic discourse is
itself a guise, just like an oral narrator may take on various personae and not
simply speak on his or her own behalf. Gunning’s filmic embodiment projects
(the illusion of) a seizable origin of intentionality. Like Casetti’s functional
conception of the body as an organ, Gunning’s embodiment describes a
functional process of media formation. It implies an advanced stage of
systemic social and aesthetic consolidation. Moving images convey stories
through systemic efforts instead of relying primarily on auxiliary agencies
such as a film explainer or spectators’ knowledge of the story.
The vicarious agency of the narrator system comprises staging, framing and
editing strategies that narrativize the filmic discourse. Editing techniques and
camera movements can create complex temporal relationships between shots,
integrating them into a narrative network of actions and events. The narrator
system also shapes the narrative mood that filters the spectator’s relationship
to the storyworld. Framing and editing techniques allow viewers to
experience the range and depth of a storyworld from different perspectives.
Finally, the narrator system generates a unified intentional scope that situates
the movie within a communicative frame. It is important, however, to see this
effect of a unified intentionality as a collaborative effort of both the narrator
system and the spectator’s interpretative strategies. Gunning acknowledges
this duality by studying Griffith’s development of narrative strategies in
conjunction with the promotional discourse that invented the film director as a
social and historical figure of intentionality.
Gunning’s narrator is best described as a function of film activated by a
system of formal relationships; it is narration through the proxy of the filmic
medium. The narrator system is an “apparatus” that is highly charged with
overtones of personality in symptomatic and productive ways. The narrative
discourse bears the “traces” (which also include indirect evidence such as
gaps, elisions, fractures and structuring absences) of a narrator who springs
from an author while producing an image of authorship. Gunning’s narrator is
a ‘negative image’ that is reconstructed by a spectator on the basis of stylistic
“choices within and among the three levels of filmic discourse (e.g.
expressionist set design, high angle of camera and match cutting).”49
Similarly, for André Gaudreault filmic narrators are functional constructs,
“impersonal (or rather apersonal)” agents,50 distinct from corporeal authors
and represented characters. Drawing on Wayne Booth’s notion of the implied
author and Albert Laffay’s concept of the ‘great image-maker,’ which he
describes as a “virtual [narrating] presence hiding behind all films,”
Gaudreault posits an underlying film narrator (or film mega-narrator) at the
top of a hierarchical system.51 This underlying narrator supervises the three
units or subsystems of narrative operations of the mise-en-scène, mise-en-
cadre and mise-en-chain. For each of these fields of activity, Gaudreault
poses an agent, whose mode of representation can be described in terms of
either monstration or narration. While the arrangement of the profilmic scene
and the framing of an image reveal a narrative agent of monstration, the
manipulation of the recorded images for the narrative representation of time in
the editing process implies an agent of narration. In short, the act of
monstration presents the events of the narrative in the present tense, whereas
acts of narration frame them as occurring in the past tense or a non-present
temporal modality.
 The historical appeal of Gaudreault’s framework is that it allows for a
genetic or intermedial reading of the filmic narrative system. The different
levels in his narrative system not only refer to different processes or aspects
of filmmaking, but also indicate commonalities and differences between film
and other media. Accordingly, narration may be defined by a narrative mode
of showing, a performative or theatrical act of presenting a spectacle, or it
may be modeled on a linguistic or literary act of telling.52 For Gaudreault,
cinema meshes theatrical and literary traditions of storytelling by associating
the camera with a system of display or ‘monstration’ (mimesis) on the one
hand and with editing as a technique of ‘narration’ (diegesis) on the other. He
regards theatricality and literariness as each being a ‘cultural series’ or
intermedial trajectory that has dominated different periods and aesthetic
traditions in film history.53 While theatrical frames shaped early cinema, the
rise of Hollywood cinema aligns more closely with literary frames of
narration. In an afterword, written ten years after the original publication of
Du littéraire au filmique in 1998, Gaudreault adds an open ending to his film
theory by raising the question of ‘filmicality’—the specificity of cinematic
narration apart from theatrical and literary frames—only to defer its answer:
“This is a question I will attempt to answer in a later book. It is a question
that is, therefore, … TO BE CONTINUED …”54
Robert Burgoyne proposed an answer to this question by postulating an
impersonal filmic narrator as an intermediary agent who negotiates and
reconciles ethical, representational and medial or technological aspects of
narrative fiction films.55 If Gunning’s absent narrator emerges ex negative as
a figuration of the filmic discourse and the socio-cultural functions of cinema
as medium of mass communication, Burgoyne offers a positive description of
a filmic narrator. He considers the filmic narrator the pragmatic foundation of
the two-fold nature of cinema as a social practice of mass communication and
medium of private intuition that allows us to vicariously experience fictional
worlds. The cinematic narrator is a “fictional instance of emission, […] an
agent who is bound by the fictional contract to convey the facts of the fictional
universe.”56
Burgoyne defends a theory of the cinematic narrator along the lines of
Marie-Laure Ryan’s pragmatic definition of impersonal narration.57 Put
simply, impersonal narration conceptualizes narrative agents that do not fit in
a personal frame or schema as they show, for example, traits of an omniscient
narrator or traits of subhuman or mechanical features of a camera recording.58
Like Gunning’s and Gaudreault’s narrators, Burgoyne’s cinematic narrator is a
construct, a one-dimensional being whose sole purpose is to narrate a story:
“This type of narrator is totally deprived of individuating, human
characteristics, resulting in a text that also appears to be freed from the speech
act.”59
Although Burgoyne is mainly concerned with a logical and pragmatic
solution to the vexed narrator debate, his recourse to an impersonal narrator,
upon whom “the truth and authenticity of the fictional universe” depends, has
important implications for understanding the cinematic apparatus as a
mechanical yet social agent guiding the narrative comprehension of film.60
While the cinematic narrator is characterized by a degree of rationality, his,
her, or its mode of being is distinct from being personal in a psychological
sense. Intentionality is reduced to a minimal level of social functionalism or
instrumentalism. Founded in the mechanism of a machine, filmic narration is
endowed with a sense of objectivity and reliability. The cinematic apparatus
is thus a world-creating machine in a quasi-scientific sense. It creates
independent worlds as if they were objective or rather social facts.
Reviewing world-creation and world-reflection in a film-specific context,
Burgoyne maps these two facets of the impersonal narrator onto Gaudreault’s
distinction of monstration (mimesis, showing) and narration (diegesis,
telling). Monstration creates the simulacrum of the present time. The filmic
medium in such acts of showing operates like a recorder that captures a scene
of continuous time. Narration, which Burgoyne associates with the postfilmic
viewing situation, introduces a temporal distance that marks a “gap between
the time of the event and the time of the telling.”61 According to Burgoyne, this
temporal distance affords the narrator and, we may add, the spectator, a
moment of reflection, a new evaluative stance to the world created. Hence,
minimally defined as a synthesis of record and replay, the filmic medium
allows us to participate in an alternative reality in an imaginary and well-
informed way. In filmic narratives, we vicariously experience this reality as a
simulated present tense while benefitting at the same time from retrospective
insights and moral reflections. Edward Branigan compares this classical
conception of cinematic experience to the subjunctive conditional mood in
which viewers experience an event as if they had been there.62
Burgoyne’s impersonal narrator is yet another figuration or mask, a guise
that seems both anthropomorphic and mechanomorphic and in its hybridity
outlines the material and mental frames of comprehending. To reflect on film
as a social medium means to explore its impersonal mode. Yet, impersonality
is an elusive term. Whereas Burgoyne regards impersonal narration as a
universal type, Branigan rejects the idea of the impersonal as a universal
form. For him the impersonal is a general form that “is relative to ‘a set of
readings’ produced through the discourse of a particular community, that is,
relative to the dimensions of a specialized use of language.”63

Lady in the Lake and La Femme défendue

If we read Gaudreault’s deferral to define filmicality as a programmatic

maneuver, then medium specificity should not be understood in typological or
ontological terms but as shaped by a historical process of intermedial
differentiation. The specificity or uniqueness of film may thus be best
understood as a potential that is historically and culturally contingent on the
media landscape. Notorious experiments in classical cinema, such as Robert
Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947), can be seen as such intermedial
projections.
In this film the story of the hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe is
presented almost entirely in point-of-view shots with the camera featuring as
a kind of spectator-actor. Critics dismissed Lady in the Lake as a failure that
violated the objective nature of cinematography by imposing the subjectivity
of a literary first-person form onto the camera. The most detailed critique
along this line comes from Julio Moreno, who describes the film as an
intermedial transposition that imitates “in cinematographic terms, a form of
literary narration.”64 He views Lady in the Lake as symptomatic of a
contemporary rapprochement of literary and cinematic narrative forms. While
the post-war novel tends towards an increasingly objective, external
presentation and a depersonalization of the narrative, recent developments in
filmic narration seek a greater personalization by presenting events from a
subjective point of view.
Lady in the Lake, Moreno argues, ultimately fails to achieve its self-
professed objective to create a strong identification between the viewer and
the protagonist. Identification, Moreno points out, is made impossible because
“[t]he spectator has to put up with a phantom-protagonist, who announces
himself, like the spirits, by indirect means: the spectator must infer him
continually from the conduct of the other characters, from the intermittent
presence of a voice and hands wandering through the world of the
narrative.”65 The film’s appropriation of the human body falsely imposes an
idea of personhood onto narrative and perceptual categories rather than
constructing a unified personal experience by them. As Sobchack points out,
the impersonating camera does not claim its identity as human experience on a
narrative but on an existential plane. Moreover, as existential claims are made
by representing a continuity of time and space, “it is precisely over time and
in space that the disparity between the nature of the film’s lived-body and the
nature of the human lived-body emerges.”66
As in A Day with the Gypsies, the long point-of-view sequences are
interrupted by autographic framings that organize the temporal order of this
experience and present it in the face of a discursive and anonymous other. In
the place of intertitles, Lady in the Lake stages its own narrative situation. In
the framing narrative, the director Robert Montgomery introduces himself as
the character-narrator, impersonating the private detective Philip Marlowe,
who has recently turned to writing fiction:

Right now you are reading in the newspapers and hearing over your radios
about a murder. They call it the case of the lady in the lake. That’s a good
title. It fits. What you have read and what you have heard is one thing. The
real thing is something else. There is only one guy who knows that. I know
it. […] You’ll see it just as I saw it. […] And maybe you’ll solve it quick.
And maybe you won’t. You think you will, eh? O.K. you are smart. But let
me give you a tip. You gotta watch them. You gotta watch them all the
time. Because things happen when you least expect them.

Marlowe’s prologue is filled with references that emphasize the power of

first-hand experience over verbally mediated news. What would cinema look
like if it were a detective novel recounted from a first person perspective?
Rather than emulating literary fiction, the detective fiction becomes a meta-
cinematic allegory of cinema as a form of vicarious experience. The plotting
and reading schemes of detective fiction can serve as a model for film’s
subjunctive conditional mood. By reading the traces at the crime scene and
hunting down the criminal, the detective imaginatively transposes him- or
herself into the criminal’s frame of mind. The imaginative scheme mirrors the
reader’s activity, which relies on the detective as a mediating figure. The fact
that Marlowe is a detective who tries his luck as a writer of detective fiction
only to end up in his own mystery case draws attention to the parallels
between the writer’s plotting and the reader’s reconstruction of the story.
Thus, the subjective camera in Lady in the Lake can be seen as a cinematic
attempt at compressing the analogous relations between plot configurations
and figurations of reading in detective literature.67 This becomes particularly
evident in the film’s ending, which introduces Marlowe’s prime suspect, the
femme fatal Adrienne Fromsett (Audrey Totter), into the framing narrative. As
Branigan observes, the ending not only turns the crime story into a romance, it
points towards dissolving the film’s flashback structure: “The time and place
of Marlowe’s telling apparently collapses into the continuing action of the
story.”68
The intermedial relationship to literature is one of differentiation rather
than imitation. In The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles pursued a
complementary experiment by blending filmic narration with the literary
figure of a third-person or author narrator. Whereas Lady in the Lake
appropriates the human body as a mask for the cinematic apparatus, The
Magnificent Ambersons foregrounds the instrumental use of film technology.
Rather than having the narrator visibly appear as a human figure, the author-
persona Welles appears as a user of technology, who positions himself, as it
were, behind the camera and microphone instead of posing in front of it.
Unlike the diegetic narrator Montgomery, who presents his story as an
autobiographical narrative, the extra-diegetic voice-over at the beginning of
The Magnificent Ambersons recalls a historical or documentary narrative.
The historical stance of the voice-over narration is echoed visually by using
early film historical styles imitating literary preterit narration through a
montage of vignettes and a tableaux of characters talking to the camera.
Another contemporary example that uses a third-person voice-over
narration is Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948). The movie begins with
aerial shots of New York City and the voice-over commentary of the producer
Mark Hellinger, who speaks the opening credits and remarks upon the film’s
innovative venture outside the studio into field cinematography before he
takes on the role of the film’s voice-over narrator. In contrast to The
Magnificent Ambersons, the voice-over narration never fades into the
background but prominently persists in the foreground throughout the entire
movie. While Welles’s introduction of himself and the cinematic apparatus
evoke the literary notion of omniscience by having a microphone ascend into a
pool of light, The Naked City remains closer to a documentary frame by
aligning the cinematic apparatus with technologies of transport and
communication. The film production network and its technology are
metonymic to the administrative and technological apparatus of the city’s
social network. Instead of retelling a family’s history from a god-like
perspective, The Naked City follows the model of Walter Ruttman’s Berlin:
Symphony of a Great City (1927) and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera
(1929). It focuses on a single day in the life of a city. The camera closes in on
the city and its inhabitants by parsing and immersing itself with various
media. When a murder is discovered, the editing follows the flow of
information as relayed by the switchboard at the telegraph bureau.
Instead of experiencing human subjectivity through technology, Lady in the
Lake posits technology as human subjectivity. The cinematic apparatus figures
as the incongruent relation between the visual percept presented by the film
and human perception. The disparity includes not only optical and
physiological aspects of vision such as the field of vision and embodied
gestures of the gaze but cognitive and psychological aspects that do not map
onto optical parameters. As Sobchack points out, objects that are currently not
at the center of attention do not appear as blurry or out of focus but attain a
diminished or softer cognitive presence. Whereas in human perception the
body is a means by which we engage with our environment, in Lady in the
Lake the body becomes an end. Thus, the film draws attention to aspects of
embodiment that normally ground perception rather than figure as an object of
perception.69 Many critics have commented on the claustrophobic experience
created by the film’s narrow conception of embodiment, which by limiting the
perspective to the character’s point of view and stream of thought, excluded a
whole range of pre-personal and peri-personal sensations.70 What
complicates the imaginary identification with the subjective camera is the
symbolic identification of the subjective camera with the character Marlowe
and director Montgomery. In contrast to A Day with the Gypsies, alienating
experience is given a face, which serves as reminder that the viewers take on
an impossible role. As highlighted in the advertising of the film, which
promised the spectator an event in which “You and Robert Montgomery solve
a murder mystery together,”71 the very act of role-play is the true protagonist
of the film. Rather than a means of perceptual assimilation and symbolic
identification, the extensive use of the camera eye in Lady in the Lake
becomes a gesture of intermedial differentiation and figuration of Hollywood
cinema as an institutional form of role-play.72
Whereas brief uses of the subjective camera have become established
conventions in classical Hollywood cinema, its extended use in Lady in the
Lake is better understood in line with the German expressionist tradition that
exploited this device as a special focalizing effect. In classical Hollywood
cinema, Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) provides a
great example where the use of subjective camera outlines a specific mask or
facets of the self. Mamoulian begins with a long point-of-view sequence that
follows Dr. Jekyll from his home to an auditorium. The subjective camera
stops when Jekyll addresses his audience and takes on the role of a public
figure. Later in the film, Mamoulian will use a first-person perspective to
introduce his alter ego Mr. Hyde. This time the subjective camera comes to
represent Jekyll’s animalist nature that addresses the body as a subversive
force. In Jekyll’s first transformation, the shift to Hyde’s point of view is
introduced by an erratic hand-held camera movement taken over immediately
by the mechanical movement of a revolving camera, a visual vortex that takes
us into the amoral depths of Mr. Hyde.
A more consistent use of subjective camera as a character’s mask that is
close to the experiment of Lady in the Lake can be seen in Delmer Daves’s
Dark Passage, in which Humphrey Bogart plays a man who has been wrongly
convicted of murdering his wife. He escapes from prison and then undergoes
cosmetic surgery to veil his identity before attempting to prove his innocence.
The first third of the film represents Bogart’s character exclusively through
point-of-view shots. The irony of this masking game is that on the level of the
story the unknown face, whose vision the camera appropriates, symbolizes the
need to hide his identity. For the viewer, this situation is reversed when
Bogart’s distinct face is to be seen as the character’s disguise. In other words,
the story of the film provides a hermeneutic frame for accommodating the
defamiliarizing perspective. It also plays with the viewer’s extra-fictional
assumption that treats the body as a resource for the character’s role.
It is this role-play that becomes a central spectacle in Lady in the Lake. By
promising an immediate link between Montgomery and the spectator, the
camera becomes a figuration of the viewer’s role-play, which frames the film
as a social act of communication, a fictional presentation and a media
production. Casting the director in the role of the fictional narrator highlights
a personal or biographical continuity that, underlying the communicative and
presentational frames of the film, cuts across the fictional threshold.73 The
relationship between the body as a prevailing resource and the discontinuity
of performed roles is reversed in the fictional frame. Whereas the body
connects the communicative and presentational frames, the camera draws
attention to a rift in what is perceived as a personal unity of Montgomery as
narrator and character (see Figure 5.1). In the fictional frame this relationship
between role and resource is reversed when the camera begins to enact the
narrator’s past experiences. The incongruences brought about by this shift in
resource point to the underlying instrumental function of the film as a
collaborative media production.
In an early perceptive review of the film Joseph P. Brinton criticized
Montgomery and his cameraman Paul Vogel, calling the film a “masterpiece of
ambiguity in which the unique powers of the subjective camera are left at the
mercy of technicians schooled in conventional methods.”74 More recently, in
La Femme défendue (1997) the French director Philippe Harel revisited
Lady in the Lake to exploit precisely this ambiguity. The film chronicles the
extra-marital affair of the thirty-nine-year-old François (Harel) with a much
younger single woman named Muriel (Isabelle Carré). As a tribute to Lady in
the Lake, Harel includes mirror shots of himself that recreate Montgomery’s
symbolic chain of identification between director, character and viewer.
Unlike Lady in the Lake, La Femme défendue does not include a framing
narrative that introduces a narrator who accounts for the temporal gaps in the
camera’s perception. Instead, the protagonist’s perception is limited to times
he meets with Muriel or contacts her on the phone. The rationale for this
compartmentalization of reality, the psychological censoring and temporal
formatting, is not articulated. Like the taboo that structures the affair and its
filmic representation, the editing rationale is marked by conspicuous
absences.
Figure 5.1 Camera as role-play in Lady in the Lake.

Harel repeats many things critics considered flawed in Lady in the Lake.
Yet, if watching the film feels less claustrophobic than Lady in the Lake, this
is because La Femme défendue does not attempt to rigorously imitate the
protagonist’s gazes and movements. The scenes are edited more freely
following a narrative continuity rather than adhering to the protagonist’s
experiential flow.
The framing and movements of the camera symbolically allude to rather
than gesture like the human body. The film begins with François giving Muriel
a ride home and the first shot depicts their shared view of the road ahead.
This establishing shot brings together the viewer’s perspective and the gazes
of François and Muriel. As in A Day with the Gypsies, the subjective register
is initially unmarked but becomes evident in a long medium shot of Muriel.
Assuming the camera accurately captures François’s gaze will drive viewers
to the edge of their seats as the camera rests on Muriel for more than a minute.
Although critics considered this Brechtian use of the subjective camera
technique risky and flawed, the La Femme défendue was reviewed
favorably.75 Critics unanimously praised Isabelle Carré’s performance for her
expressive mien and her natural interaction with the camera. The subjective
camera puts the viewer in a contradictory position, where the primary process
of identification with the viewing subject of the camera is antagonistic to the
secondary identification with Muriel. Whereas most viewers are likely to
sympathize with Muriel, François’s character offers little grounds for
sympathy. The film critic Geoff Andrew described the viewer’s stance to the
camera as “somewhere between contempt and complicity—with regard to the
weak-willed, manipulative seducer.”76 The alienating effect of the continuous
yet heavy-handed subjective camera reinforces the intended discomfort of
turning the viewer into a voyeur of the psychological power play in the affair.
François wants to keep the affair exclusive and secluded from his family life.
Resenting the secrecy of her existence in this relationship, Muriel repeatedly
insists on discussing his marriage and openly talks about her love life outside
of the affair.
The conflict offers a good description for the ambiguous mask the
subjective camera assumes in the film. On the one hand, it aligns with
François’s subjective position and his desire to control the time and space of
their affair. On the other hand, the restrained subjectivity makes room for
Muriel’s acting towards the camera. For more than two hours the camera stays
almost entirely focused on Muriel who, being framed by François’s
perspective, gauges her power and freedom performing by acting out roles
other than the one attributed to her. The film captures the microcosm of the
affair, a small world sheltered from social recognition but not independent of
the surrounding world. The camera marks the artificial boundaries of
sustaining this male fantasy and accommodating its reality.
The incongruent performance of the camera foregrounds the intersubjective
constitution of both the representation of the film’s story and its process of
production. By revealing the ruptures and refractions between the film’s
communicative, presentational and technological frames, the camera eye in La
Femme défendue emerges as an organ where we can see these frames come
together but refuse to resolve into a coherent mask. Rather than simulating
human visual perception, Harel’s vision is closer to the rhetoric of direct
cinema. Yet, the film is neither a live documentary of a love affair nor the
record of a growing intimacy between the filmer and filmed, it is rather a
fictional illustration of their paradoxical fusion.77 While the simulation of an
interpolated present tense prevails throughout the film, the final scene takes on
a memorial mood. It is five months after the affair ended. As we see vacant
shots of an urban park in winter, we hear François reading from his letter to
Muriel, in which he fears that their affair is turning into a nostalgic memory of
the past. By addressing the image as memory, the status of the film seems to
turn from present perception to remembered vision. Muriel’s absence
activates a retrospection of the viewing experience that reframes the camera’s
recording into a past record. The camera eye in La Femme défendue assumes
an ambiguous and hybrid identity as body and instrument that resists being
assimilated as a configuration of material and memorial traces, which I
discussed in the previous chapter; nor does it project a mental screen, which I
will discuss in Chapter Seven.

Notes
1. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans.
Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1998), 134–43.
2. Dziga Vertov, “The Council of Three” (1923), in Kino-Eye: The Writings
of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), 19; see also Chapter Two.
3. David Armstrong, William Stokoe and Sherman Wilcox proposed a
comprehensive model “that describes both spoken and signed languages
as systems of gestures.” See Gesture and the Nature of Language
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 6. Similarly, in a
painstaking philosophical investigation that brings together
phenomenological, linguistic, and psychoanalytic perspectives, Jean-
François Lyotard showed how the figural challenges the quasi-
metaphysical foundation of structuralist semiotics. See Jean-François
Lyotard, Discourse, Figure (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press,
2011). See also David N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or,
Philosophy after the New Media (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
4. See Jörg Schweinitz, Film and Stereotype: A Challenge for Cinema and
Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 188.
5. Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film
Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 216–17.
6. I have first proposed these terms in relation to early cinema in my essay
“Autopsy and Autography in the First Decades of Cinema,” Arbeiten aus
Anglistik und Amerikanistik 37.2 (2012), 163–85.
7. For complementary phenomenological and cognitive approaches to
embodied meaning see Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment
and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2004) and Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human
Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
8. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye, 229.
 9. Vilém Flusser, Gestures, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2014).
10. Flusser, Gestures, 3.
11. See Thomas A. Sebeok and Marcel Danesi, The Forms of Meaning:
Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis (Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter, 2000).
12. Francesco Casetti, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator,
trans. Nell Andrew with Charles O’Brien (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1998), 20.
13. For David Rodowick, figures and gestures share a sense of indexicality:
“Indexicality means that discourse is shot through with the visible: the
énoncé must point beyond its borders to objects positioned in space with
respect to it. It is plunged into a gestural space that surrounds it, and it is
riddled from within by deictic holes whose function is to indicate
positionality in space (here/there) and in time (now/then),” Rodowick,
Reading the Figural, 6.
14. The psychoanalyst Hanns Sachs drew attention to the insights that could be
gained from a film psychology that studied “the embodiment […] of
psychic events […] before or beyond speech” in small unnoticed “slip
action[s],” Sachs “Film Psychology” (1928), in Close Up, 1927–1933:
Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura
Marcus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 251 and 254.
15. Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art,
trans. Edith Bone (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 129.
16. Balázs, Theory of the Film, 42.
17. Balázs, Theory of the Film, 62–63.
18. Balázs, Theory of the Film, 47.
19. For Jacques Rancière this logic of fiction characterizes the coordinates of
the aesthetic age: “the potential of meaning inherent in everything silent
and the proliferation of modes of speech and levels of meaning,”
Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London:
Continuum, 2004), 37.
20. See Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser, Automedialität:
Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien (München: Fink,
2008), 7–16.
21. See Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel
Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).
22. See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the
Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), esp. 12–
30; and Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009).
23. See esp. William E. Stewart’s Die Reisebeschreibung und ihre Theorie
im Deutschland des 18. Jahrhunderts (Bonn: Bouvier, 1978), which
examines the concept of autopsy as a central trope in travel literature.
More recently, Vanessa Agnew has revisited this notion in the diaries of
Thomas Cook. See Agnew, “Dissecting the Cannibal: Comparing the
Function of the Autopsy Principle in the Diaries and Narrative of Captain
Cook’s Second Voyage,” in Marginal Voices, Marginal Forms: Diaries
in European Literature and History, ed. Rachel Langford and Russell
West (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 50–60. Laura Rascaroli briefly touches
upon the autopsy principle in her discussion of diary films. See Rascaroli,
The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (London:
Wallflower Press, 2009), 119.
24. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of
Symbols (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 119.
25. Goodman, Languages of Art, 121.
26. Goodman, Languages of Art, 195.
27. David N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2007), 16.
28. Marius Timmann Mjaaland defines autopsy as “a continuous reflection on
self, facing the interruption of death and the problem of despair,”
Mjaaland, Autopsia: Self, Death, and God after Kierkegaard and
Derrida, trans. Brian McNeil (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2008), 9.
29. Slavoj Žižek, “Foreword: The Camera’s Posthuman Eye,” in Henry Bond,
Lacan at the Scene (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009), xiv.
30. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006), 17.
31. See Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American
Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), esp. 23–59.
32. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 43 and
169.
33. Tom Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and
Early Cinema,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo
Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995), 35.
34. Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body,” 36.
35. Notably, the film has not only become a reference point for cinematic
realism but has also been invoked as a cinematic model in theorizing the
history of video games. See Anthony R. Guneratne, “The Birth of a New
Realism: Photography, Painting and the Advent of Documentary Cinema,”
Film History 10.2 (1998), 165–81; as well as Mark J. P. Wolf, The
Medium of the Video Game (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).
36. See André Gaudreault, From Plato to Lumière: Narration and
Monstration in Literature and Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2009), 124–34.
37. See Ben Brewster, “Periodization of Early Cinema,” in American
Cinema’s Transitional Era: Story, Style and Filmmaking, 1907–1913,
ed. Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2001).
38. Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative
Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1994), 25.
39. Drawing on Émile Benveniste’s apparatus of enunciation, Casetti views
the filmic body as the result of cinema’s expressive potential. Cinematic
enunciation “refers to an appropriation of the expressive possibilities of
the cinema which give body and consistency to a film.” See Casetti,
Inside the Gaze, 18.
40. Casetti, Inside the Gaze, 41.
41. Casetti, Inside the Gaze, 10.
42. Casetti, Inside the Gaze, 41.
43. Casetti, Inside the Gaze, 42.
44. See Gunning, D. W. Griffith, 18–22.
45. Gunning, D. W. Griffith, 15.
46. Gunning, D. W. Griffith, 23.
47. Gunning, D. W. Griffith, 21.
48. Gunning, D. W. Griffith, 21.
49. Gunning, D. W. Griffith, 21.
50. Gaudreault, From Plato to Lumière, 120.
51. Gaudreault, From Plato to Lumière, 5.
52. See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 3–26.
53. Gaudreault appropriates Louis Francoeur’s notion of a ‘cultural series’ to
describe media-specific and artform-specific trajectories (such as
theatricality and literariness) that inform and shape the development of
cinema. See Gaudreault’s afterword to From Plato to Lumière, “Cinema
between Literariness and Intermediality,” 151–64.
54. Gaudreault, From Plato to Lumière, 164. In a footnote Gaudreault adds:
“One day we will have to define such a term [i.e., filmicality] in a way
that takes into account the way narration effects monstration, thereby
avoiding, as Paul Ricoeur suggests in the preface of this book, ‘any
subordination of the filmic to the literary,’ so that we may one day
definitely pass from the literary to the filmic…,” Gaudreault, From Plato
to Lumière, 206.
55. Robert Burgoyne, “The Cinematic Narrator: The Logic and Pragmatics of
Impersonal Narration,” Journal of Film and Video 42.1 (1990), 3–16.
56. Burgoyne, “The Cinematic Narrator,” 15.
57. Marie-Laure Ryan, “The Pragmatics of Personal and Impersonal Fiction,”
Poetics 10.6 (1981): 517–39.
58. For an examination of what we require from ‘personhood,’ see Murray
Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
59. Burgoyne, “The Cinematic Narrator,” 5.
60. Burgoyne, “The Cinematic Narrator,” 15.
61. Burgoyne, “The Cinematic Narrator,” 14.
62. See Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London:
Routledge, 1992), 95 and 165–67. This narrative mode is often associated
with classical cinema. It can be aligned productively with Bazinian
cinematic realism, in which deep focus and lateral depth of a field of
vision recreate both the effect of an unobtrusive reality and the typical
parameters of human perceptions.
63. Edward Branigan, Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film
Theory (New York: Routledge, 2006), 3.
64. Julio Moreno, “Subjective Cinema: And the Problem of Film in the First
Person,” The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television 7.4. (1953), 349.
65. Moreno, “Subjective Cinema,” 352.
66. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye, 238.
67. See Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in
Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1984).
68. Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film, 143.
69. See Sobchack, The Address of the Eye, 240–44.
70. For summaries of the different theoretical perspectives from which Lady
in the Lake has been described as a failure see Branigan, Narrative
Comprehension and Film, 142–57; and Sobchack, The Address of the
Eye, 230–36.
71. Lady in the Lake, advertisement, USA, MGM, 1947. The same year that
Lady in the Lake came out, Hans Richter’s surrealist film collaboration
Dreams that Money Can Buy (1947) appeared, which mocks the notion of
Hollywood as a commercial dream factory by transforming such
promotional addresses to the spectator into interior monologue. In the
framing narrative an internal voice instructs Joe Narcissus how to turn his
introspective gift into a million dollar enterprise. Looking at himself in the
mirror Joe discovers that he can look inside himself and perhaps into
anyone. Following the advice of his inner (super-ego’s?) voice, he starts
selling custom-tailored dreams. The examples that follow are dreams
contributed by Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and
Alexander Calder.
72. The shortcomings in creating an immersive effect provide the blueprint for
Robbe-Grillet’s literary experiments with camera-eye narration in La
Jalousie. His strategy of telling the story through a series of “point-of-
view shots” deconstructs a number of tenets in classical film theory. By
relying almost exclusively on scenic descriptions, the novel emulates
filmic monstration and its privileging simultaneity over succession and
presentation over exposition. However, this preoccupation with visual
and perceptual information creates a defamiliarizing effect. Rather than
creating an object of identification it creates a conceptual blank, whose
identity is to be construed by the reader. The intermedial irony of La
Jalousie arises form juxtaposing two forms of narration that have been
traditionally considered media-specific to literary fiction and narrative
film respectively: the subjective first-person verbal narration and the
 objective presentation of purely visual information in film narratives. On
intermedial dynamics in camera-eye narration in literary fiction and theory
see Christian Quendler, “The Conceptual Integration of Intermediality:
Literary and Cinematic Camera-Eye Narratives,” in Blending and the
Study of Narrative: Approaches and Applications, ed. Ralf Schneider
and Marcus Hartner (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), 199–227.
73. Erving Goffman calls this relationship of identity “resource continuity”:
“[E]ach artifact and person involved in a framed activity has a continuing
biography, that is, a traceable life (or the remains of one) before and after
the event, and each biography ensures a continuity of absolute
distinguishableness, that is, selfsameness,” Goffman, Frame Analysis: An
Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 1986), 287.
74. Joseph P. Brinton, “Subjective Camera or Subjective Audience?,”
Hollywood Quarterly 2.4 (1947), 360.
75. See e.g. Geoff Andrew, “La Femme défendue,” Time Out Film Guide
2001, ed. John Pym (London: Penguin, 2002), 379; and Gilles Marsolais,
“Du regard à la rupture,” 24 images 88–89 (1997), 32–33.
76. Andrew, “La Femme défendue,” 379.
77. See also Marsolais, “Du regard à la rupture.”
6 Roles and Models

In 1962 Jonas Mekas proclaimed the beginning of a New American Cinema, a

counter-cinematic movement that insisted on cinema as an “indivisibly […]
personal expression.”1 Following an international trend towards personal
filmmaking, such as the Free Cinema documentary movement in England and
the Nouvelle Vague in France, Mekas discerns a new generation of
independent filmmakers. Although Mekas’ references are mainly to
filmmakers who explored the boundaries between documentary and fictional
genres, such as Lionel Rogosin and John Cassavetes, this movement became
closely associated with the autobiographical turn in avant-garde filmmaking.
Partaking in the general spirit of artistic rebellion, the New American Cinema
stood united by a common ethos rather than an aesthetic vision.

As in the other arts in America today—painting, poetry, sculpture, theater,

where fresh winds have been blowing for the last few years—our
rebellion against the old, official, corrupt and pretentious is primarily an
ethical one. We are concerned with Man. We are concerned with what is
happening to Man.2

Mekas’ insistence on the ethical dimension of artistic innovation underscores

the social and political agenda that accompanies a personal conception of art.
The invocation of a universal and capitalized ‘Man’ resounds a reactionary
note in this ethical commitment that points to the challenges and contradictions
with which this rebellion was embroiled. On the one hand, the New American
Cinema was presented as a counter-cultural underground movement that
opposed the corporate identity of commercial cinema by developing a
network of individual and independent artists. On the other hand, it largely
subscribed to the sexual politics of the French New Wave by tacitly equating
the personal camera with the “first person masculine singular.”3 Mekas’
rhetoric of the personal owes much to the romantic endeavors of discovering
the universal in the intimately personal.4 In this post-romantic reading, the
personal becomes an interface between the individual and the social. It
addresses the questions of human nature, character and spirit along with
issues of freedom and self-determination.5
Reclaiming cinema as indivisibly personal follows a paradoxical move that
defines the essence of cinema by its freedom to respond to representational
conventions and industrial standards of commercial cinema. The personal
becomes a contested realm where ethical and aesthetic demands are weighed
against one another. Thus, the politics of vision appears inseparable from the
poetics of generalizing and abstracting personal experiences. To complicate
matters, the representational practices that form the generic and intermedial
frameworks of camera-eye conceptions are themselves charged with
assumptions and models of personhood.
This chapter continues to investigate the personal politics of the camera eye
by examining the aesthetic interventions of radically subjective camera
conceptions that developed in the autobiographical turn of U.S. avant-garde
film during the 1960s and 1970s. In the previous chapter I addressed personal
conceptions of the camera as representational forms that emerge from an
underlying system of signification. The camera-eye notions discussed in this
chapter directly address such signifying systems by invoking the personal as a
creative origin. Instead of regarding the camera as a person in the sense of a
social role or a pro-nominal form of representation, the camera is conceived
of as a model or modeling activity that produces such forms.
The difference can be illustrated by the complementary senses found in the
Latin and Greek etymologies for the term person.6 The Latin word persona
appears to result from a blending of the name for the Etruscan deity Persehone
or Perspona, which came to signify ‘mask’, and the Latin verb personare (“to
sound through”) which refers to the words that were sounded through a mask
representing the goddess. Originally reserved for religious contexts, this
notion of persona as a mask was later used to describe social and civic roles
of Roman citizens, but was not applied to foreigners, slaves, women or
children. As a mask the person is reduced to a civic role and thereby confined
by societal prescriptions. The Greek word prosōpon also takes on the
theatrical meaning of a mask. However, it originally referred to the human
face and was derived from the verbs “to see” or “to be seen.” Person here
refers to the face as the primary site where human character and spirit
manifest in meaningful gestures. This etymology resists an account of the
person in the light of social functions, but calls for attentiveness to what is
presented perceptually in order to see the person being manifest.
 The visual aspect of the person in the Greek etymology of person and its
opposition to the verbal re-conception in the Latin appropriation draws
attention to an important agenda in personal avant-garde filmmaking. Rather
than restricting person to a regime of (verbal) articulation defined by a social
grammar of representational forms, the personal comes into being through
perceptual exchanges of seeing and being seen that are not confined by what
can be socially shared and expressed by representational conventions.
Moreover, by embracing social taboos and experiences that defy
conceptualization or measurement, the filmmakers’ personal visions may
challenge the social norms of what a person is and what a person may
publically reveal. Reflecting the Greek and Latin etymologies of person, the
avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage warned his audience against those that
insist on the person as a “‘mask’ or a ‘screen’ to hide or lie behind” and
thereby prevent the public surfacing of a “true-resemblance-of-self.”7
In order to fully appreciate the scope of personal camera-eye metaphors
and the autobiographical endeavors of avant-garde film, it is important to see
how notions of the personal have been used to re-define cinema as an
institution, the medium specificity of film and its expressive modalities.
Complementarily, notions of art have been used to promote film as a means of
reconciling individual and social selves, a way of creating new socially
shared ways of seeing and a form of approaching the body as the political
base of creating socially shared visions. Mekas’ institutional effort in
fostering a counter-cultural community of independent and avant-garde
filmmaking illustrates how the discourse of the personal was appropriated as
a strategy of institutional opposition and as a framework for redefining cinema
in radically subjective terms. Looking at the works of Jerome Hill, Brakhage
and Carolee Schneemann, I want to outline three increasingly expansive
conceptions of a personal camera eye that not only reflect on the self as an
image but also attempt to re-experience and re-live the self as image.
In his cinematic memoir Film Portrait (1967), Hill responds to the images
of himself, which he has acquired and produced throughout his life, by re-
animating them. The process of filmmaking is explored as an aesthetic and
mystical experience of full presence in which past and future, image and
image-maker merge. Brakhage’s autobiographical films may be seen to
expand on this fusion by exploring film as complex metaphors of visual
consciousness. Brakhage attempts to register processes of seeing that express
the artist’s physiological and psychic states. The camera thereby becomes a
means of vicarious experience that allows the viewer to share ways of seeing
that defy social rationalizations of vision. Envisioning an archaic “world
before the beginning of the word,”8 Brakhage embarks on a new mythology of
vision through filmic and personal confrontations with sex, birth and death in
everyday domestic life. The multimedia and performance artist Carolee
Schneemann shares Brakhage’s preoccupation with an archaic visual
tradition. Her early autobiographical work developed in a critical dialogue
with Brakhage. If Brakhage was fascinated with creating an Eye Myth (1967),
to use the title of one of his films, then Schneemann’s preoccupation is
perhaps best encapsulated in her work Eye Body (1963). For Brakhage, the
paradoxical notion of an eye myth describes a speech that expresses visually
the psychic and physiological roots of human consciousness. For Schneemann,
the body is not only a primary site of lived experience, it is also closely
linked to social taboos and thereby a site where social orders and cultural
myths are formed.

Personal Cinema as Institution, Medium and Genre

Mekas’ contribution to creating communal networks of artists with diverse
aesthetic and political positions was groundbreaking for the
institutionalization of avant-garde cinema. The New American Cinema Group
founded in 1960 soon developed into the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which in
contrast to earlier film distribution organizations such as the Independent Film
Makers Association or Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16 indiscriminately accepted
all submissions. Thanks to generous funding by Hill, the screening
organization The Film-Makers’ Cinematheque would be superseded by the
Anthology Film Archives, a museum, preservation center and screening venue
of avant-garde film.
As Paul Arthur points out, Mekas’ strategy was to create a loose network of
an entire host of organizations, which were frequently run by the same group
of people: “In the second report of the New American Cinema Group (1962),
Mekas declares, ‘Let’s remain disorganizedly organized’—a tactic intended
to both guarantee maximum personal freedom and to disguise the real fragility
of the network. It was, to borrow an oft-repeated mantra, ‘organizing with
mirrors.’ ”9 The ethos of the personal cinema promoted by Mekas projected
an organization in which filmmakers could obtain something from the
collective while interacting with each other according to their own
preferences and objectives.
Reclaiming a personal cinema was a double-pronged attack on industrial
modes of film production: It set out to defend the artistic freedom and integrity
of independent filmmakers and to define the essence and true destiny of film.
In his manifesto for a New American Cinema, Mekas rejects all forms of
censorship including licensing regulations and promotes models of film
production and distribution that are based on limited partnership and co-
operative distribution systems. The ethics of personal filmmaking become
particularly evident in the ways social norms and representational
conventions affect decisions in the filmmaking process. Mekas’ argument that
the very nature or virtue of cinema can only be found on personal and
autobiographical grounds performs a conceptual blend of self and medium that
is typical of camera-eye metaphors. It is based on the contention that an
authentic mediation of the self will also vouch for the true character of the
medium. Autobiography becomes a mode to reflect upon film as something
that is indivisible like an individual, singular in its physical configuration and
that is subject to a process of individuation as it comes-into-being in acts of
formation.
The autobiographical film avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s radicalizes
the auteurist understanding of the personal camera as the particular style of a
filmmaker. Personal style is more than the filmmaker’s signature that
vouchsafes for an unmistakable artistic identity. More than the author-function
of a discourse, the filmmaker’s signatory style is to be read as a psycho-
aesthetic fingerprint expressive of the filmmaker’s state. Embracing an
expansive conception of personality, filmmakers like Hollis Frampton and
Brakhage argued for an equally extensive definition of style and against the
idea that an artist’s personal style represents the goal of a continuous and
progressive development towards artistic identity.10 Early in his career
Brakhage began to sign and title his films by directly scratching on the surface
of the film, a practice that encapsulates this expressionist aesthetic and the
attempt at fusing the filmmaker’s physical and psychic state with the material
and technical make-up of the medium. The film credits are material traces that
point to “the human being that it [i.e., the film] had passed through”; they are
in Brakhage’s post-romantic diction, “the very soul of the maker writ large.”11
When they are run through the projector, they reveal the very rhythm of the
projector and thereby point to the technical apparatus upon which the
viewer’s experience depends. Such a personal camera does not simply record
and document but gives testimony to experiences that are deeply rooted in the
human body. It actively engages with the material basis of meaning in order to
project a primal vision, an immediate and deep understanding of the self in
opposition to the social roles and dramatic enactments performed by the self.
In order to project film as a genuine medium of self-expression, filmmakers
distanced themselves from fictional and dramatic re-enactments as well as
strictly documentary uses of film. Thus film autobiographies represent a
peculiar genre. The artistic claim of these films sets them apart from personal
records and documentaries. Their focus on the artist’s life and everyday
experience discriminates them from fictional enactments. Film
autobiographies must be true to life, art but not fiction. In other words, the
aesthetic experience of life and film in this approach is seen as the difference
that brings about the distinction between documentary and fictional forms.
Sitney associates the rise of film autobiography as a genre with “the
examination of the image/language relationship.”12 Yet, rather than
approaching film as a language, filmmakers contested the primacy of language
as a model of making meaning. By describing the challenge of film
autobiographies in linguistic terms, critics have inadvertently taken the very
position filmmakers attempted to move away from. Echoing Sitney, Elizabeth
Bruss gauges the suitability of the film as an autobiographical medium but
taking the linguistic systems of tenses and pronouns as a benchmark.13 Lejeune
and Raymond Bellour proposed complementary approaches to addressing the
existential relationship between the autobiographer and a filmic subject of
autobiography. Whereas Lejeune points to the context of alternative film
screening situations, where the personal presence of the filmmaker vouches
for an autobiographical act, Bellour sees a possible linkage between the
existential and represented self in the split temporality of the photographic
image as a trace (or present) of the past.14
The challenge of film autobiography is to create a filmic self, as opposed to
a self in language, that is neither a fictional enactment nor simply a document
of the self.15 Instead, the self-image projected in autobiographical acts should
include a genetic dimension that links the past self with the present self, as
well as the image and image-maker. It is a document imbued with fantasy and
desire that mark the autobiographer’s response to social roles and
representations of the self. In autobiography this psychological dimension is
linked to a quest for a structuring or ordering principle that guides the
reconstruction of the lived past and the coherence of the self-image. As we
will see, the medium of film not only serves as a resource that informs the
autobiographical conception of the self, it is also invested as a form of life.16
In his own extensive and enduring contribution to personal filmmaking,
Mekas approached this evolution of a self-image through a diaristic method.
As David James has pointed out, Mekas’ diaristic approach revolves around
the distinction between the process and activity of keeping a film diary and
the genre or finished product of the diary film.17 The practice of the film diary
remains personal, provisional and private. Mekas often compared his filming
to taking notes under great temporal constraints. The subsequently edited diary
films appropriate such personal practices as an aesthetic form, to which the
title of the first diary film, Diaries, Notes and Sketches also Known as
Walden (1969), programmatically alludes. Thoreau’s Walden provides a
genetic and aesthetic model for Mekas’ idea of a filmic self-image that
evolves in a process of transcribing private notes into a public form of
communication. Like Thoreau, Mekas explores private and fragmentary
discourse as an aesthetic form. As Arthur puts it, “[w]hat before he had seen
as private, provisional, and exergual was now recognized as its own
justification and its own telos.”18 In a much later film, Birth of a Nation
(1997), Mekas reviews four decades of his involvement in independent film
culture. Appropriating the title of D. W. Griffith’s film classic, Mekas
reverences independent film as an alternative to the industrial mode of
production that rose with Griffith. Capturing “[o]ne hundred and sixty
portraits or rather appearances, sketches and glimpses of avant-garde
filmmakers and film activists” Mekas depicts cinema as an alternative
community or what he describes as “the invisible, but essential nation of
cinema. We are Cinema.”19
Mekas explicitly distances himself from the documentary genre. In a
segment of the film that is entitled “ME” and “Autobiography,” he inserts the
reminder: “This is not a documentary film.” Recalling René Magritte’s “ceci
n’est pas une pipe,” the insert, however, does not warn us not to mistake the
representation for the object it depicts. It rather advises us not to create an
objective distance by framing the footage as a documentary object. Or, put
positively, it invites us to view the film as a contribution to an art of living
memories.
From Psychodrama to Life Models

At the beginning of this chapter, I proposed to view the autobiographical turn

in avant-garde filmmaking as an emphatic move towards a creative notion of
personality. Rather than figuring as a representational form, as a mask or a
role of the self, the personal camera eye is associated with the modeling
activity that engenders representations of the self. As the filmic creation of an
autobiographical self, this notion of the camera eye emerges from reflecting or
acting upon the difference between image and the image-maker.
The shift from role to model can be illustrated by two important aesthetic
strategies of endowing images of the self with an increased sense of being.
The first introduces role-play as a method of self-revelation in the form of a
psychodrama. The second applies the auteurist preference of model over
actors to non-fictional filmmaking. Psycho-dramatic role-playing and the
auteurist’s use of life models can be seen as two kinds of ‘othering’ that
provide complementary descriptions of what a personal camera is.
Psychodrama explores the self as other. By experiencing oneself through
acts of mirroring, doubling and role-reversals, psychodrama becomes a means
of revealing the psycho-social structures to which the self is subjected. The
gaze of the psycho-dramatic camera eye is reconstructive. By tracing the
contours of multiple and split selves, it taps into the libidinal and ideological
dispositions of cinema as a symbolic system. Put in psychoanalytical terms,
the primary identification with mirror images and fictional counterparts—the
‘small other,’ in Lacan’s terminology—does not resolve in the fiction of a
unified self, rather it aims at uncovering a ‘big other,’ the very nature of the
mirror and the symbolic order on which this fiction is based. By contrast, in
the paradigm of the model, the recognition of the other as self can be
compared to painter’s creative gaze. Rather than reconstructing a
phantasmagoric image of a big other, the painter presents himself as the
medium that turns reality into a symbolic script. Drawing on Robert Bresson’s
distinction between actors and models, psycho-dramatic acts and the
performances of life models can be described as opposing movements of
externalization and internalization.20 However, this description is complicated
by the respective frames within which these movements are perceived and the
specific ways the camera is seen to act upon them.
Psychodrama empowers the actor as an agent of reality, who is given the
freedom to act out psychological conflicts within the constraints of a self-
enacted fiction. As a therapeutic method psychodrama was developed in
critical response to the therapist-centered approach of dream analysis. It
encourages participants to act out their dreams, anxieties and conflicts in
dramatized social situations.21 In a parallel fashion, Sitney contrasts Maya
Deren and Alexander Hammid’s landmark psychodrama Meshes of the
Afternoon (1943) with earlier surrealist films such as Man Ray’s Étoile de
Mer (1928) and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929). While these films set
out to explore irrational imagery of a secret dream language, the dream-like
experience presented in Meshes of the Afternoon is focalized by the
protagonist’s inner quest for sexual identity.22 Deren objected to strictly
personal and psychoanalytical interpretations of the film. Her aim was to
create a “mythological experience”23 that engages with elementary mental
forms of culture. To the extent that myths encode the individual’s response to
his or her social existence, they promise privileged insights into the social
organization of shared values and symbolic forms. By re-experiencing
ourselves through myths, we may hope to discover something about the real
nature of our social existence.
In Meshes of the Afternoon, the protagonist’s quest for sexual identity turns
into a critical analysis of sexual politics in a patriarchal system. This
becomes particularly evident in the metonymic logic between the symbols
used in the film and the symbolic system of articulation sustained by the
cinematic apparatus. The film opens with the image of a flower, which a
goddess-like hand from above places in the path of the female protagonist.
Soon after the protagonist enters the domestic sphere of her home, the flower
is replaced by a phallic symbol of a knife; its metallic blade is linked to a
mysterious mirrored-faced woman, whom the protagonist chases throughout
her dream. Outside the dream, this allegory of a woman as an image of male
self-reflection is associated with the protagonist’s lover, played by Deren’s
husband, and the cinematic apparatus. A mirror shot of Hammid’s face
introduces a shot/reverse-shot sequence that traces the man’s fragmenting gaze
over the woman’s body. As if responding to the specular regime of the gaze,
the flower next to the woman’s body turns into a knife. When the woman
seizes the knife to attack her lover, his face turns out to be a mirror (see
Figure 6.1). Shards fall on a beach and are washed over by the sea. The
destruction of the cinematic apparatus as the looking-glass of a male viewer is
followed by a second ending in which the man finds the dead body of his wife
covered in broken glass and sea grass.
 If the cinematic apparatus registers, reconstructs and ultimately projects the
meaning of the psycho-dramatic act, then breaking through to this apparatus
represents the ultimate fantasy of the real. In Meshes of the Afternoon, the
woman refuses to be an image by destroying the image-making machinery. The
act of breaking through to the place from which the big other speaks is
represented as an ambivalent act that contrasts the woman’s liberated nature
in a boundless, oceanic space with the depiction of her social suicide death as
a nature morte. Deren’s disruption of the filmic space articulates a feminist
critique of the sexual politics that are inscribed into the cinematic apparatus.
It projects an alternative vision of cinema by staging the interaction between
role-play and camera-work in antagonistic terms. Deren’s ingenious move
was to develop a self-portrait through—that is with and against—the male
gaze and the authorial power attributed to the camera.
Meshes of the Afternoon is almost diametrically opposed to Brakhage’s
psychodramatic approach in Reflections on Black (1955), where breaking
through to the filmic apparatus becomes an act of assimilative identification.
The film is structured around the erotic visions of a blind man after he passes
a prostitute in the streets on his way home. The filmmaker’s identification
with the blind man is highlighted by having the man’s eyes scratched out on
the filmstrip, which turns them into shimmering stars during the projection
(see Figure 6.2). The metaphor of the filmmaker as a blind seer that emerges
from this fusion of representational and material dimensions of film shows
how the role enacted can be turned into a model. The blind man in Reflections
on Black provides a role model that enacts a generic description for
Brakhage’s aesthetic vision. It anticipates what Brakhage later would
describe as hypnagogic or closed-eye vision, in which sensory perception
blends with imagination and hallucination.
Figure 6.1 Disrupting the cinematic space in Meshes of the Afternoon.
Figure 6.2 Seeing through the film in Reflections on Black.

Another important topical frame that transposes the experiences of a

character into an aesthetic model of pure and creative imagination is child
vision. As Marjorie Keller points out in The Untutored Eye, notions of
childhood are particularly pertinent to an artistic tradition that reflects on the
essential and specific nature of cinema with reference to their own personal
disposition.24 Notably, Mekas’ diaristic approach developed along this
detour. His film Diaries, Notes and Sketches was originally conceived of as
a portrait of New York seen through the diary of a young girl. Sitney aptly
described this plan as “cinematic ventriloquism.”25 Like the blind seer,
childhood has been heavily invested in new mythological approaches that
hope to rediscover the sacred origin of art in childhood, which lends itself to
a developmental model of the arts that is radically anti-institutional.26
Whereas psychodrama approaches reality within ritualized and
mythological understandings of role-play, the paradigm of the model pursues
the reverse strategy by introducing the real into the realm of fiction. Moving
away from theatrical conventions of the studio system by shooting on location
with non-professional actors, who were often given limited rehearsals or
asked to improvise, filmmakers in the 1940s and 1950s increasingly drew on
real-life models as artistic means of expression. Robert Bresson’s work with
lay actors, whom he referred to as models, strongly influenced the auteur
politics and aesthetics of the French New Wave cinema. Bresson began his
career as a painter and his recourse to painting as a conceptual frame for
understanding cinematography as a mode of writing that taps into non-rational
and non-logical forms of expression had a strong impact on the
autobiographical avant-garde film movement.
Not unlike psychodrama, which shifts the focus from structural and
systematic accounts of the psyche to personal re-enactments, Bresson does not
conceive of cinema as language but as a form of writing. “Cinematography
is,” as Bresson puts it, “a writing with images in movement and with
sounds.”27 The essence of this kind of writing is not the medium in a material
or technological sense but style, which programmatically places the camera
into the personal domain of the filmmaker. Like personal style, the auteurist
notion of the model provides a conceptual basis for defining an essence of
cinema. In fact, models, generally speaking, are abstractions of reality; they
are meant to capture or convey an essence of reality. Accordingly, camera and
model can be seen as complementary means of writing with reality; they
reconcile the essence of reality and subjective expression. Film begins,
Bresson writes, “when your secret wishes pass into your models.”28
The personalization of the camera correlates with the depersonalization of
the model. Bresson opposes the model to the actor. The difference between
actors and models is one between seeming and being.29 He associated the
actor with a reproductive use of the camera. Continuing in a theatrical
tradition, the actor addresses the camera as a public eye, creating an
impression of reality that is already based on methods of acting and
representational conventions. By contrast, the models call for a creative use
of the camera, a filmic form of writing or painting, in which the camera
reveals something to the director that the public would not see.30
 Models are “taken from life.”31 In contrast to actors who operate by means
of inspiration and invention, models bring forth—unbeknownst to them—
habits and routines of life: “Thrown into the physical action, his [i.e., the
model’s] voice starting from even syllables, takes on automatically the
inflections and modulations proper to his true nature.”32 Models, as Wendy
Steiner put it, “straddle an ontological divide.”33 The models’ lack of self-
control becomes the filmmaker’s means of empowerment. On the one hand,
lacking self-control allows models to be truly or—as Bresson puts it
—“divinely” themselves as opposed to pretending to be someone else. On the
other hand, by being themselves as opposed to conforming to the director’s
expectations, models increase the filmmaker’s sensibilities and open up the
possibility of expressing an essence of reality.34
Bresson describes the communication between filmmaker and model as
“telepathic exchanges” and “divinations”: “The thing that matters is not what
they show me but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not
suspect is in them.”35 Like the camera, Bresson’s human models are also
epistemological tools. More than an aid to improve one’s observational skills
and craft, the model reveals what can be experienced and known. It helps to
“[m]ake visible what, without you [i.e. the cinematographer], might perhaps
never have been seen.”36
Muse is the traditional name that personifies this epistemological function.
The model turned object becomes a spiritual subject, a conduit that brings the
artist into a communion with a higher reality. Regarding the model as a muse
is the aesthetic compensation for an ethical infringement. Although models are
“taken from life,” their situation in life is typically arranged for them. The
model as a person is usually not considered to be part of the creative
decision-making process. For Bresson the expressive potential of models
does not come from their intentional contributions but from the discoveries
they afford the filmmaker.
The shift from role to model in personal conceptions of the camera eye is
driven by a quest for the creative and modeling self that is freed from social
roles and definitions of the personal. As I will argue in the next part of this
chapter, Hill’s Film Portrait approaches his existential self in an artistic
dialogue with the images of himself. The subsequent discussion of Brakhage’s
autobiographical films shows how the aesthetic quest for a model of the self
is caught up with the ethical demands to liberate the model from its role as a
vicarious agent. I will conclude with Schneemann’s expansion of cinema into
multi-media performances as a response to the emancipatory demands of the
model as an expression of lived experience.

Animating the Self in Jerome Hill’s Film Portrait

Many filmmakers made the search for a filmic reconstruction of their lives the
focus of their films. An exemplary case in point for such a meta-cinematic
approach is Hill’s Film Portrait, which Sitney describes as “a self-portrait
on film and a portrait of the self of film.”37
Born in 1905 into a wealthy family that built the Great Northern Railway
empire, Hill’s childhood coincides with the rise of Hollywood cinema. In his
film he could draw on a rich corpus of early photographs and home movies,
some of which were even shot by a Hollywood cameraman. The film begins
with a mirror shot that shows Hill shaving his face. The scene is emblematic
of everyday life and congenial to the reflective mode of autobiographical
genres. Hill masterfully blends this mundane scene of self-reflection with his
artistic vocation as a painter. The colors of the film are negatively inverted
and the water in which he rinses his razor looks like colorful emulsions
required for painting or developing a film. An ordinary act of shaving is
turned into a moment of personal self-reflection and artistic creation.
When Hill addresses the camera as his mirror image, he comments on the
irreducible division between the filmmaker as an image and image-maker,
which recalls Émile Benveniste’s distinction between the grammatical subject
and the subject of enunciation. The filmmaker who comes into being in the act
of filmmaking finds himself as an image and a representation of the past. He
addresses his image as a split signifier: The representational limits of the
image as a record of the past point to the elusive existence of the image-maker
that is always presupposed but cannot be positively represented. Hill alludes
to this by punctuating the negative photographic print with positive frames:
“This is the me that am. [Several frames of photographically positive images
of Hill shaving appear.] Or rather, that was the me that was at that instance,
but will never be again. The me that am, I am afraid, doesn’t even last as long
as a single frame [Insert of one positive image frame] of a motion picture
film” (see Figures 6.3 and 6.4).
Figure 6.3 Jerome Hill’s ‘me’ in Film Portrait.
Figure 6.4 Jerome Hill’s ‘am’ in Film Portrait.

The phrase “this is the me that am” can be read as a linguistic attempt of the
predicating imagistic self, a form of being that is reserved for the self of the
image-maker. In the dependent clause, the pronoun “I” is elided. It is implied
in the verb form “am,” just like the subject of enunciation is implied in the
filmic gesture of showing, expressed verbally in the deictic phrase “this is.”
Hill uses language as a model to reflect on the relationship between the image
and image-maker. Like language, film is presented as a medium of symbolic
interaction in which the individual encounters him- or herself as an object. In
the terminology of the social philosopher George Herbert Mead, the self as
image corresponds to a “me.” It represents a set of socially organized
attitudes that the self has acquired and internalized. The image-maker
performs the role of the ‘I’ that responds to and acts upon the images of the
‘me.’38
Like Mead, Hill depicts memory as conversation with oneself. Hill’s
opening statement echoes Mead’s description of the relation between I and me
in the act of remembering: “The ‘I’ of this [remembered] moment is present in
the ‘me’ of the next moment. There again I cannot turn around quick enough to
catch myself. I become a ‘me’ in so far as I remember what I said.” In memory
the ‘I’ is present as experience; but it can only be identified as a ‘me.’ On the
one hand, the ‘I’ performs a function of epistemological continuity that allows
us to go back into the experience of the past or imagine possibilities of a
future. Mead calls this functional relation the “spokesman” of the ‘I.’ On the
other hand, going back in time relies on memory images, on which the ‘I’
appears as a “historical figure”: “It is what you were a second ago that is the
‘I’ of the ‘me.’”39
The ambiguity of Hill’s Film Portrait as a filmic portrait of himself and his
portrait of film is programmatic of his overall strategy to fuse the I and me as
well as his biographical self and the medium film. Language provides the
conceptual model for this fusion and to a large extent language explains what
the film aims to illustrate. Hill’s voice-over narration guides the viewer
through filmic and photographic material from over seven decades of his life.
His commentary often draws attention to the shifting modality of moving
images. In the opening sequence he comments on a compilation of factual
recordings, frivolous enactments and curious animations that depict possible
and unlikely future selves (among them are Hill as the pope and the president
of the United States).
It seems curious that Hill frames his autobiography with speculations about
the future. Are we to view the ensuing reconstruction of his life in a similar
way as we view these whimsical projections of the future? The montage of
hypothetical futures brings out a crucial difference between the me and the I.
Whereas the me is defined by a socially organized context, the I that is
responding to this context comes with a degree of freedom and choice. Hill’s
self-portrait as an artist expresses this freedom by reviewing and revising the
social standing and perception he received through his family. Throughout the
first part of the film, Hill draws mainly on family photographs and early
professionally produced home movies. He exposes the phony and staged
character of his family’s newsreels and uses excerpts from his own filmic
artwork to document his life.
 Film becomes a material and symbolic means to respond to and re-inscribe
himself into the images he has received and created. Again, Mead’s theory of
symbolic interaction can help to account for such an organic fusion of self and
medium. Influenced by the experimental psychology of Wilhelm Wundt, Mead
conceived of the symbolic interaction between I and me in analogy to the
organism’s relation to the world of objects. The physical object is to the
organism what the social object is to the self. Whereas the interactions among
individuals manifest themselves as symbolic exchanges, the organism’s
involvement with the surrounding world of objects produces signifying
gestures.40 The apparent reversal of time made possible by movies can be
seen as such a gesture, as Hill explains over a montage of photographs that
show him at an increasingly younger age, starting in his sixties and going all
the way back to his infancy. Like Mead’s spokesman of the ‘I’, the sequence
allows Hill to revisit his past. It shows Hill at different stages of his life at a
great variety of formal and informal occasions reflecting a wide array of
attitudes towards himself, which all form a part of his response to his social
self.
In another sequence the intersection of organic and symbolic is illustrated
by juxtaposing two kinds of animations: the technological process of
producing moving images and the artistic technique or genre of animated
drawing. Hill’s earliest impressions of his father are of him handling a
photographic apparatus. In making this film he found a series of photographs
that his father had taken from a single angle while his family was getting ready
to have their picture taken. This allowed Hill to animate the series of
photographs into a moving picture. In addition, he hand-painted colorful and
translucent figures onto the film negatives, including a wiggly family dog. The
hand-painted animation adds a playful spirit that captures the spirit of
childhood memory; it also pays tribute to the animation techniques Hill used
in his early film work. In his short films Magic Umbrella (1965) and Death
in the Forenoon (1966), he applied hand-coloring and hand-pointed
animations to films that had been shot decades earlier. Magic Umbrella uses a
home movie from 1927. Death in the Forenoon animates Hill’s film
recordings of a bull fight shot in 1934.
Hill’s Film Portrait develops as an autobiographical dialogue with film
history. His artworks, which document this conversation, are themselves
contributions to his personal film history. The history of film technology plays
a pivotal role in this memoir. His early home videos were state of the art film
productions, which distorted and idealized family life in the manner of
Hollywood movies. Hill was equally disenchanted by the home movie craze
in the 1920s, which he characterized as a hapless encounter of primitive
technology and a lack of discipline. Yet, when in 1933 Eastman produced the
Cine-Kodak Special, an amateur movie camera that supported various lenses
and recording speeds, Hill found his life transformed. His life thus far had
been entirely dedicated to the past and to studying the histories of the arts and
literature. With the release of the Cine-Kodak, he began to experience the
present and create the future.
Hill begins his film with a philosophical exposition on the elusive nature of
being. He proceeds to show how art and technology help to reflect upon the
self, turning film history into the telos of his memoir. He ends his Film
Portrait by invoking film art as a mystical practice. He compares the film
editor to the alchemist and modern day magician who by dissolving the
coordinates of time allow for a moment of pure self-presence. For Hill the
reels on the left side of the editing bench represent the future in that they
contain the raw material or potential of the work. He thinks of the finished
film on the reels to his right as the past. Accordingly, the film synchronizer
that connects the reels on both sides may be thought of as the present. As we
see him editing the opening sequence of the film, Hill returns to the question
of time. “The only real and valid presence,” Hill contends, can only be the
“eternal moment” seized by art.
His reference to the eternal moment builds on a romantic and modernist re-
interpretation of this classical trope. It is not a symbolic moment as in
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s idea of a ‘pregnant moment’ that captures a
momentary and highly saturated presence.41 It is much closer to the early
romantic notion of a hovering or oscillating moment, in which past and future
are fused, and the modernist conception of a timeless moment of pure vitality
and being.42 Earlier in Film Portrait, Hill illustrates this by cutting between
two photographs of him at ages 13 and 23 at increasingly faster rates until the
images dissolve in a flicker. His final examples are shots of a stairway that
lead down to a beach in Cassis that had been recorded in intervals of twenty
years, first for the short film La Cartomancienne (1932), then again for his
biographical sketch Cassis (1950) and finally for Film Portrait. Rather than
condensing time, he promotes film as an artform that allows for an experience
of time that is discontinuous and simultaneous. Film art is seen both as a
process, where past and future merge through editing, and a product that
creates a moment apart from time. Film memory not only refers to surviving
images of the past, but an act of re-animation that fuses film technology and
artistic technique. Hill’s strategy of re-animating records of the past
emphasizes the process of editing as a creative act through which a mystical
fusion of past and future as well as self and image may be attained. Film
Portrait captures Hill’s response to the images he has acquired and produced.
The narrative commentary that guides the viewer through his arrangement and
animation of documents, enactments and artworks of his life underscores the
dialogic model of his approach. It also serves as a reminder that the synthesis
of this aesthetic reflection, the fusion of image and image-maker, can only be
intuited and experienced.

Stan Brakhage’s Metaphors and Art of Vision

The creative act of filmmaking as a mystic fusion of past and present, self and
other, is also at the heart Brakhage’s autobiographical oeuvre. Yet, instead of
using the medium film to reflect on the self as a double-edged figure of image
and image-maker, for Brakhage the filmic apparatus becomes an experiential
model for the gesturing body and the inner formation of meaning. Like Hill,
Brakhage experimented with painting and etching directly on film. However,
in Hill’s Film Portrait painting on film becomes a gesture of retrospective
animation where past and present merge. Hill’s eternal moment of self-
presence is realized in an aesthetic reflection of time as a movement that
animates the social world of images. In Brakhage’s film this eternal moment is
the experience of continuous present.43 The direct manipulation of the filmic
surface becomes an immediate means of expressing the filmmaker’s psychic
state. Whereas Hill reflects on his life in response to film history and the
technological and stylistic changes cinema underwent throughout his lifetime,
Brakhage’s autobiographical films are framed by a film mythology that
imagines a “world before the beginning of the word.”44 For Hill the aesthetic
of life and history appears to be an experience outside of time. Brakhage
projects a trance-like primary vision to resolve the dualism of organic and
symbolic realms, life and art.
I want to approach Brakhage’s visual consciousness in two steps. The first
step attempts to outline the aesthetic framework of his personal camera eye. I
will argue that the intermedial frames and artistic approaches to which
Brakahage resorts imply different models of personality. His artistic
syncretism and intermedial blends thus create a composite model of personal
vision that is both material and formal, individual and social, biographical
and artistic. The second step reviews Brakhage’s conception of camera
consciousness as a developmental model. His personal camera eye transforms
his physiological and psychic vision into organic artistic forms. It comes to
embody the history and development of his ways of seeing. Whereas the first
step deals with the antagonism between life and art, the second step focuses
on the tensions between life models and the lives of models.
Brakhage follows a romantic tradition that celebrates art as an organic form
of lived poetry. For almost thirty years, Brakhage pursued a lifestyle that
approximated the ideals of a romantic poet. In 1959 Brakhage and his wife
moved to the mountains in Colorado, where they raised five children.
Brakhage embraces the romantic view of art as an organic work in progress
from a distinctly modernist perspective that integrates insights from abstract
expressionism and literary modernism. Like Hill, Brakhage approaches the
personal camera as an intermedial composite of literature and painting.
Moreover, the aesthetic positions in modernist literature and painting favored
by Brakhage are themselves intermedial conceptions that view painting as a
form of writing and literature as a kind of painting. Brakhage’s penchant for
artistic syncretism echoes his conviction that vision is fundamentally
metaphorical. In a similar way, his intermedial references to painting and
poetry are above all interpretative frames for a radically personal and equally
hermetic vision of cinema. In Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order, James
Peterson questioned the formal and technical similarities between abstract
expressionism and Brakhage’s films. For him the filmic appropriation of this
label is a cultural-specific strategy of facilitating like-minded interpretations
of films that are difficult to make sense of.45
Brakhage was particularly influenced by Gertrude Stein’s literary
endeavors to develop a non-descriptive and non-referential form of writing
that focused on processes of verbal conception and interpretation. Due to her
close connections with the Parisian avant-garde art scene of the 1910s and
20s, this approach was frequently compared to cubism.46 Brakhage found in
Stein’s abstract and repetitive style a model for approaching film as a process
of “inner formation.”47 He describes this as a twofold process that involves
transposing everyday experiences by filmic means and transforming them into
an organic form of art that takes on a life of its own. He compares this to
Stein’s practice of keeping two sets of notebooks: one consisting of notes and
partial jottings and another one in which she transcribed daily records into
densely structured texts. Stein turns this genetic practice of transcription and
revision into a stylistic element of her writing, which by presenting its own
process of gestation seeks to reveal the very essence of a character as a
formative principle.48
If cubism provides an important frame of interpretation for Stein’s
experiments in abstracting literary forms, then writing offers a basic frame of
reference for understanding abstract expressionism. As John Bramble points
out, many artists understood abstract expressionism as a kind of psychic
calligraphy that aims “at gesturalist encodings of the rhetoric of unmediated
perception.”49 Delving beneath the symbolism of surreal and psychodramatic
explorations of the human psyche, abstract expressionism turns to the artist’s
body and the material resources of painting as primary signs that reveal the
psychic state and character of the artist.
By embracing Stein’s concern with language as a formal re-enactment of the
process of constructing meaning and psycho-physical preoccupation of
abstract expressionism, Brakhage juxtaposes two approaches to theorizing
personhood. Abstract expressionism follows a conflict-driven and state-based
account of personhood, which like Freudian psychoanalysis develops from
psychosocial premises or as Jungian theories of personality is deeply invested
in cultural myths. In contrast, Stein’s characterology radically detaches from
socio-historical and psycho-physical frameworks. Inspired by the rigid
formalism in Otto Weininger’s study on Sex and Character (1903) and his
resentment of empirical and scientific psychology, Stein regards personal
traits as disembodied mental forms (types and variants), which can only be
expressed adequately by abstract forms of representations.50
In Stein’s literary experiments of abstract writing, characterology becomes
a stylistic exploration of form. As Maria Farland has shown, Stein turns the
variability thesis, which also formed the backbone of Weininger’s sex-based
characterology, into the poetic principle of her epic novel The Making of
Americans. The variability hypothesis claimed that males are more variable
than females. A greater range of mental abilities would make men more likely
to innovate and discover, whereas women were typified as constant and
conservative with a natural disposition to repetition, routines and habits.
Stein’s literary appropriation of the variability hypothesis through stylistic
devices of repetition and variation is charged with a cultural critique of the
biological determinism on which variability arguments were based. It
deconstructs its basic dichotomy by insisting “on the generalizing power of
repetition and its vital role in the production of abstract thought.”51
However, while Stein’s formalism is a constructivist critique of biological
conceptions of gender, this aspect is lost in Brakhage’s framework. For him,
Stein’s literary abstraction serves as a dualistic counterpart to abstract
expressionism. Literary abstraction and abstract expressionism are
complementary models that mediate the bodily and mental aspects in the
sensuous perception and imagistic thought of Brakhage’s camera eye. They
can be regarded as two sides that address Brakhage’s ‘metaphors’ and ‘art’ of
vision, which he theorized in his famous manifesto Metaphors on Vision
(1963) and projected in his longest filmic work Art of Vision (1965). Abstract
expressionism helps to account for Brakhage’s metaphoric extension of vision
as an organ that fuses perception and imagination. Muting its gender
implications, Brakhage adopts Stein’s formal abstractionism as an aesthetic
model for transforming autobiographical experience into a discrete work of
art.
In his artistic manifesto Metaphors on Vision, Brakhage extends the realm
of perception to include night- and daydreams along with all kinds of
hallucinations and abstractions as well as the naive and innocent vision of an
unknowing eye. Vision is inherently metaphoric in that it interweaves the
visual perception of things within the imaginative faculty of consciousness.
Vision is a creative process, which he sees mythically rooted in acts of
copulation (experience) and procreation (understanding), that transfers and
objectifies imagistically (quasi-) transcendental notions of birth, sex, death
and God. Filmmakers continue a primordial artistic act: “They create where
fear before them has created the greatest necessity. They are essentially
preoccupied by and deal imagistically with—birth, sex, death and the search
for God.”52
For Brakhage the human eye and the camera are metonyms for the
boundless imagination of the mind’s eye—or what he calls “the only reality”53
—and the rationalization of vision that has made the camera an ideological
propagator of the Renaissance perspective. To contest the rationalization of
human vision by the “montonous rhetoric” of commercial cinema, the camera
must be used in ways that subvert dominant perceptual conventions.
Independent of and anticipating Baudry, Brakhage formulates his own applied
apparatus theory that protests the “original mechanical determination” of the
camera by turning it into the means of expression for a pyscho-physical
fantasy.54 The camera eye in his radically subjective conception produces
what he calls ‘hypnogogic’ or ‘closed-eye’ vision.
In the abstract patterns and firework explosions one perceives in the visual
field of closed eyelids, Brakhage sees a true ‘body image’ that fuses
physiological and mental processes of seeing. Contemplating such images, he
believes, is to see oneself thinking and to discover the visual roots of affects
and emotions. Thus building on an esoteric mindset of abstract expressionism,
Brakhage regards such abstract shapes as basic figures and symbols of
moving images of thought. His sense of abstraction is not a higher-order
conceptual synthesis, but like Stein’s literary abstractions, the result of
meticulous attempts at rendering the smallest visual impulses as a
disembodied form that recreates the exact intensity of the sensation.55
Transposing the autobiographical experiences of the artist, the camera eye
functions like a recorder of automatic visual thinking.
Brakhage describes sharing his hypnogogic vision as “elbowing myself, my
physiology, a little place in the world.”56 This public act is also a form of
personal divestment, in which the artist assuming an impersonal or general air
(Robert Duncan) becomes a medium. At this point everybody is free to make
up their own Stan Brakhage. The personal in this aesthetic realm becomes a
function, or as Brakhage would have it, a necessity of form. In this formal
necessity lies the political core of his aesthetics, a formal authority that
allows him to generalize his vision.57
Here the differences and similarities between Brakhage’s radically
subjective camera eye and the structural approach of avant-garde filmmakers
become most apparent. Experimenting with stroboscopic effects, filmmakers
such as James Whitney, Tony Conrad and Paul Sharits exploited the
technological set-up of film to provoke and reveal altered mental states and
hallucinatory vision. Brion Gysin’s contribution to the art of flicker represents
a radical and equally provocative approach towards a closed-eye vision of
film. In 1961, Gysin patented a stroboscopic lamp under the name Dream
Machine, which he recommended “for artistic and medial application.”58
Approaching the lamp with closed eyes may cause vivid hallucinations, which
he describes as “autonomous ‘movies,’ intensely pleasurable and, possibly,
instructive to the viewer.”59
 Like Hill and Brakhage, Gysin views art as a mystic experience that links
the primordial and religious beginnings of art with a present state of artistic
and technological realization: “in the light of the Dream Machine, one sees all
of ancient and modern abstract art with eyes closed.”60 For Gysin, the Dream
Machine proclaims the end of art; it surpasses ready-made and do-it-yourself
art. The explosions and burning gas jets shown by the Dream Machine no
longer bear the artist’s signature but become the exclusive response to an
informational system. Brakhage presents his visual mythology as the driving
force of history and biography. Gysin’s mythology, which also puts vision
before the beginning of the word, unlocks the evolution altogether. He views
the Dream Machine as a cybernetic device; its artistic and medical
application, he contends, could even propel the evolutionary process.
Speculating on the role the flicker of the sun played in the evolution of human
beings, he argues that “[it] must be possible to become something more than a
man.”61

The Development of Brakhage’s Camera Consciousness

Brakhage’s autobiographical approach can be described as ontogenetic in that
his notion of the camera eye comes to embody the history and development of
his personal and artistic vision. In an extensive series of autobiographical
films that span more than three decades, he presents a vision of cinema that
evolves from pure acts of sensory perception to complex forms of imagistic
thinking. In the early 1970s, Brakhage outlined a three-part scheme for his
autobiographical work, which was originally referred to as The Book of the
Film and later renamed The Book of Family. The three film cycles or chapters
of The Book of Family include the four parts of Scenes from Under
Childhood (1967–70) and The Weir-Falcon Saga (1970) as well as films of
the Sincerity (1973–80) and Duplicity (1978–80) series.62 Each chapter was
to focus on a different stage of visual or camera consciousness.
In Scenes from Under Childhood, Brakhage lets his children and his
camera stand in for his past experiential self. As in Bresson’s theory, the
encounter between model and camera enhances the experience of observation
but also expands the filmmaker’s epistemological scope. Brakhage’s camera
performs a triple function. It serves him as tool to observe and study his
children while being an expressive means that visualizes their experiences
from fetus to child. It also become a method of learning to see anew and an
imaginative act of remembering his own forgotten childhood experience.
Recreating this child vision fuses seeing and imagining at the very
fundamental level of sensory perception.
The Weir-Falcon Saga (1970) develops what, in contrast to the pure
sensibility of Scenes from Under Childhood, can be described as a
metaphoric consciousness of film. The first part of this chapter or series, The
Weir-Falcon Saga shows Brakhage’s anxiety as he brings his sick child to the
hospital. Brakhage examines his child’s feverish state as a state of creative
confusion that gives rise to an intersubjective consciousness, informed by a
distinction between self and other. The second film in this series, The
Machine of Eden, introduces the creative power of metaphors by cross-
cutting between a weaving loom and the textures of nature. The camera
captures the fabrics of landscape by directing its sensibilities at agricultural
and geological patterns and the layered structures of the composition. It also
reinforces and creates such patterns by rapid zooms and swish pans. As the
loom is located in the child’s room, it might be thought of as a dream machine
that patterns and organizes the impressions of nature. Yet, Brakhage warns
against a symbolic reading of the film by insisting on a material and indexical
basis in the interweaving consciousness of camera and cosmos:

The Machine (of Eden) operates via “spots”—from sun’s disks (of the
camera lens) thru emulsion grains (within which, each, a universe might
be found) and snow’s flakes (echoing technical aberrations on film’s
surface) blots (upon the lens itself) and the circles of sun and moon,
etcetera; these “mis-takes” give birth of “shape” (which, in this work, is
“matter” subject and otherwise) amidst a weave of thought.63

In the five-part Sincerity (1973–80) series and the three parts of the Duplicity
(1978–80) series, which together make up the third chapter of his film
autobiography, Brakhage comes closest to the autobiographical approaches of
Mekas and Hill, where the filmic image merges with the act or remembering.
Yet, in contrast to their filmic memoirs, the paths and processes of this
imagistic thought are often difficult to follow/duplicate. Brakhage salvages
“out-takes” from an enormous body of home movies, which he regards as
involuntary memory traces of the Brakhage family’s coming-into-being. From
the perspective of memory, character and personhood represent a synthesis of
time. Whereas the editing in the first two reels is largely diachronic, Sincerity
III shifts to synchronous editing that emulates the associative linkage and
simultaneous co-presence of various pasts.
Like the expressionist creation of a magical world of pure sensation and the
metaphoric exploration of social and ecological interrelations, the imagistic
conception of self in the painstaking process of reviewing and editing is
above all a poetic act, where self-discovery is the product of retrospective
signification. Brakhage alludes to this by proposing a number of mistaken or
fanciful etymologies for the word sincerity. The first modifies Ezra Pound’s
creative interpretation of the Chinese ideogram for sincerity in The Cantos.
Sincerity refers to the precise visual point pierced by the sun’s lance. To this
he adds even bolder etymological suggestions made by Robert Creeley and
Frampton who relate the word to an agricultural sense of growing and to a
sealing practice of pottery.
The tripartite structure of the autobiography recalls a Hegelian movement
from the sensuous to the ideal, which Hegel outlined in his aesthetics. Like
Hegel, Brakhage emphasizes the physical grounding of metaphors, which are
crucial to facilitating the move from percepts to ideas. Metaphors instigate
processes of idealization that push towards the truth of things. They set in
motion a process of formation that seeks to capture an essence of being. As
Sitney remarks, the series titles Sincerity and Duplicity may also be related to
the ambivalent role the notion of semblance or Schein assumes in Hegel’s
philosophy. Semblance does not simply refer to an illusory show of being, the
dramatic acting and cinematic trickery that Brakhage aimed to move away
from in search of a true and undeceiving beauty, it is also necessary sensuous
mediation for an essence of being to appear. Brakhage remarked that by
changing the name of the series from Sincerity to Duplicity he “came to see
that duplicity often shows itself forth in semblance of sincerity.”64
The duplicity of the autobiographical mode is both representational and
ethical. Reviewing his own films Brakhage became increasingly aware of the
difficulty to avoid the narrative and dramatic registers that have come to
define the social habitus of the medium film. Simple stage directions to his
family members, to stand still or continue an activity, led him back to drama.
At the same time, the very awareness of being recorded not only affected his
children’s behavior in front of the camera but, as Brakhage later regretted,
caused their childhoods to be “distorted in subtle and dangerous ways.”65 The
filmmaker’s ethical betrayal was to expose his family by making them the
subject of a protracted self-portrait. Although Brakhage emphasized that the
signature on his films “by Brakhage” should be read to include his wife and
children, this implication of his family as the subject and model of artistic
vision became increasingly problematic. As his children grew older, they
became less enthusiastic about collaborating in Brakhage’s artistic enterprise.
As Keller observers, the liberating vision Brakhage began to re-experience
with his children revealed its limitations: “In recognizing his need to hold the
image of his children before him in order to understand his own being, he also
recognized the frustrations in store for him when that image would be no
longer available.”66
The apocalyptic ending of Sincerity V, showing images of a burning house
and flooding, captures both a cathartic closure of Brakhage’s autobiographical
cycle as much as it symbolizes the collapse of his family. The re-surfacing of
psychodrama in the Sincerity/Duplicity series underscores the ambiguous
ontology of the memory image. Psychodrama appears in two senses or
understandings of a memory trace: as an imprint of the past and a super-
imposition that creates a past. In Sincerity I, psychodrama is featured as a
record of the past; it appears in the form of footage from Brakhage’s first film
Interim (1952). In Duplicity III, Brakhage embraces psychodrama “as the
ultimate play for truth.”67 He focuses on the theatricality of everyday life,
showing his children trick-or-treating, performing a school play and inventing
games. The roles and guises as means of self-explorations are reinforced by
Brakhage’s use of superimpositions that reveal how such psychological
masking constructs memory acts. The return of psychodrama in the
Sincerity/Duplicity series points to a crisis in Brakhage’s autobiographical
approach that re-evaluates the status of the model. Whereas psychodrama is a
strategy of exteriorization that allows expressing oneself through the guise of
someone else, the model follows a strategy of interiorization, where the self is
understood in the light of an other. Duplictiy III combines both strategies.
When we see his children dress up as animals, images of real animals are
superimposed onto them with startling visual effects. The juxtapositions
express the ‘reality’ of the children’s play. The blending of human and animal
imagery also reveals the mythological work of a filmmaker committed to
capturing his children’s spiritual nature.
Carolee Schneemann was among the first to criticize the way Brakhage
projected “his child-world of wonder”68 on his wife and children.
Schneemann met Brakhage through her first husband, the composer James
Tenney, who had acted in Brakhage’s early films. Shortly after their wedding,
Stan and Jane Brakhage visited the Schneemann and Tenney home, where he
shot his film Cat’s Cradle (1959). After the visit, Schneemann expressed her
bewilderment about the role Jane Brakhage assumed in her husband’s vision
of art and married life in a personal correspondence to Naomi Levinson. She
described Jane as a “wild animal spirit,”69 whose “almost naked
naturalness”70 and naivety, the self-conscious romantic Stan Brakhage could
not but idealize.71 For Schneemann this idealization means Jane’s complete
dependency on him. It appeared to her that Jane was “already a
configuration,” that is, Stan’s vision of a family. Schneemann described this as
a process of “transferring individualization,” in which her personality
becomes a “mask of the soul” that is “devoted to Him and His.”72
In an interview conducted by Sitney in 1963, Stan Brakhage recalled the
visit as a hopelessly misguided attempt of introducing Jane to his ideal
concept of marriage, which Schneemann and Tenney upheld for him. In fact,
two years earlier, Schneemann and Tenney were models for his meta-
cinematic allegory Loving (1957). However, Jane did not share her husband’s
“mythos of marriage”73 and completely refuted the idea of taking someone
else’s marriage as a model. Ten years later, in an interview Stan and Jane
Brakhage had with Hollis Frampton, Jane openly expressed her
dissatisfaction with being her husband’s model and muse. The ensuing quarrel
between them brings out the ethical and aesthetic dilemma in Brakhage’s use
of her as a life model. In the interview Brakhage announced that he was—“for
the very first time”—working on a portrait of his wife Jane.74 The project, he
explains, was partly motivated by or “weighed against” Jane’s repeated
criticism that even though she had been a prominent subject in so many of his
films, he had not gotten a real image of her. Stan, she said, “photographs a
woman having a baby, sweeping the floor, making a bed. It’s the making of a
bed, not how Jane makes the bed or what Jane does with it.”75
As a real-life model, Jane allows Brakhage to develop an artistic vision
without the recourse to dramatic means. However, as Jane objects, by turning
her into a model he makes her into his generalized other, in the light of which
he creates his artistic self-portrait. The process of abstraction and
generalization that undercuts Jane’s status as a situated ethical being is both
the condition and driving force of his art. Creating an image that did justice to
Jane Brakhage would be creating an image for her and thus relegating art to a
form of commissioned labor. This would be an infringement on works of art,
which as Ranciére remarks, “no longer refer to those who commissioned
them, to those whose image they established and grandeur they celebrated.”76
This does not mean that art is beyond ethics or disconnected from the social
reality to which it responds. But as Brakhage’s response shows, the aesthetics
and ethics are at cross-purposes here. He takes his wife’s disaffection as
critical instructions of a muse who upholds an unattainable ideal. Jane
Brakhage, he argues, “rightfully, wants more and more. This really is her
inspiring function in the creative process.”77 She seems to sabotage the
patriarchal notion of a never-satisfied muse by declaring passive-aggressively
that she has stopped minding being used as an appendage for the artist’s self-
portrait: “[N]ow you can make the goddamn film because I don’t give a
shit.”78 Brakhage maintains that it is difficult to talk about cinematic muses in
a society that has not fully acknowledged cinema as an artform. Moreover, the
paradigm of the muse seems to be hopelessly at odds with the political avant-
garde. His defense of film art is caught up between two battles. On the one
hand, he joins the auteurist discovery of the model as a filmic muse, which
was indeed critical for redefining film as an artform.79 On the other hand, he
resorts to the rhetoric of the muse to defend a timeless conception of art that is
radically at odds with the political film avant-garde of the 1970s.

The Eye Body and the Body Politic in Carolee Schneemann’s

Expanded Cinema
In 1964 Schneemann shook up the international art scene with a performance
developed with the Kinetic Theatre group. Her orgiastic contact performance
Meat Joy premiered in Paris in May before it moved to London and New
York in June and November. Orchestrated dramatically with lighting and a
sound collage that included Schneemann’s notes on the play, pop songs and
atmospheric noises from the streets of Paris, couples dressed in shorts and
feathered bikinis interacted in semi-choreographic dance-like movements.
Schneemann thought of this performance as enacting a “psychic and imagistic
stream in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy
complement of the audience.”80 Meat Joy can be seen as a continuation and
critique of abstract expressionism that re-introduces the body as a
representational force and expressive material.81
 Schneemann first conceptualized this extension of abstract expressionism in
her work Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions (1963), a series of
photographs that showed the artist covered in paint, grease and chalk amidst
large panels in her New York loft. Eye Body aims at two things: It seeks to
develop an alternative erotic iconography beyond the conventional
representational repertoire. And it attempts to reconcile the model and the
artist by exploring, as Schneemann puts it, “a primal, archaic force that could
unify energies I discovered as visual information.”82 Some thirty years later
Schneemann reviewed Eye Body as her quintessential contribution to female
eroticism:

It introduced images of a shamanic ritual of the sacred erotic at a time

when the female nude dwelled mainly in girlie magazines, pornographic
detective fictions, photographic reports on “primitive natives,” classical
Western painting, Abstract Expressionist dis–memberments, and the
iconic, frontal-spread paper dolls of Pop art.83

Schneemann’s use of the camera is crucial to such realignments. The camera

does not merely serve as an instrument of recording but also helps to bring out
commonalities between the artist, her material and techniques. Instead of
placing her work in the tradition of nude photography, she uses photography in
a way that is reminiscent of landscape painting. She underscores the fusion of
figure, material and medium by alluding to a long tradition in landscape
painting that depicts a place where nature and art undergo an
artistic/ritualistic process of transformation.84 This fusion is sustained by
making the artist simultaneously the visible and unseen center of a number of
sights and visions, that—as Rebecca Schneider has pointed out—include
“embodied vision, a bodily eye—sighted eyes—artist’s eyes—not only in the
seer, but in the body of the seen.”85
The double function of the ‘eye body’ as an instrument of analysis and as
the material basis of desire underscores the intricate entanglement of
knowledge and desire. Schneemann’s imagistic research focuses on the body
as a site where the limits of the symbolic order manifest themselves. She
repeatedly made social and sexual taboos the center of her work. She
considers Eye Body and Meat Joy along with her first filmic work Fuses
(1965) “a trio of works whose shameless eroticism emerged from within a
culture that has lost and denied its sensory connections to dream, myth, and the
female powers.”86 Her film Fuses is also the first part of Schneemann’s
autobiographical film trilogy; it was followed by Plumb Line (1970) and
Kitch’s Last Meal (1973–76). As a key work in her career, Fuses interlocks
her archaic criticism of culturally repressive and predominantly male
representations of erotic desire with her career as a personal filmmaker who
is committed to retaining the duplicity of life and art by turning herself into an
imagistic territory where social and personal politics are played out.
David James praises Fuses as tracing “a new copulation between the filmic
and the erotic […], one in which female sexuality is enacted in a practice of
mutuality.”87 The film shows private and explicit shots of lovemaking,
photographed by the lovers themselves who were passing the camera between
them. Drawing on techniques often found in Brakhage’s films, Fuses presents
heterosexual love through a colorful montage of heavily worked-on filmic
images. As in Brakhage’s approach, dyeing the images as well as scratching
and painting directly on the film strip undermines the film’s representational
and narrative dimension while amplifying the sensory and sensual effect of the
visual experience. Lovemaking as an act of fusion resonates through a number
of conceptual dichotomies: filmmakers and filmic protagonists, the filmic
representation and its materiality, the filmed experience and the experience of
filming, the experiences projected and the experience of reception.
Brakhage’s stylistic influence can be felt very distinctly in Fuses.
Schneemann made the film in critical response to Brakhage’s work. In her
interview with Kate Haug, Schneemann names Brakhage’s Window Water
Baby Moving (1959) as her main inspiration for the project: “I know that Stan
and Jane passed the camera back and forth, but I was still very concerned that
the male eye replicated and possessed the vagina’s primacy of giving birth.”88
Fuses also responds to Schneemann’s (and Tenney’s) participation in
Brakhage’s films Loving and Cat’s Cradle. Schneemann repeatedly expressed
her dissatisfaction with her role as model in these films. In a letter to
Brakhage dated January 18, 1958, she described Loving as a “Proustian
process of containment, a drama of extensive inclusiveness, essentialized to
formal necessity and so a unique form of unalterable and variegated arrivals
and departures (imagistically).”89 While Schneemann welcomes Brakhage’s
ambition to extend the imagistic scope of film in order to capture what eludes
(conventional) filmic representation, she distances herself from the artistic
constraints that are imposed by his idea of “formal necessity.”
 Schneemann’s reservations about Brakhage’s aesthetic vision puts her
integrative aesthetic of personal involvement in profile. Even though she did
not impersonate or represent herself in Loving, it was important to her to
contribute an authentically lived experience. Her dissatisfaction expresses a
model’s defiance to conform to the artist’s notion of use. In a letter to Robert
Haller, dated October 23, 1977, Schneemann writes: “Around the filmmaking
with Stan we three argued endlessly over Stan’s concept of ‘use.’ I felt ‘used’
because not freely, fully myself in Loving and Cat’s Cradle; because central
energies of Jim’s and my life together were fragmented or diverted from
image.”90
The reverse side to the artist’s power over his work and his creative
control is his ethical commitment to his subject. The vicarious perspective of
the model always entails a degree of decontextualization, an infringement on a
situated, ethical self. Arguably, this is even the case when an artist chooses
his or her own body as a model. Schneemann’s wish to be genuinely herself
and to express her conscious and unconscious desires in an authentic manner
are at odds with aesthetic strategies in pop art that emphasize the
overpowering forces of commodification and self-alienation in
representations of reality. After a performance of Fresh Blood in 1981, the
poet and fluxus artist Dick Higgins (then aged 43) suggested to Schneemann
(then aged 42) that it was time for her to follow his example and look for a
younger surrogate for her performance pieces. Higgins’ argument combines
auteur politics with aesthetic formalism, without failing to allude to the
libidinal bond that traditionally defines the relation between artist and model:
“What you need is, I think, […] to find yourself a beautiful young woman to
work with, not necessarily as a lesbian lover, but as a surrogate for yourself
in certain performance situations so that you can maintain your masterly
objectivity.”91
For Higgins, Schneemann’s performance wanes with time as her aging body
no longer (or less powerfully) exposes a dominant ideological assumption
that denies women an active and self-determined part in expressing their
desires. The formal necessity in Higgins’ aesthetic framework calls for an
ironic (or negative) affirmation of desire as a fetish, which may be best
achieved by amplifying the contrast between the performing subject
(Schneemann as “master-artist”) and the performed object (Schneemann as
“Hollywood desire-object fetish”). Schneemann retorted that “time is material
just as our experience is material—no matter how unidealized we may
look.”92 She argued that the advantage of being middle aged was that it
allowed one to look simultaneously forward and backward. Rather than
reflecting on an eternal present or distilling a continuous present, Schneemann
includes the history of her material and her aging body as an integral part of
her performances.

Embodied Expressionism and Living Diary

If Meat Joy transformed the physical and psychic energies of abstract

expressionism into an orgiastic contact performance that introduced the human
body as an expressive material next to dead chicken and fish, paint and scraps
of paper, then Up To And Including Her Limits (1973–77) appears almost as
a literal embodiment of Jackson Pollock’s painting process:

I am suspended in a tree surgeon’s harness on a three-quarter-inch manila

rope, a rope which I can raise or lower manually to sustain an entranced
period of drawing—my extended arm holds crayons which stroke the
surrounding walls, accumulating a web of colored marks. My entire body
becomes the agency of visual traces, vestige of the body’s energy in
motion.93

However, Up To And Including Her Limits is more than merely an illustration

of how abstract expressionist paintings are made. Whereas abstract
expressionism introduces the body to the material properties of the painting by
leaving traces of the artist’s psycho-energetic disposition, it also transcends
the body in the very same act and thereby re-stores the viewer’s detached
space of aesthetic experience. By contrast, Schneemann’s embodied
expressionism (like much of the emerging performance art) disrupts this frame
of detachment, which traditionally serves as a cultural condition for an
aesthetic experience. This frame of detachment complements frames of
approximation (such as the heroic identification with male acts of
transgression); it makes it socially acceptable and psychologically bearable to
respond to art in ways that expose the viewer as, among other things, an
emotional, biological, sexual and mortal being.
Schneemann does not stop at showing how her body works as the material
origin and as an artistic instrument but attempts to embrace everything
involved in the creative process within an expanded notion of cinema.94 As in
the fusion of camera and body, the sonic and imagistic stream of films extends
to an audio-visual event stream that approximates the lived experience
through an intermedial blending of technological formats and artistic genres.
Sound collages, six monitors and an 8mm film projector orchestrate
Schneemann’s whole-day performance, during which she makes the museum
her home and studio. Up To And Including Her Limits presents the artist and
the naked model at home and at work. Next to the canvases, Schneemann
arranged a work environment that included a table, a chair, plants, a clock,
papers, books, drawing material, a rug and pillows as well as litter, food and
bowls of water for her cat Kitch, the eponymous heroine of the last part of her
autobiographical film trilogy. The projection of the film in its different stages
was also part of the performance. The network of artistic and non-artistic
components and the interaction between independent artworks in Up To And
Including Her Limits programmatically underscore the duplicity of life and
art and their irreducible relationship.
Although Schneemann shares with Brakhage and other avant-garde
filmmakers like Jonas Mekas an expressionist attitude that seeks out energetic
and kinetic synergies between the perceiving subject and the objects
perceived, her integrative diaristic approach differs significantly from the
autobiographic approaches of these filmmakers. Appropriating Stein’s model,
Brakhage continually re-worked the representational content of his recordings
into non-representational filmic expressions. Since Mekas often let a long
period pass before editing his footage into diary films, historical distance
helped to create aesthetic detachment to his material. Schneemann’s diaristic
method can be described as an aesthetic of versioning that is closer to her
performance practice. Rather than being fixed in a final form, her ‘entries’
seem to take on a life of their own. Changing and re-writing themselves they
remain amorphous like memory itself. This dynamic or performative
dimension that refuses to be arrested and captured complements her
integrative aesthetic. By exploring sexual taboos in an authentic (internalized
and embodied) way, she stresses the integrity of her body and the singularity
of the situated event of her performances.
Schneemann’s art has frequently been criticized as ‘narcissistic
exhibitionism’ and ‘diaristic indulgence.’ This criticism implies a deficit in
artistic transformation or aesthetic detachment suggesting that her work merely
gratifies her self-image or represents an act of unfiltered self-absorbed
communication. While such a view clashes with the high degree of
conceptually and formally de-familiarized experiences of everyday life in
Schneemann’s art, it is revealing of how powerfully the naked and erotic body
operates as an emblem of the ‘real thing.’95 By bringing down barriers
between artwork and viewer, artist and artwork, or life and art in general,
Schneemann challenges the viewer’s interpretive stance of critical
detachment.96 The de-familiarization of filmic images and their heavy
manipulation in Fuses in this sense are geared towards a conclusive effect
that appeals to the viewer’s ‘bodily perception.’ At the same time the
manipulation of the filmic images is an artistic interference that refracts the
integrity of the recording: “I had to interfere with it. […] The idea that things
were pristine and integral was very repellent to me. Now I feel differently.
I’m emptying, emptying, taking everything out.”97
Her film Kitch’s Last Meal is an interesting case in point. She originally
intended this work as a study on intimacy in daily life, but later found this idea
too diaristic and programmatic. She finally realized Kitch’s Last Meal as a
double 8mm projection accompanied by a sound collage on tape. While this
complicated the editing process tremendously, it made each projection unique
and enhanced the performative dimension of the film as it required the
presence of the artist operating the projectors.98 The sound collage contained
a wide array of material including conversations with her second husband
Anthony McCall, Kitch’s meowing, domestic noises from her daily life,
notebook entries and letters. It also featured the famous monologue from her
performance Interior Scroll, during which she read a pamphlet that she
carefully unfolded from her vagina. In 1975 she performed Interior Scroll to
protest the title “The Erotic Woman,” under which the Telluride Film Festival
had listed a program of erotic films by women. The pamphlet included a
reference to a structuralist filmmaker who finds “the personal clutter/the
persistence of feeling/the diaristic indulgence/the painterly mess” impossible
to look at.99 While most people assumed that the structuralist filmmaker was a
reference to her husband Anthony McCall, Schneemann later revealed that the
statement was actually a quote from the film critic Annette Michelson: It “is a
secret letter to a critic who couldn’t look at my films. It’s a double invention
and transmutation: it’s not to a man but to a woman.”100
The double-coding of this message evokes several ironies. The overt
feminist critique of depersonalized male filmmaking of a male structuralist
filmmaker includes a secret personal message to a female critic. Schneemann
defuses the criticism of narcissistic exhibitionism and self-indulgence by
deconstructing the artistic politics that invokes form as a means of aesthetic
detachment. Schneemann’s insistence on the body as image exposes the
erotophobia and sexual politics of formalist aesthetics as much as it
emphasizes the vitality of the body in movement as an irreducible expressive
form. The taboo addresses a socially illicit (con-)fusion of image and image-
maker, an absorption of the self by the image that outside the symbolic ideals
of oneness. As Schneemann put it in a recent video work with Marie Beatty:
“We who are addressing the taboos become the taboo. The suppressors are
confused. They cannot distinguish image from image makers.”101

Notes
1. Jonas Mekas, “The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group”
(1961), in Film Culture, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper Square
Press, 2000), 81.
2. Mekas, “The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group,” 81.
3. Geneviève Sellier, Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema,
trans. Kristin Ross (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 7.
4. In his landmark study Visionary Film The American Avant-Garde, 1943–
2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), P. Adams Sitney
established Romantic aesthetic theory as a central frame of reference for
U.S. avant-garde film in the second half of the twentieth century. See also
Sitney, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of
Emerson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Scott MacDonald,
The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films About
Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
5. As Paul Arthur observes, Mekas’ rhetoric of liberation recalls romantic
and transcendentalist reverence of the personal as a primary political,
social and cosmic base in Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson
and Walt Whitman. See Arthur, A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde
Film since 1965 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 16.
6. For an etymological account and the historical development of person see:
Philip A. Rolnick, Person, Grace, and God (Grand Rapids, Mich.:
William B. Eerdmans, 2007), 10–57.
7. Stan Brakhage, “manifest” (1974), in Essential Brakhage: Selected
Writings on Filmmaking by Stan Brakhage, ed. by Bruce McPherson
 (Kingston, NY: Documentext/McPherson, 2001), 151.
8. Stan Brakhage, “Metaphors on Vision” (1963) in Essential Brakhage:
Selected Writings on Filmmaking by Stan Brakhage, ed. by Bruce
McPherson (Kingston, NY: Documentext/ McPherson, 2001), 12.
9. Arthur, A Line of Sight, 7.
10. Hollis Frampton, “Stan and Jane Brakhage, Talking,” Artforum 11.5
(1973): 72–79. Expressionistic and auteurist notions of style blend when
critics such as Sitney, Annette Michelson or Fred Camper speak of
Mekas’ or Brakhage’s ‘mature style,’ suggesting that these artists have
arrived at a stage that defines their work at their best or most
characteristic stage.
11. Colin Still, “Brakhage on Brakhage: Video Interviews” in By Brakhage:
An Anthology, vol. 1 (Irvington: Criterion Collection, 2003), video
recording.
12. Sitney, Visionary Film, 372. See also Sitney, Eyes Upside Down, 60.
13. See Elizabeth Bruss, “Eye for I: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in
Film,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James
Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 296–320.
14. See Philippe Lejeune, “Cinéma et autobiographie: Problèmes de
vocabulaire.” Revue belge du cinéma 19 (Spring 1987): 7–12; and
Raymond Bellour, “Autoportraits,” Communications 48 (1988): 327–88.
15. Michael Sheringham defines the autobiographical subject as “a hybrid, a
fusion of past and present, self and other, document and desire, referential
and textual, énoncé and énonciation—not a product but a process.” See
Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires—Rousseau to
Perec (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 21.
16. The creation of the self in the medium film corresponds to what Paul
Ricoeur refers to as “narrative identity.” Lejeune discusses the
psychological and aesthetic underpinnings of the creation of an
autobiographical self in language in “Auto-Genesis: Genetic Studies of
Autobiographical Texts.” See Lejeune, On Diary, 213–35.
17. See David E. James, “Film Diary/Diary Film: Practice and Product in
Walden,” in To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas & the New York
Underground, ed. David E. James (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1992), 145–79.
18. Arthur, A Line of Sight, 149.
19. Program notes in the Film-makers’ Cooperative catalogue, available
online at www.film-makerscoop.com.
20. Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, trans. Jonathan Griffin
(Copenhagen: Green Integer, 1997), 14.
21. Psychodrama: Advances in Theory and Practice, ed. Clark Baim, Jorge
Burmeister, and Manuela Maciel (London: Routledge, 2007).
22. Sitney, Visionary Film, 14.
23. Program notes for a screening at the Bleecker Street Theater in 1960,
quoted in Sitney’s Visionary Film, 11.
24. See Marjorie Keller, The Untutored Eye: Childhood in the Films of
Cocteau, Cornell, and Brakhage (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 1986), 13–14.
25. Sitney, Eyes Upside Down, 84.
26. It has become part of the new mythological efforts to reconcile
retrospective orientation of myths and the creative and generative spirit of
infancy. In Emerson’s new mythology “[a]n individual man is a fruit which
it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen […] The history of the
genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every
child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he
strives ever to lead things from disorder to order,” Ralph Waldo Emerson,
“The Method of Nature,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed.
Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2003), 127–28. In a similar way, Deren has described
myth as “the twilight speech of an old man to a boy. All the old men begin
at the beginning. Their recitals always speak first of the origin of life.
They start by inviting this event which no man witnessed, which still
remains mystery,” Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of
Haiti (New Paltz, NY: McPherson, 1983), 21. As with their interest in
myth, filmmakers reviewed romantic notions of childhood through
psychoanalytical and sociological frames. In her study on childhood in
films of Jean Cocteau, Joseph Cornell and Stan Brakhage, Keller outlines
a chain of influence that leads to increasingly complex representations of
childhood. Although Cornell, like Cocteau before him, follows the
romantic poets in idealizing childhood, his narrative and presentational
framework reflects Jean Piaget’s genetic model of child development.
Brakhage’s approach is also premised on developmental stages of
 cognitive development. Yet, in contrast to Cocteau and Cornell, he adopts
a Freudian perspective that does not romanticize childhood as a stage of
innocence and happiness. See Keller, The Untutored Eye.
27. Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, 16.
28. Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, 88.
29. Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, 14–15.
30. Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, 97–98 and 82.
31. Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, 14.
32. Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, 39.
33. Wendy Steiner, The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 12.
34. For the conception of the model as “pure essence,” see Bresson, Notes on
the Cinematographer, 54.
35. Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, 15.
36. Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, 82.
37. P. Adams Sitney, “Autobiography in Avant-Garde Film,” Millennium
Film Journal 1.1 (1977): 67.
38. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self & Society from the Standpoint of a
Social Behaviorist, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1934), 173–78.
39. Mead, Mind, Self & Society, 174.
40. Mead, Mind, Self & Society, 279.
41. See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of
Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 78 and 99.
42. See August Wilhelm Schlegel, Vorlesungen über Ästhetik, vol. 1 of
Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen, ed. Georg Braungart, (Paderborn:
Schöningh, 1989), 290.
43. Hill’s notion of timelessness is closer to epiphany and symbiotic moments
celebrated by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; Brakhage’s modernist
patron is Gertrude Stein.
44. Brakhage, “Metaphors on Vision,” 12. Arthur calls this mythological
rhetoric the “‘First Film/Last Film’ syndrome,” which he describes as a
strategy that opposes commercial cinema from a position that appears to
be immune “from the erosions and revisions of time figured as social-
cultural history.” See Arthur, A Line of Sight, 63. Cinema, in this mythical
 conception, is both utopian and apocalyptic in that it takes us back to the
origins of art in the evolution of human culture or points towards the
dissolution of the distinctions between art and non-art.
45. See James Peterson, Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order: Understanding
the American Avant-Garde Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1994).
46. Ulla E. Dydo, “Must Horses Drink. Or ‘Any Language Is Funny If You
Don’t Understand It,’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 4.2 (1985),
272–80.
47. Stan Brakhage, “Gertrude Stein: Meditative Literature and Film” (1990),
in Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Filmmaking by Stan
Brakhage, ed. by Bruce McPherson (Kingston, NY:
Documentext/McPherson), 201.
48. “My answer is (as inspired by hers) a freeing of each image (as her each-
and-every word) to its un-owned self-life within the continuities (rather
than context) of the work. My working process (as illuminated by Dydo’s
study of Stein’s) is to transmogrify (as Stein translates) each vibrancy of
unutterably private source into Form. The forms within The Film will
answer only to each other and the form of the paradigm the entirety-of-
forms finally is. And this will axiomatically constitute a meditative art,
just as hers is literarily thus, inasmuch as integrity-of-form forms Form.
One can empathize with Hero and Heroine of a narrative dramatic work,
but only at the expense of one’s self-awareness and/or meditation on
Other. One can ‘read’ a film along-a-line of names; but only at the cost of
formal integrity and of meditative inner formation.” Brakhage, “Gertrude
Stein,” 201.
49. John Bramble, Modernism and the Occult (Basingstoke: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2015), 117.
50. See Leon Katz, “Weininger and The Making of Americans,” Twentieth
Century Literature 24.1 (1978), 8–26; and Maria Farland, “Gertrude
Stein’s Brain Work,” American Literature 76.1 (2004), 117–48. Stein
explained her idea of abstract characterization as “[t]he exactitude of
abstract thought and poetry as created by exactness and as far as possible
disembodiment if one may use such a word creating a sense of intensity
and exactness.” Quoted in Ulla E. Dydo, “‘Stanzas in Meditation’: The
Other Autobiography,” Chicago Review 35.2 (1985), 5.
51. Farland, “Gertrude Stein’s Brain Work,” 138.
52. Brakhage, “Metaphors on Vision,” 13.
53. Brakhage, “The Camera Eye” (1963), in Essential Brakhage: Selected
Writings on Filmmaking by Stan Brakhage, ed. by Bruce McPherson
(Kingston, NY: Documentext/McPherson), 15.
54. See also David E. James, “Stan Brakhage: The Activity of His Nature,” in
Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker, ed. David E. James (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2005), 1–19.
55. Brakhage described his own closed-eye visions as disembodied acts of
consciousness, where the will to manipulate, control or simply retain the
visual patterns is freed from the physical world. See Brakhage, “My Eye,”
in Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Filmmaking by Stan
Brakhage, ed. by Bruce McPherson (Kingston, NY:
Documentext/McPherson, 2001), 25–36.
56. Frampton, “Stan and Jane Brakhage, Talking,” 74.
57. Exploring a middle ground between Brakhage’s handcrafted hypnogogic
visions and the conceptual exploitations of hallucinatory effects, artists
like Robert Breer and Robert Hutton looked for organic ways to combine
structural and expressionistic approaches to such retinal collages. See
Scott MacDonald, “Surprise! The Films of Robert Huot: 1967–1972,”
Quarterly Review of Film Studies 5.3 (1980): 297–318.
58. Brion Gysin, “Dream Machine,” in Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin
Reader, ed. Jason Weiss (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
2001), 114.
59. Gysin, “Dream Machine,” 114.
60. Gysin, “Dream Machine,” 114–15.
61. Gysin, “Dream Machine,” 115.
62. On Brakhage’s changing plans about the films to be included as chapters
of The Book of the Film see Sitney, Eyes Upside Down, 76–77.
63. Program notes to The Machine of Eden in the catalogue of the Canyon
Cinema Foundation, available online at www.canyoncinema.com.
64. Program notes to Duplicity in the catalogue of the Canyon Cinema
Foundation, available online at www.canyoncinema.com.
65. Suranjan Ganguly, “Stan Brakhage—The 60th Birthday Interview,” Film
Culture 79 (Summer 1994), 20.
66. Keller, The Untutored Eye, 180.
67. Program notes to Duplicity in the catalogue of the Canyon Cinema
Foundation, available online at www.canyoncinema.com.
68. Schneemann’s letter to Naomi Levinson, May 28, 1958, reprinted in
Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann
and Her Circle, ed. Kristin Stiles (Durham: Duke University Press,
2010), 26.
69. Schneemann’s letter to Naomi Levinson, May 28, 1958, 25.
70. Schneemann’s letter to Naomi Levinson, May 28, 1958, 27.
71. Schneemann views their relationship in terms of the romantic dichotomy
between reflexive or sentimental and naive or immediate consciousness.
In her letter to Levinson she remarks that Jane Brakhage had already begun
to see her naturalness as “idiosyncrasy, as insubstantial and resents his
making much of this while it remains her most declared outward character
sign.” Schneemann’s letter to Naomi Levinson, May 28, 1958, 27.
72. Schneemann’s letter to Naomi Levinson, May 28, 1958, 26.
73. P. Adams Sitney, introduction to Metaphors on Vision, by Stan Brakhage,
ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Film Culture, 1963), unpag.
74. Frampton, “Stan and Jane Brakhage, Talking,” 77.
75. Frampton, “Stan and Jane Brakhage, Talking,” 77.
76. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 13.
77. Frampton, “Stan and Jane Brakhage, Talking,” 77.
78. Frampton, “Stan and Jane Brakhage, Talking,” 77.
79. See Jacques Aumont, “Mortal Beauty,” in The Cinema Alone: Essays on
the Work of Jean-Luc Godard, 1985–2000, ed. Michael Temple and
James S. Williams (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), 97–
112.
80. Program notes to Meat Joy reprinted in Carolee Schneemann, Imaging
Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (Cambridge: The MIT Press,
2003), 61.
81. For Michael Benedikt “Schneemann’s contribution to both a later phase of
Abstract Expressionism and the Happening was to fulfill these gestures
with an element that has seldom been treated as anything but abstract in
both painting and theatre: the human form,” Michael Benedikt, Theatre
Experiment (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967), 355.
82. Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics, 55–56.
83. Carolee Schneemann, “The Obscene Body/Politic,” Art Journal 50. 4
(1991), 28.
84. See also Schneemann, “The Obscene Body/Politic,” 28: “In 1962 I
created a loft environment, built of large panels of interlocked, rhythmic
color units, broken mirrors and glass, lights, motorized umbrellas. I then
wanted to combine my actual body with this work, as an integral material
—a further dimension to this construction, a ritualized set of physical
transformations.”
85. Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London:
Routledge, 1997), 35.
86. Schneemann, “The Obscene Body/Politic,” 31.
87. David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 317–18.
88. Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics, 23.
89. Schneemann’s letter to Stan Brakhage, January 18, 1958, reprinted in
Kristine Stiles, Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of
Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle (Durham: Duke University Press,
2010), 18–19.
90. Schneemann’s letter to Robert Haller, October 23, 1977, reprinted in
Kristine Stiles, Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of
Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle (Durham: Duke University Press,
2010), 287.
91. Dick Higgins’ letter to Schneemann, March 10, 1981, reprinted in Kristine
Stiles, Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee
Schneemann and Her Circle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010),
327.
92. Schneemann’s letter to Dick Higgins, March 11, 1981, reprinted in
Kristine Stiles, Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of
Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle (Durham: Duke University Press,
2010), 329.
93. Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics, 165.
94. See Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970).
95. For an account of the violent and irrational responses Schneemann’s
performances have received see Schneemann, “The Obscene
Body/Politic,” 31.
 96. Antonin Artaud’s critique of the Kantian aesthetic, his rejection of
strategies of detachment and his conviction that sensuous disinterestedness
impoverished the aesthetic experience had a strong impact on
Schneemann’s performance art. See Jay Murphy, “Assimilating the
Unassimilable: Carolee Schneemann in Relation to Antonin Artaud,” in
Imaging Her Erotics, ed. Carolee Schneemann (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 2002), 226–32 and R. Bruce Elder, A Body of Vision:
Representations of the Body in Recent Film and Poetry (Waterloo:
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997), 143–91.
97. Scott MacDonald, “Carolee Schneemann” in Critical Cinema: Interviews
with Independent Filmmakers, (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988), 138.
98. See also J. Carlos Kase, “Kitch’s Last Meal: Art, Life, and Quotidiana in
the Observational Cinema of Carolee Schneemann,” Millennium Film
Journal 54 (2011), 72–83.
99. Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics, 159.
100. MacDonald, “Carolee Schneemann,” 143.
101. Imaging Her Erotics (dir. Maria Beatty and Carolee Schneemann, 1993),
quoted in Mary Magdalene Serra, “Eye/Body: The Cinematic Paintings of
Carolee Schneemann,” in Women’s Experimental Cinema, ed. Robin
Blaetz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 112.
7 Minds and Screens

Once the camera is regarded as an optical model of vision, it seems only a

small step to investigate it as a model of the mind. What happens when a
model of perception becomes a model of consciousness? As we have seen in
Chapter Two, there is a material irony in Descartes’s rationalization of vision.
While the geometric conceptualization of vision is modeled on the camera
obscura, it ultimately obliterates the material, technological and ecological
aspects of the medium. Vision in this process of rationalization runs the risk of
becoming abstract and independent of the body, medium and environment.
Does the mind’s eye duplicate the act of perception only to replace it? Is
cinematography a form of writing with things that acts upon the world? Or, is
it at a remove from this world, perceiving the same as mental images?
This chapter continues to explore the challenges and stakes of rationalizing
the camera as a model of mental vision by reviewing Bruce Kawin’s and
Gilles Deleuze’s theories of camera consciousness against autographic and
autoptic explorations of a mental camera in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom
(1960), Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch (1980), Julian Schnabel’s The
Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) and Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void
(2009). In Chapter Four I approached mental camera-eye conceptions by
regarding film as external or externalized memory traces. The next step in this
analogy between camera and mind is to look at film as a mindscreen
processing such traces as mental images. If the diary’s organization of records
enables a vectorization of time through structured absences of a series, mental
images are the emergent result of such temporal formations.
In a similar way, film theorists have introduced the idea of camera
consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. Camera consciousness is typically
seen to arise as a system of functional relations that is irreducible to its parts.
Emergent systems can be analyzed in synchronic and diachronic ways as
hierarchical organizations and developmental formations. For its application
to film studies, this means that emergent conceptions of camera consciousness
offer a way of synthesizing and revising competing approaches in film theory
as well as a way of theorizing evolving forms of cinema.1
 Kawin’s seminal study Mindscreen (1978) emphasizes a synchronic
reading. By contrast, Deleuze’s reflections on the time-image in the second
volume of Cinema (1985) describe a historical break that radically changed
how film was understood.2 Kawin’s concerns are mainly narratological. He
integrates literary theory and language-based semiotics within a model of
consciousness in order to outline a filmic system of signification that is on par
with literature.3 Deleuze argues for a theory of the image that bypasses
linguistic frames of representation. Bringing together Henri Bergson’s
philosophy of life and Peirce’s semiotics, he constructs a genetic model of
increasingly complex cinematic signs.
Despite these differences, both Kawin and Deleuze invoke camera
consciousness in an evolving sense that synthesizes developments in the
history and theory of film. As their notions of camera consciousness are
premised on processes of abstraction that map filmic gestures onto discursive
figures and medial or generic frames, they provide insightful lessons in
theorizing about film as much as they raise the question of the historicity of
theory. Kawin promotes his theory of the mindscreen as a middle ground that
seeks to amend the shortcomings of idealistic and materialistic approaches.
He criticizes auteur theory for its excessive preoccupation with the
filmmaker’s vision that culminates in a pseudo-autonomous view of the filmic
text. Conversely, he finds apparatus theory, or what he refers to as Marxist
semiotics, stuck in a “culturally predetermined iconography.”4 By focusing too
narrowly on either the filmmaker’s dream or the illusions projected by the
apparatus, Kawin argues,

analyses of film consciousness have swung on these two gates and left out
the garden. Might not the artifact, too, have or imitate mindedness? The
dialectic between the world before the camera and the image before the
projector; the relationships between the artist’s intentions, the emotive
capacity of the image, and the audience’s response; the mutual influence of
guided fantasy and willed behavior—all these have been opened to
question.5

Deleuze’s film philosophy can also be described as a response to the two-fold

interface of the camera. His distinction between movement-image and time-
image can be linked to the recording and projecting mechanisms of the
camera. For Deleuze movement-image and time-image are not only different
kinds of images with distinct imagistic logics, they also characterize different
aesthetic traditions in film history. In contrast to Kawin, who carefully avoids
a historical account of the emergence of camera consciousness, Deleuze
advances a bold historical thesis that views World War II as a catalytic event
that caused a shift from the movement-image to the time-image. Although
Deleuze’s crude reading of film history misses the mark of historical
scholarship, his insistence on a historical frame of media philosophy is
instrumental to his antithetical reasoning and his attempt of bringing together
material and idealistic approaches to film.
Instead of regarding camera consciousness as a subsequent stage or a
higher form of camera vision, I propose to view perceptual and cognitive
aspects as different facets of camera-eye metaphors. Camera-eye metaphors
operate as differentials that drive artistic innovation and aesthetic
conceptualizations. As I have been arguing throughout this book, camera-eye
metaphors are critical for understanding film as a synthetic form of seeing and
writing. They interface organs and acts of articulation and complicate the
conceptual distinction between person and discourse. At the most elementary
level, camera-eye metaphors cut across the epistemological distinction
between record and reality, or what Kant refers to as the phenomenal world of
sensory experiences and the nominal world of things-in-themselves. In doing
so they draw attention to the interstitial realms between body, mind and
medium.
The four films I will discuss illustrate in exemplary ways how metaphors
of the camera eye cut across bodily and mental domains. In Powell’s Peeping
Tom (1960), the camera appears as a discrete object, a lethal tool in the hands
of the amateur filmmaker and serial killer Mark Lewis. In Tavernier’s Death
Watch (1980), TV cameras are camouflaged in the bionic eyes of the
journalist Roddie. In Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007),
the camera shifts from perception to cognition. Recording the stream of
consciousness of a pseudo-comatose patient Jean-Dominique Bauby, the
camera eye becomes a mental screen that daydreams, remembers and thinks.
Noé’s Enter the Void (2009) takes this idea a cosmic step further, invoking a
post-mortem camera as a spiritual-molecular entity that spirals the gap
between the protagonist’s death and his re-incarnation. While it may be
tempting to read these films as part of a historical narrative in which the
camera advances from perceptual to mental and cosmic grounds, I will
discuss them as historically charged revisions of the dominant auteurist
conception of camera consciousness that looms large in Kawin’s and
Deleuze’s theories.

Bruce Kawin and Gilles Deleuze on Camera Consciousness

Kawin and Deleuze posit the mind as a site of higher synthesis and conceptual
integration. In Kawin’s case, the notion of camera consciousness helps
accommodate film narration within a theoretical framework derived from
literary studies. As we will see, the idea of the mindscreen undermines the
very distinction between mimetic or performative and diegetic or
communicative models of narration.6 For Deleuze camera consciousness
marks a moment of artistic innovation that gives rise to a new kind of image
and a novel understanding of cinema. In both theories, the camera
consciousness builds upon and disconnects from sensory aspects of camera
perception.
Kawin insists that “the mind’s eye does see, that it speaks to itself in
images, however colored they may be by nonverbal or even nonvisual
emotion.”7 Mindscreen also implies a withdrawal from the social world of
communication. It is perhaps better understood as a re-description of the
cinematic viewing situation that synthesizes a classical proposition of film
narration on gestural levels of filmic techniques, figural levels of discourse as
well as more generic or abstract levels of medium specificity. A mindscreen
presents visual or aural mentations such as the memories, dreams and thoughts
of characters, filmmakers or even the film itself.8 As a narrative technique, a
mindscreen complements voice-over narration and subjective camera, which
Kawin reserves for strictly perceptual aspects of subjectivity that may be
indicated by the camera’s focus, angle or movement. Accordingly, voice-over
and subjective camera are sensory gestures that refer to modes of showing and
telling and imply acts of ‘sounding’ and ‘sighting.’ However, as Kawin
argues, a “narrator does not have to ‘tell’ sounds orally, but can allow the
audience to share his ears, just as he does not have to construct the landscape
in front of him.”9 ‘Telling’ in this telepathic mode of participation amounts to
a mental show.
Thus as a filmic technique that signifies a mental gesture, the mindscreen
‘introverts’ the figure of the grand image-maker, which Albert Laffay
described as a “virtual presence hiding behind all films.”10 The figure of a
grand image-maker recalls a communicative agent, who exists behind or
alongside the image with which he or she communicates. Kawin’s mindscreen
replaces such an adjacent relation between product and producer with
immanent relations of characters, narrators and filmmakers who express
themselves through or as images. Finally, Kawin’s notion of the mindscreen
operates on a conceptual level of generic or medial frames. It integrates
literary theory within a psychological framework. He blends the literary
distinction between first and third-person narration with the psychological
distinction between perception and cognition. The result is a discrete or
undivided form of consciousness, a persona that stands in for the origin and
processing of the filmic work. On the one hand, Kawin’s idea of a mindscreen
frames the filmic image as a quasi-personal act of consciousness. It operates
on a quasi-personal level of consciousness and thereby maintains a unified
sense of subjectivity, which may be the collective spirit of a city, for example
in Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1966) or “a nightmare
in the mind of a silent God,” as Kawin describes Ingmar Bergman’s Shame
(1967). On the other hand, Kawin’s supposition of a mindscreen blurs the
grammatical distinction between first and third persons. As Kawin regards
consciousness essentially as a reflection on perception, the mindscreen
virtualizes the distinction between self and other: “First person cannot stand
out from third person when the mindscreen is systemic—when the world is a
face, and its mirror is the camera.”11 At this point, Kawin’s mindscreen turns
into a totalizing concept that leaves nothing from which it may be
distinguished. As Branigan points out, Kawin’s idea of a first-person
mindscreen becomes formally identical with a third-person point of view.12
The middle ground that Kawin hoped to gauge with his notion of the
mindscreen becomes one where distinctions blur. The communicative
framework of literary theory with its distinction between first and third person
appears incompatible with the presentational framework premised on the
opposition between conscious and non-conscious. Or rather, the merging of
these frameworks generates the monolithic figure of a central consciousness.
Deleuze’s distinction between the movement-image and time-image has
received a similar criticism. In Film Fables, Rancière argues that it is
impossible to distinguish the two types of images on a formal level.13
Movement-image and time-image are not only different types of images that
characterize different kinds of movies, they are also different conceptual
views on images. Two seemingly incompatible logics are also at play in
Deleuze’s distinction between the movement-image and the time-image.
Rooted in sensorimotor schemas of the perceptual apparatus, the movement-
image is characterized by organic relations between the world and the
camera. Following a mechanical logic of attraction and association, the
movement-image translates the world of things into images of affects, percepts
and actions. By contrast, the time-image relates to the character of the
projected image. The time-images are retentions of the mind that build and
reflect on movement-images. Dreaming, remembering and thinking are mental
re-enactments that through repetition and transformation introduce a sense of
time as well as a detachment or liberation from the sensorimotor system.
Whereas in the movement-image time can only be represented indirectly, for
instance, as an effect of montage, time is immanent to his mental conception of
the time-image.
Deleuze’s taxonomy of the moving image is both typological and
evolutionary. It follows a course of increasingly complex forms of making
sense that are modeled on Peirce’s notion of firstness, secondness and
thirdness.14 Affection-image, perception-image and action-image are
dominated by sense-based and gestural forms such as indexes and extensions.
Like the representation of time, movement-images express symbolic meanings
indirectly as effects of structured relations, whereas the time-image is already
symbolic. On the one hand, movement-image and time-image co-exist. They
both, indirectly and directly, partake of a symbolic and ideational regime. On
the other hand, they are envisioned in a historical development. Like Kawin,
Deleuze associates camera consciousness with auteur cinema, where the
director’s creative vision becomes a key frame of interpretation. Kawin
reviews the movies of Akira Kurosawa, Alain Renais, Bergman and Jean-Luc
Godard against the early and classical invocations of mental screens. Deleuze
suggests an even closer link between the emergence of the time-image and
post-war auteur cinema. Echoing the tastes and predilections of auteur
theory, Deleuze regards Alfred Hitchcock as the director that personifies this
shift from the movement-image to the time-image.15 Neither Kawin nor
Deleuze consider camera consciousness simply an invention or innovation of
auteur cinema; they conceive of it as a phenomenon with historical
implications. Kawin, however, refrains from explicating them. His main goal
is “a demonstration of the range and structure of what, at the risk of
proliferating terms, I call mindscreen cinema.”16
 This initially appears to be also Deleuze’s position articulated in the
preface to the first volume of the English edition of Cinema: “This book does
not set out to produce a history of cinema but to isolate certain
cinematographic concepts.”17 However, if history serves as the basis for
investigating philosophical concepts to which cinema has given rise, then the
preface to the second edition reverses this claim. There cinema or, more
specifically, the cinema of the time-image crystallizes a philosophical
development as much as it responds to a historical event. On the one hand,
time-image repeats a long-spun development that gave rise to modern
philosophy, the reversal of “the subordination of time to movement.”18 On the
other hand, Deleuze views the time-image in response to the demolition and
reconstruction of cities during and after World War II. For Deleuze, the virtual
nature of the time-image has its roots in the increased experience of
“situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no
longer know how to describe.”19
Deleuze’s heavy-handed historical thesis has not attracted many
followers.20 Critics sympathetic to Deleuze’s theory often privilege his
conceptual framework at the expense of his historical reading. However,
discarding Deleuze’s historical account misses a vital dimension of his
philosophy.21 Curiously, Deleuze’s schematic attempt to historicize his theory
is itself a story of transformation and revision. Deleuze stages the Second
World War as a theoretical event.22 The Holocaust and the atomic bomb
function as traumatic kernels of an unrepresentable (and inconceivable)
reality that can call for a new visionary rationale. History thereby follows the
same process of semiosis and is subject to the libidinal economy. As the real
remains conceptually inaccessible in the Kantian sense or defies
symbolification in a Lancanian sense, it can only be encountered as vision.23
Or as Deleuze puts it in a central aphorism: “There is no knowing how far a
real image may lead: the importance of becoming visionary and seer.”24
Deleuze’s double framing of his Cinema books provides commentary on the
machinery of his film philosophy, which is itself modeled on the cinematic
apparatus. His film philosophy perfects the model of synthetic and convergent
theorizing, which I have described in Chapter One. He avoids the
metaphysical trap of assuming an external or transcendental point of view by
following a reasoning that appears congruent with the logic of the cinematic
apparatus. Not only do movement-image and time-image align with the
receptive and projective mechanism of the camera, the transition from one
mechanism to the other constitutes the encounter of two distinct imagistic
logics that reverberates throughout film history. If the embodied movement-
image is an effect of the real that points towards a representation of time by
manipulating space, the virtuality of the disembodied time-image is a
response to it, which—as Deleuze puts it—is “actualized in consciousness in
accordance with the needs of the present actual or the crises of the real.”25 In
other words, the camera logic of causality interfaces a logic of intentionality.
While the first has a material base, the second is characterized by the mind’s
freedom to respond.26 Accordingly, the Second World War is less a
transcendental agent that brings about the time-image as it is a reference point
for its retroactive realization. The actual sites of demolition and
reconstruction become virtual sites of projections, which, as Deleuze reminds
us, need to be “qualified, corrected, adapted to concrete examples.”27
Deleuze’s philosophy of film is not only modeled on its medium, it also
reflects on its own process of construction. This becomes particularly evident
in the way he links discursive figures to filmic gestures and generic frames.
He aligns the movement-image and the time-image with the figures of agent
and seer. The figure of the agent allegorizes the virtues of the movement-
image that are especially evident in the action film. For Deleuze, the agent is
emblematic of classical cinema and its preoccupation with narrative
continuity. Removed from the world of action and reaction, the seer serves as
an archetypical figure of the time-image, personifying the oversight and
visionary scheme often predicated onto auteur cinema. As Rancière observes,

Deleuze subverts the old parable of the blind and the paralytic: the
filmmaker’s gaze must become tactile, must become like the gaze of the
blind who coordinate the elements of the visible world by groping. And,
conversely, the coordinating hand must be the hand of a paralytic. It must
be seized by the paralysis of the gaze, which can only touch things from
afar, but never grasp them.28

In both Kawin’s and Deleuze’s theories, aesthetic conceptualizations and

artistic visions of cinema develop in a series of elaborations from filmic
gestures and figures. If gestures act upon movements that connect body and
media, figures reveal typical aspects such as media-aided movement in a
singular way. When figures become types, they inform generic frames, kinds
of cinema that are based on archetypal or allegorical figures. Instead of
viewing perceptual and mental conceptions of the camera eye in a
developmental or historical trajectory or regarding them as symptomatic of a
certain kind of cinema, I will regard them as different facets of the camera
eye, which in Chapter Five I have described as automedial gestures of seeing
and writing. Accordingly, artistic innovation and aesthetic conceptualizations
may be described as specific historicizing visions of how media can integrate
modes of seeing and writing. As I will show in the remainder of this chapter,
in Peeping Tom and Death Watch autopsy serves as an object of
identification, a precarious source of vitality that inspires the auteur or
‘autographer.’ Conversely, in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and in Enter
the Void, autopsy describes an immanent state, an emphatic and emotional
basis that cinematography seeks to transcend.
Death, around which all of these films revolve, figures as a transcendental
other in the light of which the nature or virtue of cinema is reflected. Autopsy
as an inquiry into the death and afterlife of cinema means to raise the
paradoxical question of what cinema is in the face of its absence.29
Answering this question is both an imaginative and epistemological exercise
of probing the ethical, representational, technological and aesthetic
boundaries that define film within a given historical discourse.30 It calls for a
perspective of cinema that—like Vertov’s post-cinematic proclamation—lies
outside established definitions and representational models of cinema. Or, as
Deleuze puts it, it “tend[s] toward a perception as it was before men (or
after)” and toward a space that is “released from its human co-ordinates.”31
Yet, as Žižek reminds us, seeing the world from outside our body, like
revisiting life from the grave, is charged with practical, ethical and libidinal
problems. For him the epistemological failure of perceiving reality without
our subjective investment is preceded by the libidinal terror of seeing
ourselves in the face of death.32
Autopsy and autography are complementary gestures. If autopsy seeks to
approach reality beyond established concepts and preconceived
representational forms, autography re-envisions such reality in ways that can
be intuited and read. In acts of autopsy the self runs the risk of disintegrating
or disappearing amidst the forces of the real. By contrast, autography
(re-)inscribes (new) notions of the self by virtues of (new forms of)
symbolizations.
Visionary Agents in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and
Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch

In Tavernier’s internationally cast thriller Death Watch (La mort en direct,

1980),33 featuring Romy Schneider and Harvey Keitel in leading parts,
autopsy and autography are showcased by contrasting two filmic techniques:
the video-laced point-of-view shots of the TV journalist Roddie (Harvey
Keitel) and the elegiac voice-over narration of his wife (spoken by Julie
Christie). The two narrative techniques are mapped onto intermedial
relationships (literature vs. film and film vs. video), institutional contexts
(cinema vs. TV) and aesthetic traditions (mainstream vs. auteur cinema).
Since Death Watch is a literary adaption I want to begin by examining the
way this opposition is played out in the novel that served as the basis for
Tavernier’s film.
Published in 1974, David G. Compton’s novel The Unsleeping Eye
presents science fiction in a midlife crisis by introducing the figure of a
cyborg into the domain of reality TV, which in the early 1970s began by
broadcasting everyday nuclear family life. Compton’s science fiction remains
in the near future. However, what appears to be a contemporaneous Scotland
belongs to a world where medical progress has largely obliterated diseases.
The story revolves around the middle-aged hack writer Katherine Mortenhoe,
whose terminal illness becomes a media sensation. Harassed by the press,
Katherine finally agrees to sell the exclusive rights for broadcasting her death
to the NTV, who offer her protection from other media and a large amount of
money that would provide her husband with a life after her death. Katherine’s
plan to run away from the network is double-crossed by Roddie, an
undercover TV journalist, who befriends her and secretly films her final
weeks with special cameras that have been implanted in his eyes. It follows
an awkward romance and an impossible love story in which Roddie’s moral
dilemma and Katherine’s persisting defiance enact a social satire on media
surveillance and social control.
Katherine and Roddie are anti-heroes of their respective professions.
Katherine’s aspirations as a novelist have been thwarted by the entertainment
industry. She programs romances on a computer that pre-calculates the global
market value of the fiction. Roddie describes her as a romantic “who thought
of her vocabulary as manly, and used it as a device for getting on in what her
father described as a ‘man’s world.’ She had the romantic’s distaste for the
present, and the romantic’s belief in some other time, either past or future, that
had been or would be better.”34 Roddie is a mercenary journalist, who
sacrifices his private and social life for a continuous picture of reality. For
Roddie truth can only be continuous. (In the UK, the novel originally appeared
under the title The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe.) Continuous exposure
to light is also the precondition to keep the camera implants charged and
working. Roddie’s failure to supply his eyes continually with light reveals the
hubris of his truth claim. When Roddie turns blind towards the end of the
novel, he is graced with cathartic insight that leads him back to his wife.
It is easy to read the story as an allegory of opsis and mythos, the pure
spectacle of sight and the retrospective, teleological ordering of events.
Compton orchestrates this emblematic difference between Roddie and
Katherine by alternating between different narrative perspectives. While
Roddie’s story is told in first person, Katherine’s story is told from a third-
person perspective and focalized through a number of minor characters.
Roddie embodies the principle of autopsy to the point that he views the world
in the absence of his private self. Exchanging his eyes for TV cameras turns
him into public property and isolates him as a human being. Similarly,
Katherine’s computer-programmed novels turn autography into an act that
obliterates the creative authority of the writer. We can think of Roddie and
Katherine as personifying the figures of the agent and the seer that stand in for
the organic and crystalline regimes of the movement-image and the time-
image. As a character-narrator, Roddie is an agent who develops his story
organically in response to the situation he finds himself in. He records a
world that exists independently of him. Recording the world continuously
promises him a stake in this reality in that it secures him a direct link to the
actual, physical regime of light. For Deleuze, continuity is the trademark of the
real; it is recognized “by the continuity shots which establish it and by the
laws which determine successions, simultaneities and permanences: it is a
regime of localizable relations, actual linkages, legal, causal and logical
connections.”35 Continuity also becomes a way of controlling “the pure force
of time which puts truth into crisis.”36 It prevents time from forging into
alternative futures.
Katherine’s computer-assisted fabrication of fiction is diametrically
opposed to Roddie’s pursuit of truth. Her task as a romance programmer is to
exhaust all the possible worlds of commercially successful romances. Her
computer-based predictions thwart the image of a visionary seer. Ironically, it
is Roddie who recognizes Katherine’s visionary potential. In a key passage of
the novel, Roddie revises his initial prejudice towards Katherine as an
embittered romantic. He confides to the reader that “[w]orking with her
wasn’t going to be so rough after all. She possessed what I liked to call the
possibility of joy. It’s rare these days. Perhaps she had needed Dr. well-
meaning Mason to bring it out in her, but there it was. The real, the continuous
Katherine Mortenhoe possessed the possibility of joy.”37 Roddie here appears
both as a psychoanalyst and a visionary. According to the psychoanalytic
reading Roddie hints at, Katherine’s immanent death becomes a source of
jouissance that defies symbolization. Throughout the novel, her joy remains a
shifting signifier that is always something else. The recognition of Katherine’s
possibility for joy attests Roddie’s “vital intuition” and aesthetic vision that
imbue the actual image with a virtual force.
Reportedly, it was this passage that sparked Tavernier’s interest in turning
the novel into a film.38 Tavernier’s identification with Roddie as a ‘visionary
agent’ or surrogate director is characteristic of his approach to filmmaking
which he describes as “letting myself be guided by the characters, forgetting
all the rules”:39

I like the movement of a film to have the same changes of rhythm, the same
hesitations as the characters; I want the audience to discover things at the
same time as the characters do. This sometimes imposes a structure that
looks as if it’s hesitant, particularly for the first reel. The beginnings of my
films have always been haphazard, zigzagging, even uncertain. The
dramatic conflict, and especially the reasons for that conflict, appears
only later on.40

Tavernier’s model for what he also describes as diving into a character’s

universe can be found in Michael Powell, whose work he considers an
important alternative to the auteurist revolt against the classical cinema of the
studio system.41 Like Martin Scorsese, Tavernier was instrumental in
rehabilitating Powell’s image as a filmmaker after the devastating reception of
Peeping Tom. For Tavernier, defending Powell’s film against the aesthetics of
the New Wave became a way of promoting a non-partisan approach. This
rediscovery of Powell stylizes him into a patron for a non-dogmatic
cinematic:
 He was forgotten also in France, or rather completely misunderstood, the
chief victim of the auteur theory. As a means of defending Hitchcock,
François Truffaut had denied other British directors any talent, ruling out
—at a stroke—not only Powell but also Cavalcanti, Mackendrick, Robert
Hamer, Launder and Gilliat. […]. Things were worse in England. Powell
had been rubbed off the map, been put on a blacklist, since Peeping Tom,
so violent and insulting had been the critical reception […]. Within British
cinema Powell has a place of his own. He refused to follow fashion,
didn’t associate with any school […]. The films he made between 1937
and 1951 radiate an amazing originality and freedom of tone. Profoundly
rooted in a national culture, they avoid any spirit of insularity, revealing
an openness of mind, a curiosity and a breadth of vision that are almost
unique.42

In an interview with Tavernier, Powell famously distanced himself from the

auterist equation of style with a personal vision by identifying himself with
cinema itself: “most directors of my generation have their own style, but I
don’t. Take Hitchcock, for example, or Renoir; these are directors who have
found their own style in the cinema. I haven’t. I live cinema. […] I am not a
film director with a personal style, I am the cinema.”43
Powell’s meta-cinematic thriller Peeping Tom illustrates this in an uncanny
way. The film exhibits a variety of filmic practices that include scientific film,
snuff film, personal documentary and commercial feature film. Mark Lewis,
an introvert cameraman played by Karl-Heinz Böhm, lives a cinematic double
life, embodying, as it seems, the sinister spectrum of filmmaking. He works as
a camera assistant in a commercial feature film production, yet his real
cinematic aspirations are those of a documentary filmmaker. In his
documentary he continues the psychological experiments of which he had been
the subject throughout his childhood. What began as his father’s scientific
study of fear and voyeurism has turned into a perverted version of cinema
verité, in which Mark films the women he kills, while having them watch their
own agonized faces through a distorted mirror.44
If Peeping Tom represents what Deleuze calls a cinema of the agent, then it
complicates this notion in important ways. Mark’s compulsive obsessions are
the consequence of his father’s scientific vision and the cruel experiments he
conducted on him. There is also a mother figure to counter-balance his
father’s scientific realism. Mrs. Stephens is a tenant in Mark’s house and the
blind mother of Helen, who Mark has befriended. One night, while Mark is
out on a date with Helen, Mrs. Stephens finds her way into Mark’s private
cinema, a place she had visited in her imagination many times. “The blind
always live in the rooms they live under,” she tells him later.
In a climactic scene, Mark tries to film and kill Mrs. Stephens, but
eventually puts down the dagger that was hidden in his tripod. In this scene
Mrs. Stephens’ ‘superior vision’ wins over Mark’s desperate chase for the
real. She addresses Mark’s doubts hoping to improve his moral vision:
“Instinct is a wonderful thing, isn’t it, Mark? A pity it cannot be photographed.
If I had listened to it years ago, I might have kept my sight. I wouldn’t have let
a man operate I had no faith in.” Mark is an agent of cinema, whose
perception of reality is haunted by his father’s gaze, which interferes and
disrupts the continuity of this reality. Mark’s compulsion to repeat does not
simply unfold in a successive chain of events, but is repeated on all levels of
filmmaking. As Nicola Rehling points out, for the cinematic serial killer,
“killing must be performed, witnessed, reproduced, and made spectacle for an
imagined external other.”45 The opening of the film programmatically reaches
out to the viewer as an accomplice of this spectacle. It begins with a close-up
of an opening eye, a long-distance counter-shot of a prostitute patrolling in
front of a well-lit display window of a lingerie store. The next shot cuts back
to Mark and closes in on the objective of a 16mm Bolex camera he is hiding
in his coat. Framed by the finder of his camera, we then assume Mark’s point
of view as he follows the prostitute up to her room. He watches her undress
and, revealing his weapon, films her terrified face. When she begins to
scream the film cuts to a close-up of a running projector. Accompanied only
by the rattling sound of the projector, we see the opening sequence again in
black and white on the canvas of a private screening room. The change from a
filming situation to a post-filmic viewing situation immediately addresses the
question of this diegetic viewer’s complicity. By having the title credits
superimposed onto the black and white footage this question can be seen to
extend to the film audience as well, as if to check up on the audience’s
emotional involvement or detachment. Showing Mark’s camera vision and the
viewer’s reception back-to-back highlights serial logic that undercuts and
destabilizes the continuity of the narrative. Instead of following a continuous
narrative stream, the film suggests an almost seamless navigation between
different hierarchical perspectives. For Deleuze such a “series of powers,
always referring to each other and passing into one another,” is a
characteristic feature of the time-image that manifests its “power of the
false.”46
One cannot fail to see how Death Watch pays tribute to Peeping Tom. Both
movies feature voyeuristic cameramen in their precarious attempts at
controlling reality. The principle of seriality, which in Peeping Tom is
modeled on different stages of a film production, can be compared to the idea
of simultaneity that organizes the narrative structure of Death Watch. The idea
of simultaneity applies to the almost live broadcasting of Roddie’s camera
eye and the parallel universes of the TV series and the real world.
Simultaneity can also be related to the way film introduces us to these
universes. The beginning of the film Death Watch is a good example of
Tavernier’s tendency towards “haphazard, zigzagging, even uncertain”
beginnings, an almost improvised and structurally open entrance into the
storyworld that attempts to synchronize the development of the characters with
that of the plot and the process of filming itself.
Accompanied by string music, the film opens with three short, distant low-
angle shots of a cemetery that move increasingly closer until a crane shot
gradually elevates the perspective and the city behind the cemetery comes into
view (see Figure 7.1). This scene abruptly changes to Roddie’s final eye
examination. A doctor informs him that his eye can only take a few minutes of
darkness without suffering permanent damage. Following the hospital scene,
we get a first impression of Roddie’s playful curiosity. In an allusion to
Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, Roddie confuses the editors in the TV
studio by broadcasting a series of erratic gazes at an intersection. The
reference to Vertov underscores the experimental dimension of Roddie’s
project; it also draws attention to the co-operative relationship between the
cameraman and the editors. The film then returns to its incipient style. Distant
wide-angle shots of Roddie roaming the streets are accompanied by string
music and the voice-over of Roddie’s estranged wife Tracey.47 Tracey’s
voice-over reinforces the elegiac mood introduced in the opening images of
the cemetery and frames the film as the memoirs of her husband. The non-
diegetic music, the spectacular crane shots and the voice-over form a stark
contrast to Roddie’s camera-eye shots.
The two narrative perspectives approach death or loss in opposing yet
complementary ways. Tracey’s voice-over narration does not assume a
godlike omniscience, it is rather guided by emphatic imagination recounting a
story, from which she was largely absent as a character. In contrast to
Tracey’s disembodied, imaginary vision, which in the opening of the film
literally presents itself as if spoken from beyond the grave by a guardian
angel, Roddie’s embodied camera eye is playful and experimental. He
engages with his environment in an unpremeditated child-like manner where
understanding follows perception. Or, as Tracey puts it, “I don’t think he
knows a thing himself until he films it, and then he knows it” (see Figure 7.2).
In an interview with Hay, Tavernier compared Keitel’s character to the
filmmaker’s encounter with the world:

I think a film-maker should stay like a child and have the same
astonishment and admiration as a child. There is a lot of that in me, and I
like to have that in many characters. Harvey had that—the smile, a
childish guilt. I felt that he had something reminiscent of John Garfield,
who is one of the actors I admired most in the American cinema.48

Figure 7.1 Tracey’s memorial vision in Death Watch.

Figure 7.2 Roddie’s recorded vision in Death Watch.

Tavernier is aware of the ethical dilemma that comes with such a playful and
aesthetic mindset. In an interview with Judy Stone, he explains that he was
fascinated by Compton’s novel because he immediately recognized that its
adaptation could be about himself and his fears as a filmmaker: “Sometimes I
feel I’m only real, I’m only open, I’m only noticing things when I work and not
when I live. That is a danger which I think a lot of artists feel.”49
Tavernier not only places the two narrative modes in creative opposition
but also entangles them in complicit relations. There are numerous instances
where the camera swiftly changes its register from a free-floating imagined
omniscience to one that emulates Roddie’s point of view. Tracking shots that
approximate Roddie’s movements and gazes pervade the entire film and forge
a bridge between Roddie as a focalizer and his wife as the narrator. A
conspicuous example of such exchanges between narrating figures occurs
when Roddie meets Katherine in a church that has been adapted as a shelter
for the homeless. A free-floating camera introduces the locale through shots
from the church’s ceiling and elegantly traverses through the space before it
closes in on Roddie as if to remind the viewer that his gazes record material
for a TV show. The next morning we see Roddie talking to the producer
Vincent on a public phone outside the shelter. He inquires about the quality of
the recordings and gives his suggestions on editing. This shot continues with
the camera following Roddie back inside to his sleeping place. When he
arrives at his bed the camera passes Roddie, assuming a point of view that is
independent of him yet engages in the same activity as he does. Emulating
Roddie’s searching gaze that traces Katherine’s empty bed, the camera
wanders across the sleeping quarters to the adjoining altar where it finds
Katherine talking to a priest. The next reverse shot confirms the difference
between Roddie’s perspective and that of the camera. Yet, when the camera
next closes in on Katherine’s face, we are reminded of how much Roddie’s
secret recording and the disembodied imaginative camera have in common. If
Roddie only really knows something if he films it, the viewer too has to rely
on the emphatic sensibilities of the camera work to reconstruct Roddie’s
experience.
Roddie’s emotions, like the actual TV show, need to be construed by the
viewer’s imagination. Tavernier transforms Compton’s critique of an
emotionally numb society that can only consume pre-fabricated, media-
generated emotions into an imaginative triangulation between the character
Roddie, the narrator Tracey and the viewer. The viewer sees Tracey’s
narrative reconstruction that is based on what she has presumably seen on TV
and by what she knows about her husband.
The idea of simultaneity associated with television technology pervades the
film on three levels: the storyworld, its narrative transmission and the
viewer’s reception. On the story level, it creates a dramatic conflict since
Roddie’s newsfeed fatalistically intercepts Katherine’s plans to escape media
attention. Simultaneity also extends to the process of reception. On a figural
level, it is manifest in the two narrative modes associated with Roddie and
his wife Tracey. In telling us more than she could possibly know, Tracey
continually transgresses her narrative powers. In grasping only what he has
captured with his camera eye, Roddie probes the limits of an uncensored
mediation of experience. Ironically, Tracey owes her limited appearance in
the story to Roddie’s discretion. He avoids his wife in order not to turn her
into a character of his reality show. The juxtaposition of these two narrative
modes correlates with two major viewing hypotheses in processing film. The
first deals with the reconstruction of the actual TV show ‘Death Watch.’ How
much of what we have seen has already been broadcast? How much do
Roddie and Katherine know about it? The other addresses the point of view of
the film Death Watch as narrated by Tracey. Since she tells the story after the
fact, the ending is known to her but withheld from the viewer. Like the
seriality in Peeping Tom, simultaneity in Death Watch plays with the relations
between performance, filming and screening. Consider the shot-reverse-shot
sequence at the beginning of the film. A low-angle camera pan follows
Roddie’s gaze to a billboard sign promoting the upcoming ‘Death Watch’
show. Roddie’s gaze is matched by two reverse shots: a close-up of his face
and a view of the TV studio that monitors his vision. A close-up of Roddie’s
face frames the billboard as an object of his sight and a subsequent shot of the
TV studio frames Roddie as a camera. What is excluded, what cannot be
shown or seen on the TV show ‘Death Watch’ becomes the visionary object of
Death Watch. The camera pan that precedes and establishes the shot-reverse-
shot sequence is yet another gesture that aims to bring together the agent’s and
the seer’s perspectives, which are captured symbolically in Tracey’s
reappearance in the final scene to meet the blind Roddie.
Like Peeping Tom, Death Watch presents us with the director’s alter ego,
which explores the artistic and ethical boundaries of film culture. Roddie
turns from an insomniac cameraman who lives exclusively in the present to a
blind man who is left to his memories and imagination. This dramatic change
re-activates the contrast between a pure visibility of the image and its
symbolic investments of vision. Roddie does not embody a successful
synthesis of these two modes of the image. His failure to do so defers this task
to the overall structure of the film. Like Peeping Tom, Death Watch can be
grouped with a number of films that programmatically blend the camera’s gaze
with the visions of a blind seer such as Magnificent Obsession (1954), Wait
until Dark (1967), Zatôichi (2003) or Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces,
2009).
As fictional proxies of their directors, Roddie and Mark come to symbolize
the moral and artistic excess of envisioning reality. The director’s
psychological identification with the protagonist complicates the organic
paradigm of a continuous and independent reality. Reality is refracted by the
psychic compulsion to repeat or multiplied by simultaneous versions of
reality. Aesthetically, the strategies of seriality and simultaneity advocate a
style that oscillates between gestures of autopsy and autography. For Powell
and Tavernier, the systematic choice of filmic techniques should be neither
limited to the stylistic convention of a genre or institutional media practice,
nor must it turn into the director’s signature. Style here articulates a difference
between person and medium, which Powell’s identification with cinema itself
seeks to overcome programmatically. Instead of developing a personal style,
Powell argues for a plurality of cinematic styles. By seeking guidance from
his characters, Tavernier disrupts the narrative flow in his film. His
disruptive, and seemingly jumbled style becomes a way of reflecting the
virtue of cinema, which takes the shape of reviewing stylistic traditions in the
light of new media practices. As a characteristic of filmmaking practice, style
reflects on the medium film as a formal system.
In Peeping Tom and Death Watch autography envisions autopsy. As the
connection between filmmakers and protagonists remains one of symbolic
identification, cinema is dealt with as a symbolic system rather than a material
form. In the last part of this chapter, I want to consider the complementary
movement of autopsy enacting autography. What happens if filmic writing is
seen as an experience of the medium and its environment? Can we conceive of
a camera consciousness that does not disconnect from the body and
environment but constantly takes account of sensorimotor experiences?

Enacted Visions in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the

Butterfly and Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void

Powell and Tavernier turn to their protagonists as visionary agents and

sources of cinematographic inspiration. In Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and
the Butterfly and Noé’s Enter the Void, the psychological and symbolic
identification between filmmaker and protagonist is supplanted by the
filmmaker’s and viewer’s immersion in the character’s experiential world.
Schnabel’s and Noé’s films illustrate a complementary or inverse way of
linking sight and vision. While Powell and Tavernier approach autopsy
through autography, Schnabel and Noé frame filmic writing by acts of autopsy.
If Powell and Tavernier challenge continuity as a characteristic feature of
perceptual realism, Schnabel and Noé revisit fluidity as an imagistic
characteristic of the camera’s stream of consciousness.
Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is an adaptation of Jean-
Dominique Bauby’s memoir. Bauby, who was a journalist and the editor of the
fashion magazine Elle, dictated his memoir while suffering from locked-in
syndrome, a pseudo-comatose state in which patients are fully conscious and
awake but find all their voluntary muscles except the eyes paralyzed. Bauby
‘wrote’ his memoir by blinking in response to a series of letters that were
dictated to him. As blinking can be both a voluntary and an involuntary act, it
lends itself well to addressing both embodied and conceptual dimensions of
meaning in film. Gestures of blinking lie at the core of Schnabel’s camera-eye
conception.50 In the film, the brief interrupting black frames achieve a double
meaning in that they are at once realistic and symbolic. They enhance the
reality effect of depicting Jean-Do’s vision and establish an aesthetic alliance
between Jean-Do’s mode of communication and the cinematography (see
Figure 7.3).

Figure 7.3 The nurse’s eyes as Jean-Do’s organ of articulation in The Diving
Bell and the Butterfly.

Notably, blinking was simulated in different ways emphasizing the

involvement of both the director of photography Janusz Kamiński, who would
occasionally scissor his finger in front of the camera, and the editor Juliette
Welfling inserting fade-ins and outs. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly also
includes expressive and embodied gestures often found in auteurist cinema
such as the close-ups of Robert Bresson’s writing hand in Diary of a Country
Priest (1951) or Bergman’s voice-over in Persona (1957). Schnabel
provided his own pair of glasses and a hat as requisites that frame Jean-Do’s
vision. Finally, as a masking device, blinking creates a frame of
approximation that can be aligned with a rationale of editing that aims at
synchronizing the viewer’s, actor’s and editor’s blinking. In In the Blink of an
Eye (1995), the renowned editor Walter Murch not only proposes such a
theory of editing, he even regards ‘filmic montage’ as an actual, real-life
model of how the mind creates meaning: “I would go so far as to say that
these juxtapositions are not accidental mental artifacts but part of the method
we use to make sense of the world: We must render visual reality
discontinuous, otherwise perceived reality would resemble an almost
incomprehensible string of letters without word separation or punctuation.”51
In contrast to Lady in the Lake, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly does not
begin with an expositional framing narrative that explains the symbolic
meaning and the subjective use of the camera. Instead, the film’s opening
dramaturgy re-enacts the different stages of making sense or what Peirce has
described as firstness, secondness and thirdness. Jean-Do’s (Mathieu
Amalric) awakening from a coma is presented in a way that succinctly shifts
the emphasis from sensory to indexical and symbolic forms. These formal
shifts in the opening scene recall different cinematic styles ranging from
avant-garde to mainstream cinema. Simulating Jean-Do’s sensations as he
regains consciousness, the film begins in a way that is reminiscent of Stan
Brakhage’s experiments of creating a filmic vision that sees without
recognizing and identifying. Blurry and overexposed images fade in and out,
signaling his attempts to open his eyes. At the most basic level of making
sense, images afford us with percepts or sensory forms. At this level, there is
no distinction between the perceiving subject and the object of perception.52
Soon Jean-Do receives the nurse’s attention and by the time the doctor
arrives, the diffused and distorted images gradually develop focal points that
slowly adapt to objects near and far. Later his field of vision even begins to
shift a bit as he tries to follow the doctor’s finger. In directing our attention,
moving images become a means of pointing and showing. At this level,
sensation becomes perception involving indexical and extensional signs. The
act of perception unfolds a scene of objects situated in space along with a
distinction of interiority and exteriority. Early on this impressionist rendering
of Jean-Do’s clouded vision is interspersed with mental images and memories
filmed in a more conventional style. When the doctor tells him that his entire
body is paralyzed and Jean-Do realizes that all he can do is move his right
eye, he closes his eyes and the symbolic image of a diving bell floating in the
deep sea comes up.
 The contrast between interiority and exteriority is emphasized by extensive
use of interior monologue, which allows the audience to hear the thoughts he
cannot communicate to other characters in the film. Jean-Do’s voice-over
guides the viewer through the visually demanding opening sequence and it
connects the point-of-view segments with the enactments of his memories. The
recurring images of the diving bell and his memories mark distractions and
diversions from Jean-Do’s strain and they provide a visual relief to the
viewer. They also reflect the overall structure of the film, which alternates
between point-of-view shots and sequences of remembered vision until—
about two thirds into the movie—objective shots of Jean-Do are gradually
introduced. This increasing expansion of perspective turns out to be a highly
effective strategy for creating a strong emphatic link between the viewer and
the protagonist. A reason for this may be found in the fact that the distribution
of information synchronizes the viewing process with Jean-Do’s developing
sense of a peri-personal space. As his social and communicative activities
increase, Jean-Do begins to perceive himself from a quasi-objective point of
view.53
The flashback of Jean-Do’s stroke that led to his paralysis comes towards
the end of the film. As the stroke scene takes us back to the traumatic and
unfathomable experience, we can observe corresponding shifts in register
from objective to symbolic and expressive uses of the camera. Shortly after
Jean-Do left his wife’s country house, where he picked up his son for the
weekend, he feels a wave of heat rushing through his body. He stops the car in
front of a crossroad. A distant shot from the opposite side of the crossroad
shows his son getting out of the car to run for help. The camera then pans
slowly to the right surveying an empty country road, then pans in the other
direction showing no one in sight. The camera movement mimics the bodily
gestures of someone looking for help. As there is no one else present in the
scene and the camera position is incompatible with Jean-Do’s perspective
and mobility, we can interpret the camera movement as expressing his call
(symbol), search (action) or desire (emotion) for help. When framed as Jean-
Do’s remembered vision, the camera pan not only illustrates the experiential
assimilation of emotion (Jean-Do’s panic), action (a searching gaze) and its
symbolic representation (directed camera movement) but also the re-
configuration of self into a remembering I and an experiencing me.
The subsequent shots and the erratic camera movements are in stark
contrast to the panning shot. They capture the confusion and panic of the scene
after Jean-Do’s wife and son have come to help. This disembodied camera
appears to be directed by the emotions that make up the atmosphere of the
scene; it can be compared to Jean-Do’s mental vision. The third type of
camera shot frames Jean-Do’s limited point of view. The camera switches
from an extreme low-angle view of the treetops to a reverse shot of Jean-Do’s
anguished face. Closing in and out on his face and alternating with point of-
view shots, the camera also shows Jean-Do’s liminal state.
By changing its registers between embodied gestures, disembodied or
emanating emotions and stationary arrestment, the camera creates a bridge
between Jean-Do’s paralyzed state and the people surrounding him.
Oscillating between stationary confinement and free-floating disembodiment,
the camera becomes an agent of emotion itself or, as the final sequence of the
film suggests, an expression of the desire to outlive life through art and
memory. It articulates what is experientially unavailable to us. By exploring
new sensory and symbolic patterns, the film attempts to approximate
unfamiliar mental and physical states. Since the motor-pathways of patients
with locked-in syndrome are damaged and proprioception is largely
unavailable to them, the lack of embodied simulation has severe consequences
for their emotional spectrum. As Antonio Damasio observes, locked-in
patients

do not experience the anguish and turmoil that this horrifying situation
would lead observers to expect. They have a considerable range of
feelings, from sadness to, yes, joy. And yet, from accounts now published
in book form, the patients may even experience a strange tranquility that is
new to their lives. They are fully aware of the tragedy of their situation,
and they can report an intellectual sense of sadness or frustration with
their virtual imprisonment. But they do not report the terror one imagines
would arise in their horrible circumstances.54

Notably, Damasio’s hypothesis on the emotional capacities of locked-in

patients is itself informed by Bauby’s memoir, its plain style as well as its
calm and reflective tone, which stands in stark contrast to the tragedy
recounted. Schnabel’s film addresses this discrepancy through a rhetoric of
contrasts that intensifies the film’s emotional appeal. His contrapuntal style
reaches a peak in the stroke scene when limited point-view-shots contrast
with disembodied, free-floating camera movements and Charles Trenet’s song
“La Mer” is accompanied by the squealing noise of a high-revving engine.
 As if to signal the difference in emotional sensibilities between locked-in
patients and healthy people, the film concludes with two endings that contrast
Jean-Do’s intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities with the social world of
shared feelings and emotions. The final shot of the film shows the collapse of
ice-shelves in reversed and slow motion, an enigmatic image that may be read
as symbolizing Jean-Do’s desire to defy death and seek redemption by
returning to a complete state. The other ending, which immediately precedes
this shot, shows Jean-Do’s speech therapist Celine sitting by his bed and
reading his published memoirs to him. This final reference to the book
provides a narrative closure for the film and it invokes the literary genre of
the memoir as a means to outlive death. Death also becomes the ultimate
delimiter of the filmic medium—figuratively framed by the medium itself.
This scene ends with a close-up of Jean-Do’s friends and family bowing into
the camera. These shots are recorded with a hand-cranked camera that varies
the recording speed, over- and double-exposing several frames. By having the
visual stream of the medium parallel Jean-Do’s experiential stream of life,
cinema turns into a simulacrum of being (present) in (a present tense) time.
The ending of the filming and the screening become synonymous with Jean-
Do’s experiencing and remembering.
Schnabel’s adaptation of Bauby’s memoirs approaches death in parallel
narrative strands. One tells the story of Bauby’s life as a pseudo-comatose
patient, the other presents his imaginary re-enactment of his life up to his
seizure. In Noé’s Enter The Void death is also approached in circular
movements. The film revisits the protagonist’s death in three visual loops that
are vaguely modeled on the Buddhist notion of Bardo and its pop-cultural re-
contextualization as a drug-induced psychedelic experience. The film alludes
to Timothy Leary’s psychedelic re-reading of The Tibetan Book of the Dead,
avant-garde trance films by Brakhage and Kenneth Anger and popular
treatments of LSD by independent filmmakers such as Roger Corman or
Richard Rush. Enter the Void also seems to embrace more recent scientific
research that speculates about the role of DMT as a neurotransmitter that
administers our perception of reality.55 The film projects a vision of digital
cinema that grounds (voyeuristic) desire on a neuronal level of electric
excitement.
Enter the Void tells the story of the eighteen-year-old Tokyo-based DJ
Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) and his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta), who lost
their parents in a car accident and grew up in different foster homes. Having
saved some money by dealing drugs, Oscar sends his sister a plane ticket so
she could finally come to live with him in Tokyo. Yet, the family reunion is
terminated abruptly when Oscar gets shot in a drug raid. The film begins on
the evening of the raid and for about the first half hour, up until the moment he
gets shot, we see everything through Oscar’s eyes. We see him talk with his
sister and meet up with his friend Alex (Cyril Roy), who introduces him to
both DMT and The Book of the Dead. We see him smoke DMT and we hear
the muffled sound of his thoughts as if they were voices resonating in his head.
Although the subjective camera is rendered in a convincing and realistic
manner, Noé—like Schnabel—can rely on his protagonist’s extreme
psychological situation as a frame of approximation. As in The Diving Bell
and the Butterfly, point-of-view shots are soon interrupted when the drug sets
in and Oscar encounters out-of-body experiences and invisible or hallucinated
worlds represented through intravascular and intergalactic tracking shots.
Following Rick Strassman’s typology of DMT-induced experiences, these
visions can be described as personal, invisible and transpersonal. Personal
DMT experiences involve new “avenues to his or her personal psychology
and relationship to the body.”56 On this level DMT users experience a
transformation of their sense of personhood through feelings of
disembodiment that are often described as having an outside view of one’s
body and feeling a strong emotional attachment to the surroundings. An
invisible experience refers to “an encounter with seemingly solid and
freestanding realities coexisting with this one.”57 The third type of experience
includes mystical near-death experiences where DMT users have experiences
that transcend personal consciousness.
When Oscar is shot by the police in a club called The Void, the subjective
rendering of his death experience expands on the elements introduced during
his previous DMT use. The camera zooms out and assumes an aerial
perspective; it swiftly changes between settings to keep track of the parallel
actions involving Linda and Alex, respectively. Trespassing physical and
mental barriers, the camera moves along associative paths driven by electric
energy and desire: Digital tracking shots into Oscar’s gunshot wound take us
through a series of his childhood memories. Vases, holes, ashtrays, burners,
lamps and all kinds of light sources become external attractors and gateways
in the network of an internally motivated, free-floating camera.
The events that lead up to Oscar’s death and his childhood memories of his
sister are recounted in a series of loops that keep circling back to his dead
body in the club and at the mortuary. The modes of representation alternate
between a disembodied free-floating camera capturing his postmortem
perceptions and near point-of-view shots that re-enact his memory and show
Oscar’s silhouette from behind. The loops connect Oscar’s childhood
memories with his recent past in Tokyo and they document how Linda and
Oscar’s friend Alex finally find one another. Oscar’s hovering disembodied
existence represents something of a limbo. He seems condemned to circle
back to his body and reiterate his memories until the fortune of his sister and
his friend is resolved.
In Enter the Void, DMT emerges as a filmic figure of narration, a
conceptual metaphor that blends scientific models (DMT as a biochemical
key to consciousness) with religious views of reincarnation and redemption.
Another important frame, activated in particular by the many libidinous
triangular relations among the characters, is psychoanalytic theory. As a
theory concerned with relations between physiology and psychology,
psychoanalysis helps us to understand how DMT operates as a conceptual key
on a different level of the film. In Sigmund Freud’s metapsychology, the
psyche is a secondary model derived from a neurophysiological constitution.
For Freud pleasure and pain are sensuous signifiers of somatic drives that are
geared towards energy homeostasis. On a narrative level, homeostasis
describes the film’s drive towards a resolution, which is to understand
Oscar’s death as the contingent effect in an intricate web of desires.
Symbolically, this libidinous web is held together by DMT. Everything
revolves around this drug. After his first use of DMT, Oscar starts to deal
drugs, which is also motivated by his desire to see his sister again. His
contact with DMT also leads to an affair with the mother of his friend Victor,
who taking revenge on Oscar, sets him up in the drug raid. On the visual level,
DMT is invoked as a cinematic trope. Like an endogenous hallucinogen, the
camera controls the sensory perception by administering vivid associations of
varied visual patterns and dislocated scenes of the present and the past.
Together, plot patterns and visual patterns project a notion of personal identity
on a spectrum that ranges from non-intentional to intentional and the non-
conscious to the conscious.
In a final sex scene, the camera slowly approaches Alex and Linda making
love. It seems to enter Alex’s head assuming his point of view. Images of
Oscar’s earliest memories are intercut with close-ups of Alex and Linda
before the camera re-enters their bodies following sperms through an ovarian
tract. At the moment of conception, a bright light cross-fades directly to Linda
giving birth and the baby’s first sight of her mother. With this reincarnation of
the camera eye, the film comes full circle. It completes the transition from a
disembodied to an embodied perspective. It transforms the intimate relation
between the brother and the sister into one of lovers and finally into one
between a mother and her child.
By blending a wide range of subjective and objective registers and by
organizing them in a looping or spiraling structure, Noé’s camera-eye vision
effectively deconstructs the distinctions between interiority and exteriority,
which in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly organizes the differences between
actual and remembered vision. Schnabel’s film reviews the notion of filmic
writing through a nostalgic reappraisal of cinematography as a language that
gradually evolves from perceptual and emotional encounters with the world.
Even though the film undermines a rigorous distinction between subjective
and objective registers, the idea of a manually operated camera prevails as a
figure that ultimately frames Jean-Do’s memoir. The final hand-cranked and
overexposed images mark the limits of his discourse, just like the erratic
images in the stroke scene signal the disappearance of language and
consciousness.
Enter the Void does not evoke literary or linguistic frames for rationalizing
its camera vision. The film begins, where The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
ends, with a post-mortem limbo. Whereas in The Diving Bell and the
Butterfly the limits of consciousness are presented through fragmented and
erratic motion, in Enter the Void pre- and post-conscious states are explored
in fluid camera movements. In The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the domain
of what can be seen and said is circumscribed by the idea of cinematography
as a form of writing. In Enter the Void, however, the camera registers
experiences beyond the intentional realm and personhood. Stylistically, the
representation of altered and transcendental states of consciousness draws on
digital imaging technology in biomedicine, architectural visualization and
video gaming. The opening title sequence foreshadows the film’s visceral
density in an eye-numbing manner, which Chris Norris has described as “a
94-second font overdose that distills Tokyo, Times Square, and Las Vegas
signage into one non-stop retina blast.”58 When looking for a generic frame
that could capture the film’s stylistic heterogeneity, one could think of the
cinematic city symphonies of the 1920s such as Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin:
Symphony of a Great City (1927) and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera
(1929).
Enter the Void presents Tokyo as a diverse, prolific and constantly
changing media and soundscape, emblematically captured in the Tokyo Tower
as an architectonic symbol of information technology. There is a note of irony
and nostalgia in the film’s recurrent reference to this famous site, which in the
transition from analog to digital TV the Tower reached its limits as a reliable
broadcasting antenna. Enter the Void takes us back to the genre of the city
symphony while reflecting the digital shift in media culture. It explores the
new media landscape by re-investigating the city as a dynamic compound of
material, technological, social and biological energies. As a meta-cinematic
metaphor, the city undermines the boundaries between physical and mental
realms as it seamlessly navigates between the real city and its synthetic
crystal model. The idea of DMT as a psychedelic compound that administers
(different models of) reality is illustrated graphically in the miniature model
of Tokyo, which Alex’s friend Mario (Masato Tanno) has laced with acid.
The miniature city is an actual (physical) model and—to the extent that it
contains DMT—the psychotropic basis for navigating the city as a network of
biochemical and libidinal energies. Not unlike the blinking in The Diving Bell
and the Butterfly, the miniature city serves a double function: It helps to
facilitate the many tracking shots and symbolizes the blending of real and
virtual realities.
The meta-cinematic invocation of models of reality in Enter the Void and
the reflexive gestures of perception and expression in The Diving Bell and
the Butterfly underscore the sub-personal dimension of narrative experience
and its bodily resources. In a neo-expressionist manner that combines
elements of auteur and avant-garde aesthetics, Schnabel celebrates cinema as
a form of physical manipulation and embodied expression. In his film, the
idea of cinema as a site where embodied and conceptual meanings interface is
enacted through the gestures of blinking, which relates both to the formal and
symbolic levels as well as to the physiological and technical levels of human
and filmic communication.
The gesture of blinking in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly enacts and
symbolizes the integration of cognitive and sensorimotor processes. The
camera figures as an embodied mind that extends by integrating external
recourses and symbolic signifying systems. The mental camera vision
illustrates well the standard version of the extended mind thesis proposed by
Andy Clark and David Chalmers.59 Although the functional integration of
environmental and symbolic resources makes it increasingly difficult to
determine the limits of the body and the scope of the mind, for Clark the brain
remains the site of consciousness.60
In Enter the Void, camera vision goes beyond this model of centralized
consciousness. If The Diving Bell and the Butterfly recalls the image of a
ghost in a shell, a mind’s eye ‘seeing’ or refusing to see the image of the
world, Enter the Void programmatically undermines distinctions between
interiority and exteriority as well as world and representation.61 Instead of
treating vision as an internal process that accommodates the world or
fabricates an illusion of reality, vision is charged by its environment,
responding to the pressure and constraints of a given situation. Enter the Void
appears closer to enactive theories of the mind that question the brain as the
exclusive site of consciousness.62
The different models of consciousness implied can be illustrated in their
respective uses of fluidity as a body-imagistic effect. Whereas in The Diving
Bell and the Butterfly fluidity outlines Jean-Do’s conscious experience,
fluidity in Enter the Void extends to the protagonist’s post-mortem
experiences. If Jean-Do’s vision aspires to transcend his bodily
imprisonment, Oscar’s disembodied state of being is subject to a network of
social, libidinal and electric pressures that will eventually lead to his rebirth.
The mind seems to respond directly to the environment. Noé’s mental camera
reconnects with the sensorimotor schemas that characterize the movement
image. Not only is perception in things, as Deleuze argues, but consciousness
too seems to be enacted through sensorimotor experiences.
The spiraling narrative structure of Enter the Void mirrors the antagonistic
forces of attraction and resistance that act upon and animate the camera’s fluid
movements. In other words, the spiraling movement, inscribes a vision, a form
of making sense of the libidinal terror and the epistemological failure that
arises from facing death or seeing reality as it appears from outside the body.
It attunes the experience of shock by transforming it into a sensorimotor skill
that is indistinguishable from conceptual knowledge of the camera’s
consciousness. Autopsy in this sense gives way to an understanding of
consciousness as a form of skillful exploration and navigation. Rather than
projecting mental images inside the brain as The Diving Bell and the
Butterfly, the consciousness in Enter the Void reaches out and acts upon its
environment. In the place of a virtual mental image, we encounter the virtual
presence of the world. The twofold logic of the apparatus seems to collapse
and with it the distinction between perception and cognition.

Notes
1. In opposition to developmental or emergent conceptions of camera
consciousness, Edward Branigan proposed the idea of a mental camera in
strictly descriptive terms as an interpretative label for a viewing
hypothesis. See Branigan, Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in
Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 2006), 201–8.
2. See Bruce Kawin, Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person
Film (Rochester: Dalkey Archive, 2006) and Gilles Deleuze, Cinema:
The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
3. See Kawin, Mindscreen, 5.
4. See Kawin, Mindscreen, 4.
5. See Kawin, Mindscreen, 3.
6. See David Bordwell’s review of diegetic and mimetic theories of
narration in Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: The University of
Wisconsin Press, 1985), 1–26. See also Bordwell’s foreword to Edward
Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and
Subjectivity in Classical Film (Berlin: Mouton Publishers, 1984), x-xv.
7. See Kawin, Mindscreen, 192.
8. See Kawin, Mindscreen, 19.
9. See Kawin, Mindscreen, 19.
10. See Albert Laffay, Logique du cinéma (Paris: Masson, 1964), 81. Quoted
in translation in André Gaudreault, From Plato to Lumière: Narration
and Monstration in Literature and Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 5.
11. See Kawin, Mindscreen, 172.
12. See Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema, 216–21.
13. See Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, translated by Emiliano Battista (New
York: Berg, 2006), 112: “It seems impossible, in other words, to isolate in
the model filmmaker of the ‘time-image’ any ‘time-images,’ any images
endowed with properties that would distinguish them from the movement-
image.”
14. Peirce’s semiotic framework proved immensely productive for
philosophical and anthropological endeavors of art historians. Régis
Debray proposes in rather broad strokes to think of film history as
paradigmatic changes in the sign functions of film. See Debray, Vie et
mort de l’image: une histoire du regard en occident (Paris: Gallimard,
1992). Accordingly, early cinema appears largely indexical, whereas later
periods move from the iconic to the symbolic. In The Cinema Effect,
Cubitt provides a rigorous analysis of film history that complements
Peirce’s semiotic framework with phenomenological and psychoanalytical
accounts of consciousness. See Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005), 48–98. See also Thomas A. Sebeok
and Marcel Danesi’s The Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory
and Semiotic Analysis (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000) for a comprehensive
semiotic framework that is based on Peirce’s firstness, secondness and
thirdness.
15. See Deleuze, Cinema 2, 72, 146–48, 163–64.
16. See Kawin, Mindscreen, xi.
17. See Deleuze, Cinema 1, ix.
18. See Deleuze, Cinema 2, xi.
19. See Deleuze, Cinema 2, xi.
20. Deleuze’s historical analysis has been criticized on various grounds. Most
scholars lamented Deleuze’s bias toward auteur theory. James Chapman
calls Deleuze an “unreconstructed auteurist” who “writes about film
aesthetics in a vacuum: there is not consideration of the role of social,
economic or technological factors in shaping the medium.” See Chapman,
Film and History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 47. Bordwell
reviews Deleuze’s film theory as a combination of what he refers to as the
standard, dialectical and modernist accounts of film history. See David
Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1997), 116–17.
21. See David Deamer, “Cinema, Chronos/Cronos: Becoming an Accomplice
to the Impasse of History,” in Deleuze and History, ed. Jeffrey Bell and
Claire Colebrook (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 161–
87.
22. As Rancière asks, “how can a classification among types of signs be split
in two by an external historical event?” Or, since movement-image and
time-image operate on different logics, “[t]he distinction between the two
 images would be strictly transcendental and would thus not correspond to
an identifiable rupture, whether in the natural history of images or in the
history of human events or of forms of the art of cinema,” Rancière, Film
Fables, 114.
23. On Deleuze’s shift from a Kantian to a Lacanian understanding of the thing
in-it-self see Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso,
2008), 365–71.
24. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 21.
25. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 127.
26. See also Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 313.
27. Deleuze, Cinema 2, xi.
28. Rancière, Film Fables, 119.
29. Branigan has compared this investigation to a paradox raised in Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland. Asking “what film must be when it is not or
when it aims to represent what is not” is like Alice’s attempt “to fancy
what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out.”
Edward Branigan, “Death in (and of?) Theory,” in The Routledge
Encyclopedia of Film Theory, ed. Edward Branigan and Warren
Buckland (New York: Routledge, 2013), 494–504.
30. See e.g. Susan Sontag, “The Decay of Cinema,” New York Times,
February 25, 1996, 60–61; Dudley Andrew, “The Core and the Flow of
Film Studies,” Critical Inquiry 35.4 (2009): 879–915; David N.
Rodowick, Elegy for Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2014); Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity,
Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002);
Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Laura Mulvey, Death 24x
a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books,
2006); and Scott Combs, Deathwatch: American Film, Technology, and
the End of Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
31. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 122.
32. “[T]here is no ‘true reality’ behind or beneath phenomena, noumena are
phenomenal things that are ‘too strong,’ too intens(iv)e, for our perceptual
apparatus attuned to constituted reality—epistemological failure is a
secondary effect of libidinal terror,” Slavoj Žižek “The Camera’s
Posthuman Eye,” Foreword to Henry Bond, Lacan at the Scene
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009), xiv.
33. Emily Auger has classified Death Watch as a ‘tech-noir’ film, relating its
thematic interest in longevity and new media sensationalism to films like
Network (1976) and The Truman Show (1998); see Auger, The Tech-Noir
Film: A Theory of the Development of Popular Genres (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011), 278.
34. David Compton, The Unsleeping Eye (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1979), 25.
35. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 126–27.
36. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 130.
37. Compton, The Unsleeping Eye, 73.
38. See Darrel Schweitzer’s interview with Compton in Speaking of the
Fantastic III: Interviews with Science Fiction Writers ([Calif.]: Borgo
Press, 2012), 183.
39. Bertrand Tavernier, “I Wake Up, Dreaming,” in Projections 2: A Forum
for Film-Makers, ed. Walter Donohue and John Boorman, trans. Shaun
Whiteside (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 270.
40. Tavernier, “I Wake Up, Dreaming,” 269.
41. Tavernier, “I Wake Up, Dreaming,” 317.
42. Tavernier, “I Wake Up, Dreaming,” 317.
43. Tavernier, “Interview with Michael Powell,” in Michael Powell,: in
Interviews, ed. David Lazar (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2003), 29.
44. In Strange Days (1995), Kathryn Bigelow updates this form of autopsy by
forcing a cerebral recorder onto the victims, which makes them
experience their own deaths from the point of view of their killers.
45. Nicola Rehling, Extra-Ordinary Men: White Heterosexual Masculinity
in Contemporary Popular Cinema (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2010),
245.
46. See Deleuze, Cinema 2, 133.
47. Tracey is played by Thérèse Liotard, yet her voice is dubbed by Julie
Christie, whom Tavernier had wished to cast in that role. See Stephen
Hay, Bertrand Tavernier: The Film-Maker of Lyon (London: I.B. Tauris,
2000), 81.
48. Hay, Bertrand Tavernier, 80.
49. Judy Stone, Eye on the World: Conversations with International
Filmmakers (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1997), 219.
50. On word-and-image as well as embodiment relations in the film see also
Jonah Corne, “In the Blink of a Speaking Eye: On Vision and Language in
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” Literature Film Quarterly 38.3
(2010), 217–29.
51. Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing
(Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2001), 63.
52. Hans-Georg Gadamer has described this aspect as “picture magic.” For
him this “non-differentiation remains essential to all experience of
picture.” See Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Continuum, 2006),
134. For Vivian Sobchack, “cinematic intelligibility” begins at this level:
“to understand movies figurally, we first must make literal sense of
them” (italics in the original). See Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts:
Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004), 59.
53. For a phenomenological reading of Jean-Do’s development of a peri-
personal space see Tarja Laine, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as an
Emotional Event,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 34.1: (2010), 295–
305.
54. See Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion
in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.,
1999), 299. The books Damasio refers to are Bauby’s memoir and Judy
Mozersky, Locked In: A Young Woman’s Battle with Stroke (Toronto: The
Golden Dog Press, 1996).
55. See Rick. J. Strassman, DMT The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s
Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical
Experiences (Rochester: Park Street Press, 2001).
56. See Strassman, DMT The Spirit Molecule, 154.
57. See Strassman, DMT The Spirit Molecule, 155.
58. See Chris Norris, “The Origin of the World: The Dangerous Sex, Bad
Drugs, and Eternal Bliss of Enter the Void,” Film Comment 46.5 (2010),
26.
59. Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58
(1998): 10–23.
60. Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive
Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
61. I am here revising my position articulated in Quendler, “Subjective
Cameras Locked-In and Out-of-Body,” Image & Narrative 15.1 (2014),
 71–88.
62. See Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and
Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (New York: Hill and
Wang, 2009), esp. 171–81.
8 Retrospective

In her award-winning video installation Extramission 6 (Black Maria)

(2009), Lindsay Seers projects a biographical fantasy inside a tar-papered
reconstruction of the Black Maria, Thomas Edison’s first film production
studio built in New Jersey in 1894. In a humorous and moving mockumentary,
narrated by actors impersonating her mother, an art dealer and a
psychologist, Seers mythologizes her life story by fusing it with the history of
photography and cinema. In this documentary Seers’s artistic alter ego
refuses to speak until the age of eight. A psychic consulted by her mother
ascribes this to Seers’s traumatic experience at birth. A psychologist later
explains that as a child Seers had photographic memory. This allowed her to
experience herself and the world around her in timeless unity, which made
language unnecessary to her.
When presented with a photograph of herself as a younger child, Seers
suddenly breaks her silence. “Is that me?” were her first words spoken.
However, as she begins to speak, her eidetic memory starts to fade away.
Longing to regain her photographic skills, she consciously transforms herself
into a camera. She covers herself in a black shroud and places light-sensitive
paper into her mouth. Later, Seers becomes dissatisfied with being a passive
recorder and she decides to turn herself into a projector. She exchanges the
shroud for a miniature model of the Black Maria, which she wears on her
head. In the film, Seers’s allegorical transformation from photography to
cinema is seen as a positive turning point from a melancholic medium
preoccupied with death and the past to an animistic medium that points to the
future.
In screening the documentary, Seers playfully integrates the viewer in this
creative fusion of her artistic biography with film history. Projecting her
biography inside a model that resembles the one she wears on her head
recalls Vertov’s double camera in Man with a Movie Camera. Vertov’s
cameraman mounting an enormous camera can be seen to illustrate his
constructivist efforts of mastering a social reality that is itself cinematic. In
Seers’s playful projection inside a projector, the spectator is framed as a
human projector.
Extramission 6 is retrospective in more than one sense. It integrates both
versions of Seers’s biography and her previous projects. She engages with
contemporary developments of media technology in an ostensible
anachronistic fashion. The title refers to ancient, emissive theories of vision,
which (like Plato’s color theory) assume that light emanates from the eye and
literally captures objects of sight. Even though optical theories of
extramission have long been refuted by accounts of intromission, different
notions of extramission and emanation became influential in Henri Bergson’s
philosophy of life as well as in psychological and cognitive theories that
stress the active role of the mind in processes of visual perception. Seers
approaches seeing as a skill and technology of image capturing. However,
instead of using wearable computers, she invites us to imagine the
photographic laboratories and film studies as wearable technology. David
Burrows described Seers’s vision as the inversion of a cybernetic dream, in
which cinema inspires her to become a “fleshy analogue machine.”1 Seers’s
work is full of historical references and allusions that reflect and refract
many of the themes I have traced throughout this book. By way of conclusion,
I want to address the metaphorical entanglement of Seers’s human camera
with matters of biology and biography, media history and mythology, and
review the different camera-eye models her life as a camera is built upon.
The metaphor of the camera eye is frequently deployed to describe the link
between individual and social realities, biography and history. Taking
Vertov’s kino-eye as their model, Christopher Isherwood and John Dos
Passos explore the camera eye as a medium for recognizing oneself as a
historical subject. Or, as the autobiographical turn in avant-garde film in the
1960s and 70s insisted, media are intricately personal and personalizing.
Reconstructing her biography as a media archeological history of cinema,
Seers approaches media history as her story of individuation. She reminds us
that personal history is inconceivable without—or perhaps even
indistinguishable from—media history. As in Jerome Hill’s Film Portrait,
writing one’s personal history becomes an act of re-writing media history.
The relation is not only mutual but also co-dependent on consciousness and
media as respective means of storing memory. Seers’s invocation of the
Black Maria as a memory palace relates both to the individual mind and
cultural memory. It is a place where remembered vision and institutionalized
fantasy become inseparable. Unlike Hill’s Film Portrait, Seers does not
reconstruct her life along film history; nor does she re-imagine her life as a
mythological or mystic experience. Instead, she exploits media history as a
mythological model for her artistic development. By projecting her artistic
obsession with the idea of a human camera, which began in the mid-1990s,
onto the history of film and photography, Seers creates a mystified
autobiographical narrative.
Seers’s human camera merges Brakhage’s idea of an ‘eye myth’ and
Carolee Schneemann’s notion of the eye body in a literal way. Brakhage
envisioned ‘eye myths,’ which he understood as the visual articulations or
fabrications of an eye-mouth, as retinal collages that simulate hypnogogic or
closed-eye visions. In 1995 Seers began experimenting with taking pictures
by deploying the mouth cavity as a camera obscura. Seers’s Mouth Camera
(1999) resonates with Schneemann’s emphasis on a visual body, embracing
both the seeing and the seen body as an integral part of the image-making
process. By situating the photographic mechanism inside the body, the body
becomes both a resource and a system of meaningful transformation.
Seers’s Mouth Camera illustrates the interrelation of embodied and
abstract meanings, physical/physiological and symbolic forms of meaning.
Drawing on the optographic myth, whereby the last image seen before death
is retained as a retinal image, Seers later integrates mouth photography
within gestural meanings that relate the act of photography to a kiss of death
or vampire kiss: “I had become very preoccupied with an idea about how the
small opening in the mouth, formed just before a kiss, makes an aperture
through which the image of the lover falls. This inverted portrait falling
cannibalistically onto the throat (as if about to be swallowed) foreshadows
the intention of the kiss itself.”2 For Seers, the mouth is an organ of
incorporation; its intake may be physical when it functions as a digestive
organ or camera, or symbolic when it designates and names things as an
organ of articulation.
The interrelation of physical and symbolic also serves as a developmental
telos of Seers’s biography as a media history that alludes to nineteenth-
century scientific and spiritual photography as well as silent and sound
cinema. Like her desire to become a camera, the longing to be a projector is
the consequence of traumatic experiences. The terror of seeing herself as a
photograph is repeated in a modified form when she discovers an inadvertent
imitation of her work by another artist; Seers’s identity and originality as an
artist is undermined. At a gallery in Ireland she encounters the work of Ann
Hamilton, who also experimented with mouth photography. Seers describes
seeing the recognition of those images as a “physical blow to the body”: “I
felt a terrible collapsing nausea. It was as if that process and its results had
made me exist and then it had been taken from me. It was the dream made
real and despair followed.”3 In this respect, Seers’s transition from camera
to projector echoes Deleuze’s theorizing of the transition from the movement
image to the time-image as a conceptual event and as a virtual response to a
crisis of the real.
Seers’s life as a camera and projector reiterates different developmental
stages of making sense, ranging from sensory perception to abstract models
of visual thinking. Her biography also offers a narrative history of functional
change. I want to review the different functional models Seers’s life as a
camera and projector builds upon in the light of three different historical
moments and traditions that link the human body and visual technology
against different ontological backgrounds or explanatory images. In the first
model, the alignment of eye and camera share a common teleological history
of creation. As meaning and function in this model are deduced from a
logical and ontological origin, I will call this model the originary camera
eye. By contrast, the second model links the camera and eye by identifying a
common context for solving problems. Following a dialectical or
evolutionary rationale, the camera eye emerges as the (provisionally)
ultimate meaning or function. The third, vitalist model establishes an organic
identity where eye and camera seem to become interchangeable.
The complexity of the human eye and the primacy of vision in the human
sensorium made the eye a key example for arguing against evolutionary
accounts. In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin responds to the
creationist position that regards the eye a product of an intelligent design in a
mocking comparison that imagines God as a lens-crafter, who takes millions
of years to finish his instrument:

It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye to a telescope. We

know that this instrument has been perfected by the long-continued efforts
of the highest human intellects; and we naturally infer that the eye has
been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this
inference be presumptuous? […] If we must compare the eye to an
optical instrument, we ought in imagination to take a thick layer of
 transparent tissue, with a nerve sensitive to light beneath, and then
suppose every part of this layer to be continually changing slowly in
density, so as to separate into layers of different densities and
thicknesses, placed at different distances from each other, and with the
surfaces of each layer slowly changing in form. […] We must suppose
each new state of the instrument to be multiplied by the million; and each
to be preserved till a better be produced, and then the old ones to be
destroyed.4

Darwin’s historical critique of creationism was criticized by Henri Bergson

in Creative Evolution (1907). If Darwin criticized creationist theories for
subscribing to a naive notion of workmanship, Bergson used this same
criticism against Darwin. “Life,” Bergson argues, “does not proceed by the
association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.”5 He
criticizes both finalist and evolutionary theories for limiting their
conceptions of creation to notions of manufacturing and assembling elements
and for neglecting to acknowledge organization as a principle of
construction.6 If evolution theory describes the effect of extrinsic forces,
organization represents an intrinsic or immanent response to an environment.
Bergson, too, supplements his position by comparing the eye to visual
technology:

Certainly the photograph has been gradually turned into a photographic

apparatus; but could light alone, a physical force, ever have provoked
this change, and converted an impression left by it into a machine capable
of using it? It may be claimed that considerations of utility are out of
place here; that the eye is not made to see, but that we see because we
have eyes; that the organ is what it is, and ‘utility’ is a word by which we
designate the functional effects of the structure. But when I say that the
eye ‘makes use of’ light, I do not merely mean that the eye is capable of
seeing; I allude to the very precise relations that exist between this organ
and the apparatus of locomotion. The retina of vertebrates is prolonged in
an optic nerve, which, again, is continued by cerebral centres connected
with motor mechanisms. Our eye makes use of light in that it enables us to
utilize, by movements of reaction, the objects that we see to be
advantageous, and to avoid those which we see to be injurious.7
Seers’s first approach to becoming a camera can be described within a
finalist or creationist model. By exploiting her mouth as a camera obscura,
she hopes to restore the imagistic presence of herself and the world. In this
model, function is understood as the ultimate goal in the construction of an
organ:

My head became the camera body and my lips the shutters. I clothed
myself in the sack and then put the prepared paper in my mouth. I would
pull the sack off and open my lips to allow the image in. Trapped upside
down, it appeared on the paper against my throat: a tiny image, blurred
and red, coloured by my blood—tinted by the light passing through the
blood within my cheeks.8

Seers’s notion of a mouth camera goes well beyond an anatomic conception

of the camera eye. Juxtaposing the mechanical model of vision with the
human organ of the mouth places it in the context of the mouth’s physiological
and symbolic function to incorporate and appropriate. The model of this
camera can be described in evolutionary or dialectical terms, in that it
responds to external constraints or an inherent lack. Seers’s transformation
into a projector can be seen as a response to both external and internal
constraints. It is a reaction to a real crisis and a solution to the loss of her
imagistic self-presence that photography could only partly remedy. Becoming
a projector means re-organizing the use of light, turning it from a receptive
into a projective force. Seers experiences cinema as “an inversion of my
own camera life, but that turning inside out released me. I found an animated
soul to photography.”9
Originary camera-eye conceptions assume a stable predetermined function
by identifying the organ with its purpose. The camera and the eye serve as
blueprints for understanding human perception and camera work,
respectively. Originary camera eyes are not only fundamental to the
understanding of human and technological domains, they also illustrate the
intricate and inseparable relation of humans and technology.10 The
hallucinatory invocation of a subjective camera in early phantom ride movies
or the extended experiments with subjective camera can be seen as
invocations of this model. The attempt to recreate the perceptual parameters
of a viewer’s experience is, of course, not limited to sight. In Sound
Technology and the American Cinema, James Lastra discusses the dominant
representational model in Classical Hollywood Cinema, which in analogy to
the film-theoretical tenet of the invisible observer assumed an “invisible
auditor.”11 He quotes the sound engineer Joseph Maxfield for a succinct
summary of this approach: “The problem to be solved is that of obtaining a
sound record which correlates with the picture in such a manner that a
member of the audience is given the illusion of being an actual spectator in
the scene.”12 Even though the invisible auditor approach was never practiced
rigorously, it proved a powerful argumentative base for sound engineering
during the early stages of sound cinema. Identifying camera and microphone
as literal percepts of an actual and situated spectator and auditor means that
each shot creates a distinct, theatrical experience. This will likely create
conflicts between individual shots and the overall audiovisual structure of
the film. For instance, matching sound perspective with shot scales may
cause sudden changes in the sound texture that compromise the intelligibility
of the film.13
Representational models of sound that privileged fidelity were soon
superseded by approaches that favored intelligibility. Sound and vision are
not only arranged in relation to a perceptual center but are integrated on the
basis of cognitive and aesthetic dimensions. Instead of re-constructing an
actual, situated viewer and auditor, the viewer assumes the place of an
intended rhetorical and aesthetic effect. As Lastra shows, this change in
model was itself contingent on a shift from a technological to a scientific
approach to recording that evolved from new research insight in the field of
sound processing in telephony.14
In retrospect, the transition from the fidelity model to the intelligibility
model may be described as a dialectical development. According to a
Hegelian view of dialectics, the later model can be understood as a response
to a shortcoming of the previous model.15 Camera and microphone are given,
by which he meant that they are neither natural nor necessary. Hegel refers to
this as positivity, which—as I discussed in Chapter Two—Agamben
believes to be a conceptual root of Foucault’s notion of the dispositif. The
first dialectical step defines the camera and the microphone by comparing
them to the human percepts of seeing and hearing. As this is an abstraction
that does not fully capture the ‘nature’ (or ‘being’) of these instruments (and
their potential uses), it is readily met with an objection: the antithetical
negation that camera and microphone are not like eyes and ears. Yet, the
negation that something is not the case is also the affirmation of a lack.
Determining what the analogy lacks (e.g. a ‘central intelligence’ that co-
ordinates and arranges sound and image in a meaningful manner) could be a
next step in constructing a less abstract and more concrete theory of film (e.g.
by introducing rhetorical and aesthetic rationales that simulate perceptual and
cognitive experiences).16
In dialectical models, the camera and the eye do not mimic or represent
normative models for each other. Rather, the functions of the eye and the
camera are interpreted as responses to a similar set of problems or
constraints. Or as Georg Wald stated, camera and eye follow a convergent
evolution, “because both have had to meet the same problems, and have
frequently done so in the same way.”17 When Pudovkin compares “pieces of
exposed films” to “words” and “sentences” to a “combination of these
pieces,” he does not regard the word as a model for the shot, but compares
compositional principles of film and writing as analogous responses to the
same psychological tasks of directing attention.18 Like evolutionary models,
dialectical models address problems of causality. Both construct trajectories
on the basis of what they postulate as given or positive evidence. The crucial
difference between the two models is their sense of directionality. While
Hegelian dialectics speculates about a philosophy of history, evolution
reconstructs principles of historical developments. In dialectical models
problem-solving responds to (the postulation of) an inherent lack, which to
the extent that it determines the future development is also considered the end
and destination. By contrast, evolutionary mechanisms respond to external
constraints.
In film theory dialectical and evolutionary models have gained an
increasingly bad reputation. Later generations of film scholars dismissed
such dialectical readings of film history in classical film theory as unduly
essentialist and teleological.19 In part, the objections can be explained as a
response to an ambiguous notion of agency that emerges from blending a
method of argument (dialectics) with the series of events (history). Hegel has
described this blend as an all-animating world-soul, a notion he derives from
Plato. While Hegelian dialectics is premised on the emerging and expanding
tendency of consciousness aspiring to become fully conscious of itself,
Darwin’s evolutionary theory is radically historical. While Hegel’s world-
soul sounds fantastically speculative, evolution is frequently misconceived
as a pseudo-agency. Natural selection does not aim at perfection, but—as
Trevor Lamb puts it— “tinkers with the material available to it, sometimes to
odd effect.”20 It is, perhaps, not surprising that media-theorists have wavered
between dialectical and evolutionary models and sometimes combined both.
André Bazin’s “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema” (1951)
represents a well-known and intriguing case in point. Bazin’s outline of
historical and national developments in film style not only includes
dialectical and evolutionary frameworks, but also draws on geology and
geography.21 He uses evolutionary theorems to account for continuities and
discontinuities between theatrical and cinematic styles on the one hand and to
describe the development of film genres on the other. He complements his
evolutionary analogy with images of geological stratification, which
represent the temporal process of evolution in a spatial way. By analyzing
and reviewing films, critics and filmmakers open up a cross-section that
reveals the synthetic and historical spheres of cinema. Insights gained from
such an analysis may lead to revolutionary moments. Such moments are, as it
were, dialectical interventions in an ongoing evolutionary process. For
instance, Bazin considers the long take and the deep focus, which have
become stylistic trademarks of neorealist filmmakers like Jean Renoir,
examples of a dialectic feature that, in resisting (‘negating’) montage,
rediscover techniques of the silent period (e.g. the static long shot and
staging in depth).
David Bordwell criticized Bazin’s evolution of film language as an
example where “tangible goals of concrete agents are swept up into a
momentum governed by an abstract idea of evolution.”22 Ironically, his
criticism proposes a line of attack that is consistent with Hegel’s dialectical
rationale of getting from abstract generalizations to concrete explanations. In
fact, Bordwell’s On the History of Style constructs a historical narrative of
film historiography that re-iterates these dialectical steps. The basic story of
film history propagated by the trade press gives way to the standard version
of Bardèche and Brasillach before it is superseded by Bazin’s dialectical
program. Bordwell presents his own research program of a piecemeal
history as a critical reworking of Bazin and what he identifies as Noël
Burch’s oppositional program. He conceives of film history as the result of a
series of problem-solving strategies that deal with external and internal
constraints such as limitations imposed by the physical medium, poetic needs
of internal patterning, the film’s intermedial and multimedial relations, the
achievements of tradition as well as the artistic desire for innovation.23
Bordwell’s historicist approach tones down the revolutionary moments of
dialectics to subtler processes of differentiation. In a sense Bordwell and
Carroll’s post-theoretical program articulates what Martin Heidegger has
attested to Hegel’s philosophy: the endeavor to overcome (überwinden)
grand theory in an ambivalent attempt at ending and completing metaphysics.
Heidegger’s phrase “Ende und Vollendung” denotes ending and purpose as
well as perfection and termination. For Heidegger resolving (überwinden) or
‘unwinding’ grand theory implies a process of convolution (Verwindung).
Bordwell’s polemics, however, aim at cutting the ties with grand
theorizing.24
Bazin’s theorizing is not only exemplary of combining evolutionary and
dialectic reasoning, his layering of different disciplinary frameworks proved
highly influential on non-linear and transversal ways of thinking. Bazin’s
theory of film had a great impact on Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema. Tom
Conley has described Bazin’s theorizing as that of a “stratigrapher” in a
Deleuzian sense: “They look at the world in its layers, its strata, while at the
same time they are strategists who use the longer history of the medium to
craft new—but also very old—forms of film writing.”25
Such stratigraphic and strategic convolutions already point to organic
models of the camera eye. Whereas anatomic models establish one-to-one
correlations between camera and eye (the camera re-builds the eye or vice
versa), dialectic and evolutionary camera-eye models imply synthetic
correlations (the camera and the eye perform similar tasks). Euclidian
geometry in this sense provides a basic camera-eye model by translating
vision into a mathematical system. Similarly, Kepler’s optics represents a
basic camera-eye model. Notably, he refused to make speculations that go
beyond the optical mechanism of perception.

I say that vision occurs when the image of the whole hemisphere of the
world that is before the eye […] is fixed on the reddish white concave
surface of the retina. How the image or picture is composed by the visual
spirits that reside in the retina and the [optic] nerve, and whether it is
made to appear before the soul or the tribunal of the visual faculty by a
spirit within the hollows of the brain, or whether the visual faculty, like a
magistrate sent by the soul, goes forth from the administrative chamber of
the brain into the optic nerve and the retina to meet this image, as though
 descending to a lower court—[all] this I leave to be disputed by the
physicists. For the armament of opticians does not take them beyond this
first opaque wall encountered with the eye.26

By contrast, Sigmund Freud’s use of optical metaphors remains intentionally

speculative. He suggested picturing the relation between the psychic and
physical systems as analogous to the relation between the material
configuration of the telescope and the virtual image generated by the lens: “if
we pursue this analogy, we may compare the censorship between the two
systems to the refraction which takes place when a ray of light passes into a
new medium.”27 Freud was critical of his own analogy. He regarded it as an
imperfect illustration that, rather than asserting knowledge, revealed the lack
of it. He at once affirms and negates the analogy between the mental image of
the psychic apparatus and the virtual image of the optical apparatus.
As I argued in Chapter One, Benjamin and Baudry corroborate this
analogy by invoking an organic rather than a causal relation. They elaborate
and reverse the reading of the analogy in order to uncover hidden aspects of
a social and ideological apparatus. Baudry reverses not only the inferential
direction but also the relation between the human and mechanical domains.
The functions of the camera and the eye are not seen as responses to similar
external constraints (as in a model of convergent evolution), nor are the
mechanisms of one domain simply used to illustrate unknown aspects in the
other domain. Rather, the two domains are seen in an interdependent, organic
relationship. Vertov’s kino-eye provides a paradigmatic example of this non-
linear model of causality. By asking the viewer to submit to the ‘will’ of the
camera, the kino-eye projects such an organic or cybernetic interdependence
between human and camera vision. Vertov’s kino-eye is also a prime
example of the excess of identity that arises from exploring and exploiting
new playful alignments between camera and eye. One may think of the
camera’s ‘will’ as a form of play that develops its own self-constituting (or
autopoietic) principles, generating new identities on different levels of
mediation and subject formation. In the course of this book, I have followed
the camera eye as a way of seeing, an art/form of vision, a generic practice
of self- and media formation as well as an artificial, figural and social organ
of the body and the mind.
As a way of seeing, the camera eye invites us to review and revise habits
of seeing and conceptualize methods or poetics of discourse founded in
vision. On another level the camera eye describes a form of vision that
interrogates the relationship with empirical realties and representational
conventions across dramatic, literary and visual artforms. Such inquiries into
the aesthetic and representational premises of vision are inseparable from
ethical dimensions. The aesthetic rationalizations and the
(over-)generalizations that are implied in camera-eye conceptions cannot be
studied independently of the cultural and generic practices of formation. As a
powerful and prolific practice of self-care, diaries and notebooks feature
prominently as generic contexts of camera eye vision. Metaphors of the
camera eye negotiate between grammatizations of film and its organization
into a physical and figural, an expressive and communicative, an individual
and a social body and into material and symbolic externalizations of
consciousness. As an orienting metaphor that captures diverse artistic and
theoretical developments of film culture, the camera eye can also serve as a
model for approaching media and spectatorship within a framework of
multiple and interlocking theories. Seers’s meta-biographical allegory of
cinema in Extramission 6 shows this by interrelating and converging
anatomical, developmental and creative understandings of the camera eye
into a form of life.

Notes

1. David Burrows, “Becoming Analogue,” in Human Camera: Lindsay

Seers, ed. Lindsay Seers (Birmingham: Article Press, 2007), 120.
2. Lindsay Seers, “Vampire,” in Human Camera: Lindsay Seers, ed.
Lindsay Seers (Birmingham: Article Press, 2007), 89.
3. Seers, “Vampire,” 94.
4. Charles Darwin, On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural
Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for
Life (London: John Murray, 1859), 188–89.
5. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola:
Dover Publications, 1998), 89.
6. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 91–97.
7. See Bergson, Creative Evolution, 71.
8. Lindsay Seers, “My Camera Life,” in Human Camera: Lindsay Seers,
ed. Lindsay Seers (Birmingham: Article Press, 2007), 59.
 9. Lindsay Seers, “Return to Mauritius/My Life as a Projector,” in Human
Camera: Lindsay Seers, ed. Lindsay Seers (Birmingham: Article Press,
2007), 164.
10. For a critical history of this philosophical relationship see Arthur
Bradley, Originary Technicity: The Theory of Technology from Marx to
Derrida (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
11. See James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema:
Perception, Representation, Modernity (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2000), esp. chapters four and five.
12. Joseph P. Maxfield, “Acoustic Control of Recording for Talking Motion
Pictures,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 14.1
(1930): 85.
13. See Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema, 160–61.
14. See Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema, 162–70.
15. See esp. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s interpretation in Hegels Dialektik:
Fünf hermeneutische Studien (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck,
1971).
16. One can discern a similar dialectical shift in Descartes’s philosophy
where the camera eye becomes the vehicle of an epistemic revolution.
Applying Kepler’s law of refraction, Descartes demonstrates how the
nature of human vision can be improved by artificial means. Even though
Descartes describes it as a quasi-natural act, it is an act of engineering
that transforms the camera eye into something else. By introducing the
camera eye into a network of scientific and philosophical discourse, it
becomes a model for something else. Just like Descartes uses clear and
distinct vision as a model for philosophical reasoning, transforming the
eye from an of survival to one of scientific discovery, the camera
obscura transforms an optical model into a model of consciousness.
17. George Wald, “Eye and Camera,” Scientific American 1883 (1950): 32.
18. Vsevolod Pudovkin, The Film Director and Film Material (1926), in
Vsevolod Pudovkin: Selected Essays, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor
(New York: Seagull Books, 2006), 78.
19. See Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996).
20. Trevor D. Lamb, “Evolution of the Eye,” Scientific American 305.1 (July
2011): 66.
21. André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema” (1951), in
What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1967), 23–40. See also Tom Conley, “Evolution and
Event in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?,” in Opening Bazin: Postwar Film
Theory and Its Afterlife, ed. Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-
Laurencin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 32–41; and Ludovic
Cortade’s “Cinema Across Fault Lines: Bazin and the French School of
Geography,” in Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife,
ed. Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 13–31.
22. David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1997), 74.
23. Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, 142.
24. See David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, Post-Theory: Reconstructing
Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). On
Heidegger’s relation to Hegel’s metaphysical program see Gadamer,
Hegels Dialektik, 83–96. On different conceptions of theory in the
history of film theory see David Rodowick, Elegy for Theory
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).
25. Conley, “Evolution and Event in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?,” 39–40.
26. Johannes Kepler, Optics, quoted in David C. Lindberg, Theories of
Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1976), 203.
27. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1901), vol. 5 of The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953),
611.
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Index

Abel, Richard 118

Adaptation 76, 84, 87, 94, 99, 101–3, 109, 197, 200, 203
Adorno, Theodor W. 11n17
The Adventures of the Ten-Mark Note (Viertel, 1926) 103
aesthetic regime 66, 127–9, 150
afterimage 20
Agamben, Giorgio 40, 42, 61n7, 217
Agnew, Vanessa 145n23
Allen, Richard 12n23
Althusser, Louis Pierre 28, 30, 36n58
Altman, Charles 32, 37n66
Amalric, Mathieu 201
analogy 8, 22, 38, 42, 50–3; reasoning 14, 19, 24, 26, 31–2, 37, 217–18,
220; relations 50, 74, 184; see also disanalogy
Anderson, Barbara and Joseph 35n32
Andrew, Dudley 10n16, 10n17, 210n30
Andrew, Geoff 143, 148n74
Anger, Kenneth 205
anorthoscope 15
antropomorphic 16, 32, 137
apparatus see dispositif
apparatus theory 6, 14, 27–33, 37, 43, 45, 61, 167, 185
Aristotle 2, 9n4, 13
Armstrong, David 144n3
Arnheim, Rudolf von 24
The Art of the Moving Picture (Lindsay, 1915/1922) 17
Art of Vision (Brakhage, 1965) 166
Artaud, Antonin 183n96
Arthur, Paul 152, 154, 178n5, 180–1n44
aspect seeing see seeing-as
Astruc, Alexandre 87
Auger, Emily 210n33
Aumont, Jacques 182
authenticity 28, 124, 137, 152, 175, 177; and diary fiction 99, 103, 118, 119–
20n30; and autopsy 128
autobiography: and art 153, 164, 167; autobiographical film avant-garde 8,
149–55, 176, 179n15, 213; camera vision as autobiographical writing 58,
66, 74, 76, 78, 90, 239; and diary 96–7, 118
and film 153–4, 159–63, 168–71, 173, 176–8, 179; and narrative 123–5,
140, 213; and style 74, 119n11; and psychodrama 154–9
autography 124, 127–33, 144, 191–2, 199
automediality 8, 127–8, 190
autopoiesis 33
autopsy 124, 127–33, 144, 145, 146, 190–2, 199, 208, 210
avant-garde 165; avant-garde film 1, 8, 9n2, 35, 92, 117–18, 122, 149–52,
154–183; Soviet avant-garde 65, 67, 70; see also autobiographical film
avant-garde

Bacon, Francis 45, 60

Balázs, Béla 11, 12, 24, 103, 126–7
Bammé, Arno 99, 101, 119n23, 120n31
Barbier, George 114
Bauby, Jean-Dominique 186, 200, 203, 211
Baudry, Jean-Louis 6, 14, 27–33, 43, 45, 61, 167, 220
Bazin, André 10, 31, 43, 87, 89, 90, 92, 147, 218–19, 222
Bechtel, William 35
Bellour, Raymond 36n59, 153
Benedikt, Michael 182n81
Benjamin, Walter 6, 11n17, 14, 23–7, 33, 59–60, 72, 93, 126, 220
Benveniste, Émile 146n39, 160
Bergman, Ingmar 187–8, 200
Bergson, Henri 12n24, 40, 185, 213, 215
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Ruttmann, 1927) 140, 206
Bigelow, Kathryn 210n44
Birth of a Nation (Mekas, 1997) 154
Black, Gregory D. 121n52
blending: 2–3; conceptual blending theory 6, 10, 23–7, 33; embodied and
abstract senses 6, 14, 42; intermedial blends 6, 56, 68, 92n85, 139,
148n72, 160, 164, 176; ideological blends 6; material blends 25, 36n44,
113, 150, 152; mental blends 205; mind and machine 20, 27, 33, 44;
narration and focalization 85–7; personal blends 150, 152, 171, 178, 187;
perceptual and conceptual domains 6, 19, 21, 124; physiology and
psychology 22, 50–2; physiology and technology 45; perception and
memory 93–4; perception and imagination 157; record and display 93;
subject and object 18, 55, 57, 206–7
Böhm, Karl-Heinz 194
Böhme, Margarete 94, 98–102, 109, 119n24
Boll, Franz Christian 18
Boltiansky, Grigory 71
Booth, Wayne 135–6
Bordwell, David 62n17, 147n52, 208n6, 209n20, 219
Bottomore, Stephen 64n71
Bourdieu, Pierre 62n15
Boynton, Robert 22
Bradley, Arthur 221n10
Brakhage, Jane 165, 170, 171–2, 174, 178, 181, 182
Brakhage, Stan 1, 8, 12n24, 151, 153, 156–7, 159, 164–72, 174, 176,
180n26, 180–1n44, 181n48, 181n55, 181–2n57, 182n62, 201, 203–4, 213
Bramble, John 165–6
Breer, Robert 181–2n57
Brentano, Clemens 119n18
Bresson, Robert 117, 155, 158–9, 168, 200
Brewster, Ben 146
Brinton, Joseph P. 142
Broken Embraces (Almodóvar, 2009) 199
Brooks, Louise 99, 102, 103
Brooks, Peter 147n67
Brown, Nathaniel 204
Brown, William 61n4
Bruss, Elizabeth 153
Buckland, Warren 37n65
Buñuel, Luis 155
Burch, Noël 219
Burgin, Victor 122n63
Burgoyne, Robert 136–7
Burrows, David 213

Calder, Alexander 147–8n71

Calvino, Italo 103, 120n44
camera consciousness 8, 93, 184, 186; as developmental model 165, 168–
72, 184–5, 188–91; see also mindscreen
camera eye 1–4; and analogy 8, 14, 19, 22, 32, 38, 50–53, 184, 215, see also
blending; anthropomorphic vs. mechanomorphic uses of 16, 137; and
cinematic modernism 4–5, 10–11; and convergent theorizing 4, 14, 27–33,
61; developmental 158, 164–5, 168–72, dialectical and evolutionary
camera-eye models 188–90, 214, 217–19; material 17–20; mechanical
20–22; as mirror 2, 76–7, 103, 143, 148, 155–6, 160–1, 187, 194; and the
novel 66, 71–8, 80, 87–8; as organ 7–8, 17, 123–4, 134–5, 143–4, 166,
202, 213–16, 220; organic camera-eye model 23–7, 215, 219–20;
originary camera-eye model 214–17; as otherness 55, 129–33, 155; as
phantom 132, 138, see also false body; and poetry 56, 65–71, 123, 165; as
self 3, 8, 24, 33, 45, 55, 74, 87, 127–33, 141, 151–6, 159–64, 168–72,
175, 177, 187–192, 202, 216, 220, see also personal camera; and theater
70, 77–80, 91, 170; and voice-over 82–5, 91–2, 140, 162, 187, 191, 196,
201; as window 3, 76–80, 86–7
camera obscura 15, 16–18, 45, 60–1, 184, 213, 216, 222
Camper, Fred 178–9n10
Carré, Isabelle 142, 143
Carroll, Noël 37n65, 219
Carterette, Edward C. 35
La Cartomancienne (1933) 163–4
Casetti, Francesco 4, 61n2, 89n36, 126, 134, 135, 146n38
Cassavetes, John 149
Cat’s Cradle (Brakhage, 1959) 171, 174
Cavalcanti, Alberto 193
Cavell, Stanley 12n23
censorship 37n67, 80, 91n68, 91–2n82, 99, 101, 109, 122, 152, 220
Cézanne, Paul 75
Chalmers, David 34n17, 207
Chapman, James 209n20
Charlier, Philippe 61n10
Charney, Leo 10–11n17
Chatterton, Ruth 108–10, 122
Un Chien Andalou (Buñuel, 1929) 155
Christie, Julie 191, 210
cinema of the agent (Deleuze) 190–4, 198
cinema of the seer (Deleuze) 189–90, 92–3, 198–9
Clark, Andy 2, 9, 34n17, 207
Cocteau, Jean 179–80n26
Cohen-Séat, François 31
Colburn, Ethel 120n30
Collier, John 66, 76, 81
Combs, Scott 210n30
Comolli, Jean-Louis 36n57
Compton, David G. 191–2, 197–8
Conley, Tom 219, 222n21
Conrad, Tony 167
constructivism 24, 47, 166, 212,
continuity 2, 29, 33, 48, 118, 138, 142, 148n72, 161, 192, 195; narrative 29–
30, 91–2, 143, 190, 195; editing 30, 192
Copjec, Joan 32
Corman, Roger 203–4
Corne, Jonah 211n50
Cornelius, Henry 76, 77, 80, 81, 84
Cornell, Joseph 179–80n26
Crary, Jonathan 11, 15, 45
Creeley, Robert 170n70
Crone, Anna Lisa 64
cubism 165
Cubitt, Sean 34n19, 62n21, 209n14
Currie, Gregory 96
cybernetics 2, 38, 41, 53, 60, 168, 213
A Day with the Gypsies (Hepwporth, 1906) 8, 132–3, 138, 141, 143

D’Aloia, Adriano 24, 36n42

Dalle Vacche, Angela 10–11n17
Damasio, Antonio 202–3
Danesi, Marcel 145n11, 209n14
Dark Passage (Daves, 1947) 1, 141
Darwin, Charles 215, 218
Dassin, Jules 140
David Holzman’s Diary (McBride, 1968) 117–18, 122n65
Daves, Delmer 1, 141
de la Huerta, Paz 204
de Lauretis, Teresa 35, 36
Deamer, David 209n21
Death in the Forenoon (Hill, 1966) 163
Death Watch (Tavernier, 1980) 8, 184, 186, 190–1, 195–9, 210
Debray, Régis 209n14
decoupage 28
Deleuze, Gilles 3, 8, 11n21, 12n23, 24, 32, 33, 40–1, 184–92, 194–5, 208,
209n20, 209n23, 214, 219
Dennett, Daniel 3, 21, 34n14
Deren, Maya 155–6, 179–80n26
Derrida, Jacques 123
Descartes, René: 2, 7, 17–8, 55, 59–60, 184, 222n16; Discourse on Method
51; Optics 39, 42, 45–51, 59–61, 62n21; Meditations of a First
Philosophy 14, 47
Deval, Jacques 109, 121n51, 122n62
Diaries, Notes and Sketches (Mekas, 1969) 154, 158
diary 7, 93–122; as antifiction 96–7; fiction; 94, 97–8 see also authenticity;
and film 95–6, 112, 145n22, 154, 176; as a genre of intermedial
approximation 7–8, 57–8, 94–5, 98, 102–3, 109, 112–13, 116–17; as
 imaginary other 7, 94, 99–101; and interpolated narration 5, 58, 96; and
public 7, 94–5, 98, 101, 103, 116, 175; and time: 95, 97, 112–16, 184; and
trace 7, 95–6; and transactive self-concept 7, 94, 98, 101, 107–8, 113–14,
116–17, 179
Diary of a Country Priest (Bresson, 1951) 117, 200
Diary of a Lost Girl (Pabst, 1929) 7, 94, 101–8, 113, 117, 120n40, 136
The Diary of a Lost One (Böhme, 1905) 94, 98–101, 119–20n30
The Diary of a Lost One (Oswald, 1918) 99, 101–2
Different from the Others (Oswald, 1918) 102
disanalogy 13, 25–6, 54, 59
dispositif 27–33, 34n12, 38–44, 48, 55–6, 59, 61, 65, 94, 100, 116–17
dispositio 38–9, 41–4, 47, 56, 59
disposition 31, 38–9, 42–4, 47–8, 53, 56, 59, 62n15, 84, 93, 103, 158, 166,
176
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Schnabel, 2007) 8, 184, 186, 190, 199–
204, 206–8, 211
Doane, Mary Ann 32, 210n30
Dos Passos, John 89–90n38, 117, 123, 213
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Mamoulian, 1931) 1, 141
Dreams that Money Can Buy (Richter, 1947) 147–8n71
Duchamp, Marcel 147–8n71
Duncan, Robert 167
Dünne, Jörg 127
Duplicity (Brakhage, 1978–80) 168–71
Dydo, Ulla E. 181

Eakins, Thomas 67
Eisenstein, Sergei 48, 123
Elder, R. Bruce 183n96
Elliott, Kamilla 90n50
Elsaesser, Thomas 10–11n17, 37n71
emergence 8, 26, 59, 184, 208n1
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 178n5, 179–80n26
Enter the Void (Noé, 2009) 8, 184, 186, 190, 199–200, 211
Epstein, Jean 118n1
Ernst, Max 147–8n70
ethical regime 127–8, 170–2, 175, 191, 220–1
Étoile de Mer (Ray, 1928) 155
Euclid 2, 9n5, 33n1, 219
evolution: artistic 30; cinematic 154, 168, 180–1n44, 188, 218–19, 222n21;
convergent 43, 220; evolution of the eye 215, 218, 222n21; see also
dialectical and evolutionary camera-eye models
The Evolution of Film Language (Bazin, 1951) 218–19
expressionism 126, 135, 207; abstract 165–7, 173, 175–6, 182n81; German
135; embodied 175–8
Extramission 6 (Seers, 2009) 212–13, 221
Eye Body (Schneemann, 1963) 151, 173
Eye Myth (Brakhage, 1967) 151

false body 125, 138

Falsely Accused (1908) 131
Fantasy 31–2, 53, 133, 154, 167; ideological 93–5, 117, 131, 213; male 108,
143
Farland, Maria 166
Fauconnier, Gilles 6, 10, 23–6
La Femme défendue (Harel, 1997) 8, 138, 142–4
figure/figuration 3, 8, 9, 15–17, 25, 38, 44, 56, 115, 144n3, 145n13, 164,
173; of cinema 141; editorial 114, 122n60; and gesture 123–7, 185, 190;
and ground 44–5, 59–60; intermedial figures of writing 7, 42, 56, 65, 71,
87, 112, 130; of narration 77, 103, 134–40, 142, 187, 192, 197, 203; of
reception 139, 142; of subjectivity 45, 164; visual vs. verbal 76
film language 4, 8, 53, 65; as dream language 115–16, 122n61, 155; kino-eye
as 48, 53–6, 63–4n65, 69–70; as non-symbolic language 73, 75, 89n26,
123, 124–7; vs. language 153, 158, 161
film mythology 151, 155, 158, 164, 168, 171, 179–80n26, 213
Film Portrait (Hill, 1967) 151, 159–64, 213
Flusser, Vilém 125
focalization 103, 112, 114–15, 122n58, 141, 155, 192, vs. narration 52, 85–
7, 197–8
Forceville, Charles J. 33n4
Foster, Michael 19
Foucault, Michel 12n24, 28, 40–1, 127, 217
Fox Talbot, William 6, 17
Frampton, Daniel 12n23
Frampton, Hollis 152, 170–1
Free Cinema 149
Freeburg, Victor 24
French New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague) 1, 149, 158
Fresh Blood (Schneemann, 1981) 175
Freud, Sigmund 31–2, 37n67, 166, 179–80n26, 205, 220
Friedberg, Anne 10–11n17
Frisby, David 10–11n17
Fritsch, Daniel 10–11n17
Fuses (Schneemann, 1965) 173–4, 177
futurism 45, 47, 67, 74

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 211n52, 221n15, 222n24

Gallese, Vittorio 23
Ganguly, Suranjan 182n65
Garfield, John 196
Gateways to the Mind (Crumb, 1958) 21
Gaudreault, André 134, 135–8, 147n53, 147n54
Genette, Gérard 58, 96, 117
geometry 2, 9, 18, 219
Gerstenberger, Katharina 119n21
Gessner, Robert 10n17
gesture: 4, 8, 57, 72, 96–7, 133, 140–1, 144n3, 145n13, 145n14, 150, 161–2,
164, 187, 190, 200–2, 207; cinema as 126–8; and figure 123–6, 185;
filmic gestures of seeing and writing see autopsy and autography;
Getting Evidence (Porter, 1906) 131
Gilliat, Sidney 194
Godard, Jean-Luc 1, 117, 187, 188
Goffman, Erving 148n73
Goodbye to Berlin (Isherwood, 1939) 7, 58, 66, 74, 76–8, 84, 90n51
Goodman, Nelson 129
grammatization 123, 221, see also rationalization of vision
grammatology 123
Grandma’s Reading Glass (Smith, 1900) 1
Griffith, D. W. 135, 154
Gris, Juan 75
Grodal, Torben 11n21, 24
Grosz, Georg 75–6, 81, 90n51, 91n74
Guattari, Felix 3, 15, 24, 40, 41
Guneratne, Anthony R. 146n35
Gunning, Tom 10–11n17, 15–16, 131, 133–7
Günther, Gotthard 53, 64n80
Gysin, Brion 168

Habermas, Jürgen 36n54

Hagener, Malte 10n16, 11n22
Hamer, Robert 194
Hamilton, Ann 214
Hammid, Alexander 155, 156
Hansen, Mark 12n23
Hansen, Miriam 10–11n17, 27, 36n50, 146n31
Harel, Philippe 8, 142, 144
Harms, Rudolf 12n23
Haug, Kate 174
Hay, Stephen 196, 210n47
Hays, Will 121n47, 121–2n54
Hediger, Vinzenz 10n15, 122n58
Hegel, Friedrich 34n12, 170, 217–19, 222n24
Heidegger, Martin 33n5, 40, 219, 222n24
Hellinger, Mark 140
Helmholtz, Hermann von 16
Hepworth, Cecil 8, 132
Hering, Ewald 16, 19
Higgins, Dick 175
Hill, Jerome 8, 151, 152, 159–65, 168, 169, 180n43, 213
Hitchcock, Alfred 188, 193, 194
Hock, Stephen 89n37
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 89n29
homunculus 21, 45, 59, 60
Horak, Jan-Christopher 121n46
Hutchins, Edwin 25, 36n44
Hutton, Robert 181–2n57

identification 31, 100; and aesthetic detachment 176; imaginary 141, 148n72;
primary and secondary 31, 143, 155, 156; as process of reception 132,
138, 148n72; symbolic 141, 142, 199
identity 113, 138, 215, 220; artistic 152–3, 214; cinema 1, 149, 199, see also
medium specificity; continuity 29–30, 148n72; formation 29–31, 74, 127–
8; hybrid 55, 144; and materiality 36n44, 94; narrative 100, 133, 138,
179n16; personal 6, 205, see also person; sexual 32, 155, 156; and style
152–3, 165, 178–9n10, 194, 199
ideology 6, 7, 36, 43, 67, 70, 155, 175; and apparatus theory 27–31, 85, 220;
critique 5; ideological effect 27–30, 93; ideological fantasy 93, 117, 131
impersonal narration 135, 136–8
intentionality 12, 27, 42, 96, 220; and the aesthetic regime 98; and gestures
125; and instrumentalism 22, 137; and narrator 134–5; and personhood
205, 206
Interim (Brakhage, 1952) 171
interior monologue 126–7, 147–8n71, 201, 206–7
Interior Scroll (Schneemann, 1975) 177
intermediality 1, 10–11n17, 65–6, 74, 87, 94, 117–18, 136; differentiation
66, 77, 83, 124, 138–9, 141; intermedial figuration 65, 71, 124; history 7,
191; and person 150, 164–5, 176
interpolated narration 5, 58, 96, 144
Isherwood, Christopher 7, 58, 66, 74, 76–87, 90, 91, 117, 213

La Jalousie (Robbe-Grillet, 1957) 148n72

James, David E. 154, 179n17, 180–1n44, 180n54
Jay, Martin 12n24
Johnson, Mark 1, 3, 9, 10n11, 13, 16, 17, 24, 35n38, 144n7
Journal of a Crime (Keighley, 1934) 7, 94, 95, 108–17, 121n47, 121n49,
121n52, 121n53, 121–2n54
journal see diary
Joyce, James 180

Kaes, Anton 10n17, 89n29

Kahn, Fritz 21–2
Kamiński, Janusz 200
Kant, Immanuel 183n96, 186, 189, 209n23
Kase, J. Carlos 183n98
Katz, Leon 181n50
Kaufman, Mikhail 47, 58, 61, 63–4n65
Kawin, Bruce 8, 118n1, 184–90
Keighley, William 7, 94, 95, 108–17
Keitel, Harvey 191, 196
Keller, Marjorie 158, 170, 179–80n26
Kepler, Johannes 16–17, 18, 219
kino-eye 7, 39, 45, 47–8, 53–61, 64n76, 65–72, 75, 93, 123, 213, 220
Kitch’s Last Meal (Schneemann, 1973–76) 173, 177
Kittler, Friedrich 119n11
Koch, Gertrud 10–11n17
Koselleck, Reinhart 3
Kozloff, Sarah 91n91
Kracauer, Siegfried 10–11n17, 24, 101, 120n38
Kühne, Wilhelm 6, 18–20, 22
Kuntzel, Thierry 116, 122n61
Kurosawa, Akira 188

Lacan, Jacques 12, 30–2, 61n12, 129, 155, 209n23

Lady in the Lake (Montgomery, 1947) 1, 8, 138–43, 147n69, 201
Laffay, Albert 135–6, 187
Laine, Tarja 211n53
Lakoff, George 1, 10n11, 16, 17, 23, 24, 34n18
Lamb, Trevor D. 218
language game 14, 15, 40
Lastra, James 216–17
Launder, Frank 194
Leary, Timothy 204
Lederman, Susan J. 35n32
Léger, Fernand 147–8n71
Leibniz, Gottrifed Wilhlem 2
Lejeune, Philippe 95–7, 118n3, 118n5, 119n10, 153, 179n16
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 163
Let there be Light (Oswald, 1918) 102
Levin, Thomas Y. 10–11n17
Levinas, Emmanuel 12n24
Levinson, Naomi 171
Lewin, Kurt 10n17
Lindberg, David C. 2
Lindsay, Vachel 10n17, 24
Litch, Mary M. 12n23
Love in the Afternoon (Billy Wilder, 1957) 91–2n82
Loving (Brakhage, 1957) 171, 174
Ludington, Townsend 89–90n38
Lyotard, Jean-François 144n3

MacDonald, Scott 122n65, 178n4, 181–2n57

The Machine of Eden (Brakhage, 1970) 169
machinic thinking 33, 41
Mackendrick, Alexander 194
Maeterlinck, Maurice 73
magic object 103
Magic Umbrella (Hill, 1965) 163
The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles, 1942) 139–40
Magnificent Obsession (Sirk, 1954) 199
Magritte, René 154
The Making of Americans (Stein, 1925) 166, 181n50
Mamoulian, Rouben 1, 141
Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929) 33, 55, 57–60, 63n56, 68, 70, 74,
140, 196, 206, 212
Mannoni, Laurent 15
Marey, Étienne-Jules 15, 19
Marion, Jean-Luc 34n12
Marsolais, Gilles 148n75
Martens, Lorna 99, 110, 119n17, 120–1n45
Marx, Karl 1, 31, 185
material anchors 25, 36n44
Maxfield, Joseph P. 217
Mayakovsky, Vladimir 67
McBride, Jim 117–18, 122n65
McCall, Anthony 177
Mead, George Herbert 161–2
meaning 38, 81, 84, 96, 145n18, 150, 156, 209n14; embodied 10n11, 70,
144n7; embodied vs. abstract meaning (sensory vs. conceptual) 6, 14, 71,
123–8, 200–1, 207, 214; formation 31, 134–5, 152–3, 164, 166; immanent
meaning 28–9
M eat Joy (Schneemann, 1964) 172–3, 175
medium specificity 4, 6, 129, 136, 138, 151, 187
Mekas, Jonas 149, 151–2, 154, 158, 169, 176
memory 3, 6, 21, 27, 34n17, 35n35, 39, 71, 77, 85, 87, 109, 115, 117–18,
134, 154, 187, 198, 202–3, 204–5, 212–13; image 161, 163, 170;
mémoire involontaire 27, 169; memorial mode 8, 25, 84, 144, 196;
remembered film 116; remembered vision 1, 87, 93–4, 110, 144, 202–3,
206, 213; trace 7, 8, 93–6, 144, 171, 177
Menary, Richard 34n17
Menjou, Adolphe 108–9
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 12n24, 61n12
Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren and Hammid, 1943) 155–7
metaphor 1–6, 108; conceptual 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 19, 33n4, 112–13, 117, 124, 134;
theory of 13–7, 23–7; ontological 1, 9, 17–8; understanding as seeing 50–
3; vision as metaphor 165–7, see also seeing-as
metonymy 5, 17, 53, 87, 113, 117, 118n1, 130, 140, 156, 167
Metz, Christian 24, 37n62, 43
Michelson, Anette 177, 178–9n10
mind 13, 40, 41–2, 93, 108, 129–30, 213; embedded 3; embodied 10n11,
35n38; extended 17, 34n17, 93, 207–8; as machine 1, 4, 6, 9, 16, 20–2;
optical model of the 4, 23–5, 27–8, 33–4n6, 50–1, 52–3, 167
mindscreen 8, 38, 39, 45, 93–4, 118n1, 184–208, see also camera
consciousness
mirror stage 30–1
mise-en-cadre 134
mise-en-chain 134, 136
mise-en-scène 136
model 5, 52, 188, 189–90, 191, 200–1, 205–7, 212, 213–21; life models and
art 165–7, 168–9, 170, 171–8, 179–80n26; literary 57, 136; of mind 3,
19–20, 23–33, 42–5, 52–3, 184–6, see also mind: optical model of;
language 160–2; modeling systems 144, 145, 209; organic 6, see also
organic camera eye model; person as model 8, 149–54, see also personal
camera; vs. role 8, 154–9; theater 80; for theorizing 14; of vision 2, 7, 15,
39
A Modern Hero (Pabst, 1934) 108
modernism 7, 12n24, 27, 38–9, 163–5; cinematic 4, 10–11n17, 39; literary
10–11n17, 65–7, 75–8, 87–8, 89–90n38, 180n43
monstration (vs. narration) 136–7, 147n54, 148n72
montage 28, 63n44, 70, 85, 115–16, 133, 162, 174, 188, 200–1, 218; shifting
attention 50–3; as writing 12n24, 53, 56, 66, 74, 83, 123
Montgomery, Robert 1, 8, 138–42
Moreno, Julio 138
Moser, Christian 127
Mouth Camera (Seers, 1999) 213–14, 216
movement-image 11n21, 185, 188–90, 192, 209n13
Mozersky, Judy 211n54
Mullarkey, John 12n23, 61n12
Mulvey, Laura 210n30
Münsterberg, Hugo von 10n17, 24, 63n44, 118n1
Murch, Walter 200–1
muse 159, 171–2
Musser, Charles 11
mythos 39, 171, 192
mythology see film mythology
Muybridge, Eadward 15, 19, 67

The Naked City (Dassin, 1948) 140

Nansen, Peter 98
narrator 187, 192, 197; cinematic narrator 135–8; camera as literary narrator
74, 77–80, 84–5; frames 138–43; system 133–5
Neefs, Sonja 119n11
New American Cinema 149–52, 178
New Objectivity (neue Sachlichkeit) 7, 102
Newhall, Beaumont 34, 35
Nichols, Bill 35n32
Nick Carter (1912) 131
Night and Day (Hong San-soo, 2007) 117, 166
Noë, Alva 9, 211n62
Noé, Gaspar 8, 184, 186, 199–200, 203–8
Norris, Chris 206
notebook see diary
The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio (Pirandello, 1915–16 and 1925) 7, 58,
66, 71–4, 88–9n20, 89n25, 123
La Nouvelle Vague see French New Wave

opsis 39, 192

optical unconscious 6, 14, 23–7, 36n47, 93, 126
optography 18, 214
organology 123–4
Oswald, Richard 99, 101–3

Pabst, Georg Wilhelm 7, 94–5, 98–9, 101–9, 112, 113, 120n38

Paech, Joachim 38, 41–2, 62n15
Panofsky, Erwin 10–11n17
panorama 21, 132, 133
Pasquinelli, Matteo 61n7
Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960) 8, 184, 186, 190–9
Peeters, Hugues 61n10
Peirce, Charles Sanders 11n21, 185, 188, 201, 209n14
pencil of nature 15, 17–18
Penfield, Wilder 21, 35n35
Penley, Constance 32, 85
person 6, 8, 69, 73–6, 87–8, 100, 124, 128, 186; creative conception of 154–
5; etymologies of 150–51; impersonality 8, 135–8, 213; literary person
and subjective camera 138–44; persona 93–4, 132, 139–40, 150, 187,
150; personal camera 8, 150–51, 168–72, 159–68, 168–78; personal
cinema 149–50, 152–4; personalizing media 113, 134–5, 158; personality
theory (state based vs. typological) 166–8; personal re-enactment 154–8,
161–2; personhood 138, 147, 204–6; sub-personal conception of mind and
narration 207; and style 152–3, 194, 198–9; and trace 96–7
Persona (Bergman, 1957) 200
Peterson, James 165, 181
Le Petit soldat (Godard, 1963) 117
Petrić, Vlada 63, 64, 88
phenakistoscope 15
phenomenology 4, 11n21, 12n24, 15–6, 24, 44, 61n12, 125, 144n7, 209n14,
211n53
photogenic drawing 17–8, 35n23
photography 6, 15, 17–9, 22, 35n23, 67, 95, 212, 213–4, 216
Picasso, Pablo 75
Pirandello, Luigi 7, 58, 66, 71–4, 123
Plato 2, 31, 213, 218
Plumb Line (Schneemann 1970) 173
point-of-view shot see subjective camera
Polan, Dana 10n17
pop art 173, 175
post-cinema 40, 70, 72, 191
post-humanism 40, 61
Pound, Ezra 170
Powell, Michael 8, 184, 186, 191–5, 199
Prévost, Marcel 98
Prostitution (Oswald, 1918) 102
Proust, Marcel 27, 66, 174
Pryor, Thomas M. 91n68
psychoanalysis 1, 24–32, 37n66, 37n67, 43, 89n29, 97, 116, 121, 129–30,
144n3, 155, 166, 179–80n26, 190–3, 205, 209n14
psychodrama 154–8, 166, 170–1
Pudovkin, Vsevolod 12n24, 39, 48–56

Quiribet, Gaston 132

Rabinovitz, Lauren 10–11n17

Rascaroli, Laura 145n23
Ray, Man 147–8n71
Reflections on Black (Brakhage, 1955) 156–7
refraction 5, 37n67, 42, 46–50, 53, 143, 220, 222
Rehling, Nicola 195
Renais, Alain 188
Renoir, Jean 194, 218
representational regime 66, 27–9, 150
resolution 44, 48–9, 55–6, 73, 75, 78, 205
Ribe, Neil M. 46, 49, 62
Richter, Hans 147–8n71
Ricoeur, Paul, 147n54, 179n16
Robbe-Grillet, Alain 148n72
Rodowick, David 12n23, 129, 144n3, 145n13
Rogosin, Lionel 149
role and role-play 8, 125, 131, 134, 141–3, 149–50, 161–2, 171, 174
Rolnick, Philip A. 178n6
Rosch, Elenor 35n38
Rössner, Michael 89n25
Roy, Cyril 204
Rozanov, Vasily 57
Rush, Richard 204
Ruttmann, Walther 206
Ryan, Marie-Laure 137
Ryder, Robert G. 36n47
Ryle, Gilbert 3, 10n10
Sachs, Hanns 89n29, 145n14
Sartre, Jean-Paul 12n24
Scenes from Under Childhood (Brakhage, 1967–70) 168–9
Schlegel, August Wilhelm 180n42
Shloss, Carol 74–5
Schlüpmann, Heide 120n40
Schnabel, Julian 8, 184, 186, 199–204, 206, 207
Schneemann, Carolee 8, 151, 159, 171–8, 182n71, 182n81, 183n84, 213,
214
Schneider, Rebecca 173
Schneider, Romy 191
Schrader, Sabine 89n25
Schwartz, Vanessa R. 11n17
Schweinitz, Jörg 144n4
Schweitzer, Darrel 210n38
Scorsese, Martin 193
Scott, Walter 75
A Search for Evidence (G. W. Bitzer, 1903) 130–1
Sebeok, Thomas A. 145n11, 209n14
seeing 6, 16, 39, 46–8, 75–6, 93, 123–4, 127, 130–3, 151, 191, 213–4, 220;
better 7, 39, 48–53; as directing attention 19, 51–3; and imagination 155–
7, 165–9; more 7, 39, 53–58, 65; and reasoning 2, 6, 12, 51; seeing-as
(aspect seeing) 6, 12n24, 13–14, 17, 25, 33–4n6, 118,
Seers, Lindsay 212–4, 216, 221
Sellier, Geneviève 178n3
semiotics 24, 27–9, 31, 40, 116, 126, 134, 144n3, 145n11, 185, 189, 209n14
Shame (Bergman, 1967) 187
Sharits, Paul 167
Sheringham, Michael 179n15
Sherwood, Robert 121n51
Shklovsky, Viktor 57, 71
Silverman, Kaja 9n2
Simmel, Georg 10–11n17
Sincerity (Brakhage, 1873–80) 168–71
Singer, Ben 88n7
Sinnerbrink, Robert 12n23
Sitney, P. Adams 153, 155, 158, 160, 170–1, 178n4
A Sixth Part of the World (Vertov, 1926) 7, 66, 67–71, 75, 88
Smith, George Albert 1
Smith, Murray 14, 147n58
Sobchack, Vivian 11n21, 24, 124–5, 138, 140, 144n7, 147, 211n52
Sokolov, Ippolit 70
Sontag, Susan 210n30
Spiegel, Alan 66
Spindler, Michael 90n51
Stein, Gertrude 165–7, 176, 180n43, 181n48, 181n50
Steiner, Wendy 159
stereoscope 15
Stewart, Garrett 95, 118, 210n30
Stewart, William E. 145n23
Stiegler, Bernard 123
Still, Colin 179n11
Stokoe, William 144n3
Stone, Judy 197
The Story of Dida Ibsen (Oswald, 1918) 101
The Story the Biograph Told (1904) 131
Strassman, Rick 204
stroboscope 6, 15
subjectivity 5, 7, 17–9, 21–22, 30, 33, 48, 59, 64n73, 66, 81, 93–5, 97, 101,
103, 108, 110, 112–17, 123, 127–8, 130, 131–2, 138–40, 148n72, 150–2,
158, 160–1, 170, 176, 187, 191, 201, 204, 207–8, 220; and dispositif 38–
45; intersubjectivity 27–8, 31, 52–5, 58, 143, 169
subjective camera 112, 132, 141–3, 148n72, 187, 200–1, 204, 206, 216
Svilova, Elizaveta 47

Talbot, Frederick A. 20
Talbot, William Henry Fox 6, 17–8, 34
Tavernier, Bertrand 8, 184, 186, 191, 193–9, 210, 211
Taylor, John Russell 9n2
technological imagination 1, 18, 53–4
telescope 17, 32, 37, 39, 49–50, 53–4, 68, 215, 220
Tenney, James 171, 174
thaumatrope 6, 15
Thompson, Evan 35n38
Thoreau, Henry David 154, 178n5
time-image 8, 11, 185, 188–90, 192, 195, 209n13, 214
Tinayre, Marcelle 120n45
Tinee, Mae 91
Tobin, Richard 9n7, 33n1
Totter, Audrey 139
trace 7, 8, 18, 93–8, 117, 119n11, 123, 130, 134–5, 139, 144, 153, 169, 171,
176, 184
Trenet, Charles 203
Truffaut, François 1, 193
Turbayne, Colin Murray 9n7, 11n19
Turner, Mark 6, 23, 24, 25, 26
Turner, R. Steven 19
Turvey, Malcolm 10n10, 33n1, 54
Two or Three Things I know About Her (Godard, 1966) 187

U.S.A. (Dos Passos, 1930–36) 7, 58, 71, 74–6, 89–90n38, 123

The Unsleeping Eye (Compton, 1974) 191
Up To And Including Her Limits (Schneemann, 1973–77) 175–6
Urazov, Izmail 70
Urios-Aparisi, Eduardo 33n4

Van der Heijden, A. H. C. 35n31

van Druten, John 66, 76–80, 82, 90, 91
Varela, Francisco 24, 35, 36
Veitch, John 34
Vertov, Dziga 1, 7, 12, 39, 45, 47–8, 53–61, 62, 63, 64, 65–72, 74, 75, 88,
89, 93, 123, 126, 140, 144, 191, 196, 206, 212, 213, 220
vision: child 157–8, 169; closed-eye (hypnogogic) 1, 156–7, 167–8, 181,
213–4; dream 27, 155–6, 166–7, 168–9, 173, 182, 185, 186–8, 222;
 hallucinatory 27, 156–7, 115–16, 166–7, 181, 204, 216; mental 84, 202
see also mindscreen; embodied 11, 140–1, 172–4, 213; perfecting vision
39, 45–63, 222; persistence of 20, 29, 35; poetics of vision 7–8, 47, 65–
92, 220–1; rationalization of 1, 2, 7, 16–17, 38–64, 150–3, 167–8, 219–
20; theory of 2, 9, 16–19, 35, 212–3; remembered vision see memory;
visual consciousness see camera consciousness
visual substance 6, 17–21
Vogel, Amos 152
Vogel, Paul 142
voyeurism 7, 94, 103, 108, 117, 131, 194–5
Vygotsky, Lev 58

Wait until Dark (Young, 1967) 199

Wald, George 43, 217
Walden (Thoreau, 1854) 154
Walton, Kendall 96
Wedekind, Frank 120n38
Wees, William C. 9n2, 22
Wegner, Daniel M. 34n17
Weininger, Otto 166, 181n50
The Weir-Falcon Saga (Brakhage, 1970) 168–9
Welchman, Alistair 37n72, 61n8
Welfling, Juliette 200
Welles, Orson 139–40
Westerhoven, James N. 89–90n38
Whitford, Frank 90n51, 91n74
Whitman, Walt 67, 75, 88n7, 178n5
Whitney, James 167
Wilcox, Sherman 144n3
Wilde, Alan 90n51
Wilder, Billy 91–2n82
Window Water Baby Moving (Brakhage, 1959) 174
Wingate, James 121n47, 121–2n54
Winter, Alison 35n35
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 6, 10, 12, 13–4, 33–4, 42, 62 118
Wolf, Mark J. P. 146n35
Woolf, Virginia 180n43
Wundt, Wilhelm 162

Youngblood, Gene 183n94

Zatôichi (Kitano, 2003) 199

Zhemchuzny, Vitaly 70
Žižek, Slavoy 120n41, 130, 146n32, 191, 209, 210n32