Subjectivity

Subjectivity
The Key Debates
Mutations and Appropriations

in European Film Studies
Series Editors
Ian Christie, Dominique Chateau, Annie van den Oever
Subjectivity
Filmic Representation and the
Spectator’s Experience
Edited by Dominique Chateau
Amsterdam University Press

The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from the Netherlands
Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
Cover illustration: Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966
Cover design: Neon, design and communications / Sabine Mannel

Lay-out: JAPES, Amsterdam
isbn 978 90 8964 317 9

e-isbn 978 90 4851 420 5
nur 670
© D. Chateau / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2011
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Contents
Editorial 7
Acknowledgments 9
Introduction: Rethinking Subjectivity in Film 11
Dominique Chateau
Part I
From Mind to Film, from Film to Mind
The Cinema as Art of the Mind: Hugo Münsterberg, First Theorist of

Subjectivity in Film 23
José Moure
The Representation of Experience in Cinema 41
Gregory Currie
Beyond Subjectivity: The Film Experience 53
Francesco Casetti
Part II
Ways of Expressing Subjectivity
The Man Who Wasn’t There: The Production of Subjectivity in

Delmer Daves’ Dark Passage 69
Vivian Sobchack
From Aesthetic Experience to the Loss of Identity, in Three Steps 85
Pere Salabert
Robert Bresson and the Voices of an Inner World: “I” Can Never Be
“You,” or the Impossible Identification 99
Céline Scemama
The Silence of the Lenses: Blow Up and the Subject of Photography 119
Pierre Taminiaux
5
Part III
Subjectivity and the Epistemology of Film Studies
Beyond Subjectivity. Bakhtin’s Dialogism and the Moving Image 135

Karl Sierek
Imaginary Subject 147
Jacinto Lageira
A Philosophical Approach to Subjectivity in Film Form 161
Dominique Chateau
Part IV
Conversation
Subjectivity in Artistic Coupling
Conversation with Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki 189

By Marina Gržinić
Notes 207
General Bibliography 235
Notes on Contributors 249
Index of Names 253
Index of Film Titles 259
Index of Subjects 261
6 index of subjects
Editorial
Thinking and theorizing about film is almost as old as the medium itself. Within
a few years of the earliest film shows in the 1890s, manifestos and reflections
began to appear which sought to analyze the seemingly vast potential of film.
Writers in France, Russia, and Britain were among the first to enter this field,
and their texts have become cornerstones of the literature of cinema. Few nations,
however, failed to produce their own statements and dialogues about the nature
of cinema, often interacting with proponents of Modernism in the traditional arts
and crafts. Film thus found itself embedded in the discourses of modernity, espe-
cially in Europe and Soviet Russia.
“Film theory,” as it became known in the 1970s, has always had an historical
dimension, acknowledging its debts to the pioneers of analyzing film texts and
film experience, even while pressing these into service in the present. But as scho-
larship in the history of film theory develops, there is an urgent need to revisit
many long-standing assumptions and clarify lines of transmission and interpreta-
tion. The Key Debates is a series of books from Amsterdam University Press which
focuses on the central issues that continue to animate thinking about film and
audiovisual media as the “century of celluloid” gives way to a field of interrelated
digital media.
Initiated by Annie van den Oever (the Netherlands), the direction of the series
has been elaborated by an international group of film scholars, including Domin-
ique Chateau (France), Ian Christie (UK), Laurent Creton (France), Laura Mulvey
(UK), Roger Odin (France), Eric de Kuyper (Belgium), and Emile Poppe (Bel-
gium). The intention is to draw on the widest possible range of expertise to pro-
vide authoritative accounts of how debates around film originated, and to trace
how concepts that are commonly used today have been modified in the process of
appropriation. The book series may contribute to both the invention as well as the
abduction of concepts.
London / Paris / Amsterdam

Ian Christie, Dominique Chateau, Annie van den Oever
7
Acknowledgments
This book is the second volume in the book series The Key Debates. After Ostrannenie
(edited by Annie van den Oever), the first in the series, it is once again a testament
to the relevance of the project Mutations and Appropriations in European Film Studies.
For this reason, first of all, I am very grateful to Annie van den Oever, who in-
itiated the project and who remains by and large responsible for its continuing
richness and productiveness. It is always a great pleasure to discuss and work
with both her and Ian Christie as part of the editorial board. I sincerely thank
those who participated in laying the groundwork for Subjectivity during meetings
in Amsterdam, Groningen, London, and Paris: Laura Marcus, Pere Salabert, and
Viola ten Hoorn, as well as my colleagues at the University Paris I, Panthéon-Sor-
bonne: Jacinto Lageira, José Moure, and Céline Scemama. I wish also to express
my gratitude to the other authors of the book, Francesco Casetti, Gregory Currie,
Marina Gržinić, Maria Klonaris, Karl Sierek, Vivian Sobchack, Pierre Taminiaux,
and Katerina Thomadaki for their insightful contributions. With the rich and va-
luable contributions of all these distinguished film scholars and artists, I hope
that the book will provide an account of the most important recent thinking on
the topic of subjectivity in film. As with Ostrannenie, this project again proved an
inspiring yet challenging undertaking of uniting an international group of scho-
lars from different academic traditions, and stemming from countries as diverse
as America, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, and
Spain.
With my above-named colleagues at Paris 1, I formed a research team within
the Sorbonne’s Laboratory of Theoretical and Applied Aesthetics (LETA, Labora-
toire d’esthétique théorique et appliquée), directed by Marc Jimenez. I would
especially like to thank him for giving a warm welcome to the research team and
for contributing to the financing of the book. Thanks also to the Doctoral School
of Plastic Arts, Aesthetics and Sciences of Arts, its former Director Jean Da Silva,
and its present one Bernard Darras. I sincerely thank Jeroen Sondervan, Chantal
Nicolaes, and their teams at Amsterdam University Press, who have once again
been very patient, supportive, and a pleasure to work with. For their support to
this international research project, I am also grateful to the Netherlands Organi-
sation for Scientific Research (NWO), whose funds make the publication of this
book possible. Finally, this book would not have been possible without Viola ten
Hoorn. I owe a great debt to her. Not only for her assistance in producing the
9
volume concerning its revision and editing, but also its conception from the
whole to the details. Many thanks to her.
Dominique Chateau
Paris, May 2011
10 acknowledgments
Introduction: Rethinking Subjectivity in
Film
Dominique Chateau
André Bazin’s objectivist postulate is well-known: cinema is a production of ob-

jective moving images because, as a temporal achievement of photography, it is
automatic or mechanic. However, from this standpoint, what are we to think of
an assertion such as “Godard’s comeback to subjectivity occurred only in the mid
to late 1970s through his video work with Miéville”?1 Does it mean that Godard
lost touch with cinema when he came back to subjectivity? In other words, can we
consider that some films are more cinematographic than others? This reminds
me of Eleanor Rosch’s brilliant expression about retrievers being “more doggy”
than other dogs.2 As a sociologist, she empirically analyzes American representa-
tions of dogs in an anti-essentialist theoretical context (under the protection of
Wittgenstein), while Bazin’s postulate is deliberately essentialist. Strictly defining
cinema by the objective power of the “impassible lens,”3 Bazin follows the over-
simplified definition of objectivity as the lack of subjectivity (which matches the
equally oversimplified definition of subjectivity as the lack of objectivity): “All the
arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage
from his absence.”4
We do not need a retrospective study throughout film history to convince us
that it is a procession of productions where man – that is, an identified subject,
an author – is sometimes absent, sometimes present, and that the films where
man is supposed to be present are no less cinematographic than others. Further-
more, Bazin was in fact a mentor to a lot of young filmmakers, who made films
where we recognize the distinctive and somewhat conspicuous stamp of subjec-
tivity; as a matter of fact, these filmmakers have played a larger part in defining
cinema as subjective than those who, at the same time, were absent from their
films. Nevertheless, the topic of this present book does not amount to a discus-
sion about the Nouvelle Vague and the credit of its members. Some signs of sub-
jectivity occur in films (even in some Nouvelle Vague ones) that do not refer to an
identified author, and these signs lead us to the idea that the question, if indeed
there is one, involves whether film in general is able to express a wide range of
subjective aspects with its own means. Some of these aspects concern the repre-
sentation of a character’s subjective relation to the real (more specifically, to
something represented in the film that is taken as real), like in the famous PoV
11
shot. Others, undoubtedly, pertain to the presence or the expression of a super-
vising subjectivity, referring more or less explicitly to a distinct author. And then
there are those that deal with a quite different perspective: as well as the set of
issues calling for narratology, subjectivity concerns such topics as the cinematic
apparatus, film spectatorship, and the representation of inner states (memories,
thoughts or dreams). In all these cases, we can consider that the key to the prob-
lem can be approached from a general view about cinema or from the perspective
of film studies.
Subjectivity from the Standpoint of Film

So to specify what this book intends to explain, it is useful to begin with a com-
prehensive definition of the notion of subjectivity. It can be considered to have
three main meanings:
1. Subjectivity as consciousness: the ability to connect our mind to the environ-
ment, to be aware of our feelings or ideas and also to be aware of our own
existence.
2. Subjectivity as internal representations of various kinds: sensations, percep-
tions, feelings, mental images, dreams, ideas.
3. Subjectivity as the position of the subject: the identity of the human being as a
unified source of external and internal representations, and also as a source
of self-representation (and self-consciousness).
One finds these three meanings, sometimes isolated but mostly mixed, in film
studies as well as in the present book. Discussions about the various isolated or
mixed aspects of subjectivity in film arise when film as a text is stressed or film as
a machine. Film as a text (or as a form) will be our objective in this book, without
losing focus by going for the shadow instead of the prey, to quote Jean de la
Fontaine’s famous phrase: lâcher la proie pour l’ombre. Our choice does not mean
that the structural conditions of subjectivity in film or the philosophical sense of
this concept are of no concern to us, it rather means that we start with the hy-
pothesis that film plays a crucial role insofar as, both from the point of view of its
textuality and its interplay with the spectator, the objectivation of subjectivity re-
quires the film’s mediation, and a specific one at that.
This mediation means that film substitutes specific signs of subjectivity, and
that this substitution depends both on the kind of subjectivity taken as a reference
point in each case and on the material and formal choices made to the purpose of
subjectivity. By revisiting theories about the issue of subjectivity or proposing new
insights, the essays collected here explore the interface between subjective phe-
nomena and film; by exploring different angles and approaches, they show the
relevance of subjectivity in film and reveal that subjectivity continues to be an
important key debate for film studies.
12 dominique chateau
Contributions
The book is structured in four parts, each of which deals with a particular aspect
of subjectivity. We will come across subjectivity as it is mediated by the texts, just
as we will read about the mediation of subjectivity by film. As one will find, there
are many possible interrelations between the texts concerning concepts, themes
or subjects, all of which creates a dense hypertextual network of related subject
matter. The order in which the essays appear in this book is based on this inter-
related network that may help facilitate the reader in becoming acquainted with
the concept of subjectivity. Thus each part consists of essays that are either asso-
ciated because they argue respectively two faces of the same issue, they develop
similar themes, or because they concentrate on a similar epistemological vector.
Concerning our subject matter, one of the most important challenges that film
theory has to face is to ascertain what sort of subjectivity can be ascribed to film.
One may be inclined to answer very quickly that “film thinks.” But without ar-
guing, this is no more than a gimmicky idea. There is perhaps no better introduc-
tion for discussing this issue than to go back to the first film theorists, especially
to Hugo Münsterberg, who is not only recognized as one of the forerunners in
the field of film theory, but who also presented a series of subtle arguments in his
The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916), in which subjectivity was the center-
piece.
The book opens with a contribution by José Moure dealing with Münsterberg’s
heritage and its importance for film studies. In “The Cinema as Art of the Mind:
Hugo Münsterberg, First Theorist of Subjectivity in Film,” Moure elaborates on
Münsterberg’s way of drawing an analogy between mind and film which enables
him to explore two major lines of inquiry: the possible analogy between the cine-
matic processes and the mental processes; and the possible connection of the
mental cooperation of the spectator to the cinematic processes. Studying the per-
ceptions of depth and movement, Moure shows that the spectator’s mind, aware
of the nature of visual percepts, adds something to them. And studying the pro-
cesses of attention, memory and imagination, he argues that the spectator is de-
termined by what can be found in the film form as such. Moure also examines the
internal representations, distinguishing between the spectator’s subjectivity and
the character’s, between “objective images which are modeled on the mental pro-
cesses of the spectator and subjective or mental images.” This theory, “more cog-
nitive than perceptive,” involves meaning. But, for him, producing emotions is
the central aim of the film form, therefore aesthetics is also a central aspect of
his theory. In his conclusion, José Moure indicates that his conceptions can be
compared with ideas discussed among French critics more or less influenced by
Bergson’s thesis, such as Emile Vuillermoz and Paul Souday. In addition, Moure
uncovers an anticipation of Münsterberg’s treatise in “an important essay entitled
introduction: rethinking subjectivity in film 13

‘Cinematography,’ published in 1912, in the Ciné-Journal and signed under the
pseudonym of Yhcam.”
The other essays included in part one deal with the exploration of the filmic re-
presentation of experience and the spectator’s experience. Experience, defined as
a moment of life or as a personal skill, evokes not only the practical side of hu-
man behavior, but it is also generally assumed that subjectivity partakes in it. The
problem that may be worth raising is whether it is possible to discover some
specific aspects of the subjective phenomena in whatever is experienced in a film
or as a film. Film (or cinema) as experience means the experience (and subjectiv-
ity) represented in a film, as much as the way (more or less subjective) a film is
experienced by the spectator. Two authors, Gregory Currie and Francesco Casetti,
approach this aspect of subjectivity. A first glance would suggest that Gregory
Currie considers only the first issue and Francesco Casetti the second one, but,
with regard to Currie’s approach, we see that the two issues are tangentially re-
lated to each other. Under the title “The Representation of Experience in Cine-
ma,” Gregory Currie, to begin with, dissociates the representation of subjectivity
from the representation of experience. He proposes a reconsideration of what is
perhaps one of the best-known formulations in film studies, Vivian Sobchack’s
“Watching a film, we can see the seeing, as well as the seen.”5 For Currie, a film
can represent (show, depict) the world, that is, “objects in space and time,” but
not an experience of the world. This does not mean that film is a radically objecti-
vist tool, incapable of representing subjectivity, but that the filmic representation
of subjective phenomena requires the mediation of “certain mental constructions
on the part of the viewer herself.” This approach of the viewer’s role in the con-
struction of representation seems to be questioned by the PoV shot, insofar it is
supposed to do the work for the viewer. Facing this kind of objection to his con-
ception, Gregory Currie examines a series of “subjective shots” – not only PoV
ones, but also hallucinatory images, dream sequences, depictions of delusions,
blurred images, inflected shots and representational prompts – and, in all these
cases, he concludes that the film does not directly represent a character’s experi-
ence, but that through the spectatorial experience of watching the film: “the mind
of the viewer [is] co-opted into the film’s representational system.”
Film can be the object of theory, but not its subject when the focus is not put on
the film’s system but on the spectator’s attitude towards a film. In “Beyond Sub-
jectivity: The Film Experience,” Francesco Casetti proposes to identify a range of
aspects ascribed to this standpoint of film reception that, however, must be ex-
pressed less in terms of reception than of experience. The notion of reception
does not correspond with what we are experiencing when we watch a film. We
do not receive the film, we live it, in the sense that it has a practical effect on our
existence, including a mental effect. This perspective seems very useful if we con-
sider cinema as a specific experience of the world. But it is also a crucial issue
because “cinema seems to be putting an end to its century-long history,” or, in a
less pessimistic mode, seems “to relocate” within new media and new environ-
ments. Francesco Casetti explores some questions about these new conditions of
the film experience in the time of post-cinema: what does the irrevocable disse-
mination of cinema – or, more precisely, its contamination by the dissemination
of media – produce? Casetti argues that it not only produces a concrete “reloca-
tion” of film, but that it also produces a significant process of mutation of the
film experience. Francesco Casetti makes it clear that the metamorphosis of cine-
ma, which creates some doubt as to its identity, has considerably transformed
film experience: this “more and more personalized” and “increasingly active”
kind of experience has been becoming a performance. What are now the effects
of this change? To answer this question we have to consider the spectator’s free-
dom, the difference between film experience and media experience, and, finally,
we have to ask if “film experience will survive”…
Part two of this book deals with the numerous ways of expressing subjectivity. In
the context of her suggestive phenomenology of film experience, Vivian Sobchack
(see Gregory Currie’s contribution for a questioning of her phenomenology in the
previous part) argues that the spectator, while seeing the world represented in the
film, experiences the difference between the film’s seeing and its own seeing of
the film’s seeing. It is interesting to notice that seeing the world can be under-
stood literally as the optical and mental relation to the world or, in a larger and
metaphorical sense, as a Weltanschauung. Similarly, there is a literal sense of the
“parallax problem,” its technical sense, and a metaphorical one, the “visual and
ontological ‘parallax’ of embodied subjectivity.” Vivian Sobchack develops this
double interpretation about the “uncanny and inaugural moment early on in Del-
mer Daves’ Dark Passage (1947).” Sobchack’s contribution offers, first, a very
precise analysis of this inaugural sequence, with the help of Daves’ technical
notes and Žižek’s theoretical propositions. Dark Passage’s main character, Vin-
cent, appears to be situated between two antagonistic positions, both inside and
outside the image, in a sort of “chiasmic conjunction yet misalignment of subjec-
tivity and material embodiment,” so that it produces an impression of the uncan-
ny in the spectator’s mind. Arguing with Emmanuel Levinas and comparing
Dark Passage with Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947), Vivian
Sobchack concludes that Daves’ work is a very convincing exemplification of the
filmic production “as necessarily both immanent and transcendent, visible and
invisible, divided and self-distanced – and ever engaged in an ongoing process of
‘becoming’ in the face of others.”
From its opening pages, there is, throughout this book, the potential discussion
about the relations between the representation of subjectivity in film and the spec-

tator’s subjectivity. Are these two levels absolutely separated, or relatively so, or
not at all? In “From Aesthetic Experience to the Loss of Identity, in Three Steps,”
Pere Salabert considers that the spectator’s uncanny feeling is based on some
depiction of an uncanny situation in the storytelling. By uncanny (das Unheimliche),
he means some mental state that arises when there is a gap between “the sub-
ject’s inner world” and the objective world. This gap has to do with Freud’s fight
of pleasure with reality, the fact that the principle of reality implies the repression
of our impulsions and that the repressed ones, remaining latent, can reappear in
dreams and art, where, by representation, the ways owing to which we suffer
“from hypothetical, imaginary threats to the fundamental structure of [our] in-
ner-outer world” become real. From this perspective, Salabert argues, one finds
in novels such as Dostoyevsky’s The Double and Maupassant’s Le Horla, and in films
such as John Huston’s The Night of the Iguana (1964), Luis Buñuel’s Él
(1952), and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) the depiction of phenomena like
“depersonalization” and “derealization” associated with an uncanny experience.
But more importantly, Pere Salabert’s contribution evokes a stimulating discus-
sion on the cooperation of Peirce and Freud. The examined films, exemplifying
three cases of subjectivity, related respectively to “an aesthetic event,” “a mental
disorder,” and “personal subjectivity,” can be referred, respectively again, to
Peirce’s maybe (Firstness), reality (Secondness) and the interface between these
two ontological categories (Thirdness).
How does the transfer from the filmic subjectivity to the spectator work? How
does the subjectivity expressed in the film, whatever kind it may be, meet its own
spectator’s subjectivity? Identification is a possible answer to these questions.
Some think, indeed, that there is “an equivalency of subjectivity and identifica-
tion: the subject is identification; the I is another.”6 The next essay in part two of
this book is Céline Scemama’s “Robert Bresson and the Voices of an Inner World:
‘I’ Can Never Be ‘You,’ or the Impossible Identification.” The second part of this
title signifies very plainly that she does not agree with this conception, that is,
concerning Robert Bresson’s work. Analyzing his films – especially the trilogy:
Diary of a Country Priest (1951), A Man Escaped (1956), and Pickpocket
(1959) – she argues that Bresson’s idea that the films are “made of inner move-
ments which are seen”7 leads to a special treatment of the filmic raw material, of the
voices as much as of the images, of the actors as much as of the presence of the
author, producing a whole series of disconnections at the various filmic levels: a
disconnection between sounds and images, voices and bodies, actors and charac-
ters, and, to some extent, the author himself and his works… It follows that the
supposed mechanism of spectatorial identification does not work, but also that
“this impossible identification paradoxically gives birth to the greatest expression
of an inner life.” Céline Scemama’s analysis sheds light on this specifically Bres-
sonian paradox when it concerns the voice which is neither “off screen,” nor
“voice-over,” but literally an “interior voice.” Or, in other instances, when it
shows the importance of the textual origin of the film either in the vocal behavior
of the actors or in the author’s style qualified as “lyrical asceticism.”
Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) is amongst the most meaningful

films of the 1960s. The radically new form of representation that characterized
the film is symptomatic not only of the artist’s need to be fully emancipated from
the classical forms of storytelling, but also of a time of crisis that concerned both
the means of representation and the political and cultural functions of subjectiv-
ity. In “The Silence of the Lenses: Blow Up and the Subject of Photography,”
Pierre Taminiaux analyzes Blow Up from this point of view. Its story, taking
place in a time in suspension, is not developed for itself, for its proper effects,
but insofar as it makes visually present a kind of being in the world which associ-
ates strangeness with contingency. For the same reason, the film emphasizes the
residing of photography in moving pictures. Like in Freud’s theory of dream in-
terpretation, the details are more significant than the plot: in this case, it is “a
slight detail that catches the eye of the photographer and unveils the dark nature
of the scenes in the park” – in other words (following Barthes), it is a punctum. It
appears that there is a strong parallelism between Blow Up’s voyeur punctum that
reveals a crime and, according to Barthes, “the strong link between photography
and death.” On this basis, Antonioni’s movie is structured by the photographic
mediation used as a play with subjectivity: the photographer searches for the truth
by abstracting the image from reality in order to grasp this reality, which is then
proved to be an illusion. By again referring to photography, the silence of the film
is associated with this revelation. Pierre Taminiaux thus shows that the attempt to
reach the truth throughout a blurred and mute image of a crime can be associated
with the analogy between art and crime considered as a transgression, except that
the photographer, instead of experiencing the voyeur’s pleasure, remains the pris-
oner of a truth that escapes as he tries to catch it.
Part three of this book deals not only with the debate over the role of subjectivity
in film, but also in film studies. It is not merely about discussing the filmic repre-
sentation of a subject’s viewpoint or inner world, but also about an epistemologi-
cal discussion about film studies. Is it possible to introduce a transdisciplinary
perspective in the field of film studies that could combine cultural theory with
film-analytical research? In “Beyond Subjectivity. Bakhtin’s Dialogism and the
Moving Image,” Karl Sierek proposes to achieve this task with the help of the
Bakhtin Circle, composed of Mikhail Bakhtin himself, Valentin Vološinov, and
Pavel Medvedev, on account of their original and powerful notion of subjectivity.
The advantage of this notion is the possibility of guiding the analytical examina-
tion through a general theory of culture. The Bakhtin Circle’s subject, unlike the
philosophy of identity, is conceived “as a dialogue which makes the inner psychic

dynamic analogous to social speech situations.” The originality of this theory of
subjectivity is that the subject, instead of being conceived as unique, permanent
and abstract, is defined as multiple and dynamic, according to continuously var-
ious processes linked to its active presence in social space and textual representa-
tion. This new concept of subjectivity as a “plurality of unmerged conscious-
nesses” that we find especially in Bakhtin’s essays on Dostoyevsky, offers a large
scope for a theory that reaches beyond literature (where it originated), and there-
fore has, unlike the formalist theories limited to narratology, an aesthetic value
which gives a new dimension to the issue of subjectivity. According to Karl Sierek,
film theory may benefit from this representation of art (and possibly of media)
that draws a “dialogical image-text of differentiated subjectivities.”
In the context of discussing the relevance of the concept of subjectivity within the
field of film studies, the interpretation of subjectivity as the position of the subject
must be isolated and examined from both a philosophical and an aesthetical
standpoint. Jacinto Lageira, in “Imaginary Subject,” draws from Locke (self-con-
sciousness) about the first standpoint, and from Kant, about the second (univer-
sally shared subjectivity). Then he shows that this classical basis must be enriched
by a theory of the imaginary. The principal pressure point regarding this topic is
that “the film is an imaginary object that requires a game of make-believe so that
its functions and significations can gain sufficient grasp of my subjectivity.” The
“imaginary subject,” Lageira suggests, can be examined through phenomenol-
ogy, especially Husserl and Sartre, and through psychoanalysis, especially Metz’
theory. Applied to film analysis, concerning fictional as much as documentary
films, such a perspective leads to the idea of a complex interplay between the
more-or-less subjective signs in the film and the spectator’s imaginary subjectiv-
ity.
The merging of subjectivity with film studies can be managed in different disci-
plinary frames, in a single one, or in an interdisciplinary context. In “A Philoso-
phical Approach to Subjectivity in Film Form,” I argue that for subjectivity, being
originally a philosophical concept, philosophy provides the best theoretical
ground for its incorporation with film studies, on condition that the work should
be bound in a theory of film form. Epistemology is the theory of science or the
theory of cognitive representations. In the first sense, it deals with fields of study
such as film studies, philosophy and their possible interface. In the second sense,
as John R. Searle proposes, it can define a first meaning of subjectivity, its cogni-
tive adequacy to reality. Searle proposes to consider another meaning he called
“ontological,” that is, its relation to consciousness and inner experience (as he
illustrates well with the example of lower back pain). In my essay I argue for this
second meaning and for its confrontation with film form. Film is seen as an orga-
nized structure of representations where signs of subjectivity are inscribed and
designed to activate human minds. From this perspective, I begin with exploring
the relation of the camera to reality, which leads me progressively deeper and
deeper into internal representations. Additionally, I refer to Merleau-Ponty’s no-
tion of the “internal landscape,” and with the help of landscape theory, I argue
against the philosopher’s idea to limit film as an art of behavior.
Part four of this book contains a conversation in the form of an interview, or what
the French call an Entretien, between Marina Gržinić, Maria Klonaris, and Katerina
Thomadaki. At first sight, this last contribution looks like an exercise of intercul-
tural communication: the Slovenian doctor of philosophy and video artist Marina
Gržinić – who wrote Fiction Reconstructed: Eastern Europe, Post-Socialism and the Retro-
Avant-Garde, published in Vienna and translated in French,8 – interviews Maria
Klonaris, born in Cairo, and Katerina Thomadaki, born in Athens, who have both
been working in Paris since 1975! More relevantly, Maria Klonaris and Katerina
Thomadaki as a team produce films, videos, multi-media installations, perfor-
mances, photographic pieces, sounds and texts, exemplifying artistic coupling in
a special way: two women forming a partnership, sharing the subjective responsi-
bility of a work where, what is more, the duality is a thematic material and a
pragmatic device. Since Double Labyrinth (1976), when they both began to
sign the same work, they have explored, throughout a continually wider choice of
media and mixed media, and recurrent themes (body, female, androgynous iden-
tity, sexuality, the unconscious), the various statuses of auctorial cooperation:
personal work, double author, presence (or absence) in the work of the other,
role reversal in the same film. Sometimes, it is clear that the challenge is to par-
take of the authorial function, sometimes, to develop a more or less complete role
reversal, and, even, when the separation seems to be clear, like in Selva (1981-
83), signed only by Maria, and Chutes. Désert. Syn (1983-85), signed only by
Katerina, these two works are shown at the same time.
This diversified play with the limits of double subjectivity is based on an ontol-
ogy of the double (couple, twin, hybridization, image-mirror), and, correlatively,
on a phenomenology of the double (body, look and image). Firstly, Maria Klo-
naris and Katerina Thomadaki begin to work in the presentness of a body relation
that associates a filming body to a filmed one. Secondly, the films, together or
separate, show the mediation of two reversible viewpoints. They write:
Self-representation is double: one looks at oneself, and at the same time one
looks at another, and, one after the other, the ‘I’ and the Other usurp the space
in which we express ourselves, in which we perceive. To pass in front of, and
behind, the lens – this eye, open to the world – is to destroy the classic di-
chotomies of subject/object, acting/transcribing, seeing/being seen.9

It is clear that the double is not only embodied through its filmic representation,
but is also mentally transformed according to the related themes. Thirdly, we
must not neglect the fact that the composition of images and sounds constitute
the ultimate level of representation in such a work. Quasar (2002–03) and the
Unheimlich series, among others, accentuate this fact: Klonaris’ and Tomada-
ki’s cinema of the body (in French: cinéma corporel) is also a way of experiencing
the field of media, both the cinematic one and, beyond it, the media one, and,
through this experimentation, expressing an always-reviving desire of art.
PART I
From Mind to Film,
from Film to Mind
The Cinema as Art of the Mind:
Hugo Münsterberg, First Theorist of
Subjectivity in Film
José Moure
It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tlön comprises only

one discipline: psychology. All others are subordinated to it. I have said that
the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes
which do not develop in space but successively in time.
– Jorge Luis Borges1
The idea that there is an analogy between the human mind and the cinema – i.e.,
between the mental processes and the cinematic processes – pervades the history
of film theory. This idea appears as early as the very first years of cinematography,
often expressed metaphorically by philosophers or writers who announce intui-
tively what would become a persistent and viable theoretical approach to cinema
in the following decades. In Matter and Memory, published in 1896, the philoso-
pher Henri Bergson already uses a cinematic metaphor to describe the process
through which a memory returns to the mind: “Whenever we are trying to recover
a recollection, to call up some period of our history, we become conscious of an
act sui generis by which we detach ourselves from the present in order to replace
ourselves first in the past in general, then in a certain region of the past – a work
of adjustment something like the focusing of a camera.”2 And in an interview in
1914, the French philosopher states even more significantly: “As a witness of its
beginnings, I realized [the cinema] could suggest new things to a philosopher. It
might be able to assist in the synthesis of memory, or even of the thinking pro-
cess. If the circumference [of a circle] is composed of a series of points, memory
is, like the cinema, composed of a series of images. Immobile, it is in neutral
state, in movement, it is life itself.”3 In 1898, in a note about the novel by René
Dujardin, Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888), which inspired James Joyce in his use of
the stream of consciousness, Rémy de Gourmont speaks of a novel “which seems
to be the anticipated transposition of the Cinematograph into literature.”4 And in
1907, in a short narrative entitled Cerebral Cinematograph, published in L’Italiana
Illustrazione, the Italian writer Edmondo De Amicis uses the technique of the
stream of consciousness, and, through this metaphor, suggests the links between
23
the mechanisms of dreams, of memories, of interior language, and those of the
cinematograph, between the thinking machine and the cinema machine.
These intuitions show that the film, as a medium which is apparently meant to
reproduce concrete reality both externally and objectively, has, from the start,
been considered a privileged vehicle of subjectivity and interiority. This theoreti-
cal, albeit not dominant, perspective was already in place in the second decade of
the last century and we find its first elaboration as early as 1916 in the book by the
philosopher and psychologist Hugo Münsterberg,5 The Photoplay: A Psychological
Study6 which is considered the most sustained and accomplished text devoted to
cinema in the 1910s. Although we cannot just reduce Münsterberg’s study to an
attempt to conceive the new medium – which he called, in the language of his
time, the photoplay – as an art of the mind and an attempt to characterize cine-
matic processes as if they were modeled upon mental processes, this theoretical
investigation constitutes Münsterberg’s most important and original contribution
to film theory. For the first time since the beginning of film as a medium, a study
raised the problem of subjectivity in film and provided the foundations for what
can be called in modern terms a spectator theory (the effectiveness of moving
images is based on a psychological phenomenon that requires the mental coop-
eration of the spectator in order to achieve their full potential) and a narrative film
theory (if there is an analogy between the devices which are specific to the cine-
matic medium and the mechanisms of the mind, the film will be particularly sui-
ted to express what is happening in the consciousness of a fictional character).
The main goal of Hugo Münsterberg, along with other film theorists of the
silent period, was to demonstrate that the new medium was not merely a mechan-
ical device and that it could be an art form in its own right. This demonstration
meant, as Noël Carroll perfectly explains it, “first, to show that the film medium,
despite its photographic provenance, could imaginatively reconstitute whatever it
recorded; second, that the cinematic mode of transforming reality was different
from the theatrical mode; and third, that this mode of transformation implemen-
ted the general purposes of art – which purposes could be identified without re-
ference to cinema.”7 This extensive project can be summarized in one basic ques-
tion: what are the aesthetic conditions that would give cinema its autonomy from
the theater and its independence from the practical, outer world? The answer to
this question is guided by Münsterberg’s Kantian conception of art as something
which is isolated from real life, as an aesthetic object characterized by a total
harmony of its elements and at least a certain degree of detachment – isolation –
from reality. I will therefore, in the following, offer close readings of Münster-
berg’s work to examine the question of subjectivity in film.
To prove that film is an independent art form, Münsterberg raises the question
of the aesthetic specificity of cinema not in terms of the relationship between
cinema and reality, but in terms of the relationship between film and spectator.
His approach does not resort to the analysis of the “differentiating factors,”
24 josé moure
namely, of the technical limitations of representationalism which, as Rudolf Arnheim
explained two decades later in Film as Art (1932),8 guarantees the autonomy of the
moving picture from its model and allows the artist a creative use of the medium.
In Münsterberg’s view, the material with which cinema works does not consist of
single elements of articulation of the cinematic language (the picture and its rela-
tionship with the objects, facts, reality), but of all the mental processes of the
spectator (which are supposed to be in connection with the devices of the cine-
matic language).
This preliminary methodological choice which determines the specificity of
Münsterberg’s approach – a psychological study – has to be linked with another
important point concerning the movies which Münsterberg takes as references
for his analysis: the narrative films. This interest in fiction films can surely be
related to Münsterberg’s own spectator experience, to his contact with a type of
film which was, at that time, becoming institutionalized in the United States, but
it is also justified by the fact that, for him, the aesthetic aspect of cinema was
linked with fiction and that the very essence of film favored entertaining over
teaching, narrating over informing. Thus adopting a psychological point of view
in order to approach the art of film cannot be separated from the idea that
Münsterberg saw in narrativity a kind of natural goal for the cinema or rather the
best way to achieve what he considered to be the aesthetic purpose of art: the
construction of objects characterized by their absolute “freedom from the bon-
dage of the material world.”9
As an autonomous and aesthetic narrative system, the photoplay required the
mental resources and the cooperation of the spectator. That is why in the first
section of his work entitled “The Psychology of the Photoplay,” Münsterberg
does not explore the characteristics of the film medium itself, but the psychologi-
cal processes activated in the spectator’s mind at the moment of the film viewing,
i.e., “the means by which the photoplay influences the mind of the spectators,
[…] the elementary excitation of the mind which enters into our experience of the
moving picture.”10 This psychological orientation led him to outline a new theory
of the spectator which paved the way for a theory of cinematic narration.
The Active Mental Cooperation of the Spectator

For Münsterberg, as Dudley Andrew explains, film “exists in fact not on celluloid
not even on the screen, but only in the mind which actualizes it by conferring
movement, attention, memory, imagination and emotion on a dead series of sha-
dows.”11 Münsterberg begins his psychological study by demonstrating that even
the perception of depth and the perception of movement depend on the active
mental cooperation of the viewer: depth and movement were not properties
which the image would receive as such from the model, but they resulted from
the mental activity of the spectator who adds depth and movement to static and
the cinema as art of the mind 25

flat pictures. This distinction between what is objectively given to the viewer (flat
and static pictures) and what the viewer subjectively experiences when he sees a
film (“deep” and moving pictures) allowed Münsterberg to jump, before even
raising it, over the problem of the reproductive character of the cinematic picture.
The Impression of Depth

Münsterberg starts by analyzing the impression of depth in film, or better, the
absence of a real three-dimensionality which characterizes the cinematic picture.
He notices that we must distinguish between our knowledge about the film and
the “immediate impression” its screening gives us: “we know that we see a flat
screen,” flat “like a picture and never plastic like a work of sculpture or architec-
ture or like a stage,” but, at the same time, “the scenes which we see on the
screen [do not] appear to us as flat pictures.”12 The cinematic picture, in spite of
its bi-dimensionality (of which the spectator is rationally conscious), is able to
produce a very intense illusion of depth (which depends on factors such as the
movements of the characters towards the foreground or the background, the dif-
ferences in dimensions of the objects, the shades, etc.):
That flatness is an objective part of the technical physical arrangements, but

not a feature of that which we really see in the performance of the photoplay.
We are there in the midst of a three-dimensional world, and the movements of
the persons or of the animals or even of the lifeless things, like the streaming
of the water in the brook or the movements of the leaves in the wind, strongly
maintain our immediate impression of depth.13
However, such an illusion is, for Münsterberg, never completely achieved, and it
is always received by the viewer in a conflicting way: the viewer perceives depth,
yet he knows that the screen and the objects in it are flat. The perception of depth
is indissolubly accompanied by the knowledge of the flatness of pictures, the
knowledge that filmic representations of people or landscapes are not “truly plas-
tic” – these people “can move toward us and away from us,” while “the distance
in which the people move is not the distance of our real space, such as the theater
shows, and the persons themselves are not flesh and blood.”14 What kind of ex-
perience is this? Münsterberg is clearly concerned about this crucial question:
It is a unique inner experience, which is characteristic of the perception of the

photoplays. We have reality with all its true dimensions; and yet it keeps the
fleeting, passing surface suggestion without true depth and fullness, as differ-
ent from a mere picture as from a mere stage performance. It brings our mind
into a peculiar complex state; and we shall see that this plays a not unimpor-
tant part in the mental make-up of the whole photoplay.15
26 josé moure
The illusion of depth induced by the cinematic vision is thus for Münsterberg the
result, not of a technical process, but of a mental process: a mental activity of the
spectator which only the “unique inner experience” of cinema can make possi-
ble... An inner experience which Münsterberg does not try to explain.
The Impression of Movement

Münsterberg’s explanation of the perception of movement in film does not differ
much from the explanations given for the perception of depth: “The perception of
movement is an independent experience which cannot be reduced to a simple
seeing of series of different positions. A characteristic content of consciousness
must be added to such a series of visual impressions.”16 The impression of move-
ment is based on conditions which are different from those of the actual vision of
movement. This “unique experience” is not only independent from the perception
of “the actual seeing of successive positions,” it is also independent from the
phenomenon of afterimages (He describes what is actually now called the phi-
phenomenon or phenomenon of the apparent movement). Münsterberg recog-
nizes that the retina retains visual impressions momentarily after a stimulus has
been removed, but he goes beyond this passive phenomenon to an active experi-
ence, “a higher mental act” in which the mind confers motion. An action of the
mind must be added to the “mere perception of successive phases of movement”:
“the impression of the continuity of the motion results from a complex mental
process by which the various pictures are held together in the unity of a higher
act.”17 “Higher central process,” “complex mental process,” “higher mental act,”
“higher act,” “inner activity,” “inner mental activity...” Münsterberg uses differ-
ent terms in order to emphasize the active powers of the mind, but he never tries
to explain this process, act or activity which he analyzes as a “subjective help,” “a
mental mechanism,” through which the spectator perceives the world of the
screen with depth and animates it with motion:
Depth and movement alike come to us in the moving picture world, not as
hard facts but as a mixture of fact and symbol. They are present and yet they
are not in the things. We invest the impressions with them. The theater has
both depth and motion, without any subjective help; the screen has them and
yet lacks them. We see things distant and moving, but we furnish to them
more than we receive; we create the depth and the continuity through our
mental mechanism.18
At this primary, sensory level of the perception of the cinematic image (depth
being a production of the viewer and not the property of the things or of the
represented action; the movement being a viewer’s mental construction from sti-
muli coming from fixed pictures), Münsterberg shows that the experience of the
photoplay results from a conjunction of “unique, inner experiences.” The specta-

tor, as a perceiving subject, participates in the construction of an autonomous
universe regulated by the laws of his mind.
The Objectification of Subjective, Mental Processes of the Spectator

As Münsterberg says, “The mere perception of the men and women and of the
background, with all their depth and their motion, furnishes only the material.
The scene which keeps our interest alive certainly involves much more than the
simple impression of moving and distant objects. We must accompany those
sights with a wealth of ideas.”19 In order to explain how these sights have a mean-
ing for us, how they play on our suggestibility, how they are enriched by our
subjectivity, the psychologist sets his demonstration at a higher level, which no
longer involves the optical perceptions but the way the spectator perceives the
cinematic language, the way film works on the viewer and the way the mental
processes enter into the cinematic construction.
For Münsterberg, all the cinematic processes are developed to shape films out
of the mind of the spectator. They are an objectification or externalization of in-
ner mental processes, which belong to the ordinary experience of the viewer.
They are modeled on psychological acts of the human being, especially on atten-
tion, memory and imagination. This notion of the cinematic devices as the objec-
tification or the analog of mental processes forms the core of Münsterberg’s ana-
lysis. It enables him to think of the film as an autonomous production whose
forms are not organized according to the laws of the physical world, but accord-
ing to the psychological laws of the mind. Münsterberg thus summarizes this
essential point: “[…] the photoplay tells us the human story by overcoming the
form of the outer world, namely space, time, and causality, and by adjusting the
events to the forms of the inner world, namely, attention, memory, imagination,
and emotion.”20
The Attention – the Close-up

Münsterberg’s method consists in identifying and describing mental processes
and in identifying their equivalents in terms of devices of the cinematic language.
He starts with examining the problem of attention. He makes a distinction be-
tween voluntary attention (“we approach the impressions with an idea in our
mind as to what we want to focus our attention on”21) and involuntary attention
(“the cue for the focusing of our attention lies in the events which we per-
ceive”22). For him, an aesthetic system is characterized by the specificity of the
means by which the involuntary attention of the spectator is constantly drawn in
accordance with the intentions of the artist (“the audience is necessarily following
the lead of an attention which receives all its cues from the work of art itself and
which therefore acts involuntarily”23). If – with the exception of spoken words –
the photoplay keeps all the means by which, on the theater stage, the attention of
28 josé moure
the audience can be drawn to any important point, it has at its disposal a device
which it does not share with any other form of representation, which gives it its
artistic specificity – and indirectly its superiority over theatrical art – and which
makes it possible for the attention to be drawn in its purest and most perfect
form. This device is the close-up:24
Here begins the art of the photoplay. That one nervous hand which feverishly
grasps the deadly weapon can suddenly for the space of a breath or two be-
come enlarged and be alone visible on the screen, while everything else has
really faded into darkness. The act of attention which goes on in our mind has
remodeled the surrounding itself. The detail which is being watched has sud-
denly become the whole content of the performance, and everything which our
mind wants to disregard has been suddenly banished from our sight and has
disappeared. The events without have become obedient to the demands of our
consciousness. In the language of the photoplay producers it is a ‘close-up.’
The close-up has objectified in our world of perception our mental act of atten-
tion and by it has furnished art with a means which far transcends the power
of any theater stage.25
The close-up, as the objectification of the inner act of attention contributes to

creating a subjective world that is free from the physical form of space, time and
causality. Moreover, it is adjusted to the free play of the mental experiences of the
viewer: “It is as if [the] outer world were woven into our mind and were shaped
not through its own laws, but by the acts of our attention.”26
The Memory – the Flashback / the Imagination – the Flash-forward

When he tackles the problem of memory and then of imagination, Münsterberg
still follows the same goal: to demonstrate that the specificity of the photoplay
among the other arts lies in its capacity to make the inner psychological processes
of the spectator objective on the screen. In his analysis he moves from a question
that puts emphasis on space (the close-up) to questions which involve temporal
relationships (the various kinds of editing).
Münsterberg first analyzes the action of the memory whose mental operation is
objectified on the screen by the cinematic device of the flashback, which he calls
“cut-back”:
We see the jungle, we see the hero at the height of his danger; and suddenly
there flashes upon the screen a picture of the past. For not more than two
seconds does the idyllic New England scene slip into the exciting African
events. When one deep breath is over we are stirred again by the event of the
present. That home scene of the past fitted by just a hasty thought of bygone
days darts through the mind. […] We have really an objectivation of our mem-

ory function. The case of the cut-back is there quite parallel to that of the
close-up. In the one we recognize the mental act of attending, in the other we
must recognize the mental act of remembering. […] It is as if the outer world
itself became molded in accordance with our fleeting turns of attention or with
our passing memory ideas.27
The same principle occurs “when the course of events is interrupted by forward
glances.”28 This device, called in modern terms flash-forward, objectifies the
mental operation of anticipating the future on the screen, which Münsterberg
classifies under the mental function of imagination: “the photoplay can overcome
the interval of the future as well as the interval of the past and slip the day twenty
years hence between this minute and the next. In short, it can act as our imagina-
tion acts.”29 So the scene we see on the screen has “the mobility of our ideas
which are not controlled by the physical necessity of outer events but by psycho-
logical laws for the association of ideas.”30
It should be noted that in the mental processes of attention, memory, or imagina-

tion that Münsterberg discusses in relation to respectively the close-up, the flash-
back and the flash-forward, the spectator, unlike what occurs with depth and mo-
tion, does not add something to the visual image. He is entirely modeled by the
film, which adjusts its communicative process to his mental experiences. The
mental process resides no longer in the spectator, it is replicated in the film by a
cinematic device which simulates the subjective action of attention, memory or
imagination. When Münsterberg discusses the spectator’s perception of depth
and movement, he emphasizes the active role of the mind of the spectator; when
he examines attention, memory or imagination, however, the focus is put on the
way subjective processes are objectified on the screen by cinematic devices. The
mind of the spectator seems here less active, it is the instrument through which
an entirely autonomous and narrativized world is built. Even though the images
projected on the screen are phenomenally objective, the cinematic devices can be
viewed as structurally subjective insofar as they are objectifications of subjective,
inner processes.
Mental Images: In the Mind of the Characters...

Even if his principal concern is to describe all cinematic properties as mental and
to emphasize the role that the subjectivity of the spectator plays in the perception
of film (perception of depth and movement, perception of meaning), Münster-
berg also considers how the film can picture the internal representations of char-
acters. He thus makes a distinction between the subjectivity of the spectator and
that of the character, between objective images which are modeled on the mental
processes of the spectator and subjective or mental images – he never uses this
30 josé moure
latter term – which visualize what the characters in the film “see in their own
minds”: that is, “the play of memory and imagination can have a still richer sig-
nificance in the art of the film. The screen may produce not only what we repro-
duce or imagine but what the persons in the play see in their own minds.”31
Münsterberg is certainly the first film theorist who emphasizes this capacity of
cinema to enter into the mind of a character and to picture his memory or imagi-
nation. For him, what particularly distinguishes a subjective flashback from an
objective flashback are the kinds of transitions used, i.e., a fade or dissolve:
If a person in the scene remembers the past, a past which may be entirely
unknown to the spectator but which is living in the memory of the hero or
heroine, then the former events are not thrown on the screen as an entirely
new set of pictures, but they are connected with the present by a slow transi-
tion. He sits at the fireplace in his study and receives the letter with the news of
her wedding. The close-up picture which shows us the enlargement of the
engraved wedding announcement appears as an entirely new picture. The
room suddenly disappears and the hand which holds the cards flashes up.
Again when we have read the card, it suddenly disappears and we are in the
room again. But when he has dreamily stirred the fire and sits down and gazes
into the flames, then the room seems to dissolve, the lines blur, the details
fade away, and while the walls and the whole room slowly melt, with the same
slow transition the flower garden blossoms out, the flower garden where he
and she sat together under the lilac bush and he confessed to her his boyish
love. And then the garden slowly vanishes and through the flowers we see
once more the dim outline of the room and they become sharper and sharper
until we are in the midst of the study again and nothing is left of the vision of
the past.32
In the same terms as those used for the precise description of the appearance and
disappearance of a subjective reminiscence, Münsterberg examines the mental
images which visualize what a character imagines: “Just as we can follow the
reminiscences of the hero, we may share the fancies of his imagination. Once
more the case is distinctly different from the one in which we, the spectators,
had our imaginative ideas realized on the screen. Here we are passive witnesses
to the wonders which are unveiled through the imagination of the persons of the
play.”33
Not only is the photoplay unique, according to Münsterberg, as it is able to
picture the character’s memory and imagination, but it also has a peculiar ability
to represent “fantastic dreams”:
The ragged tramp who climbs a tree and falls asleep in the shady branches and
then lives through a reversed world in which he and his kind feast and glory

and live in palaces and sail in yachts, and, when the boiler of the yacht ex-
plodes, falls from the tree to the ground, becomes a tolerable spectacle be-
cause all is merged in the unreal pictures. […] Even the whole play may find
its frame in a setting which offers a five-reel performance as one great imagi-
native dream.34
Münsterberg does not insist on the implications of this ability. He foresees a cine-
ma of fantasy that visualizes dreams, but he prefers to dwell upon the ability of
the new medium to create a world which can never be embodied except in the
photoplay and in whose objective reality the viewer does not believe because it is
modeled by the interests of his mind.
If Münsterberg elaborates on a theory of subjectivity in film, this theory is more
cognitive than perceptive. The processes of attention, memory, and imagination
which he describes are above all perceptions of meaning, and the corresponding
cinematic devices are the objectifications of those processes. And when he dis-
cusses the ability of the photoplay to enter into the mind of a person in the film,
it is striking that Münsterberg mentions – without using the term – mental
images which picture the reminiscences and fancies of characters, and that con-
versely he does not allude to shots which adopt the subjective point of view of a
film character.
Emotions: “The Central Aim of the Film”

When he moves from attention, memory, and imagination to emotion, Münster-
berg turns his discussion to what he considers not only the highest level of the
mental processes, but also the central aim of the photoplay: “to picture emotions
must be the central aim of the photoplay.”35 Since the film is a medium whose
processes of meaning are adjusted to the mechanisms of the mind, its main pur-
pose must be the picturing of the mental life, of mental events, that is, of emo-
tions. The focus of Münsterberg’s demonstration is no longer the way subjective
processes are objectified by cinematic devices, but the way emotions are pictured
on the screen, the way the photoplay brings the feelings of the characters and of
the spectator “to a convincing expression.”36 The problem becomes less cognitive
than aesthetic. It deals with the expressive way in which the photoplay externa-
lizes emotional moods, imitates or projects the emotions of the characters and of
the spectators. Münsterberg does not seem to make a distinction between mental
processes and emotions: “The fundamental principle which we recognized for all
the other mental states is accordingly no less efficient in the case of the specta-
tor’s emotions.”37 But in the discussion of emotion, the emphasis of his argu-
ment changes. He seems to have difficulty analyzing emotions as objectifications
of subjective processes, as well as identifying the cinematic devices that corre-
spond to emotions, insofar as emotions concern the story as a whole and depend
32 josé moure
on the narrative art of the filmmaker. He then focuses on the expression of emo-
tions. He distinguishes the emotions felt by the characters on the screen from
those felt by the spectator in front of the screen.
The Emotions of the Characters on the Screen

Münsterberg begins his demonstration by studying the characters’ emotions. In
the silent cinema, they are expressed mainly by the acting of the actor, and nota-
bly by his facial mimicry which can be emphasized by the close-up: “Here again
the close-up can strongly heighten the impression. […] The enlargement by the
close-up on the screen brings [the] emotional action of the face to sharpest relief.
Or it may show us enlarged a play of the hands in which anger and rage or tender
love or jealousy speak in unmistakable language.”38 But for Münsterberg, the
emotional expression in the photoplay cannot be limited to the bodily movements
or the facial play of an actor who imitates the emotions felt by his character, it
must be extended to and complemented by what Münsterberg calls “the emotio-
nalizing of nature,”39 that is, the reflection of the emotions and moods of the
characters in the settings around them. Münsterberg illustrates such a subjectiviz-
ing of the surrounding world in film with several examples, one concerns the case
of a girl who receives a letter from her lover:
There is a girl in her little room, and she opens a letter and reads it. There is
no need of showing us in a close-up the letter page with the male handwriting
and the words of love and the request for her hand. We see it in her radiant
visage, we read it from her fascinated arms and hands; and yet how much
more can the photoartist tell us about the storm of emotions in her soul. The
walls of her little room fade away. Beautiful hedges of hawthorn blossom
around her, rose bushes in wonderful glory arise and the whole ground is alive
with exotic flowers.40
Only a few years later, such attempts were found: they consisted of the subjecti-
vizing of settings in German expressionist films such as The Cabinet of Doc-
tor Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919) and of the emotionalizing of nature in
French impressionist films such as La Dixième Symphonie (Abel Gance, 1918)
or Cœur Fidèle (Jean Epstein, 1923). According to Münsterberg “such imagina-
tive settings can be only the extreme; they would not be fit for the routine play.”41
The Emotions of the Spectator Before the Screen

When he analyzes the cinematic emotion from the viewpoint of the spectator,
Münsterberg makes an important distinction between two types of emotion
which coexist in the experience of the cinema audience: “On the one side, we
have those emotions in which the feelings of the persons in the play are trans-
mitted to our own soul. On the other side, we find those feelings with which we

respond to scenes in the play, feelings which may be entirely different, perhaps
exactly opposite to those which the figures in the play express.”42 We find here
the first formulation of the famous process of projection and identification which
Edgar Morin described in 1956, in The Cinema or the Imaginary Man, and which
Münsterberg analyzes as a double process of imitation (through empathy) and
projection.
According to Münsterberg, the first and most frequent type of emotion felt by
the spectator corresponds to emotions which are imitations of the emotions of
the characters in the film:
Our imitation of the emotions which we see expressed brings vividness and
affective tone into our grasping of the play’s action. We sympathize with the
sufferer and that means that the pain which he expresses becomes our own
pain. […] The visual perception of the various forms of expression of these
emotions fuses in our mind with the conscious awareness of the emotion ex-
pressed; we feel as if we were directly seeing and observing the emotion itself.
[...] It is obvious that for this leading group of emotions the relation of the
pictures to the feelings of the persons in the play and to the feelings of the
spectator is exactly the same.43
Not only does the spectator imitate the character’s emotions through an empathic
reaction, he also projects this emotion elicited by the film onto the screen and
into the character and the setting: “If we start from the emotions of the audience,
we can say that the pain and the joy which the spectator feels are really projected
to the screen, projected both into the portraits of the persons and into the pic-
tures of the scenery and background into which the personal emotions radiate.”44
This is the principle of the objectification of subjective processes which Münster-
berg has described for the other mental states (attention, memory, expectation
and imagination): in the case of the spectator’s emotions, there is both an objec-
tification, through imitation, of the character’s feelings and an objectification (or
embodiment), through projection, of the spectator’s feelings.
Münsterberg also considers the projection of emotional qualities as an objecti-
fication of a subjective process when he analyzes what he calls the second group
of emotions, “those in which the spectator responds to the scenes of the film
from the standpoint of his independent affective life.”45 The analysis of this sub-
jective process by which the spectator “superadds [emotional qualities] to the
events into the show, on the screen”46 leads Münsterberg to formulate what will
be a fundamental concept in film narrative theory and a crucial point in Hitch-
cock’s definition of suspense: the distinction between what the character knows
and feels and what the spectator knows and feels: “We see the laughing, rejoicing
child who, while he picks the berries from the edge of the precipice, is not aware
that he must fall down if the hero does not snatch him back at the last moment.
34 josé moure
Of course, we feel the child’s joy with him. Otherwise we should not even under-
stand his behavior, but we feel more strongly the fear and the horror of which the
child himself does not know anything.”47
This emotional participation of the viewer in the film, which does not depend
on a mimetic reaction to the emotions of the characters pictured on the screen,
but on a projective response to a narrative situation, can be objectified – or em-
bodied – on the screen by the lighting, the shades, and the setting. However,
because the cinema was still in its infancy, it had not yet used the rich possibilities
provided for expressing these secondary emotions. Something Münsterberg him-
self does not neglect to mention.
Emotion Produced by Formal Means: “The Subtle Art of the Camera”

Münsterberg ends his discussion of emotion (and the first chapter of his book
dedicated to “The Psychology of the Photoplay”) by considering what he calls the
formal side of the photoplay, which he distinguishes from the material side:
“There is a material and a formal side to the pictures which we see in their rapid
succession. The material side is controlled by the content of what is shown to us.
But the formal side depends upon the outer conditions under which this content
is exhibited.”48 Among these outer conditions which can arouse bodily sensations
in the spectator and tend to subjectivize his perceptive experience of the film,
Münsterberg mentions the out-of-focus shot – which he analyzes as a spatial for-
mal change – and slow and fast motion – which he analyzes as a temporal formal
change. He particularly describes how methods of editing or of moving the cam-
era can produce an effect of trembling:
We might use the pictures as the camera has taken them, sixteen in a second.
But in reproducing them on the screen we change their order. After giving the
first four pictures we go back to picture 3, then give 4, 5, 6, and return to 5,
then 6, 7, 8, and go back to 7, and so on. Any other rhythm, of course, is
equally possible. The effect is one which never occurs in nature and which
could not be produced on the stage. The events for a moment go backward. A
certain vibration goes through the world like the tremolo of the orchestra. Or
we demand from our camera a still more complex service. We put the camera
itself on a slightly rocking support and then every point must move in strange
curves and every motion takes an uncanny whirling character.49
Even if Münsterberg knows that a sensation is not an emotion, he claims that “the
changes in the formal presentation give to the mind of the spectator unusual
sensations which produce a new shading of the emotional background,”50 be-
cause “as soon as much abnormal visual impressions stream into our conscious-
ness, our whole background of fusing bodily sensation becomes altered and new
emotions seem to take hold of us.”51 Although he does not still directly tackle the

possibilities of what we call subjective camera, he foresees a future time when
“the characteristic features of many an attitude and feeling which cannot be ex-
pressed without words […] [are] aroused in the mind of the spectator through the
subtle art of the camera.”52 The example which Münsterberg imagines in order to
illustrate the possibility of the camera to confer a subjective form to a movie scene
is very significant, insofar as it announces some experiments carried out in the
1920s by the French impressionist cinema:
If we see on the screen a man hypnotized in the doctor’s office, the patient
himself may lie there with closed eyes, nothing in his features expressing his
emotional setting and nothing radiating to us. But if now only the doctor and
the patient remain unchanged and steady, while everything in the whole room
begins at first to tremble and then to wave and to change its form more and
more rapidly so that a feeling of dizziness comes over us and an uncanny,
ghastly unnaturalness overcomes the whole surrounding of the hypnotized
person, we ourselves become seized by the strange emotion.53
Hugo Münsterberg and the French Film Theory of the 1910s

Münsterberg’s idea that cinema is an art of the mind particularly suited to express
subjective processes finds a better echo and illustration in the impressionist films
of the first French avant-garde. In her book devoted to the flashback, Maureen
Turim observes:
These films are often expressions of the mental states of anguish, ennui, or
desire. [...] Images are transmitters of emotional charges, sculpted to convey
the fusion of external environment and inner states of mind. Mise-en-scene
and camera angles portray the interaction between the subjective states of
characters and the atmosphere of the place they inhabit. The objective world
is subsumed in a subjective response to it. In this context, flashbacks play a
key role. They infuse the present with the weight of the past, allowing an al-
ready subjectively rendered site to give way to another that is even more sub-
jective, in that it is constituted as a memory image. If subjectivity is the site of
these fictions, memory is the site that offers explanations for the dark subjec-
tivity one experiences in the present.54
As Maureen Turim explains, while American silent cinema used the narrative
flashback as an artifice, and depicted the subjectivity of characters within a sym-
bolic pictorial mode of representation, some cinematic experimentations carried
out at the end of the 1910s and in the 1920s by Abel Gance (La Dixième Sym-
phonie, 1918; La Roue, 1922-1923), Marcel L’Herbier (El Dorado, 1921),
Louis Delluc (Fièvre, 1921; La Femme de Nulle Part, 1922), Jean Epstein (La
36 josé moure
Glace à Trois Faces, 1927) or Dimitri Kirsanov (Ménilmontant, 1929) can
appear to be attempts to transpose mimetically on the screen the subjective men-
tal processes of memory, imagination, or emotion which Münsterberg analyzed
in his psychological study of the photoplay.
Louis Delluc’s Le Silence (1920) which has not survived as a film and which
can only be studied through Delluc’s detailed screenplay, published in Drames de
cinéma,55 can be considered a perfect illustration of Münsterberg’s discussion on
the flashback and mental images, and more generally, on the analogy between
cinema and the processes of memory and imagination. Le Silence is one of the
first cinematic attempts to present the stream of consciousness mimetically. Not
only does it show the memories of the main character (Pierre) through fragmen-
tary, repetitive and associative subjective flashbacks that burst into the present of
Pierre, but it also describes the functioning of his imagination through mental
images which do not refer to any actual event, either past or present, but exclu-
sively correspond to what the character imagines. Delluc conceives his whole film
as an interior monologue; only the scenes which present Pierre’s apartment have
an objective and concrete reality, whereas the retrospective or prospective inserts
are perceived by the spectator as purely mental images.
Such cinematic experimentations, of course, could not have been directly influ-
enced by Münsterberg’s study, which had passed very quickly into oblivion and
was not rediscovered until the 1970s in the United States and even later in Europe;
however, there does seem to be a connection with Bergson’s influence on the
French film debate in the 1910s. For instance Emile Vuillermoz, in his 1917 article,
“Before the screen,”56 does mention “Bergsonian cinema,” whereas Paul Souday,
in his essay “Bergsonism and cinema,”57 published in the same year, refutes Vuil-
lermoz’s thesis. This debate was perfectly summarized and settled a year later by
Marcel L’Herbier in “Hermes and Silence”:
[...] since Bergson indeed compares conceptual thought to the mechanism of

the cinema and, then again, pronounces himself against ‘the philosophy of
ideas’, [Souday] hastens unperturbed to the induction that ‘Bergson doesn’t
like the cinema.’
Amusing logic, don’t you agree?...
Let’s look further and speak clearly. If it’s true that in its fundamental aspira-
tion, Bergsonism can be summarized as a desire to merge with the ‘flux,’ as
desire to elevate the soul over the mind, as a desire to satisfy the soul ‘in its
deepest, most genuine, and purely emotional region’ (a region that’s anti-ver-
bal and anti-fictive), and finally as a tendency to descend toward the zone of
deep-seated instinct, is not Bergsonism, I say, in all its propensity if not its
essence, precisely analogous to current cinégraphie?
In this way, on the whole, at least in his conclusion that cinégraphie is by and
large Bergsonian, M. Vuillermoz sees admirably well.58

This Bergsonian idea of what he calls cinégraphie led Emile Vuillermoz to empha-
size the analogy between cinema and the mind. In a text dedicated to André An-
toine’s film, Les Frères Corses (1917), he claims:
The thousands of tiny frames in a moving filmstrip act like the cells of the
human brain: the same overwhelming rapidity of perception, the same multi-
plicity of many-faceted mirrors which effortlessly juxtapose the farthest hori-
zons, suppress distances, abolish the bondage of time and space, embrace all
the cardinal points [of the compass] simultaneously, and transport us in a
fraction of a second from one extreme point of the universe to another!59
And speaking more precisely about Les Frères Corses, Vuillermoz praises
Antoine’s ability to transpose mental images into cinematic language:
Antoine, of course, has done remarkable things with this visual proteanism; he
has been able to intensify his drama with quick glimpses, allusions, echoes,
interferences, forebodings, memories, hallucinations, and dreams; to illumi-
nate it with fugitive suggestions analogous to the flashes of mental associa-
tions which traverse our imagination and multiply its creative power tenfold.
As soon as a situation gives birth to some remote thought, a mental impulse
toward the past, or a flight of memory across space, the screen picks up its
quick spark and offers us its image.60
This line of thinking, which was very influential in French film theory and criti-
cism of the 1920s, consists of conceiving of film as an art that is able to represent
mental processes; it finds its first formulation – four years before Münsterberg’s
study – in an important essay entitled “Cinematography” that was published in
1912 in the Ciné-Journal and written under the pseudonym of Yhcam. The author
of this essay, who is still unknown to this day, discusses the cinematic method of
rendering what is going on in a character’s mind:
In the composition of scripts for the cinema, first of all, the author finds him-
self faced with a very tough problem for, if his characters can act, they cannot
reason; and it is only through their manner of acting that they can convey what
is going on in their minds.
The author does have the resource of projecting explanations [expository inter-
titles], but these explanations break up the spectacle and produce a bad effect
– they are the anti-artistic. The best thing would be to reach the point of being
able to compose a completely intelligible film without any need for expository
texts.
38 josé moure
We could envision a method which would constitute a theatrical art that is
both original and interesting; this would involve projecting the characters
and, simultaneously, their states of mind.
This method would be strongly analogous to the ultramodern painting of the
Futurists who sought to paint not only a character but also what is happening
in his mind. If the initiative attempted by the Futurists only ended in ridicule,
an effort of this kind initiated in the cinema, on the contrary, would give re-
sults altogether more interesting.
In the cine-theater, this method is currently practiced when there is a dream or
hallucination. In order to achieve a moral effect as ‘the final word’ in his film,
L’Auto Grise [1912], [Victorin Jasset] projects the hallucination of one of the
bandits who sees his own head fall under the blade of the guillotine. This
method could be generalized by applying it to the waking state.
The Wagnerian opera employs the same tendency when the orchestra endea-
vors to reproduce musically the feelings which are stirring the character on
stage.
In sum, theatrical art has always sought to dissect the psychic states of its
characters and, in some fashion, make them manifest for the spectators.
For example, ‘La Tempête sous un crâne’, that marvelous chapter in the fa-
mous Victor Hugo novel [Les Misérables] is perfectly possible to render cinema-
tically, by the following method.
Jean Valjean, in the guise of M. Madeleine, would appear alone on the screen,
in the foreground or middle ground, while all the thoughts succeeding one
another in his mind would be projected in the background – that is, made
material by means of the cinematic image. Naturally, the gestures and facial
expressions of the actors would remain in perfect synchronization with the
projected image. The author could vary the intensity of the thinking through
the focus – the clarity of the image corresponding to the clarity of the thought,
and vague thoughts corresponding to soft images produced by a lack of focus.
He could vary the intensity of the light and leave the images of dark thoughts
in shadow.
This example may raise the possibility of a next theatrical art in the future
which can only be achieved through the cinema.61
In this very significant and early text which anticipates some of Münsterberg’s
views, Yhcam envisions the cinema as a new narrative mode of subjective expres-
sion whose technological means will serve to represent the inner life of fictional
characters. It is interesting to note that, unlike Münsterberg, the technical meth-
ods which he advocates (soft-focus images, lighting variations, superimpositions)
in order to “materialize” and objectify a character’s state of mind do not yet refer
to editing techniques (dissolve, fade, cut) or to camera movements. They remain
devices, still used in primitive cinema, in which flashbacks, dreams, and halluci-

nations are shown on the screen simultaneously with the real scene. As Maureen
Turim remarks:
Such vision scenes were also common in lantern slide shows from the 1860s
through the turn of the century. Photomontage techniques were used to con-
nect an image of a character to a remembrance from his or her past. In all
probability earliest flashbacks in film used this image-within-the-image tech-
nique rather than an edited cut to past. This doubling of images could be
achieved by a kind of double stage scenography which located the scene from
the past in the background of the profilmic scene, by using slides or filmic rear
projections, or by double exposing the image using mattes.62
The difference between Yhcam’s approach to subjectivity in film and Münster-

berg’s lies not only in the cinematic means they suggest for objectifying the men-
tal processes of a character on the screen, but also, and most importantly, in the
role they confer to the spectator. If Yhcam seems to consider the question exclu-
sively to be an expressive and visual problem of representation, Münsterberg fore-
sees that the effectiveness of the cinematic experience requires a subjective inter-
action between spectator and film, and that this experience is closely related to
the narrative purpose of cinema. Thus, in his psychological study of photoplay,
this profound intuition led Münsterberg to provide for the basis of a theory of
subjectivity in film which, in his view, was both a spectator theory and a narrative
film theory. But by attempting to abstract cinema from reality and to see the film
as an objectification of the viewer’s mental processes, Hugo Münsterberg over-
looked the creative force and the subjectivity of the filmmaker.
40 josé moure
The Representation of Experience in
Cinema1
Gregory Currie
It is notoriously difficult to say what the world we experience is like without say-
ing something about how we experience it. That has encouraged many to think
that a representation of the world, especially one which presents the world as it
appears in sensory experience, must be the representation of experience, and
hence of something subjective. We see this in the discussion of cinema, with for-
mulations such as this: “Watching a film, we can see the seeing, as well as the
seen.”2 But while we may not be able to say what the world as disclosed by experi-
ence is like without referring to our experience of it, we can certainly distinguish
between a representation of that world and a representation of an experience of it;
film images are good for doing the former and no good at all for doing the latter.
What is depicted in a film image, if it depicts anything, is always some aspect of
the world and never any aspect of experience of the world. We may see what the
character sees, and we may see things as they see them, having experiences our-
selves which are relevantly like their own. But we do not see their seeing of it.
This does not mean that cinema fails as a medium for representing subjectivity;
film images, when combined with certain mental constructions on the part of the
viewer herself, enable her to represent the experiences of characters, as we shall
see. But those experiences are not represented on screen.
Many Representations of the World

Experience, and reflection on experience, tells us that the world is this way or
that, that there is an object here, another there (imagine pointing as you say
this), while this one is red and round and that one is white and square. As well as
perceiving things in the world, we can think about the world in other ways. We
can see how things are, but we can imagine how they might have been or might
be in the future; the red thing might have been square and the white thing round.
For creatures like us who depend on planning, it is essential to be able to do so;
we think about how we would like the world to be, and then decide how to bring
about appropriate change. We can, in other words, imagine the world being dif-
ferent from the way it is, yet still being a world of objects distributed around us in
space and time. And that is what makers of fiction ask us to do. When people tell
41
stories about Emma Woodhouse or Anna Karenina they are asking us to imagine
things taking place in a world somewhat different from the world we live in. But it
is a world of objects in space and time all the same. And movies which counte-
nance Martians and monsters ask us to imagine these things having their place in
the world. A film may postulate beings that exist outside of space and time, and it
will usually be understood as attributing to its characters ordinary kinds of sub-
jective mental states. But what is shown in film – what is depicted on screen – is
represented as belonging to the world of things in space and time.
So, there are many ways to represent the world. We represent it in perception,
and hope thereby to represent it as it is. But a hallucination will represent it as it is
not. In imagination, we may represent it as we would like it to be, or as we fear it
will be. In giving testimony to others we represent the world as being a certain
way, and if we are lying or mistaken we represent it not as it is. In fiction we
represent it according to the dictates of the author or filmmaker. And we can
combine these forms of representation in increasingly complex ways. A fiction
may represent the world as being a certain way, but also represent one of its
characters as representing the world some other way, through illusion or false
testimony. And a fiction may represent the world as containing another fiction,
something which represents the world in some other way, and that inner fiction
may represent one of its characters as seeing or saying that the world is yet an-
other way. And all these kinds of representations, and combinations of them, are
capable of being rendered on screen, insofar as they are representations of things
in space and time. This idea of multiple, interlocking representations and their
presentation on screen will be important to the argument that follows.
Point-of-view Shots
I have said that what is depicted on screen is depicted as belonging to the world,
and not to experience of the world. There are kinds of film images which seem to
bring this principle into doubt. Consider point-of-view (PoV) shots: those from
the perspective of a represented character. In terms of what is represented on
screen, I say that such a shot is no different from an ordinary “objective” shot,
one which implies nothing about the presence of an observer. The images we
count as PoV show us what the character’s visual experience is of, and what a
visual experience is of is part of the world that we experience.3 This does not tell
us what is distinctive about PoV shots, but that is because what is distinctive
about them is not what they show, but what is communicated by the act of pre-
senting them to an audience. By seeing the shot in a certain relation to other
shots, and in the context of the narrative’s development so far, I understand that
I am to imagine that what is depicted is what is seen by the character, and seen by
the character pretty much as it is depicted.
42 gregory currie
Because it is implied by the use of a PoV shot that the character sees things
pretty much as they are depicted on screen, a further possibility arises. That is for
me, the viewer of the film, to think of my own experience of seeing what is visible
on the screen as like the experience of the character. More carefully stated: seeing
the shot myself, I imagine, of my own visual experience, that it is an experience of
directly seeing the fictional characters and events depicted in the shot. Thinking
of my experience in this imaginative way, I can then think: that is what the char-
acter’s experience is like, where “that” refers, not to the shot or anything visible
in it, but to my experience of seeing it.4 For example, at a certain moment in John
Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Reverend Clayton (Ward Bond) sees Martha
(Dorothy Jordan) fondly holding the coat of Ethan (John Wayne), and he draws
some conclusions from what he sees. And the viewer at this point is able to think
“That is how Martha’s holding of the coat appears to Reverend Clayton.” And our
knowing how it looks to Reverend Clayton is important for understanding the
conclusions he draws. The significance of this way of understanding PoV shots
will be made clearer when we discuss non-depictive aspects of the film image.
Lies, Dreams, Delusions

On the account given so far, PoV shots do not challenge the idea that film shots
always show us what the character sees. But what, then, of cases where the char-
acter sees something only in a loose sense, as when the character is having a
hallucination? We say that people hallucinating see pink rats, and I have no objec-
tion to our speaking this way. But that kind of seeing is not seeing anything out
there in the world. So if a character in a fiction film sees pink rats during a hallu-
cination, what she sees is not part of the world as it is according to the story.
According to the story, the character sees pink rats which are not there. The
same problem arises for shots which are indicative of what someone claims or
thinks, when what they claim or think does not happen according to the story.
The first flashback in Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947) has the murderer leav-
ing the victim’s apartment before the crime. This, we soon learn or have already
guessed, is merely what happened according to the murderer’s account, and not
what happened according to the film, the relevant content of which we see in the
flashback following.5 Also common are the representations of dreams or sus-
tained delusions. Indeed many films consist almost entirely of the representation
of what is so according to a dream or delusion, with just enough material dedi-
cated to what actually happened to alert us to the purely imagined content of the
rest, though the clues sometimes arrive very late. The Woman in the Win-
dow (Fritz Lang, 1944) and The Other (Robert Mulligan, 1972) are examples
of this delayed-revelation genre.6
I deny that in these sorts of cases the film image represents anything subjective;
what is represented in dream sequences or in depictions of delusions is the
the representation of experience in cinema 43

world, but this time the world as it is said, imagined, dreamed, fantasized or
hallucinated as being by some character (“imagined” will be my shorthand for
this disjunction). What is represented as being the case is not true, nor true ac-
cording to the film’s story. But it is true according to the imagining of the film’s
character. And just as in more orthodox filmic narratives, we are shown what is
so according to something (the film), we are in these less common cases shown
what is so according to something else – the imagining of a character. Film may
show us things which are not part of the story it presents, but which are part of
some representation within that story: some dream, hallucination, lying account,
or whatever. We have in such a case an example of the layering of representations
referred to earlier.
In some films the material which depicts the content of a character’s imagining
is segregated from the material which depicts what actually happened according
to the film. Most of the shots in The Woman in the Window depict things
that happen only according to Professor Wanley’s dream, and do not happen ac-
cording to the story the film tells. They contribute to telling that story because
they enable us to make inferences – when we know what is going on – about
what did happen in the story, namely that Wanley had a dream according to
which those things happened.7 In other cases the imagined material is not segre-
gated from the material which depicts the story’s real events. In The Other, a
young boy, Niles, seems drawn unwillingly into his twin brother Holland’s evil
activities; it eventually becomes clear that Holland has been dead for some time
and that Niles is responsible for the mayhem. To the point where this becomes
evident, we see Niles and Holland talking and acting together; this is later under-
stood by us as the depiction of how Niles imagines things to be. However, the
scenes in which Niles and Holland appear together (they do not appear in the
same frame, though they do appear in the same shot) are also scenes which de-
pict events which actually happen, according to the film: other characters appear
in those scenes and say and do things which have consequences, sometimes fatal,
further on. When we come to know what is really going on, we are able to divide
the information we have received from these shots into two channels: one com-
prises information about what happened according to the story, the other, infor-
mation about what happened according to Niles’ delusions. And we are also now
able to make inferences about the relations between the two. For example, we can
now see that Niles’ quarrel with his mother was a cause of him imagining that
Holland pushed her down the stairs, something we now realize Niles was respon-
sible for.
Shots associated with dreams or hallucinations are sometimes also shots which
tell us about how the character having the dream or hallucination is experiencing
these things. They may be PoV shots, showing the content of the imagining from
the point of view of the imaginer. But often the images are not of this kind; when
the subject is visible within the shot, it shows how things are in the world of the
44 gregory currie
imagining, including how they are with the subject whose imagining it is. There
is some tendency to regard shots of this kind as anomalous, though perhaps un-
derstandable from a dramatic point of view. In my view they are not always anom-
alous; in the world as it is according to a subject’s imaginings, the subject may
himself be placed in relation to the imagined events.8 It is then a legitimate choice
as to whether the film shows what the subject imagines seeing – in which case
the images will be PoV – or shows what is happening according to what the sub-
ject imagines; for what the subject imagines, and what the subject imagines see-
ing are not always the same. I may imagine seeing down into the Grand Canyon
from Lipan Point, as part of a wider imaginative project which involves imagining
that I am standing at Lipan Point. It would then be a legitimate filmic representa-
tion of my imagining, taken as a whole, to depict me standing there.
This is how things are in some scenes from Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Straw-
berries (1957).
Film still from Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957).
In these scenes Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström), finds himself at the house he lived in
long ago, and imagines seeing the people he knew there, including a girl he had
wanted to marry, Sara (Bibi Andersson). Bergman has said that he conceived
these scenes by wondering how it would be to literally revisit one’s past, and that
is the sense conveyed, since the now-elderly Borg is often visible in the frame,

along with the other characters, still in their youth.9 But it seems likely also that
we are not to take these scenes as ones Borg actually recalls having been present
at, since he is now hearing, at close quarters, conversations which the partici-
pants would have taken care not to have him hear.10 Borg’s imagining is, in that
case, more complex: he imagines visiting a past which he imaginatively con-
structs on the basis of things he does know – that, for example, the woman he
wished to marry married someone else. Thus understood, these shots do not tell
us much about exactly how he visually imagines these things; they do not tell us
how these things look to him in his visual imagination, for we see him in the
frame. Nor do they tell us much about what actually happened. They are simply
representations of the world as it is according to his imagining, which involves a
good deal more than is included in what he imagines seeing.
Non-depiction in the Film Image

We have not found anything, so far, to contradict the idea that what is depicted
on screen is always depicted as belonging to the world, and not to our experience
of the world. The screen images in those scenes from Wild Strawberries
represent events happening in space and time, not in reality, and not according
to the film’s account of reality, but according to Borg’s imaginings; what we see is
the world according to Borg’s imagining, not his imagining of it. The same holds
for PoV shots, both where what is seen is, according to the film’s story, veridical,
and where it is not; what is seen is how the world is according to a character’s
perceptions. But we come now to some cases where not everything visible on the
screen represents something in the world. Examples of this occur when the image
is out of focus, or has a smeared appearance because the camera is smeared with
some substance, or a strange light suffuses the scene. In at least some of these
cases, we are not to understand that objects themselves are represented as out of
focus, or smeary, or suffused with a strange light. There need be nothing intrinsic
to the image itself which makes this so. A shot suffused with a strange light could
represent a scene suffused with exactly that light; even a blurred image, in the
right context, could represent things that are supposed, in some way, to be
blurred – imagine a Horizon documentary on quantum indeterminacy. Nonethe-
less, in some cases where the image is blurred or strangely lit we may, taking
into account the broader context of the movie’s narrative, form the view that these
and other aspects of the shot do not contribute to the depiction of the world; the
blurriness indicates some deficiency in the perceptual apparatus of the character
who, we may suppose, is drunk. And one tempting response to this apparent
opening up of a gap in the film’s depictive fabric is to believe it filled by the
depiction of an experience of the world and not of the world experienced. We are
tempted to say that what is here depicted are aspects of the phenomenology of a
character’s experiential state.
46 gregory currie
Does the smeariness or blurring of the film image really depict something in
the phenomenology of a character’s visual experience? I deny that. I say that the
blurring does not depict anything at all. But in that case I have to tell a plausible
story about the function of the blurring. Our earlier discussion of PoV shots is the
clue here. Recall: the PoV shot does not depict the character’s experience, but it
does convey to us the information that the character’s experience is like our ex-
perience of seeing the shot. Similarly, in the case where some aspect of a charac-
ter’s phenomenology is being made salient, this is not because the film image is
depicting it. Nor is the film image representing it in some other, nondepictive,
way. Rather, it is serving as a means by which some aspect of my experience of
watching the film represents some aspect of the character’s experience. When I
take off my glasses, the screen before me looks blurred, but my experience is not
as of a blurred screen; my experience is of something sharp which I cannot see
properly; the blurring I take to be a projection onto the world caused by my defec-
tive vision. The movie image, with its deliberate blurring of objects depicted, gives
me an opportunity to recreate something like that experience. When I see the
blurred image, it is somewhat as if I am seeing things – the things depicted in
the image – which are sharp but which, for some reason, look blurred to me. I am
able then to imagine, of this experience, that it is an experience of seeing those
objects directly – seeing them without the mediation of a camera – but seeing
them with blurred vision. And that enables me, finally, to say that this experience,
which I imagine to be an experience of seeing things with blurred vision, is like
the experience had by the character. I can think “That is how the character is
seeing things,” where “that” refers to the experience I am having now.
When a shot contains visible features which do not contribute to what the shot
depicts, I shall say that the shot is inflected. In the case just imagined, the blurring
of the image is an inflection of the image. But the shots which I have considered
so far are all shots in which inflections, while not themselves representational,
play a part in helping us, the viewers, to represent a character’s experience. In
Murray Smith’s happy phrase, they are representational prompts; they prompt us to
use our own experiences to represent the experiences of characters.11 Occasion-
ally, we find inflected elements of shots which are not representational prompts;
instead they serve an expressive purpose. In a moment I will consider an example
of this kind.
If an inflected shot is a representational prompt, must it be a PoV shot? No.
George Wilson recalls a scene in Farewell my Lovely (Edward Dmytryk, 1944)
where Philip Marlow (Dick Powell) has been drugged.12 We see Marlow in a hos-
pital room, and the shots are inflected with cobweb-like strands which seem to
hang in the air. We understand that these are not depictive; there are no cobweb-
like elements hanging in the air according to the story. We understand that some-
thing in our experience of watching the scene, namely the seeing of these cob-
web-like strands, corresponds to something in Marlow’s own current drug-

Film still from Edward Dmytryk’s Farewell my Lovely (1944).
affected visual experience.13 But the shots that make up this scene are not PoV
shots; we see Marlow himself in these shots, and see things from points of view
other than his.14 We may think that his experience is similar, in respect of the
appearance of cobweb-like inflections, to our own current experience of seeing
the shot, without thinking it similar in respect of point of view.15
I turn finally to the category of inflected shots which are not representational
prompts. In the final shot from Bergman’s A Passion (1969), Andreas Winkel-
man (Max von Sydow) is seen at a distance, anxiously walking back and forth.
The shot slowly closes on Andreas as his path to each turn shortens, the grain of
the image becoming more evident, and the detail of the scene correspondingly
less visible. He collapses as the picture degrades to the point where he is no long-
er distinguishable from his surroundings.16 The increasingly visible graininess of
the image eventually takes us beyond the point where anything representational
can be seen. But for a section of the shot, as long as we can still see Andreas,
there is a mixture of inflected and representational elements in the shot. We are
able to pick out elements in the pattern on the screen which are representative of
Andreas, at the same time as we can pick out elements which compose this repre-
sentation – the visible grains – but which do not themselves represent anything.
Those visible grains inflect the shot, but they do not do so experientially.
This might be denied. One might think of the shot as similar to the one dis-
cussed from Farewell my Lovely, in which we see Marlow, and see him as we
48 gregory currie
think he sees his surroundings, namely as if the room were filled with cobweb-
like strands. Should we then think of Andreas as having a perceptual experience
relevantly like the experience we have when we see the shot, a visual experience in
which the world about him seems to fragment? I think the answer is no; this shot
is best understood as devoid of experiential inflection, for the kind of experiential
inflection it would imply is not helpful for understanding Andreas’ situation. An-
dreas’ difficulty, as the film has made plain throughout, is not with his visual
access to the world, but with his emotional access to it. The shot’s increasing
graininess, and the consequent degradation of its capacity to represent is expres-
sive of the now acute phase of a mental as well as physical collapse we may
assume Andreas to be undergoing; a condition which in earlier and less acute
stages helps to explain his destructive behavior.
We have distinguished a number of different kinds of shots, but we have not
discovered anything in which something subjective is depicted. What we have
learned instead is that sometimes things appear in the shot which do not depict
anything at all. And sometimes this happens because it helps us to use our own
experience to model the experience of the character.
Problem Cases
There are some kinds of cases which seem to resist the treatment I have pro-
posed.
Paisley Livingston asks whether there might be exceptions to my claim that
what is depicted on screen is always a world of objects in space and time. What,
he asks, of cases where a surrealist-inspired film purports to depict a strange,
solipsistic world. I think there are difficulties in the way of such depictive proj-
ects, but I will not argue the case here. I am content to withdraw to the more
modest claim that, except in cases where the film asks us to accept a non-stan-
dard metaphysics of experience, what is depicted are scenes in the objective
world. This withdrawal will not matter for present purposes because the claim I
am keen to defend is that such things as point-of-view (PoV) shots, lying flash-
backs, dream sequences, and delusional and hallucinatory episodes can be fully
accommodated within a theory which limits what is depicted on screen to occur-
rences within the world of ordinary objects in space and time. Whether there are
ever other reasons to accept the possibility of the filmic depiction of a solipsistic
world is something I do not try to settle here.
Another objection has it that we do not need extravagant ideas about solipsistic
worlds in order to challenge the idea that the screen depicts only objects in space-
time. What, for example, of the depiction of rainbows and other visual phenom-
ena which have no spatial location? These are things we can see, and they can be
captured on film, but if film depicts these things, surely it depicts things which
are not part of the world of objects in space and time.

It is true that rainbows are in some ways puzzling entities. But they need not
puzzle us here. We see rainbows, and they are given in experience as having loca-
tions; it comes as a surprise to us that they do not, after all, occupy regions of
space. A film image may depict a rainbow that no one saw, just as it may depict a
dead body that no one found. It may depict a rainbow that really is not there, but
which a character is hallucinating; in that case, the image depicts what is happen-
ing in the world according to the character’s hallucination, and not what is hap-
pening in the world according to the film’s story. The categories we have available
for the treatment of film images of ordinary objects do just as well for rainbows.
Finally, Jenefer Robinson objects as follows.17 Sometimes what we see on
screen looks so stylized or otherwise “unrealistic” that it is difficult to think of it
as depicting anything in the world of space-time objects, though it does seem that
something is being represented. For example, in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock,
1958), during a dream sequence, we see Scotty’s face at the center of a vortex.
Are we really suppose to see this as a depiction of how the world might be,
namely as containing Scotty’s face at the center of a vortex? I agree that it is hard
to interpret shots like these. One might simply point out that depiction of events
is not always realistically done; Hitchcock delights in non-realistic depictions of
events that clearly are supposed to be occurring in the extra-mental world, as with
his use of painted or modeled scenery, back projection, and so on. This is not the
only interpretive option. One might instead take such a shot as a sort of com-
pressed visual metaphor, designed to convey, in summary form, the tone of
Scotty’s nightmare, and not as a depiction of how things are represented in the
nightmare as being. Such a visual metaphor contributes to the broader project of
helping us understand what Scotty’s nightmare was like, without purporting to
depict how things were according to the nightmare.
Stretching the Medium

I have argued that what is depicted on screen is always something in the world we
experience, not some aspect of our experience of it. But this is not the claim that
what is represented in film is always objective, because a film represents much more
than is depicted on screen. Films generally represent their characters as existing
when off screen, but this, obviously, is not depicted. Now the question arises as
to what we consider to be the boundaries of the film itself. We might think of the
film as a representational system, with functionally organized parts – an image
track and a soundtrack being the obvious ones – but also with the capacity to
exploit communicative practices which allow inferences to be made about what
else is going on in the story from premises about what is directly seen and heard.
My suggestion now is that we can also think of the mind of the viewer as co-opted
into the film’s representational system. Having viewers there watching enables
things to be represented in certain ways in film which would otherwise not be
50 gregory currie
able to be represented in those ways, namely the experiential states of characters.
Film allows the experiential states of viewers to represent the experiential states of
characters. Because it can do that, it does not need to attempt the impossible: to
depict those experiential states on screen.

Beyond Subjectivity: The Film
Experience1
Francesco Casetti
Return to Experience
Anticipation and concentration, sensual excitement, craving for a habit, sudden
astonishment: they are all part of watching film. Therefore, I shall attempt to
consider the cinema as a locus of experience – an experience of a particular kind:
the film experience. This is perhaps not a new endeavor,2 but it now seems a
necessary one for at least three reasons.
The first reason regards film studies, and I will therefore treat it only briefly.
Over the course of the last two decades a great interest in reception has devel-
oped. This interest has been manifested in various fields: in semio-pragmatics,
with the description of various ambits in which film may be experienced, from
spectacle to didactic;3 in feminist film studies, with an emphasis on the implica-
tion of gendered elements in film viewing;4 in historical studies, with attempts to
reconstruct the ways in which film has been proposed to the public,5 interpreted
over the course of time,6 and rendered a collective patrimony;7 and in ethno-
graphic studies with their objective of analyzing in parallel visual and social prac-
tices.8 There have also been a large number of contributions dedicated to linking
the type of spectatorial gaze to the types and genres of films made,9 as well as
studies of the cinematographic apparatus, which focus on the machine of vision
and its impact both on the perceiver and on that which is being perceived (i.e.
both on the spectator as a subject, and on the image as a signifier).10 Reception,
together with representation and production, have been the three pillars of film
studies. However, the orientation of this research risks missing its target, at least
in part. A spectator does not find herself “receiving” a film: she finds herself
“living” it. This requires us to ask not only how she is a spectator and what she is
a spectator of, but also on what basis she becomes a spectator, and what effect
this has on her existence. In short, when can one say that one is seeing a film and
what meanings do we attribute to the fact of seeing it? Returning to the question
of experience – as opposed to, or beyond, the question of reception – can help us to
respond to these questions. In fact, this return allows us to place ourselves at the
level of lived life, so to speak, as we recuperate the dynamics of vision in all their
complexity and concreteness. Furthermore, it allows us to focus in on the process
53
through which vision is constituted as such, with its meanings, values and moti-
vations, which enlarges decidedly the field of inquiry. The research, then, not only
describes a situation – that of the spectator in front of a film – but it also recuper-
ates its conditions of existence and intelligibility, telling us what vision is, what
makes it what it is, and what allows it to be understood as such.11
The second reason in favor of experience concerns, from a historical perspec-
tive, the role that cinema has played in twentieth-century modernity. On the one
hand, film seemed to be an instrument which negated our direct relationship with
things. Beginning with Pirandello,12 many have thought that the mechanical im-
age offered by the cinema kills our relationship with the world: moreover as Ben-
jamin reminds us: “the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the
land of technology.”13 On the other hand, cinema seemed to restore to us the full
sense of things: it allows us to see again those things that had dropped from view
due to habit and indifference, as Balázs emphasized in the early 1920s.14 It also
permits us to observe the world with a precision unattainable by the naked eye, as
Epstein suggested in around the same time.15 Finally, film brings to light forma-
tions that only a machine can perceive, as Benjamin reminds us again, speaking
of “unconscious optics.”16 In essence, the cinema removes and hides, but it also
shows and reveals. It is not difficult to grasp in this dialectic the entire twentieth-
century tension between subtraction of the real and its possible restitution – per-
haps through the work of art. On the one hand, the century is pervaded by the
idea that the complexity and rapidity of events make it impossible to “gain experi-
ence” of what occurs, and altogether useless to “have an experience” on which to
lean. The portrait that Benjamin paints of soldiers returning from the front, mute
and incapable of expressing (to themselves or others) what had happened to
them, is a perfect emblem of this situation.17 On the other hand, the twentieth
century is also riddled with the conviction that there are moments – offered parti-
cularly by art – in which it is possible to see reality “again” and “as if for the first
time,”18 and in which therefore it is possible to reestablish our relationship with
things.19 Within this tension, cinema occupies a particular place: it is the living
proof of the truth of both the one thing and the other. The analysis of film experi-
ence gives us insight into this inextricable – but essential – knot.
Finally, thematizing film experience is helpful in order to understand what is
happening: to the cinema, and perhaps also to us. We live in a period during
which the cinema seems to be putting an end to its century-long history, as a
result of the progressive abandonment of the photographic image in favor of the
digital image, and the declining centrality of the movie theater as the primary
location for watching film. If, in fact, there is anything that persists between the
first birth of cinema – the Lumières’ projection in the “Salon Indien” at the Café
des Capucines, on 28 December 1895 – and its innumerable other births – the
harnessing of narrative, the honing of the film theater, the introduction of sound,
the adoption of Panorama, of Cinemascope, of Circorama, of 3-D – it is precisely
54 francesco casetti
the presence of a film and the presence of an audience. Now these two presences
are slowly weakening, and what remains is only the screen. However, this is not
only the screen of the movie theater, but also, and above all, the screen of a tele-
vision set, a DVD player, a computer, a media facade, an iPod, a tablet, and a cell
phone. It is the screen installed in a waiting room, an airplane, a bus, a car, an art
gallery, a square or a street, and a museum. It is the screen on which I watch the
latest Hollywood production, the work of an independent filmmaker, an auteurist
documentary, an analysis of current events, a montage of readily available materi-
al, a slow-motion projection of a famous film,20 a theatrical version of a made-
for-tv movie, an infomercial, a series of images accompanying a videogame, an
opening sequence, and two trailers of a work presented only as a promise. There-
fore, we can legitimately ask if cinema still exists, or if it has merged completely –
“convergence, honey” – into the indistinct world of media.21 In essence, the ques-
tion is whether cinema has broadened its field of action, or has lost its identity;
and it is precisely by focusing on the film experience that we will be able to for-
mulate an answer to this question. What kind of spectator was I, and what kind
am I now, if I still even am one now? Upon which memory do I rely, and to which
expectations do I open myself? Which behaviors or postures have my body con-
served? And, more radically: what do I continue to experience in these new situa-
tions, if I really experience anything at all? In asking myself these questions –
questions of experience – I come to understand if cinema has disappeared, or if it
has simply turned a corner. Furthermore, I can discover whether I continue to
find sense in cinema, or whether I am now dealing with a phantasm – or, worse
yet, with something characterized by an indifference and an indistinctness that
permits a true “anesthesia” of the senses and of sense.22
To Gain Experience and to Have an Experience: Excess and

Recognition
What characterizes the film experience? “Experience,” in general, means at least
two things, strictly linked one to the other: on the one hand, the fact of perceiving
reality in person and almost for the first time (as in the expression: to “gain ex-
perience”); on the other hand, the fact of possessing knowledge and competence
which allow one to face reality and understand it (in this case, we speak of “hav-
ing experience”).23 Analogously, we can define the film experience as that mo-
ment in which the spectator measures herself against the images and sounds
which are forcefully summoning her; and in which in the meantime she becomes
(reflexively and proactively) aware of the act of seeing and of what is seen. We
have an activation of the senses – especially of vision – as a result of something
that appears on a screen; and an understanding that something appears, to us,
under certain circumstances and that it bears a certain content. In essence, there
is a film and the world that it represents, which capture my attention, almost
beyond subjectivity: the film experience 55

imposing themselves on me; accompanied by the emergence of a “knowing-that-
I-see” and a “knowing-how-to-see,” referring both to the film per se and the
reality to which it makes reference.
This definition of the film experience requires some further refinement: the
analogy with general experience may seem too limiting; and the circuit formed
between exposition and re-elaboration runs the risk of appearing too automatic.
Nevertheless, this definition has a certain advantage: it helps us to understand
how much lies at the heart of the film experience precisely as experience. On the
one hand, it entails something that captures our attention, that makes an impres-
sion on us, that obliges us to measure ourselves directly against things. On the
other hand, it involves returning to that which is happening, in order to under-
stand it, re-elaborate it and make it our own. In short, it entails both an excess
and a recognition.
First of all, excess. There is always something in experience that surprises and
captures, on both sensory and cognitive levels, as a result of its particular inten-
sity, or its distinctiveness with respect to what surrounds it, or its problematic
nature, which renders it an unsolvable rebus at some level. In the case of cinema,
this something may be the force of its images or sounds, the particularity of the
space in which it is projected, the inevitable ambiguity – between real and unreal
– of the spectacle, the dizziness created by the feeling of being immersed in a
narrated world, the sudden and problematic freedom of the eye, etc. It is this
excess that triggers the encounter with that which one finds in front of oneself –
and that simultaneously forces one to emerge from the “taken-for-granted”
stance to face directly that which one is confronting.24
And then there is recognition. In experience, there is always a moment in
which we come back to the encounter in order to frame it and to make it our
own. It is an essential moment in which two closely related aspects enter into
play. We have an agnition, as a result of which something is identified; and a
ratification, as a result of which something is accepted and included in one’s own
world.25 Therefore, when we recognize something we identify and accept it; that
is, we draw attention to its already recognizable aspects, and we acknowledge
those aspects which are ready to be recognized. These two actions do not always
occur: we often have difficulty identifying that which happens to us, and we often
refuse (consciously or unconsciously) to accept it. We often cannot – or would
rather not – name that which we encounter in our everyday lives or, we give it
another name, which actually distances us from it. In these cases, we pull our-
selves out of the experience, as we remove it away from us. However, when we
both identify and accept that which is happening around us, then the experience
is constituted for what it is: a substantial and meaningful encounter.26 This is also
true for the film experience: to recognize means to open ourselves to that which
has surprised us and to the very fact of being surprised. In this way, we coax it out
of the background of the unnoticed, we give it a body, we reflect upon it, we
arrive at highlighting its whys and hows. In essence, we reflexively trace back its
conditions of existence and its intelligibility. In doing so, we give space to its
requirements and reasons, we make it become film experience in the fullest
sense.
The Film Experience: Lines of a Possible History

By placing excess and recognition at the center of attention we may understand
how cinema may give rise to a real experience, or, if you will, to vision as experi-
ence. This is valid for today, just as it was in the past. By projecting these two
aspects back onto the history of cinema, we can also shed light upon the forms
that the film experience assumed through the years: in particular, they can reveal,
respectively, what made filmic vision “alive,” and what allowed it to be recognized
and accepted as “filmic” vision. From this exercise there may be born both a
history of cinema as well as a history of the cinematic experience. This is precisely
what I shall now attempt to do, as concisely as possible, by reflecting upon some
of cinema’s historical phases, starting with what would eventually constitute the
element of excess and ensure a process of recognition.
Early cinema largely characterized film experience in terms of modernity and
popularity. On the one hand, film experience seems to include all of the typical
traits of its time: it realized a need for economy, a taste for speed, an investment
in the progressive mechanization of life and the growing importance of contin-
gent phenomena; and its flux could be paralleled with other flowing forms, such
as the stream of consciousness.27 On the other hand, film experience was also
accessible to everyone: it joined a cross-border and a cross-cultural public to an
easily accessible language, it proposed themes of general interest and it expressed
common values.28 In short, cinema reflected its age whilst at the same time turn-
ing to a universal audience. Today, it is evident that film “re-transcribed” the
modern experience that was actually lived in factories, in the metropolis, even in
the trenches of World War I. In this context, cinema “reinvented” the modern just
as it “reinvented” the popular. What is interesting about this is that the two “re-
inventions” overlapped. On the one hand, cinema joined modernity to the sphere
of the show or to the space of the collective game, and film after film popularized
this modernity.29 On the other hand, however, cinema associated popularity with
the presence of a communicative device capable of involving multitudes: by trans-
forming this into a “medial” and “mass” popularity, cinema modernized it.
We have, accordingly, the popularization of modernity and the modernization
of popularity. I would go on to suggest that if, in the first twenty years of its life,
cinema had a strategic function, this consisted in its very ability to recall these two
terms and to redefine their reciprocity. The consequence of this move is impor-
tant. What really qualifies early film experience is not the fact that it engages the
gaze, but the fact that it offers a new range of sensations while also building a

new type of collectivity. And, in parallel, what characterizes the nascent cinemato-
graphic spectator is not the fact that she/he is constituted as an observer, but the
fact that her/his body engages in a richer sensibility and through this becomes
more involved and engaged with others. Among the critics of the time, it is per-
haps Ricciotto Canudo who best articulates this aspect of film experience. In his
writing, constant attention is paid to the ways in which cinema enables new
forms of feeling and new social aggregates to be “tried,” and “experimented”
with, by the onlookers.30 This new horizon of experience is not, however, ex-
pressed only in theoretical writing. A group of US films, from Uncle Josh at
the Moving Picture Show (Edwin S. Porter, 1902) to Mabel’s Dramatic
Career (Mack Sennett, 1913) or A Movie Star (Fred Hibbard, 1916), illustrates
this same theme through small, exemplary tales. These films depict an audience
that is systematically surprised and engaged by what appears on the screen and by
what happens in the cinema.
Throughout the 1910s, and particularly after the end of World War I, we can
progressively identify a “regulation” that imposed itself on the forms of represen-
tation depicted, on the comportment expected of spectators, and on the very
spaces cinema used. Cinema had to offer appropriate contents on the screen, it
had to induce proper behavior in the audience, and it had to guarantee environ-
mental conditions that were not harmful to public health and safety. In sum, film
had to answer to the canons of a morale, etiquette and hygiene.31 Such “regula-
tion” conceals, however, a deeper process: cinema is “institutionalized” – that is,
it stabilizes its own ways of being and doing – and at the same time it becomes a
“social institution,” in that it is now a coordinated complex of objects, behaviors
and expectations.32
What is apparent here is a new strategic goal. After redesigning the meaning of
modernity and popularity, film experience now has to prove that it is a “good
experience.” Going to the cinema, seeing a film, has to be a legitimate and legit-
imating act. The bitter division between “cinephiles” and “cinephobes” that
marks the debate of the 1910s and 1920s (a good example is the quarrel between
Paul Souday and Emile Vuillermoz in the columns of the French newspaper Le
Temps)33 clearly underlines this goal. Notwithstanding their divergent stances,
both sides in fact draw an “ideal” cinema. While for the one group film has not
yet achieved this ideal and for the other it already offers good examples in this
direction, the two sides nevertheless are in accord on an undertaking that can
and must be realized.
Two observations may be added here. Firstly, the institutionalization of cinema
is aided by an emerging need for narration and artistic expression. The first need
is mainly expressed by a popular public, and is the grounds for the progressive
rise of the full-length fiction film. The second need is expressed by an intellectual
class, and is the grounds for the progressive “sanctification” of cinematic work
(this “sanctification” began in the 1920s and culminated in the 1930s in the film
exhibitions curated by Iris Barry at New York’s Museum of Modern Art). The sa-
tisfaction of these two needs saw a “standardization” of the filmic product, whilst
it also credited cinema with the stigmata of “quality.” Film experience becomes,
accordingly, “safe” and “precious.”34 Secondly, the institutionalization of cinema
brings with it a sense of equilibrium between diverging forces. For instance, film
viewing can maintain tracts of great intensity, and yet images and sounds do not
overwhelm the spectator. In the same way, it drives the onlooker so that she/he is
immersed in the representation onscreen, and yet it ensures safety margins, both
mental and physical. Moreover, although cinema tends to depict the world in
fragments it nevertheless preserves a sense of unity with regard to what is shown.
And finally, while film viewing depends on a machine, a device, at the same time
it favors a certain “naturalness” in the subject’s gaze. Through this series of
“compromises,” film experience becomes at once more constant and more prac-
ticable. Modern and popular, it makes modernity and popularity more livable.
A consequence of this process is that we can delineate a form of experience
that might appropriately be called attendance.35 Against the background of wide-
spread regulation (both in terms of the viewing environment,36 ways of viewing,
and the object of vision itself37) what comes to light are three key elements.
Firstly, we have experience of a place, the theater. It is a delimited place, but not
closed. The theater is not a retreat, like the home, nor is it an open world, like the
metropolis. It instead forms something of a middle ground, where citizens con-
verge and share the same emotional experiences. Looked at it in this way, it pro-
vides a peculiar form of habitat: here one can be a mobile individual, a flâneur, and
at the same time find a place of belonging. It is therefore a physical place, a little
like the arcades or malls of the nineteenth century. And it is also a place perme-
ated with a set of shared symbols which function, in a Heideggerian way, as lan-
guage does for a community.
Secondly, we have the experience of a situation that is both real and unreal. The
spectator goes on living in an everyday universe, and at the same time also lives in
an extraordinary universe. The first universe revolves around her/his encounter
with other spectators, the second around her/his encounter with the film. Thus,
what we find in cinema is an interface between two worlds, and it is here (also
because of its profound regulation) that film experience manifests the character
of a rite.
Thirdly, we have the experience of a diegetic world which is made up of images (and
sounds), but which can also have a consistence and depth of its own. Indeed, the
spectator, viewing a film, sees pictures, but at the same time sees “beyond” the
pictures, to the reality that is represented.38 This means that the spectator inter-
prets filmic reality as something in which she/he might be immersed, thanks to a
tight game of projection and identification with what appears onscreen. But the
spectator also recognizes in these same images an exemplary portrait which can
help her/him interpret the world in which she/he actually lives. Viewing then be-

comes an act that joins pleasure and productivity: the film stimulates and attracts,
but also teaches and educates. The spectator consequently becomes a subject par-
ticipating in a world that seems to offer itself as a gift, but is at the same time a
subject that takes hold, on the cognitive level, of a world that can also function as
prey.
There is, then, the experience of a place, the experience of a situation and the
experience of a world. In attendance, the first two aspects converge towards the
third: going to the cinema and joining other spectators activates a gaze (and also
a capacity to listen) which allows the events recounted to be at once grasped and
lived as an experience. What is important is that one exposes oneself to film, that
one concentrates upon it and follows its unfolding. Moreover, what matters is
filling one’s eyes with a world made into a spectacle, which allows us to become
privileged observers.39 Perhaps the most efficient description of this form of ex-
perience is given not by a theoretical text, but by a film. This film – Buster Kea-
ton’s Sherlock Jr (USA, 1924) – is a work that is no less theoretical than other,
written, texts.40 In it, the main character, a projectionist, leaves the projection
booth and penetrates the screen. Initially he finds himself confused by what he
encounters: here we follow the trope of the early film spectator, who was sur-
prised by the unpredictability of “modern” experience. Keaton’s character then,
however, adapts to the world that the film discloses; he takes part in it, he accepts
its lessons, and, back in the projection booth, he immediately applies to his own
life what is represented on the screen. There is no better description available of
the process I am trying to explain: in attendance, reality is available to be seen, and
at the same time the spectator is ready to appropriate what she/he watches.
Nevertheless, the model of attendance has a sort of blind spot. The acquisition
of the world on the screen almost hides two aspects. Firstly, this acquisition is
made possible by the fact that the spectator inhabits space (the cinema) and parti-
cipates in a collective rite (the vision). The risk is that she/he can master reality
only by conforming with a residency and a collectivity. Secondly, this acquisition
is accompanied by a strong sense of participation in what one observes: it is a
matter less of “grabbing hold” of things than of “living” with them. The risk is
that in taking hold of the world one cancels this availability and, with this, the
possibility of a real “opening.”
After World War II, the so-called “modern cinema” highlights these two limits
of attendance. What surfaces is a more ductile, articulated experience – one in
which observer and observed no longer confront each other, but rather engage in
a more subtle form of complicity. The emerging awareness of film as a political
act (revived by Italian neorealism) and the emerging conception of film as an
authorial and creative act (initiated by Alexandre Astruc41 and subsequently taken
up by the nouvelles vagues), constitute two important steps in this direction. In both
instances, the spectator is no longer asked to “attend” a show: she/he must in-
stead “respond” to the film and “correspond” with its author. The viewer is asked
to engage in a tight dialogue with what she/he has seen. Film has to be penetrated
in order to be interpreted – what is at stake are both its open meaning and its
masks. At the same time, the viewer is also asked to engage in a dialogue – direct
or distant – with other spectators involved in the same task. Only an “interpretive
community” is capable of accessing filmic meaning as well as authorial thought.
Dialogue with the film and its author, in search of a meaning; dialogue with
the other spectators, in search of a community: what comes to light is a situation
in which the spectator loses her/his privileges and her/his exclusiveness as obser-
ver; she/he has to face – and to expose her/himself to – the world and the others.
The effect is a profound restructuring of spectatorial subjectivity (no more “mas-
tery,” but remaining “open” to things). But the effect is also an increasing role for
film’s perlocutionary effects, that is, its ability to do and make others do. The
diffusion of “cinephile” consumption, wonderfully parodied by Jean-Luc Godard
in Masculin, Féminin (1966), made this trend progressively evident.
From the 1980s onwards, change becomes even more apparent. New types of
theater are born, with specialized places such as the “X-rated” cinema and the
multiplex.42 At the same time, alternatives to the traditional film theater begin to
emerge: television regularly shows films, and in some cases even acts as produ-
cer. Finally comes the development of the videotape – first Betamax, launched by
Sony in 1975, and then VHS, which was to prove the successful format, launched
by JVC the following year. A film could be recorded and rewatched in one’s living
room, but also bought in a shop in video format. What consequently emerges are,
on the one hand, new forms of access to film experience and, on the other, new
surroundings in which this experience might take place. New forms of access: to
watch a film, one is no longer bound to a single ticket that allows entrance to a
particular venue. One can instead pay by subscription to a public television service
(or to a channel, or opt for a particular package); one can be at the same time a
spectator of films and advertisements on commercial channels; and lastly, one
can buy films on video. New surroundings: the living room, with its changed
spatial structure, joins the film theater. Cinema thus begins to disentangle itself
from its exclusive medium (film-projector-screen) and from what has long been
its privileged place (the film theater).
In other words, film experience begins to relocate: it finds new media, new en-
vironments. This move is a decisive trait of cinema. It works on a deeper level
than the re-mediation process to which cinema is also subjected.43 In fact, thanks
to the new physical supports, there is the emergence of new spatial systems and,
along with these, new viewing conditions. These sites are arranged very differ-
ently from previous places: for instance, they retain features of the home environ-
ment. They are also sites that boast different types of technology: for instance, a
small luminous screen rather than a large reflecting one. Furthermore, they are
sites that are ready to join, and perhaps even to absorb, film consumption into the
flow of daily life (watching a film in the living room alternates with other activ-

ities). Most importantly, film consumption is joined to other “media” activities
(watching a film takes place alongside using the phone, listening to the radio,
reading the newspaper, and so on). It is this relocation that drives, and will con-
tinue to drive, the process of transformation of the experience of film.
But why is this a relocation? And what are its consequences? As I shall note, at
the end of the 1990s the relocation of cinema would impetuously “spread” to
other media and other spatial situations. It would become possible to watch a
film in places other than the domestic space: on computers, iPods, mobile
phones; in waiting rooms, art galleries, on airplanes. In sum, films can be viewed
on a number of platforms and in a number of situations. This occurs not only
because of the pressure of the technological revolution, which facilitates a new
diffusion of the cinema, but also because there is a new cultural scenario with
which cinema must engage. This scenario is characterized by the emergence of
two important needs. On the one hand, there is the need for expressivity: the iden-
tity of social subjects hinges increasingly upon the way they can put this into play.
Cinema certainly presents an opportunity to attend a show, but it can only offer
the possibility of becoming, at best, a virtual protagonist. Other media seem to do
this better; cinema must update itself.44 On the other hand, there is a need for
relationality: social subjects are less and less part of pre-established social net-
works, and so they must build their own. Cinema traditionally provided a repre-
sentation of the world and was engaged far less as a space of social exchange (the
social encounter before and after the screening, virtual dialogue with the director,
conversations in film societies, and so on). Other media responded far better to
this need for exchange. If cinema wanted to retain its centrality as a medium it
had, therefore, both to recuperate and to depend upon these same media.45 The
urge to face these two needs (for expressivity and for relationality), as well as the
competition with other media, pushed cinema towards an exploration of new
possibilities. If cinema relocates itself, it does so in response to this situation.
The conquest of new spaces and new platforms – starting with domestic space
and the video recorder – progressively opens up new forms of film experience. I
have already noted that film experience became increasingly quotidian as it be-
came connected with other media. It may be added here that film experience be-
comes increasingly elective, born of specific choices, and no longer dependent
upon habit. Hence, even though it lends itself to being repeated, film experience
does so as a hobby rather than as a custom. Moreover, the experience of film is
increasingly individual and inter-individual. The act of seeing brings the construc-
tion of small “companies,” both immediate and at a distance. Lastly, film experi-
ence becomes increasingly private: something to be had inside “reserved” spaces
(such as the home) or in isolation (and this even though the barriers around us
have become glass walls). In short, film experience becomes more and more per-
sonalized. In turn, it also becomes increasingly active. The spectator has ceased
simply to consume a show and begins to intervene in the act of consumption:
she/he is asked not only to see, but also to do.46 That is why this type of experi-
ence may be characterized as a performance.47
Performances with which the spectator is engaged are multiple, and these in-
crease as the act of viewing a film finds new places and new ways to articulate
itself. There is a cognitive “doing” linked to the varying interpretations and differ-
ent uses of film’s symbolic resources.48 To see a film is more and more about
speaking about it and recounting it.49 There is an emotional “doing,” precisely
because of the increasingly emotive elements connected to the act of viewing
film.50 Watching a film is more and more about putting oneself in the condition
of being amazed and moved (perhaps also because of the presence of both “spe-
cial effects” and “special affects”). There is also an increasingly practical “doing”
which is linked to the behaviors triggered by the process of consumption. One
negotiates concrete spatiotemporal limits as well as the possible composition of
the “menu” of what one wishes to view.51 Watching a film is more and more
about organizing oneself for vision. But there is also a new relational “doing,”
connected to the fact that one has to build a social network of sharing and ex-
change – and that this might also be undertaken virtually. At the same time, there
is a new expressive “doing,” linked to the fact that viewing “that” movie, in “that”
way is related to the construction of identity. Choosing a film is, increasingly, a
declaration of belonging. Finally, there is a textual “doing.” This is determined by
the fact that the spectator increasingly possesses the chance to manipulate the
text that she/he is consuming, not only by “adjusting” viewing conditions (keep-
ing or transforming the format, choosing high or low definition, and so on), but
also by intervening in it (as with the clips, and the re-edited and new soundtracks,
on YouTube). Thus, film experience is a performance based on an act, rather than
a moment of attendance. It places the individual, not the group, as its focus. It
allows selected relationships, rather than generic gatherings. It develops abilities
as well as interests. It entails a continuous handling, rather than an adaptation to
pre-established situations. And, finally, film experience boasts liberatory values
rather than the celebration of a discipline’s glory. This, then, is how film experi-
ence adjusts and responds to the appeal of a new historical and cultural situation.
It changes form in order to adapt to the times.
Post-cinema
I have mentioned that since the end of the 1990s, cinema has been perfecting its
relocation process. Film viewing takes place on single-screen theaters, in multi-
plexes, on the home television; but also on DVD, on home theater systems, inside
rail and underground stations, on buses, on airplanes, in art galleries, through
one’s computer, by surfing online, in virtual spaces such as YouTube or Second
Life, through personal exchanges via the Internet (peer-to-peer), on mobile
phones. Cinema now disperses itself through social space and invades virtual

space. And it multiplies its products: fiction films, documentaries, docudrama,
final cuts, clips, re-editings, sound re-editings, narrations rendered from video-
games. What emerges from all this is a multiplicity of windows which both open
and frame our viewing experience. This enormous relocation of cinema,52 which
relaunches and radicalizes a form of film experience based on performance,
raises at least three issues.
Firstly, at a time when the spectator seems to become more “active,” what is
really her/his degree of freedom? What of the “disciplinary” bounds at stake in
attendance: do they dissolve through performance or do they simply become new
limitations? It is clear that through new windows, subjects often “invent” ways of
building their “own” experience. This invention can be seen as a negative act
(when they give up the linear viewing of a film and simply linger on privileged
clips), and as a positive spectatorial proactiveness (when they use home theater
systems to reintroduce a certain sacredness to the act of viewing). Such creativity
is, however, ambiguous. It is often simply an execution of pre-established rules
(DVDs allow – and actually anticipate – viewing “in pieces”). Creativity is often
also dictated by nostalgia (the “sacred” value of viewing is no longer on the agen-
da). Further, creativity is more often invested in lateral activities than in film view-
ing proper (for instance, it manifests itself in blogs rather than in actual modes of
consumption). In these cases, the freedom of the neo-spectator reveals its limits.
It is more like choosing a game than the actual possibility of playing it. There can,
however, be more dialectical moments in less-regulated situations. From this
point of view, the most interesting windows are not those linked to non-places
(such as airports or buses) where filmic engagement is too contingent; nor are
they those linked to artistic environments of particular interest (such as gallery
installations), since here the spectator has no choice but to “play by the rules” set
by the artist. The most interesting windows are, rather, those which enable and
facilitate peer-to-peer exchange, meaning that they introduce a viewing practice
that extends into the rewriting of the text; and those linked to domestic space,
where the creation of one’s “own” viewings calls for constant negotiation with
other household members. In these cases, film experience illustrates how disci-
plinarity in contemporary society is less an application of previous rules and more
a self-construction of contextual and contingent rules.
Secondly, inside these new windows are we still dealing with film experiences,
or are we instead dealing with more generic “media” experiences? It is clear that
cinema, in widening its definition, risks losing its specificity. At the same time as
it relocates, its identity is subject to question. However, film experience remains
specific in at least two, very different, cases. The first is where new technological
platforms work simply as delivery tools: they create a cinematographic situation
in so far as they offer a film. This is what happens when, for instance, we use our
computer on a train to watch a DVD or a film we have downloaded: it is not the
viewing environment that makes us film spectators, but simply the viewed object.
The second case is where there is a re-adaptation of the environment: here the
film’s permanence is ensured by the fact that the conditions of film viewing are
reinstated. This is what takes place in the living room when we turn off the lights,
sit comfortably and watch a broadcast, following the old rituals of the theater
(even though we may be looking not at a film but at a television series, or even a
football game). The characterization of a window as more or less “cinemato-
graphic” occurs between these two poles.
But why, thirdly, should we even seek to preserve film experience? Should it not
be consigned to the attic, so to speak, or to a museum? It is clear that cinema is
not a contemporary medium: it enjoys esteem, it continues to celebrate its most
traditional rituals (after all, old cinemas with projectors and screens still exist);
but it is not here that the spirit of the times treads. However, there is perhaps one
thing that is still guaranteed in the permanence of the cinematographic within a
vast mediascape: this is an aesthetic dimension, in the proper sense of the term,
that can pit itself against an otherwise generalized and growing anesthesia. Film
experience, in fact, still presents itself as a moment which “enlivens” our senses
and nourishes sensibility. This is true, above all, of the cinematographic in its
performative variant. Thanks to this, the spectator does not simply consume film
but instead seizes control of her given situation. At the same time, she reflexively
engages with the object of vision; she produces and articulates meaning. Perfor-
mance accordingly helps us elude the “channeling” of experience that modern
media seem to pursue, introducing the possibility of a new experiential founda-
tion.53 After the redefinition of the modern and the popular, after the establish-
ment of a legitimate and legitimating experience, after the opening of a more
articulate dimension, it is the re-aestheticization of communication that might
mark the last strategic duty assigned to film. This is why I would argue that film
experience will survive: in order to allow the spectator of media to be involved in a
truly exploratory way, in order to force eyes and ears to be opened as they are
nowhere else. In short, film experience still advocates not just the simple manage-
ment of a “bare life” but asks that the spectator gives it meaning and sensibility.
Translated by Dafne Calgaro, Victoria Duckett and Daniel Leisawitz.

PART II
Ways of Expressing
Subjectivity
The Man Who Wasn’t There: The Pro-
duction of Subjectivity in Delmer Daves’
Dark Passage
Vivian Sobchack
Form – incessantly betraying its own manifestation […] for it is adequate to
the same – alienates the exteriority of the other.
– Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity1
There are different ways of being a face.

– Emmanuel Levinas, “On Obliteration”2
First Person Parallax

There is an uncanny and inaugural moment early on in Delmer Daves’ Dark
Passage (1947) that makes visible the paradox – or better, the “parallax” – of
embodied subjectivity. Although we have not yet “seen” him, Vincent Parry, a
convict falsely accused of murdering his wife, has escaped from San Quentin hid-
den in one of several large metal drums being hauled from the prison on an open-
bed truck. The only objectively visible cue to his presence has been a pair of hands
gripping the edge of the round canister from inside as the truck drives along a
deserted road. We then see the container rocked from within until it falls off the
truck and bounces down a hill, a movement during which we are quite suddenly –
and vertiginously – made privy to Vincent’s disorienting view from inside the roll-
ing container. This, the film’s inaugural use of “first-person” camera, is brief but
kinetically powerful. The rotating view turns fuzzy and occluded and then we are
again, and objectively, outside the still-rolling container, which abruptly comes to
rest on its side in a stream running under a highway overpass. At this point, the
entire screen goes black but for a few glimmers of reflected light and it is now
that something quite extraordinary occurs: the blackness is revealed as caused by
Vincent’s back, for we see more and more daylight as he moves forward and out
of the canister into visible figuration. We then watch him move away into the
distance from the motionless aperture of the container, its dark circular interior
now framing the day-lit world outside. In that uncanny moment, as a subject
Vincent seems split and yet doubled, become both, and at once, the seer and the
seen. Certainly, as J.P. Telotte writes of the shot, it “suggests a distance that at-
69
taches [to a form of] visual identification [in] which the character whose point of
view we share remains estranged from us.”3 However, what is truly uncanny
about this estrangement is that it is not just ours but also Vincent’s. Indeed, stag-
gering out of that circumscribed black hole into the objective light of day and
visibility, Vincent seems also to be escaping the circumscription of his own sub-
jective vision.
Film still from Delmer Daves’ Dark Passage (1947).
It is through this “sleight of eye” that both conflates and constitutes the distance
between “first” and “third-person” that Vincent Parry is materially “borne” into
the narrative, and into the visual and ontological “parallax” of embodied subjec-
tivity. However, as Slavoj Žižek elaborates, parallax – “the apparent displacement
of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in
observational position” – is not simply “due to the fact that the same object which
exists ‘out there’ is seen from two different stances, or points of view.”4 Rather,
the phenomenon of parallax emerges because the materialized and enworlded
subjects and objects of vision inherently mediate each other. Thus – and philoso-
phically dramatized in Vincent’s complex installation as an embodied subject who
can be seen as well as see – Žižek writes:
70 vivian sobchack
Materialism is not the direct assertion of my inclusion in objective reality […];
rather, it resides in the reflective twist by means of which I myself am included
in the picture constituted by me – it is this reflexive short circuit, this necessary
redoubling of myself as standing both outside and inside my picture, that
bears witness to my ‘material existence.’5
Vincent emerges into visibility and figuration, then, through a quite literal “short
circuit” – a reflexive and reflective “dark passage” that inaugurates and “redou-
bles” him as both “inside” and “outside” his own (as well as our) picture. Doing
so, it confers upon his earlier, and aptly vertiginous, subjective vision a visibly
objective form, a “material existence.” As Žižek points out, however, the conse-
quence of this materialization is “that the reality [we] see is never ‘whole’[…],
[this] because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which indicates [our] inclusion in
it.”6 Vincent’s embodied subjectivity, however, not only constitutes but also – and
uncannily – emerges from his own “blind spot” in the metal canister, its “short
circuit” the conduit that reflexively redoubles and splits him into subject and ob-
ject, seer and seen. And, indeed, quite literally, it is the metal canister that pre-
viously contained Vincent’s subjective vision that now “bears witness” to his ob-
jective “material existence”: thus, in this moment of his “splitting,” and
“doubling,” we see him “watch his back” as he staggers away from himself to,
like all of us, disappear from his own sight. Parallax, indeed!
Given this extraordinarily complex on-screen moment, it is not surprising that,
like Žižek, the film’s director was also concerned with parallax and its chiasmic
conjunction yet misalignment of subjectivity and material embodiment. For
Daves, however, parallax presented a technical rather than philosophical prob-
lem. In a document he wrote about pre-production camera tests for Dark Pas-
sage, Daves notes that most motion picture cameras at the time had, indeed, a
“parallax problem.”7 That is, the physical distance between the camera’s lens and
viewfinder frequently led to the misaligned or “incorrect” framing of the image, a
misalignment that would be especially noticeable in subjective shots, and thus
undermine the credibility of what was to appear on screen as Vincent Parry’s in-
tentionally-directed vision. In this regard, testing three lightweight cameras,
Daves and his director of photography Sid Hickox and special effects photogra-
pher H.F. Koenekamp ultimately chose the “German camera” (in a later interview
identified as an Arriflex, supposedly “captured” from the Nazis).8 The “prime
factor” in Daves’ choice was that it was the only camera he knew of to have a
“prism” viewfinder that functioned “directly from the shutter,” so that “what is
seen through the finder, during shooting, is what registers on the screen.” As he
writes, “All other cameras have a parallax problem which particularly applies to
close shots such as hands before the camera and inserts […] [The Arriflex] elim-
inates guess work on shots of this kind of which there will be many in Dark
Passage.”
the man who wasn’t there 71

“Observations on the Camera Acting as a Person”
Daves issued the results of his pre-production experiments in a document for
Warner Bros. in October of 1946. The results of testing the three cameras –
“Notes on Experimental Camera Work” – filled one page, but the remaining four
pages were devoted to “Observations on the Camera Acting as a Person: Dark
Passage.” Here, Daves again grappled with practical rather than philosophical
problems, these nonetheless grounded in Žižek’s “reflexive short circuit” – that
is, the filmmaker’s need to “redouble” his main character as standing both out-
side and inside his own picture, and to make sure that this picture bore visible
“witness” to both his subjective vision and his “material existence.” For Daves,
the film’s screenwriter as well as director, this “redoubling” was mandated less
by ontology than cinematic fidelity to the eponymous novel from which Dark
Passage was adapted9 – but it was made particularly problematic by the star
casting of Humphrey Bogart as Vincent. In the novel, Vincent eventually under-
goes plastic surgery so as to appear “other” than himself and Daves thus had to
deal with the conundrum of the main character’s pre- and post-operative appear-
ance. Daves could not cast two actors in the role. As he put it in an interview,
“You couldn’t have Humphrey Bogart’s voice coming out of a man that wasn’t
Humphrey Bogart, because he’s too well known […]. You had to create a pre-
Bogart character and the only way I could think of doing it was with the subjective
camera.”10 Thus, for the first sixty-two minutes of the film – prior to his change
of face as well as post-operatively when he is swathed in bandages – Vincent’s
“material existence” is only tenuously visible “in the picture” whether he is filmed
in “first” or “third person.”11 That is, for more than half of Dark Passage, the
subjective camera “bears witness” only to his hands and feet as they might appear
in his “own” picture or, shot objectively, he is obscured, his pre-operative face
hidden in shadow and his “new” face bandaged until it is fully revealed as
Bogart’s. Further troubling Vincent’s visible embodiment as a “self-similar” sub-
ject are the brief insertions of two newspaper photos of the escapee that show his
“original” face as a pre-operative “other” that, because of Bogart’s voice, we
know he cannot be.
Daves, however, was less concerned with this “misalignment” than with the
more practical problems of how to “bear witness” to Vincent’s “material exis-
tence” when, for extended sequences, he was wholly or partially displaced by his
own vision to dwell in the subjective “blind spot” of his own picture. First, insofar
as the “camera acting as a person,” it was critical to solve the vibration problems
of the hand-held Arriflex, particularly in close shots that would literally “focus”
Vincent’s subjective attention, since the “more restricted the [visual] field, the
more noticeable the vibration.” Thus, a special gyroscope and harness were devel-
oped that (like today’s Steadicam) transferred vibration from hand through the
arm to the shoulder. The harness was also designed to hold the camera at “eye
72 vivian sobchack
level” so that it “walked as the man walked.”12 In this regard, the document
notes, the camera also needed “at all times to represent the height of the same
man,” established in “first-person” but respected later, “after the camera ceases
to be an actor,” since “the audience will have become accustomed to looking
down or up at the other characters.”
More difficult, however, was correlating the camera’s coordination of move-
ment and vision to that of a “person.” Subjective “walking shots” were particu-
larly problematic because the human body “sways” as it “steps from one foot to
another and […] rises and falls with each step.” Furthermore, the fact that human
eyes “have virtually a 180º angle whereas the lens angle is restricted” also pre-
sented a problem, for the widest angle lenses closest to human range magnified
vibration and also distorted the visual field “so that the perimeter of the aperture
seem[ed] to fold in when the camera [was] in motion.” Daves’ compromise was
to use a mid-range 35mm lens. Crouching, crawling, and running presented
other problems. Not only did a gyroscopic “cradle” need to be constructed so as
to stabilize the “free” (or hand-held) camera in such actions, but Daves discov-
ered that, in “low angle traveling shots as crawling,” it was necessary to have an
object in the scene “such as a fence or foreground piece” to establish “some idea
of scale” as well as Vincent’s height from the ground. Without such cues, he
notes, the camera appeared “higher off the ground than it actually [was].” Reclin-
ing or sitting also required special attention. As Daves writes, “When we lie
down, the horizon line and all horizontal lines remain horizontal […]. When the
camera turns on its side, the horizontal lines become vertical […]; [thus] the cam-
era must be kept horizontal and lowered to […] a bed or sofa to maintain the
normal horizontal view of a reclining person.” Furthermore, when the “first-per-
son” action was sitting, Daves found that “the illusion […] would not be success-
ful” unless cues were added to indicate the action, such as dialogue or the sub-
jective camera looking “ahead of time” at the chair in which Vincent was going to
sit.
Daves’ practical rather than philosophical “materialism” also led to experi-
ments with those literal “parts” of Vincent’s “body” that would be visible figurally
in his own (as well as our) field of view. The greatest concern was with his hands
and feet, but it extended even to his eyelids (this, in all likelihood, for the se-
quence in which Vincent is pre-operatively anesthetized).13 Daves found that
when “the hands of the actor who is presumed to be the camera are […] in front
of the lens,[…] there is a danger of foreshortening,” and he suggests two solu-
tions: “limiting […] the amount of arm showing to an elbow to finger-tip length,”
or, making sure Vincent’s clothing was “fairly tight-fitted in the region of the
upper arm” to mitigate the distortion. Experiments also revealed that simulta-
neously using the right and left arms of two different actors gave the illusion that
“the camera eye-view is midway between the shoulders,” whereas, with a single
actor, “the illusion is that the camera is shooting over one shoulder or the

other.”14 (Daves notes, as well, that, “in most normal acts with our hands,” we
see both rather than one of them.) Daves recommends a similar strategy to film
Vincent’s feet and further suggests having available “two jointed and separate
[dummy] legs clothed to match the actor’s costume” and “a cut-out” representing
“the head and shoulders of the camera-character so that we may be able to create
our own shadow where we please.”
Help! I’m Trapped in a Human Body

However fascinating and cinematically necessary, there is a certain oppressive-
ness in all this attention to body parts, to a focus on material detail that seems to
reduce a “person’s” body to nothing but its “immanence”– even as, paradoxically,
that body, distributed across several actors or severed into dummy parts and “cut-
outs,” is never really “there.” Indeed, there is something, dare I say, philosophi-
cally (if not practically) “creepy” about Daves writing: “On shots wherein another
actor apparently looks into the eyes and face of the camera representing our lead-
ing actor, the lens itself becomes the eyes, the lower rim of the mat box becomes
the chin, the upper rim the forehead, and the side rims the ears of the camera-
actor.” All this “bearing witness” to Vincent’s “material existence,” his objective
immanence, even when it is “out of the picture” tends to overpower the body as it
is subjectively “lived” – and thus always also transcendent of a solely (and soul-
lessly) ontic existence.
Daves, however, was quite aware of the need to avoid provoking through fig-
uration the literal sense – whether Vincent’s or ours – of being “trapped” in a
human body. That is, when the body is “grounded” in immanence (if not always
visibility) by such intense attention to its materiality, the world visibly shrinks,
“folding in” rather than extending outward at the perimeter of vision. Correla-
tively, that body’s subjectivity, too, shrivels to one dimension, its intentional di-
rectedness focused only on what is objectively before its eyes. Thus, in the docu-
ment, Daves reveals his plans to “whip” the camera in rapid “pan” shots, and to
use “cut-aways,” “insert” shots, and “flash cuts” – these not only to expand Vin-
cent’s “first-person” vision but also to make visible through variety in scale and
rhythm the dynamism and motility of his intentional interest in the world and
others. For example, so as to release both Vincent (and the spectator) from “con-
tinuous camera techniques” tied to the material insistence on his body’s imma-
nence “in” his vision while also “outside” it, Daves writes: “A few flash cuts
would be entirely in keeping […], as though the camera-character took two or
three quick looks at objects before his own movement is continued.” And, per-
haps most significantly, he adds: “Further, I am sure that sound may be used for
cut-aways from the camera’s point of view as though the camera-character on
hearing something transports his mind to that object, such as a passing car, vi-
sualizes it,[…] making it possible for us to cut from his actual view point to, for
74 vivian sobchack
example, a panning shot of what he hears.” Nonetheless, there was the “danger”
of “misleading” the spectator into thinking “the camera-character sees such cut-
aways,” so Daves suggests cues such as dissolves, changes in scale, and, particu-
larly, “whip pans,” to indicate these “cut-aways” are not Vincent’s subjective vi-
sion of the objective world but, rather, his subjective imagination or “inner” vi-
sion. Daves, however, also uses several of these devices to also effect transitions
from “first” to “third-person.” The cinematic result is thus, for brief moments, a
certain productive “confusion” – a destabilizing uncertainty – that locates us as
spectators, like Vincent, as at once both “inside” and “outside” the picture.15
Never mentioned in the Warner Bros. document, perhaps because recording it
did not seem particularly problematic at the time, was Vincent’s – and Bogart’s –
voice, a major index of Vincent’s subjectivity. Certainly, its particular (and famil-
iar) “grain” provides a continuity of “self” in the film that transcends Vincent’s
physical transformation – and Bogart’s seeming “absence” – whether or not he is
visible in the frame. Thus, in production if not in Daves’ notes, the close relation
– particularly, of timing – between Vincent’s voice and his subjective actions when
he isn’t “in the picture” warranted special attention. Indeed, Daves later spoke of
how “[Bogart] would do [the dialogue] on a track right there on location and I
would time the film to the work track and his voice.”16 Additionally, when record-
ing a separate “work track” was not practical, Daves would write Vincent’s dialo-
gue after filming so as, he says, “to fit what I got.”17 In sum, through careful
attention to the synchrony of Vincent’s behavior and speech in the subjective se-
quences, Daves attempts to overcome any sense of “voice-over” in which “narra-
tion” in particular – even of the “self” – seems disconnected both in time and
place from the action visible on screen. Indeed, one might pun here and suggest
that, particularly for Vincent’s subjective “inner speech” (inaudible except to us),
Daves was trying, instead, to construct a “voice under.”18
As the film’s screenwriter as well as director, Daves’ decision to endow Vincent
with this capacity for “inner” speech lends a significantly transcendent dimension
to his “material existence,” particularly when he is not visible. The often despe-
rate expression of his thoughts and feelings audibly “testifies” (rather than vi-
sually “bearing witness”) to his embodied subjectivity, and thus lends presence to
his “first-person” vision, thickening the picture with the sense that Vincent is
“there” – even if not “here” before us. Nonetheless, at the same time that Vin-
cent’s “inner speech” strengthens our sense of his subjectivity and his coherence
as a subject, his “inner speech” also undoes any simple sense of self-synchrony to
emphasize, instead, and again, his distance from “himself.” That is, Vincent’s
“inner speech” points to his subjectivity as inherently divided and “redoubled,”
and thus always already asynchronous with “itself.” Indeed, what Žižek writes of
the “noir subject” in general is apposite in particular not only to the speaking
subject that is Vincent Parry but also, and more transparently, to the seeing sub-
ject that is the film: “Everything that I positively am, every enunciated content I

can point at and say, ‘that’s me,’ is not ‘I’ – I am only the void that remains, the
empty distance towards every content.”19 This constitution of the “void” that is
the seeing subject as well as its “empty distance” from the seen object begins, as
I have written elsewhere, with cinematic enunciation itself (whether in “first” or
“third-person”).20 However, this originary cinematic “void” and “empty distance”
is transferred to, and made explicit by, Dark Passage’s narrative “redoubling”
and parallactic “division” of Vincent as a seeing and speaking subject – “voided”
by his presence to, but absence from, his “first-person” vision, and by being
neither here nor there in the reflexive “inner speech” which locates him in the
“empty distance” between “I” and “me.” Dark Passage, then, installs Vincent,
literally an “outcast” and figurally a man estranged from “himself,” in a dialectic
of “first” and “third-person” that explores the “empty distance” between them as,
at once, a negative void and a constitutive positivity – this inaugurated by the fact
of material existence but made manifest in the reflexive and transcendent divi-
sions wrought by sight and speech.
Eyes Without a Face

This “void,” or “empty distance,” is figured, however, not only in Vincent’s “first-
person” vision or reflexive speech, but also when he is explicitly present on screen
and thus not constitutive of the picture. Throughout the film’s first sixty-two min-
utes of primarily subjective camera (the “Camera-I,” as it was called at the time),
we increasingly see Vincent in “third-person” – but, as mentioned earlier, at these
moments he is almost completely hidden, or turned away from us, or partially
obscured by shadow. Thus, but for the strange – and estranging – inserts of the
newspaper photos we cannot fully believe, we never see his face. In sum, even
figured in the “positive” space on screen, Vincent inhabits “negative space” and
thus hides in plain sight. Indeed, in another extraordinary sequence that is more
poignant than uncanny, Vincent becomes, as it were, the visible site (and sight) of
his own negative space and constitutive “blind spot.” The quite lengthy sequence
begins immediately after Vincent’s face-changing surgery and inaugurates his
(and the film’s) seeming release from any further expressions of subjective vision.
Thus, despite some ambiguous moments, for the rest of the film Vincent is visible
on screen not as a “first-person” subject but as an object of the camera’s “third-
person” gaze. However, even as he is brought out of the shadows and into the
light, Vincent remains an “invisible man.” His face is completely swathed in ban-
dages but for his beseeching eyes and silenced mouth. Indeed, whatever meager
material presence he now gains in visibility, he narratively loses by virtue of being,
by doctor’s order, told not to speak until his bandages come off. As he recovers in
the apartment of Irene Jansen, the woman who has rescued and helped him
throughout (and is played by Lauren Bacall), he is not only still withheld from
our vision but he is also deprived of his voice – and, most significantly, his “inner
76 vivian sobchack
speech.” In objective “third-person,” then, he is reduced to writing brief notes to
Irene or blinking his eyes to communicate with her.
And Vincent’s eyes – eyes without a face – overpower this sequence. Not only
are they (finally) revealed as Bogart’s eyes, but they are also unexpectedly moving
in their helpless dependency and beseeching silence. Indeed, they move us to yet
a different order of recognition and a different understanding of the subject and
subjectivity, particularly as it is constituted and witnessed not in its material exis-
tence but, more significantly, as an ethical relation to others. In this regard,
Emmanuel Levinas writes, in an apt description of a film sequence that, in all
likelihood, he had never seen: “The eyes break through the mask – the language
of the eyes, impossible to dissemble. The eye does not shine; it speaks.”21 That is,
with an expressiveness that would be somehow less revealing were we to see his
full face and hear his voice, Vincent’s eyes in this sequence speak most eloquently
– and abjectly – not only of his “self-effacement” but also of his “self-subjection”
to an “other.” If we follow Levinas, however, this is not a negative diminishment
of Vincent’s subjectivity but, rather, its positive constitution. As occurs for Vincent
throughout most of the film, for Levinas both subjectivity and ethical responsibil-
ity are produced in and through one’s subjection to an “other” in a “face-to-face”
encounter – in this moving sequence, Vincent, in his helplessness, to Irene and
she, in her care, to him. In an asymmetrical and irreducible relation of alterity, it
is another person’s absolute elusiveness that not only affirms one’s own but also
disallows any reductive presumption of “self-similarity” or “identification.” In-
deed, throughout Dark Passage, both Vincent and Irene maintain a respectful
“distance,” acknowledging each other’s alterity even as they become increasingly
more intimate. Subjectivity is born, then, in intersubjectivity, but it emerges not in
the reduction of the other’s “difference” to the “sameness” of what the “I” knows
and categorizes relative to its own existence. Rather, it is an ethically responsible
recognition of the other as always an “Other” – who, like Vincent on the run,
escapes and transcends full epistemological capture and containment.
“The Other Who Manifests Himself in a Face…”

In this regard, once his bandages are removed, Vincent emerges into a visibility
that is still ambiguous and escapes us even as we see it. His material presence
resists being taken “at face value” – even as it appears to deliver to us the familiar
“sameness” of Humphrey Bogart. Vincent’s face, then, retains much of its mys-
tery and will not cede itself or fully yield to the “third-person” camera’s mastering
gaze – or, for that matter, to Bogart’s star “image.” (We have, after all, looked
behind that image into the unexpected abjection of his eyes.) Indeed, given all of
Vincent’s off and on-screen guises (perhaps, better, “disguises”), what Levinas
writes of the face in general can be said of Vincent’s in particular: “The face is
present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense it cannot be comprehended,

that is, encompassed. It is neither seen nor touched.”22 Thus, when Irene re-
moves Vincent’s bandages and he emerges into full visibility and voice, both she
and he quizzically examine and comment upon his “new” face as a wonderment.
Having seen his pre-operative face, Irene now recognizes him quite literally as an
“other” – but, in doing so, she also acknowledges his subjectivity and presence as
transcendent of his manifest form. Indeed, in a passage that speaks beyond the
“congealed image” of the face as it is taken for granted and viewed as “known,”
Levinas writes: “The Other who manifests himself in a face as it were breaks
through his own plastic essence […]. His presence consists in divesting himself
of the form which does already manifest him.”23 In caring for and coming to love
Vincent no matter what he “looks” like, Irene “sees” beyond the material con-
tours – the superficial façade – of his face to the much deeper and ethically con-
stitutive relation of alterity between self and other that Levinas has privileged as
“faciality.”
Vincent’s presence, then, transcends his form – which, as Levinas suggests,
“incessantly betrays” the subject’s alterity, its “radical exteriority,” by being “ade-
quate to the same.”24 Throughout the course of this sequence as well as earlier
when he is off-screen but “in the picture,” both Irene, who rescues him, and the
film, that has refused to represent his face, affirm Vincent’s subjectivity and resist
reducing his “radical exteriority” to the merely visible. Certainly Daves’ use of
“first-person” camera quite literally “breaks through” not only Vincent’s but also
the cinema’s “plastic essence,” “divesting” both of their “congealed” form. How-
ever, the entire film engages its main character, both literally and figurally, in the
open, uncertain, and unresolved process of “becoming” other than who he was or
is. Thus, although Vincent escapes from prison so as to “figure out” who mur-
dered his wife, his primary project throughout the film is to literally “figure out”
himself. He does this not only in “first-person” but also in the face of others. In-
deed, following Levinas, Vincent’s “self” (however always provisional and “sub-
ject” to change) comes into full existence only in “face-to-face” encounters with
others. Dark Passage, then, is a film of, and about, faces – not only Vincent’s but
also those seen through his eyes in close-up. These are the faces that visibly
threaten or nurture him.
Facing the Other

Levinas’ own “focus” on “faciality” is, however, metaphorical, and, until late in
his work, he rejected vision as a reductive (and often violent) mode of mastery
over – rather than “subjection” to – an other’s “radical exteriority.” As Chloé
Taylor writes: “Since form betrays the other, for Levinas, the face of ethics is not
the face whose form we take in with our eyes.”25 Thus, while the philosopher’s
thought may be apposite to Vincent, whose face, off-screen or on, transcends its
form and “is present [only] in its refusal to be contained,” it would seem (at first
78 vivian sobchack
glance?) less relevant to the images of visible faces we see through Vincent’s eyes
in his “face-to-face” encounters. Indeed, understanding the “image” as simple
mimetic representation, Levinas rejects it insofar as it fixes and reduces the
other’s face to a mere aesthetic form rather than as an “opening” and “blind
spot” marked expressively by an always elusive and unfigurable subjectivity. The
face, he writes, “is not resplendent as a form clothing a content, as an image, but
as the nudity of the principle, behind which there is nothing further.”26 Faciality
is thus a conceptual principle: a foundational and ethical relation of radical alter-
ity between expressive subjects, whose “nudity” would be covered over by the
mere façade of the mimetic image.
As Marty Slaughter points out, however, “the very experience of alterity – ne-
cessarily connected with a body (and its drives) – brings forth its figuring.”27 In-
deed, Slaughter as well as other scholars such as Chloé Taylor and Philippe
Crignon argue that, “ultimately, what Levinas opposes is not the visual or the
image per se, but rather the image conceived solely as representation.”28 The
“face-to-face” encounter is one of proximity between “two vulnerabilities stripped
of form,” but these “vulnerabilities” are “neither incorporeal nor invisible, but
neither are they representations.”29 Rather, as Slaughter writes, such “contact in
proximity is a kind of figuration, like a trace,” which, as Crignon argues, does not
fix or “represent” but indicates instead “an absence that cannot be presented.”30
In fact, late in his life, Levinas suggested that “distortions and disfigurements” of
“realistic images” could “create an uncanny depth and interiority that oscillates
with the realistic exterior and suggests the unfigurability of what lies between the
two.”31 The philosopher’s explicit reference to the “distortion” of “realistic
images” thus brings us finally back, if in a roundabout way, to parallax, and also
to Žižek’s unfigurable “void” and “empty distance” that is the subject who is al-
ways elusively (dis)located in the chiasmic space between objectivity (given as the
“real”) and subjectivity (taken up as the “experienced”). Parallax and the distance
and “distortion” it installs is thus itself “redoubled” in the near convergence yet
destabilizing distance between Žižek and Levinas – both constituting the subject
in alterity, but the one focused on the space that connects but also divides the “I”
and “me” and the other on the space that connects and divides the “I” and the
“Other.” Nonetheless, both of these “empty” yet constitutive spaces are necessary
to the production of subjectivity. That is, not only is Vincent produced as a “sub-
ject,” both literally and figurally, through his reversible “oscillation” between
being both “in” and “out” of his own picture and between his reflexive distancing
of “I” from “me.” He is also produced as a subject, again both literally and figu-
rally, through an “oscillation” that “traces” the reversible distance between the
film’s “objective” or “realistic images” of others and his own “subjective” and
“distorting” “parallax view” of them – the latter thus “dis-figuring” the former in
their “close-up” proximity to him.

Indeed, each of Vincent’s subjective “face-to-face” encounters are, as Dana Po-
lan notes, “first registered visually as a kind of shock, as an intrusion into the
screen’s frame of an initially alien force.”32 Given Vincent’s situation, particularly
early on after his escape from prison, he is aware – and wary of – each encounter
with an “other” as potentially life-threatening, and the film’s “first-person” cam-
era and close-ups intensify both “the aggressiveness of the camera look and the
aggressiveness of the outside world against that look.”33 In sum, Vincent’s fugi-
tive status (ontological and narrative) disallows taking anyone for granted: for
him all looks, all faces, all others, are enigmatic and grounded in alterity. None-
theless, an outcast dispossessed of “himself,” Vincent is also explicitly aware that
his existence depends upon his “putting himself in the hands of others.” This
occurs literally as Vincent cinematically depends for his “first-person” presence
on the hands of others, but it also occurs figuratively and figurally throughout
the narrative. Thus, Polan writes of Vincent’s “face-to-face” encounters: “Interac-
tion becomes the point of a fundamental interplay of an anxiety and security that
pivot around each other.”34 Furthermore, the fundamental – and ethically
charged – “faciality” of this interplay co-constitutes and modifies not only who
Vincent is but also who he may become. As Levinas writes: “Contact is not an
openness upon being, but an exposure to being.”35 And, thus, as Crignon points
out, “what gives itself to be seen” in this “face-to-face” contact is not “exhausted
in representation”; rather, “as trace [and] figuration, it addresses itself to a sensi-
bility and susceptibility.”36
Initially, in the film’s “first-person” sequences, each of Vincent’s encounters
are subjectively disfigured by his fear of recognition and capture, by what Polan
describes as a “paranoid reversibility” in which the look loses its “confidence of
sight.”37 Baker, the man who first stops his car to offer Vincent a ride and later
returns (in “third-person”) to blackmail him, seems chatty at first. However, in
exaggerated close-ups that become too proximate for comfort, he begins to sense
Vincent’s “susceptibility,” fixing – and transfixing – him with an insistent gaze
and questions to which the escapee has no answer other than to insist he be let
out of the car, after which he knocks the man out and takes some of his clothing.
Vincent is then picked up by Irene Jansen, who appears out of nowhere and
seems to know who he is. Offering to hide him, Irene in close-up is held by
Vincent’s gaze at a cautious distance but is nonetheless softened by his need for
help and by her “sensibility,” this traced in her unthreatened and unthreatening
looks back at him. Later in the film, in a sequence primarily in “third-person,”
Vincent also encounters Sam, a cab driver, whom Vincent, hidden by shadows in
the car’s back seat, watches and reluctantly talks to, his own “first-person” gaze
briefly catching the cabbie’s eyes in the rearview mirror which, as Telotte notes,
“objectifies the menace that has previously attached to such exchanged
glances.”38 Sam, however, like Irene, is sympathetic and asks few questions, siz-
80 vivian sobchack
ing up Vincent as in need of help and giving it to him. When asked why, he
responds, “From faces I can tell a lot,” and later, “I study people’s faces.”
Subjection and Subjectivity

Irene and Sam thus both suggest, as Telotte puts it, “at least a possibility for
[Vincent’s] proper identification and a level on which the gaze need not be de-
fined by a nexus of fear and menace.”39 In an ethical relation of “faciality,” that
“proper identification” transcends superficial form to contemplate something
“unfigurable” – the face of the other in its expressive “nudity” as both an abject
cry for help and a demand for respect. It is thus not surprising that Sam has no
qualms about leading Vincent to a back-alley plastic surgeon to alter his appear-
ance – nor does Irene have any problem with Vincent’s assumption of a new
identity as “Alan Lynell.” In Vincent’s subjection to both Irene and Sam, in giving
himself over to their hands, his own subjectivity is, over time, modulated. Indeed,
as he comes to care for Irene, she shines in his vision – this, however, not in what
Levinas claimed was the “self-sufficiency” of the “beautiful image,” whose perfec-
tion ‘imposes silence without caring about anything else.’”40 Rather, the “perfec-
tion” of Irene’s objective aesthetic beauty is rendered through Vincent’s eyes in an
ethical disfigurement that ruptures its self-sufficiency without denying Irene’s al-
terity, and thus reveals her own calm call for Vincent’s recognition and care. It is
fitting, then, that the last scene of the film is precisely one of recognition. It is
unclear how much narrative time has passed, but Vincent, not able to clear his
name despite solving his wife’s murder, has fled to live with his other face and
different name in what will be “permanent exile” and “alienation” of a geo-
graphic kind. We see him sitting alone in a crowded nightclub in Peru, looking at
no one. Then familiar music begins to play and, in “third-person,” we see him
look up, his eyes changing in medium close-up from quizzical to loving as he
sees Irene, looking back at him from a distance. Indeed, in a shot that places her
in an ambiguous yet privileged space between Vincent’s “first” and the camera’s
“third-person,” she stands smiling and still in the crowd of dancers.
Dark Passage is, of course, a film noir, and is thus pervaded by anxiety, its
final “dream of totality,” as Polan writes, “a fragile, reversible, unstable one – a
vulnerability that is figured especially in film noir.”41 In this regard, it is worth
noting that there were a number of Hollywood noirs released in 1947 that em-
ployed subjective camera to varying degree. Distributed in January, the first, and
most notable among them for its sustained use of the “Camera I,” was Robert
Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake, made at MGM.42 Dark Passage appeared
in theaters eight months after that film, toward the end of a very brief “trend.” As
Telotte notes, “Thereafter the extended subjective narrative practically disap-
peared from film noir, “its sustained use seen by most reviewers and the public
first as an unconventional cinematic curiosity, but then as a distracting – and

disconcerting – “gimmick.”43 Forced “identification” with the protagonist’s vi-
sion was discomfiting and, paradoxically, alienated spectators. In this regard,
Lady in the Lake not only overshadowed but also undermined the accomplish-
ments of Dark Passage by making its viewers a promise it could not fulfill:
“YOU accept an invitation to a blonde’s apartment! YOU get socked in the jaw by
a murder suspect.”44
Indeed, unlike Dark Passage, both cinematically and narratively, Lady in
the Lake disallows the constitutive alterity that divides the self from others.
Thus, it is insistent on collapsing the ontological difference and absolute distance
not only between the spectator and private detective Philip Marlow but also be-
tween Marlowe and the narrative’s characters, who seem to have no other existen-
tial purpose than to affirm Marlowe’s presence, however invisible he is.45 Further-
more, the film disallows the constitutive alterity that would split Marlowe as a
subject. Whereas Vincent’s subjectivity is predominantly figured as unstable,
threatened, and often abject, Marlowe’s is rigidly “secured” and bounded. Despite
his primary existence in the “blind spot” of his own picture, Marlowe and the film
refuse to acknowledge his own “effacement” or that his subjective look divides
him from “himself.” Thus, however spectral his body, Marlowe’s commanding
(and commandeering) gaze and presence impose themselves on everything we
see, unlike Vincent who does not command – but is “subjected to” – the gaze of
others. Indeed, as Marlowe presumes mastery of the world and others, both
shrink in the containment of his sight. The fugitive Vincent, however, shrinks
from sight whether in “first” or “third-person,” and thus the world we see – and
not only through his eyes – encompasses him rather than the other way round.
Unlike Vincent, Marlowe also never reveals his thoughts to us or to the other
characters and, instead of “inner speech” that might reflexively split his subjectiv-
ity in two, he serves in the film’s few “third-person” sequences as the self-presen-
tational and public “narrator” of a tale to which he already knows the ending.
In sum, Marlowe as a subject seems less human than Vincent – this because of
his unquestioning and fixed “self-possession” and narrative agency whether in or
out of the picture. Secure in “who” he “is” rather than engaged in the open un-
certainty of “becoming” in the face of others, Marlowe seems narratively and ci-
nematically limited and his “subjectivity” one-dimensional: all he does is “figure
out” a murder and is never engaged in “figuring out” himself. In this regard,
Pascal Bonitzer has written that the use of subjective camera is disjunctive for the
film spectator not only because the character whose vision we are asked to as-
sume resides in a “blind spot” that is not our own, but also because “it can only
make enigmatic a character who, in the story, is not enigmatic.”46 Marlowe is
definitely “not enigmatic.” What you see is all that you get. Lacking subjective
dimension and complexity, lacking any transcendent qualities that might mark
his elusiveness as an “other” to himself or might subjectively figure others as
elusive to him, Marlowe is produced literally as an “empty void” – disguised by
82 vivian sobchack
the façade of human subjectivity rather than revealing the elusive expressivity of
its face. Indeed, we cannot “identify” with Marlowe’s “first-person” because it is
always, as Levinas might say, a “manifestation of the same” and rigidly refuses
the destabilizing self-alienation and alterity that produces human subjectivity
from objective and ontic “material existence.”
Vincent, however, is from the first enigmatic, and to the end not only self-alie-
nated but also aware of the alterity of others. His subjectivity always in flux, al-
ways uncertain in its relation to others, and thus always in the “third-person”
world as well as in and out of his own picture, Vincent traces and figures his own
dimension and complexity as well as that of others. Through his – and the film’s
– insistence on self-alienation and alterity, we see beyond the façade of self-simi-
larity and a reductive “identification” with the other as an affirmation of subjec-
tivity (whether cinematic or otherwise). Rather, subjectivity as figured in Dark
Passage is affirmed more expansively – in a dialectic of alterity between “first”
and “third” person, between “interiority” and “exteriority,” and between “self”
and “other” in an ethical relation that recognizes their convergence but refuses
their conflation. Unlike Lady in the Lake, the film thus encourages us to feel
for Vincent, but not as him.
Cinematically, Dark Passage may seem less radically “experimental” than
Lady in the Lake which, but for its beginning, two intercalated sequences,
and its ending, maintains the subjective camera throughout. Nonetheless, Dark
Passage actually surpasses Lady in the Lake’s quite literally “grounded” and
thus limited figural project of, to quote Daves’ document, “the camera acting as a
person.” Indeed, while Daves’ document focuses on the challenges that arise
when the subjective camera pretends to the perception and expression of a hu-
man “lived-body,” the film itself “bears witness” to the more philosophical ques-
tions posed by attempting to figure subjectivity’s “material existence” as also
transcendent. Indeed, its narrative complementing its cinematic dialectic of
“first” and “third” person, Dark Passage offers an extraordinarily rich and com-
plex text through which to explore the production of (cinematic) subjectivity as
necessarily both immanent and transcendent, visible and invisible, divided and
self-distanced – and ever engaged in an ongoing process of “becoming” in the
face of others.

From Aesthetic Experience to the Loss
of Identity, in Three Steps
Pere Salabert
The central theme of this paper is subjectivity, to the extent that it becomes
étrangement, associated, in turn, with uncanny experiences (Unheimlich), which are
close to derealization, and thus to depersonalization in its various degrees. This
entails loss of identity, which leads to the “Double” in literature, and especially in
the cinema.
Subjectivity
Because subjectivity is closely related to the subject, which in turn, philosophically
speaking, is the individual – an ego, or self, in its relation with an outer world that
becomes his world, that is, his object – the term subjectivity designates the sub-
ject itself “in everything that constitutes his being in himself and for himself, in
his natural disposition, aptitudes, feeling, wanting, thinking, melancholy, love,
suffering and faith.”1 In short, subjectivity is the subject’s inner world. We should
not expect it to be a faithful reflection of the outer world, that is a naive viewpoint
foreseeing a more objective thought that leads to Kant’s criticism, which paved
the way for a study such as the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms by Ernst Cassirer. Ac-
cording to Cassirer, the way to cross over into the outer world and thereby mak-
ing it, in the same act, an inner world, can be shared by communicating with
others. As this world can be constituted in many ways, the number of its features
can be considered infinite. We must recognize, then, how reasonable the Freu-
dian proposal related to pleasure and reality,2 two basic principles that involve
human repression as a corollary, actually is. To be civilized (which means accept-
ing the principle of living under the “reality principle,” in Freudian terms, that is
to say, a rule-governed society), means that each individual is required to repress,
starting from childhood, a great part of the earliest impulses, inclinations or de-
sires, the satisfaction of which would embody the “pleasure principle.” But far
from disappearing, the repressed material does not vanish, it remains latent, still
pending as in a reserve, and may be projected at any time by various means:
dreams that occur when one is asleep or awake, and creative activities such as
art, or literature. According to Freud: “The unconscious, or repressed, does not
tend itself to anything but a path into the consciousness or to find an open way
85
through the real act, overcoming the constraint to which it is subjected.”3 Some-
times, unable to find a way out, elements of this unconscious realm give rise to
unexpected neurosis. In such cases, a wide variety of imbalances work to reveal
those elements through attitudes, actions or verbal expressions that seem to come
from an unreal world such as dreams.
Depersonalization: Uncanny Experience

In the present study, I propose that in a number of experiences the affective state
of individuals suffers from hypothetical, imaginary threats to the fundamental
structure of their inner-outer world. The consequence can be described as a
weakening of self-identity, accompanied by a feeling of unreality, let us say a con-
sciousness of “not being here” or depersonalization, a warning sign that accord-
ing to its features and intensity can last from a few seconds to several years. In
such a situation an experience takes place which may be closely related to the
aesthetic field of “painful pleasure” which Freud characterized as the Unheimlich:
uncanny, strange or adverse, a bad omen. Inasmuch as the individual is unable to
recognize things around him, or feels that his own words, when he is speaking,
come to him from another speaking subject or as a strange voice coming from
somewhere else, this experience of anguish may be considered uncanny.4 In his
essay on the uncanny from 1919,5 Freud quotes Schelling: “We call Unheimlich
everything that should have been left […] hidden, secret […] and [which] has
come to light.”6 But in attempting to understand uncanny things, Freud thor-
oughly examines the distressing sensations to really get at the heart of them, and
finds that the word Unheimlich has different meanings. Some of those may coin-
cide with its antonym Heimlich, a word that on the one hand denotes a well-
known, familiar thing, while on the other it evokes something hidden, secret...
So, opposite to the first meaning, Unheimlich seems to agree with the second:
something unknown, hidden, that lingers and grows to manifest itself.
We should look at the various observations and reports on experiences of this
kind, just to be able to realize that depersonalization, which in many cases in-
volves an uncanny experience as well as mental disorders, can coincide with de-
realization connecting the two.
The philosopher and writer Jean-Paul (Richter) gives us some literary images of
depersonalization, particularly in two of his novels, one of which is Siebenkäs, and
the other is Titan. Otto Rank reminds us in his essay on Der Doppelgänger that
Siebenkäs “has expressed in a very symbolic way, even in the name of his hero prey
of the Double – ‘Leib-Geber’, someone who can detach from his body – all this
penchant to depersonalize.”7 Is there a real connection between the inclination to
be (or become) a prey of the Double and the depersonalization experience? The
answer is affirmative. When we think about this Leibgeber character, and his fear of
looking at himself in the mirror, the same way that Albano, in Titan, is terrified of
86 pere salabert
seeing the image of his own body, we enter a kind of wide world – real or fictional
– a broad domain of psychopathologies on a scale of varying intensities. Many
authors have written on this figure of the Double, and in so doing they linked
anguish to depersonalization. I refer, for example, to Hoffmann, Dostoyevsky,
Miguel de Unamuno (El Otro), Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray) and Guy de
Maupassant (Le Horla, Pierre et Jean) among others.
What concerns us here is not exactly the figure of the Double (or the Other),
but some of those pathologies in which anguish related to unfamiliar things is
accompanied by a feeling that the individual is out of place (not being here). In
The Double, by Dostoyevsky, the central character, Mr. Golyadkin, has experienced
a series of emotions and physical reactions: astonishment, fear, deep anxiety,
trembling knees, weakness, before becoming lucid enough to acknowledge that
“His nocturnal visitor was other than himself – Mr. Golyadkin himself, another
Mr. Golyadkin, but absolutely the same as himself – in fact, what is called a dou-
ble in every respect.”8 Here, terror goes along with shame at the moment that
“reality speaks about itself” opening the way to “something abnormal, senseless,
incongruous.” He is not dreaming, but nevertheless something “unheard, un-
seen” (jamais vu) happens, because “anguish suffocates him, tortures him.” A
“strange anguish” will not set him free.9 The more Golyadkin becomes conscious
of the physical reality of his Double, the more he feels himself unable to under-
stand. At last:
Mr. Golyadkin junior destroyed the whole triumph and glory of Mr. Golyadkin
senior, eclipsed Mr. Golyadkin senior, trampled him in the mud, and, at last,
proved clearly that Golyadkin senior – that is, the genuine one – was not the
genuine one at all but the sham, and that he, Golyadkin junior, was the real
one; that, in fact, Golyadkin senior was not at all what he appeared to be, but
something very disgraceful, and that consequently he had no right to mix in
the society of honourable and well-bred people.10
Depersonalization, to a variable extent, takes place as a result of a decline and

perhaps the ruin of identity. In the story by Dostoyevsky, this occurs through a
Double that can multiply itself and even become a long series of “young Golyad-
kins.” In such a case, the uncanny experience is proof that Mr. Golyadkin himself
– the previous or “original” one – has become someone who occupies, what we
may consider to be, “nobody space.”
We find something similar in the novel Pierre et Jean by Maupassant, a story that
revolves around two brothers, one of whom appears to be a reflection of the
other; more than that, each one feels his “other” rising inside of him. And in the
short story Lui, like in Le Horla, Maupassant confronts a subject with itself, which
means a speaking shadow, a ghost that is, in short, a quasi-presence of the Dou-
ble that causes the subject to lose control over its own identity. Thus, while in Le
from aesthetic experience to the loss of identity, in three steps 87

Horla there is no actual presence, but merely a voice whose sole responsibility is to
say “I,” in the short story Lui the presence is unavoidable, although it does not
exist: “he does not put himself on view […]. But he is still in my thoughts. He
remains invisible, but he is there anyhow.”11 The paranoid way of thinking in a
depersonalization process may bring reason to paradox: “[…] but then I feel him
behind me. I turn, though, sure that I shall not see him, that I shall never see him
again. But he is nonetheless behind me, again […]. I can’t do anything about it.
But if we were both at home, I feel, yes, I certainly feel that he wouldn’t be here
anymore! For he is there because I’m alone, just because I’m alone!”12
I would like to consider now some of these degrees of decline before identity
reaches its lowest level in the depersonalization process, an event whose expres-
sion does not progress equally in all cases. To this end I intend to follow three
different approaches, that is, phases or intensities.
Catching the World in a Momentary Flash of Light

The film The Night of the Iguana (1964),13 directed by John Huston and
based on the play by Tennessee Williams, provides us with an aesthetic event on
the occasion of a poem recited by its author. I mean aesthetic here in the stron-
gest sense of the word, when it includes an unusual but effective experience for
all those who stand there listening to the sound of the words. The effect of this is
a kind of mild, and sometimes significant, shock to the consciousness – of course
one’s own personality also plays its part. According to my aim in this paper, I
consider that scene the most relevant one in the film. The function of the rest of
the story is to prepare the audience for this scene. The film is set “in a rather
rustic and very Bohemian hotel”14 on the coast of Mexico. The main characters
are the proprietor of the hotel, Maxine Faulk (Ava Gardner), and Reverend Shan-
non (Richard Burton), a defrocked pastor who is working as a tourist guide.
Among the group of women for whom he is responsible – a busload of school-
teachers – there is a young girl, Charlotte (Sue Lyon), who tries to seduce him. To
this pair of Mrs. Faulk and her friend Shannon, another couple is added, even
more unique, consisting of Hannah (Deborah Kerr), a woman between thirty and
forty years old, and her elderly grandfather, Nonno (Cyril Delevanti), who is con-
fined to a wheelchair and needs his granddaughter to look after him. Hannah is a
cartoonist and Nonno a poet. They travel around the world and live off people
who take pity on them in hotels, where she draws portraits of the hotel guests
and he recites his poems.
Now, what is the connection between these main characters? One gets the feel-
ing that it is probably something that is both important and trivial at the same
time: none of them seem to have their own place in the world. Except for the
women’s group, who are annoyed, even furious at their guide, the Reverend
Shannon, because he changed their travel itinerary, each of these individuals is
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Film still from John Huston’s The Night of the Iguana (1964).
looking for something that they cannot identify. Not even the girl, Charlotte, has
any clue as to why she is trying to seduce Shannon, an adult male who is very
receptive to female beauty. But at least she obeys her recently acquired sexual
instinct. At any rate, an instinct like that of a teenager always leads to something
needed, while the adults in this story appear to be looking for something they
have lost, something unknown that they try to rescue in vain. This air of hope-
lessness that fills the room and distinguishes each character as a blurry figure
with no place to go, lies at the heart of the film. The widow Mrs. Faulk, the care-
taker Hannah, the defrocked priest Shannon; they all show signs of this indeci-
siveness and hopelessness, Shannon is even described as, “a young man who was
cracked up before and is going to crack up again – perhaps repeatedly.” Only one
individual knows what he wants, what he is looking for: the 90-year-old poet,
Hannah’s grandfather. He wants to finally complete a poem that he began a long
time ago, a poem that lingers in his mind but which he cannot seem to remem-
ber. His struggle to achieve his final goal becomes increasingly imperative as the
action continues. In spite of this fact, there is a moment the old man calls his
granddaughter and tells her to get ready to write, because he has now found all
the words that he needs to finish his last poem. Here, Mrs. Faulk and Shannon
pay, so to speak, absent-minded attention, while the poet starts his recitation and
Hannah writes, standing up. The sun has already set and the old man is in his
wheelchair, with his back to his audience, looking at the evening sky; he begins –
“in a loud, exalted voice” – for the whole of nature in its entirety:

How calmly does the orange branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.
Sometime while night obscures the tree

The zenith of its life will be
Gone past forever, and from thence
A second history will commence.
A chronicle no longer gold,

A bargaining with mist and mould,
And finally the broken stem
The plummeting to earth; and then
An intercourse not well designed

For beings of a golden kind
Whose native green must arch above
The earth’s obscene, corrupting love.
And still the ripe fruit and the branch

Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.
O Courage, could you not as well

Select a second place to dwell,
Not only in that golden tree
But in the frightened heart of me?
While the voice resounds powerfully in the air, the poem goes on and Hannah
writes, and Mrs. Faulk and Shannon pay increasingly more attention; we might
even say that, seduced by the power of the words, their bodies are attracted to
each other, autonomously. Huston’s work here increases the intensity already
contained in Tennessee Williams’ lines with a clear result: he multiplies the sig-
nificance of the scene and its possible consequences.
At the end of the poem, Nonno asks his granddaughter a question: he wants to
settle his principal, probably unique, worry: “Have you got it?… – Yes!… Every
word of it. – It is finished? – Yes. – Oh! God! Finally finished… After waiting so
long… – Yes, we waited so long. – And it is good? – Beautiful, Grandfather!” Mak-
ing sure that everything is in place, Huston lets Nonno remain where he was,15
opposite the night, while Maxine Faulk and Shannon, speechless, stay watching
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his back, this old man in his wheelchair as if they had just discovered him now,
for the first time. In the meantime, the hand of the old man slips from the arm of
his chair, and the cane on which it rested drops to the floor.
I have already mentioned that John Huston makes this scene in the film more
intense, deeper, than Tennessee Williams does in his play – in spite of his annota-
tion, thus: “it is apparent that the night’s progress has mellowed her spirit: her [Maxine’s]
face wears a faint smile which is suggestive of those cool, impersonal, all-comprehending
smiles on the carved heads of Egyptian or Oriental deities.”16 In fact, something has hap-
pened, something for which they cannot offer a reasonable explanation. Some-
thing has changed that cannot be plainly described. Just one thing is clear: Non-
no’s poem is finished, so Nonno is dead.
At this moment, there are still three people without a place in the world. The
following day, early in the morning, there will be some suggestions, some plans.
But none of them look as if they know what to do next, where they want to go.
Now, it seems they are just looking for a way out. It has been an aesthetic experi-
ence in the very sense of the expression. As if time had stopped its course for a
few seconds, the three prominent characters seem to have lost their self-con-
sciousness in that moment, only to recover it, the day after. In a sense they recov-
ered their lucidity, restored their identity – like catching the world in a momentary
flash of light.
Let me say that this experience is close to what Charles S. Peirce describes in
his phenomenology under the name of “Firstness,” that is to say, the realm of a
monadic quality or a may-being. Moreover, as this scene can be seen as a part of
the Peircean triadic structure for the sign, it must be considered as a possibility
sign, so it is a first Representamen. For a brief time, during this Firstness stage,
there occurs what Peirce calls Presentness. This means there are no thoughts, just a
sensation of immediacy.17 This means, too, that the action has produced, because
of its nature, a kind of crack in the mental space, or Thirdness. At long last, in the
Firstness stage, nothing is real yet, everything is in a state of latent possibility.
There is something poetic in Peircean possibility, and people will be inspired by
it depending on how emotional they allow themselves to feel.18 According to this
film, we may call this the “threshold,” a point between possibility and reality – or
presentness and representation.
Fetishism or “Partial Love” with Loss of Reality

Él (Him, 1953), the film by Luis Buñuel, could well be a model for a paranoid
depersonalization. If we examine both instances, the aesthetic event in The
Night of the Iguana, which is nothing but a brief loss of clear conscious-
ness, and Francisco Galvan’s (Arturo de Córdova) trouble in the film by Buñuel,
we should consider what happens here as a real occurrence. I mean that Francis-
co’s unsteady identity is related to an effective mental disorder, a psychopathology

that, just as it takes root in strong jealousy, ejects him from his usual everyday
life.
Thus what is going on, from a phenomenological viewpoint, should be called a
real effectiveness, no longer a possibility, or may-being, but quite a reality. In
Peirce’s terms: a dyad is “an act of arbitrary will or a blind force. [...] The dyad is
an individual fact, as it existentially is […]. The being of a monadic quality [i.e.
presentness] is mere potentiality, without existence. Existence is purely dyadic.”19
And: “it is to be noted that existence is an affair of blind force.”20 Let us retain
this: pure dyadism is an arbitrary will, a blind force – not a thought. Well, in the
story that concerns us, the psychopathology of Francisco is a mental disorder
related to a megalomania founded on a rough jealousy that guides him far away
from the ordinary world. Of course, I speak here about real effectiveness to the
extent that his mental illness is not a momentary bother, a disruption of his train
of thought, which was the case in The Night of the Iguana, but a kind of
effective, or real, circumstance, that retains Francisco in another world.
Let us, for a moment, pay attention to the beginning of the film and we shall
see that there is an aesthetic feature there as well. One day, as Francisco is attend-
ing a church service on Holy Thursday, he sees a pair of well-shoed feet that
belong to a woman; these feet are placed side by side in such a way that they
seem to be an astonishing sign of an almost modest wisdom. Then, after a slight
gesture of surprise mixed with curiosity, a brief reflection drives him to a resolu-
tion: he will marry the unknown woman, he must marry her. So he starts sedu-
cing the woman, Gloria Milalta (Delia Garcés), in spite of the fact that she is the
bride of his best friend, of which he is fully aware.
So, from the beginning it becomes clear that Francisco is likely to be a fetishist
who takes the woman’s feet as his partial object, which is to say, as a starting
device for a love that is projected, hypothetically, to the whole object: Gloria. For
a fetishist, the other person is often nothing but an accidental appendage of a
special part of the body that holds an irresistible attraction for him.21 That is
what defines a paranoid personality. This element, I mean the woman’s feet, be-
comes a persistent idea, an obsession that will lead the man to imagine that his
woman is being unfaithful, and thus leads to conceive of an infidelity that justifies
several episodes of jealousy. For Francisco all this will be the origin of a woman’s
loss of value, and consequently a contempt that will lead him to attempt an act of
madness just to recover peace. However, Francisco Galvan does not necessarily
feel himself haunted by his obsession at all times. He is frequently conscious of
its power, or knows how far he is coerced in his beliefs, opinions, and even in his
actions, throughout his daily existence.
What happens to Francisco in Buñuel’s movie can be compared to what hap-
pens to Paul Prieur (François Cluzet) in Claude Chabrol’s L’Enfer (1994),22
though Paul’s affliction should be considered as another version of such a mental
disturbance. Even though Francisco Galvan’s behavior is often led by his idea that
92 pere salabert
motivates his encouragement – the obsession is a driving force and an aim in
itself – he does not react to reality. While Paul’s behavior in Chabrol’s film takes
him progressively away from reality, the force of Francisco’s obsession does not
seize him at any particular moment; we could say he is frequently under its influ-
ence, but discontinuously. So, his personality, distorted, seems double: one side
seems normal enough but the other side is definitely abnormal, which makes him
behave unfairly, and violently. As Foucault describes in Maladie mentale et Psycholo-
gie, when an individual loses control of his “symbolic universe,” words and ges-
tures are no more in a “common domain” of knowledge where intentions of peo-
ple can be seen and understood.23 Here, the individual world becomes an
environment of possible significances that turns into a composite of self-valid
things that he is able to read (or to see) according to his obsession that serves as
a background where everything becomes clear. For example, one day as Francisco
and Gloria are in a restaurant, she looks carelessly in one direction. He wrongly
interprets this as her way of flirting with a man seated at the other table.
In the film the woman’s feet function as a true fetish, a talisman responsible
for pacifying her husband, for making him calm, and it works on two particular
occasions, before his mental disturbance takes him too far away from reality. The
first time is in the church, and the second time is when they are at home quarrel-
ing, which stops the moment he catches a glimpse of his “partial object” – Glor-
ia’s feet – and he suddenly becomes gentle and devoted to her. Why do they quar-
rel? Is it nothing but jealousy? The story of the couple takes place between two
opposite points. One has a metonymic nature in the form of a suggestive object
(the woman’s feet: a fractional love), the other is a chain of unreasonable meta-
phors – except if we admit that Francisco has nothing but a mental disease that
makes him more and more foolishly suspicious of rivals, and so it is: a progres-
sively weaker personality. So, if the first point was the view of the properly shod
feet making him fall in love and marry the woman, a part of the object, the feet,
guides the man to the entire object, the woman. Later on, when married, and
things go wrong, a casual look at the woman’s feet returns Francisco, for a while
at least, to correct behavior.
Francisco’s jealousy becomes extremely violent. Though in psychology it is
generally admitted that the best way to attain some mental normality, which
means some individual aptitude to objectify the world around you, is being able
to recognize that not all our thoughts are valid, and that not all our wishes can be
fulfilled. Here, Buñuel displays this lack of normalcy very well, by showing to
what extent Francisco suffers from a paranoid disturbance that makes him feel
powerful, and makes him believe that his will and all his thoughts, acts (order
and beauty, moral purity, truthfulness, highest integrity) are correct. It is almost
as if Francisco thinks he is so much better than other people who scarcely deserve
any value in his opinion.

We know that a paranoid character projects his thoughts and wishes onto the
outside world.24 But as Francisco Galvan feels that he is the victim of an unfaith-
ful wife, fully aware that his marriage is not as successful and controlled as he
needs it to be, his life becomes a real torture. His erroneous beliefs, so much like
his wrong thoughts, are projected onto the world with the result that his mental
health deteriorates. Or conversely, let us say that his thoughts and wishes do not
make the outside world a cozy place; on the contrary, it turns his world into a
disturbing, uncanny site that works as a solvent for his integrity. Fear and appre-
hensions betray him every time people around him laugh, thinking that they
laugh at his expense.
As a contradictory presence, just as loved as she is hated, found and lost, well-
known and uncanny simultaneously, Gloria soon becomes a depersonalized body
in need of protection from being sexually invaded or assaulted. One night, while
she is sleeping in her bed, Francisco collects a pair of scissors, a needle, sewing
thread and a rope to tie her up. He intends to sew up Gloria’s vagina, to prevent
her from having any more illegal sexual intercourse. That way order, moral purity,
and her highest integrity, will be protected. But the moment Gloria awakes and
thus avoids this gruesome fate, the environment starts to become an unfamiliar
place to her, a strange world.25
In such a situation, reality is effectively lost; the everyday environment be-
comes, for both, a phantasmagoria. The domestic interior in which the couple
had been living changes from a happy architectural decoration to an uncanny
scene: this is a nest of shadows in which Francisco feels himself aimless, and his
way of moving in zigzag motion reminds us of an animal in a cage.
Divorced, his mental disease makes him enter a religious community – a sig-
nificant detail, coming from Buñuel – outside this world.
Hopeless, Francisco is unable to think rationally about himself and his unfor-
tunate love; he cannot stop the hallucinations about his unfaithful wife. So, here
the Peircean phenomenological triad makes itself known in the form of Second-
ness, I mean a real effectiveness derived from the Firstness we found at the begin-
ning of the film with an aesthetic event related to the Freudian “scopic compul-
sion” (“pulsion de voir”): an imaginative sight of the beautiful, pure, honest feet of
Gloria in a religious ceremony. But, unfortunately, once developed, paranoia re-
mains, this time settled in the Secondness level. From a phenomenological point
of view, Francisco’s development finally leads him, with his insanity, into a pit of
subjectivity, a stranger to the outer world. It appears that a fracture occurred in
his way of reasoning towards a stage of completion in the Peircean emotional
Thirdness, a stage in which the first experience – the aesthetic vision in the
church – should have been consciously assumed through the Secondness stage
of reality, in order to attain an effective and shared love. But by failing to reach
the higher level of an emotional consciousness, Francisco’s love – with his partial
94 pere salabert
object – remains in a phase of uneven reality, a state of incompleteness, without a
human accomplishment.
Transfer, from Anywhere to Nowhere. A Man in the Backseat of

Reality
Paranoia is not unavoidably divorced from logical reasoning, merely from a com-
mon sense related to daily reality. Now, imagine an individual like Francisco Gal-
van who retains a regular level of realism – say a common sense – but who is
living in an unreal, albeit credible, world in which the way that things go by
makes him feel as if he lives in an alien world: no real emotions, nor authentic
suffering, a routine life lived by another person that is not him. This is very simi-
lar to the circumstance of the main character in the Jim Jarmusch film Dead
Man26 (1995), a motivating and disturbing story that definitely gives us food for
thought. Let us call the main event psychic transfer, or spiritual relocation, the
name does not matter much. I am referring to the event that takes William Blake
(Johnny Depp) away from the bounds of his own identity, and retains him in a
sort of altered state of consciousness, which is the anteroom to his own death. He
lives in this mental space, accepting everything that happens around him, appar-
ently adapted to the circumstances, that is to say: keeping his life as a normalized
abnormality.
Film still from Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995).
A cognitive semiotic point of view should identify here, in Peircean terms, a real,
factual Thirdness. That is, as Thirdness is a three-interpretant structure, Blake is
no longer in its first, or emotional stage, but in the second stage of action and

effectiveness. In other words, if, as Peirce says, “we live in two worlds, a world of
fact and a world of fancy,”27 then Blake lives in the second, the world of fancy, as
if it was the first, the world of fact.
So the film has three basic moments: first there is the moment Blake arrives in
the surprising and unexpected environment of Machine, a rough and unfamiliar
town in western America, where a factory job awaits him; second, there is the
moment of the effective, realistic time, that occurs twice in the film: when he
realizes that the job is no longer available for him and he is cruelly rejected, and
when he kills a man in self-defense trying to protect a woman from getting hurt.
The third moment, the longest, most valuable and conclusive one, starts when
William Blake is joined by a fancy Native American called Nobody, whom he be-
friends. This Native American is under the impression that Blake actually is the
well-known poet and painter whose name he bears. In Dead Man, Nobody ap-
pears as Blake’s fate that takes him along a journey from fake poet to wanted
killer.
Here there is no Peircean “possibility,” or First (emotional-cognitive) stage, as
we found in Huston’s scene of The Night of the Iguana, nor is there a rough
reality, effective action, or Second stage, as we found in Buñuel’s Él, but a sort of
concluding alliance of these two previous stages in the Thirdness, or three-inter-
pretant stage. I want to suggest that in this case William Blake’s mind is no long-
er in the emotional first stage (this was on the train to Machine, perhaps even
when thwarted in the factory), nor yet in the logical, conclusive third stage, but at
an interface between the two. That is to say that William maintains a sort of men-
tal content – say an idea or group of ideas – without any enhancement towards a
full-grown phase where self-consciousness should make the so-called train of
thought achievable.
If this is believable, it appears that the main character becomes, because of his
name, a kind of double, or doppelgänger, of William Blake, the English poet and
painter, a man from whom we might argue that he arose as an artist as one whose
life is submerged in a dream, I mean into a sort of unreal world, albeit aestheti-
cally effective because of his art, which represents it. Probably because the film
depicts this world (that of the English poet and his namesake) in a two-faced
mode, one reality too harsh, and the other idyllic and dumb, Blake feels himself
able to conform to it, either because he lives as if he were in a kind of trance or
hypnotic state, or because he has come round to accepting things from the first to
the second part, where he lives a dream of freedom without any restriction, a
dream of nonexistent friendship (Nobody is his friend and guide) with an ac-
quiescence that obeys only the primary impulses for survival.
Finally, these three stages are the whole human life in a triad development that
can be examined – and surely understood – in the same terms we would use to
consider a classical Greek tragedy. From an origin that could be located anywhere
(Cleveland, Ohio, for William Blake) to nowhere (a boat-uterus sliding on the
96 pere salabert
water-amniotic fluid), life is a circular trip from nothing to nothing. Just as Oedi-
pus, Blake also kills to defend his life, and all that a man needs is an imaginary
companionship, Nobody, to reach his destination alone, as he began his journey.
At this point, we find out that the train scene at the beginning of the film, as
well as the rough environment of the city of Machine, and the second part to-
wards the end – in short, Blake’s journey as a whole – is part of a metaphor of
life and may have several meanings depending on how we understand it. The film
is a work of art and there are many reasons to believe, even if they cannot be
developed in detail, that the counter-poet and painter, I mean this double charac-
ter, does not feel himself to be in an unfamiliar environment. My viewpoint is that
he does not take the world around him as an unreal world. I agree with C.G.
Jung28 that the other side of conscious – or intentional – subjectivism is the objec-
tive unconsciousness given that its manifestations are especially uncontainable
feelings, emotions, impulses or dreams that finally come together. Once he has
admitted that none of this is produced intentionally, the individual receives the
objective perception that all this simply occurs and takes hold of him. So, the
experience that Blake is not allowed is the uncanny one (Unheimlich): the film
itself, the story as it unfolds, becomes to a certain extent an uncanny feeling for
the spectator, who may really be disorientated. If William himself does not appear
to be lost, confused, that is because his relationship to Nobody leads us to believe
that things are going the same way as they do between psychologist and patient
when the latter fully accepts the company of the former in his walk through life,
magnifying subjectivity and discarding any critical reference of responsibility.29
William Blake, the unemployed clerk whom Nobody, his friend, mistakes for
his admired eighteenth-century poet-painter, neglects everything: he does not
care what happens to him nor what happens around him. Moreover, as he learns
more about the world as the days pass, the world itself is tumbling down on him,
in a devastating way, so he no longer needs to think about anything: it is enough
to sit back and let the world go by. No feelings, emotions, no sentiments making
him aware, conscious, just reactions (i.e. anxiety when Nobody vanishes for a
while), opposing actions to circumstances of possible danger. Could his personal
subjectivity then perhaps be considered as a kind of objectivity? I am inclined to
say yes.
Conclusion
In summary, I argue that the films I have examined provide us with three cases of
subjectivity with varying degrees of strength. The first relates to an aesthetic
event, the second relates to a mental disorder involving obsessive jealousy, and
the third, so complicated and ambiguous as a dream, belongs to personal subjec-
tivity. We can consider this an objective state, albeit strange to reality, and thus
with such characteristics that its familiarity for the individual in the film is con-

stantly canceled out in the spectator’s eyes. The first event, a “maybe” in Peirce’s
terminology, produces a kind of break, which means an episode of discontinuity
in the consciousness of the main characters, which induces a thoughtful modifi-
cation in their behavior, so that they will be able to make real decisions about
their life. Once that decision is made, or the individual becomes aware of (or
believes in) what he needs and wants in life, then another phase is attained –
Peircean “reality” in its strongest manifestation. In spite of our example of a sub-
jective reality distorted by the severe mental disorder of the main character – Bu-
ñuel’s Francisco Galvan – the next step takes us onto a difficult but possible path:
to a conclusive but unfinished phase in Dead Man. I say unfinished because
there is no conclusion, here nothing reaches an end: death is a continuation of
life just as life is an anticipation of death. In the meantime, human life, between
these two extremes which are impossible to separate, is an undecipherable fan-
tasy.
Dead Man in its entirety seems to be an analogous experience to the one that
Maxine, the Reverend, and perhaps Hannah, have through the recitation of the
old poet in The Night of the Iguana, a performance that adequately fits
Peirce’s first level for the sign (Firstness). Meanwhile, Buñuel’s film, Él, as a
whole should come to the second level (Secondness) of reality from the first
(Firstness) with the woman’s feet at the beginning in the church: a random sight
in which Francisco finds such a large dose of pure beauty and harmony, which
transforms him30 by its powerful attraction...
98 pere salabert
Robert Bresson and the Voices of an
Inner World: “I” Can Never Be “You,” or
the Impossible Identification
Céline Scemama
Introduction
Because the cinema is an art form that succeeds so well in exploring the various
aspects of the outside world, it has very quickly found its own ways of expressing
the inner world as well. But when it comes to analyzing its resources, it seems
that film theory has attached more importance to images than sounds, and even
less so to voices. Whereas such filmmakers and early cinema theoreticians as
Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Poudovkine and Grigori Alexandrov have, with the
advent of talking movies,1 theorized the relationships between sounds and
images, other artists and thinkers such as Walter Ruttman, Charlie Chaplin, Béla
Balázs and Roman Jakobson have been considering sounds – and even dialogues,
in Balázs’ case – as raw material per se for making a film. But these contributions,
rich though they may be, do not really take into consideration the contents of
what is being said along with the moving images, and how it is said – which is
quite normal at this early stage of talking pictures. Maybe an ancient state of
antagonism with the theater also explains why it was – and to some extent still is
– generally considered almost a shame to pay too much attention to such things
as dialogues, different tones of voice and kinds of diction, and even actors’ per-
formances. However, a director’s framing choices were considered as really per-
taining to the art of filmmaking, along with the kind of directions he gave his
actors about the way they moved, stared or talked.
Later on, many authors examined with great acuteness the different kinds of
sounds in films, as well as the various effects they produced on the pictures and
narrative. The substantial publications of Michel Chion are almost entirely given
over to the study of sound in films, and provide an outstanding glossary referring
to countless different situations in many different films.
It nevertheless remains true that:
[G]enerally speaking, cinema is above all associated with images. However,

the photogrammatic process only represents one of ‘the five materials of cine-
99
matographic expression’, besides voices, noises, text and music. Within the
semiotic plurality of the medium, it seems to me that voices are a decisive
component,[…] for many different reasons, they constitute an essential factor
of the talking film’s discursive organization. This function is most obvious
with the voice-over, or when the voice is disconnected from the film’s uni-
verse: it comments, narrates, gives us access to another environment, or helps
us penetrate the consciousness of a character.2
Because movies offer new configurations, they cannot be used merely as illustra-
tions. Concerning the use of voices in a film, Robert Bresson’s work is particu-
larly relevant, which is why this essay will be based upon three of his movies
using interior voices: Diary of a Country Priest (1951), A Man Escaped
(1956), or: The Wind Bloweth Where it Listeth (1956), and Pickpocket
(1959). Throughout this analysis, we will examine the way in which Bresson man-
ages to express the depths of a soul.
What is most surprising, first of all, is the fact that Bresson is able to seize this
dimension of existence without ever abandoning a certain cool aloofness and
sharpness. He absolutely rules out any kind of psychology in his relationship to a
story or character, and neither does he use any obvious point of view shots, but
rather shows everything with a cold, glass-like precision. On the other hand, he
may be the film artist who most deeply and subtly succeeds in expressing the
torments and obsessions of one’s conscience, which allows the viewer to witness
an interior experience without necessarily identifying with the main character. A
special way of using voices greatly contributes to this uniqueness.
The way Bresson’s characters talk is so specific that it can be recognized by
anyone who has already seen one of his films. Nevertheless, unlike many of his
contemporaries, Bresson does not want to crowd his films with too much of his
own subjectivity as an author. This makes him the most classical of the moderns.
In fact, Bresson’s style permeates his films in a particular way, notably with the
“Bressonian voice,” which has to do with what Pasolini or Deleuze called “free
indirect subjectivity.”
This is very different, however, from the way Antonioni proceeds. In Blow up
(1966), for example, certain scenes are shot as if they were lived by the main
character, without necessarily involving any subjective camera. Neither is it that
Bresson’s characters incarnate the author by adopting his voice. It is rather that
these voices conjure up something that seems strangely exterior to the character,
something which has nothing to do with the character’s psychology. Bresson’s
characters – his “models,” as he used to call his actors – are able to express the
words they speak precisely because they are not looking for any expression; they
merely become the receptacles, the voices of the text, through which Bresson’s
style appears, along with the text in which the movie originates. What strikes us
in this configuration is that even though the spectator may feel very close to a
100 céline scemama

character, even though he may share the latter’s thoughts and innermost feelings
while listening to the interior voice, he can never fully identify either with the
character or the author. This is precisely why Bresson’s films offer a highly singu-
lar experience of someone else’s inner experience. Our analysis will thus revolve
around the strangeness of these intimate – and literally unfathomable – interior
voices, which prevent any identification from taking place. The spectator of a film
by Bresson goes through the living experience of someone else without ever being
put in his place; he may feel very close to him while remaining an absolute stran-
ger all the same. The “I” of the viewer can never become an incarnation of the
character’s “You,” although he may be sharing his thoughts, doubts and anguish.
By exploring the inner world of another, the viewer may feel very close to the
character despite this irremediable otherness, which itself is responsible for the
fact that “I” can never be “You.”
Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, Pickpocket:

Voices from Beyond the Film3
The use Bresson makes of voices in these three films is so specific that notions
borrowed from the field of literary analysis no longer prove adequate. Minimizing
the contributions of literary studies to the understanding of cinema is of course
not the point here, especially as the narrative study of films has made certain
literary notions its own. However, they sometimes seem insufficient, especially as
far as voices are concerned, whether voice-over, interior voices, voice-off, voice-
in… These categories may indeed prove efficient on some occasions, yet how of-
ten do the definitions they provide lack precision? In many books and articles
dealing with Bresson’s work, one often comes across expressions such as “voice-
over” or “interior voice,” which never exactly correspond to the reality of either of
the three films. Concerning the voices that the spectator hears, although they are
not addressing him, they cannot be “off-screen,” as the character whose voice we
hear is visible on screen. Neither can they be “voice-overs,” as the character who
speaks is diegetical, including at the very moment his voice is being heard. Final-
ly, such a voice is not exactly “interior” either, since the character speaks in the
past tense, and his commentaries are thus of a retrospective nature. However,
these objections may also give way to even more objections, which is why new or
redefined notions have to be found. The character is indeed well visible on the
screen: hence his voice cannot be termed as “off-screen.” But the character mov-
ing before us is not exactly the same as the one who is talking, given he is speak-
ing in the past tense. Consequently, this creates a kind of “disconnection” be-
tween the image happening here and now and the retrospective speech which
comments on everything that is being done in the present. The objection regard-
ing the “voice-over” may be overruled for exactly the same reason, as the charac-
ter who is telling the story is no longer exactly the same character we see on the
robert bresson and the voices of an inner world 101

screen: in the case of Diary, the priest of Ambricourt’s voice is his own, although
disembodied, as he is dead; as to Michel, in Pickpocket, he speaks from a per-
spective that reaches beyond the story, a time after the film, after he served his
sentence and found Jeanne again; and we suppose that Fontaine, in A Man Es-
caped, goes into every detail of his escape once he is free. “Interior voice” there-
fore seems to be the most adequate expression to describe such occurrences, but
it is once again the use of the past tense that prevents us from interpreting what is
being said as a comment in the present tense of what the character is going
through at the same moment on the screen. What he says pertains to what is
being seen, but from the perspective of his memory: in other words, he speaks
with a “voice from beyond the film,”4 or beyond the grave.
These films show us the present in a raw kind of way, although all three of
them tell us about memories. The present which appears on the screen is long
gone, the voice we hear speaks from someplace else – some other type of tempor-
ality – and it is precisely the contact between these two different temporalities –
combining an image in the present and a voice from the past – that creates this
strange feeling in Bresson’s films, like the expression of an interiority which can
only be grasped from a distance. The lapse of time that separates the body from
the voice creates a gaping discrepancy between what is actually lived and what is
told. In all three films, the voice nevertheless seems to stick closely to what the
character is going through – especially in A Man Escaped, where every visible
detail is described with meticulous care. A kind of distant proximity is therefore
created between the voice and the image, which confers a strange feeling of ex-
teriority upon those tales of inner experience.
The voices of these characters present on the screen remind us of what Chion
has called “acousmatic voices,” to describe the kind of recorded voice, the sound
of which is able to conjure up a ghostly presence, as in Fritz Lang’s masterpiece,
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, which adopted this kind of technique as early
as 1933. As Tim Anderson remarks:
The acousmêtre is Chion’s most vital concept […]. Drawn from the French
word ‘acousmate’, this term signifies ‘invisible’ sounds. The cinema, Chion
argues, continually presents us with a game of present / absent significations
[…]. Sound films can show an empty space and give us the voice of someone
who is supposedly ‘there’, in the scene’s ‘here and now’, but outside the
frame.5
In the case of Bresson’s films, however, the space is not emptied of its characters,
and we can hear their voices at the same time as we see them:
102 céline scemama

Film still from Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956).
Of course, the journal voice is that of the priest whom we see in the picture
[…]. But the subject is constantly split up into an image and a voice, both of
which are never presented as synchronous: the priest is writing after the event
and, when his voice gets superimposed upon the image, it covers up that of
the interlocutor, which is instantly smothered and cancelled.6
Insofar as these films are not entirely devoid of dialogues, “never presented as
synchronous” might be a rather hasty way of putting it, although dialogues in-
deed remain scarce in all three films, and often get interrupted or covered up by
this voice which does not entirely belong in the picture: “This off-screen voice
conjures up a kind of ghost image […]. The man who is remembering his adven-
ture remains faceless […]. The disacousmatisation of this voice is only partial.”7 If
these voices do not “entirely belong in the picture,” it is because they do not “ex-
actly belong to a body” either. These voices separated from their bodies have a
disembodied quality about them, which probably helps considerably in creating
the deeply spiritual dimension in the story of these three characters, who look
alike in many regards.

The Way of Silent Men
First of all, these three characters look alike because they have the same way of
haunting the films with their voices. These voices take up a lot of space in the
sound universe of the movies, even though these characters are far from being
talkative: more often than not, they are even deeply silent. This particularity has
led Marcel L’Herbier to write the following about Diary:
Because he was the first person to discover the mysterious point of conver-
gence between thirty years of silent films and twenty years of talking films, he
became the conqueror of an unknown territory and offered us the fascinating
revelation of a film, which in being both – silent and talkative all at once – is
neither one or the other, therefore wholly itself.8
L’Herbier’s lyricism highlights the singularity and strange sobriety of Bresson’s

characters. Their voices are omnipresent although they hardly ever talk, and all
three of them seem possessed with some transcendental force which confers
upon their existence an almost mystical dimension, whether for the priest, the
pickpocket or the prisoner sentenced to death: “Bresson’s heroes live in another
kind of reality, that of mystics, maybe, of madmen or criminals […] the Infinite of
death and nothingness is already within them and has purified and abraded
them.”9
Le Clézio’s terms of “purified and abraded” perfectly characterize the Bresso-
nian characters and the filmmaker’s method towards his “models,” whom he
wants abraded and purified so they can receive the text which is dictated to
them.10 This is why these characters whose stories are so different nonetheless
look so much alike and speak with the same voice.
Although their voices are omnipresent, these characters are men of few words.
The priest of Ambricourt in Diary, an adaptation of the eponymous novel by
Georges Bernanos, is a pale young man tormented by bad health – he has sto-
mach cancer – the cause of which may be the huge amounts of alcohol his family
consumed before him. He is so discreet and humble that it seems he is about to
dissolve in the hazy paleness of the sad village. Nevertheless, this pallid priest
with the face of a prematurely old child does not hesitate to speak out in this
village eroded by buried animosities and deadly secrets. There is a mission he
must accomplish. There is nothing he can gain from it, but it has to be done.
Only death can stop what he has undertaken. But every time he speaks, his other
voice, timeless and disembodied, snatches him away from the present of the im-
age. Or sometimes a dizzy spell will rob him from his speech capacity and force
him into silence, compel him to sit down and withdraw himself. The priest is also
capable of listening. He listens to Mademoiselle Chantal as she tells him of her
hate for Mademoiselle Louise, her private tutor and father’s mistress. He listens
104 céline scemama

to her as she talks about suicide and “doing evil for evil’s sake,” if she does not
get what she wants out of life. He also confronts her mother, the Countess, intent
upon bringing back the peace she has lost ever since her little boy died. He
speaks, he listens, and stands by his words and actions when he is confronted by
the priest of Torcy and his superior who both accuse him of having exceeded his
authority which, they believe, led the Countess to suicide. Only his illness can
compel him to leave the village and confront death, which he does, but only after
parting with some last words – repeated off-screen by the priest of Torcy – a few
words which accurately express the strangeness of this priest, at once so weak
and so strong: “What does it matter? … Everything is Grace.” The priest of Torcy
also mentions that at one point, “he even smiled.”
It may seem odd to compare a priest and a thief, yet they deeply resemble each
other. The priest of Ambricourt, Michel the thief, and Fontaine, the man sen-
tenced to death, are remarkably similar. As Doctor Delbende from Diary has it,
these characters are “of the same race,” “the race of those who cope.” The three
characters are as relentless as they are uninterested and selfless. They seem to be
acted upon by something which transcends their mere personal interests as mor-
tals: actually, the priest of Ambricourt, Michel the thief, and Fontaine the prisoner
are all believers. Their belief is not necessarily of a religious or metaphysical kind,
but they act out of faith and nothing can stop them from going where they want
to go, like the wind bloweth where it listeth: “The transcendence of the Bernanos-
Bresson universe is not the transcendence of destiny as the ancients understood
it, nor yet the transcendence of Racinian passion, but the transcendence of grace
which is something each of us is free to refuse.”11 Michel, the cold and dry char-
acter in Pickpocket, steals like Raskolnikov kills in Crime and Punishment12 by
Dostoyevsky, without even thinking of the haul. For Michel, in the same way as
for Raskolnikov, what is at stake is something else. The two heroes, both Bres-
son’s and Dostoyevsky’s, very clearly explain that it is not the perspective of mak-
ing a profit that drives them. Furthermore, both of them seem to feel the same
kind of excited anxiety when they confront the moral and social authority symbo-
lized by the police inspector. In Pickpocket, this confrontation happens at a
very early stage in the narrative, only five minutes after the beginning of the film.
Michel begins his life as a thief with a strong feeling of resolution, he just asks
himself if he will be bold enough to live up to it. Just after his first theft, with the
same retrospective interior voice, he says: “I could not feel the ground under my
feet any more, it felt like I dominated the world, but one minute later, I was
caught.” Once at the police station, he eagerly affirms that they have no proof
against him. The inspector lets him go, but only so as to better catch him later
on. At this point, the same way as in Crime and Punishment, a never-ending conflict
begins between the law enforcer and the pickpocket, a conflict which by far
supersedes the question of the sole offense and engages a moral debate between
the two men. Just before the opening credits, a written warning announces the

discrepancy between the film and its title: “This is not a police movie. With
images and sounds, the author tries to express the nightmare of a young man
driven into an adventure of pickpockets for which he was not made.”
In Bresson’s transposition of Dostoyevsky’s novel, the murderer becomes a
thief, but the moral conflict between the two men is quite the same. When Michel
meets the inspector in a bar, he shakes his hand before he really recognizes him –
the viewer learns this by the same retrospective interior voice, because Michel
hardly ever speaks. The spectator only hears him partially explain his theory13
about theft, based upon George Barrington’s book, The Prince of Pickpockets. But at
the end of the scene, the inspector exclaims: “a kind of useful thief, all in all. The
world is upside-down.” “Well, given the world is already upside-down, it might
put it right-side up,” answers Michel.
Michel and Raskolnikov also seem to be rather closed off to everything con-
cerning love. Nevertheless, once their adventures have come to an end, it is al-
most in spite of themselves that they miraculously find love in the persons of
women they have always known and paid little attention to: Sonia for Raskolnikov
and Jeanne for Michel. “Only this adventure, through mysterious ways, will join
two souls who maybe never would have met,” thus reads the second part of the
written warning that appears before the film starts. It foreshadows the film’s last
shot showing Michel as he takes Jeanne in his arms across the prison bars and
pronounces these words, which remind us of the Priest of Ambricourt finding
Grace before dying: “Oh Jeanne what a strange way I had to take to find you.”14
Paradoxically, Fontaine acts in a disinterested way too. Bresson’s choice of in-
terrupting the memoirs of Commandant André Devigny15 before his final specta-
cular adventures, brings another dimension to the escape. In Bresson’s movie, the
breakout is an end in itself. In Devigny’s story, he first escapes from the Fort of
Montluc, he then gets caught, but manages to escape a second time, this time for
good. This double escape confers on the event an epic dimension which is absent
from the film.
The action takes place in 1943. Fontaine – who is a lieutenant and not a com-
mander in the movie – is a German prisoner from the French Resistance. The film
begins with a failed escape attempt from a car during a transfer, after which Fon-
taine is told that he will be sentenced to death. At this point, the film and his
character are all focalized on the escape. But behind Bresson’s camera, this es-
cape becomes an almost abstract event. Fontaine is guided by the thought of lib-
erty, but liberty as a principle. From out of his cell window, he tells Blanchet – the
totally desperate inmate of the cell next to his – that he must fight. “Fight for
what?” answers Blanchet. “Fight against the walls, against myself, my door, you
have to fight too.” In his prison cell, with his retrospective interior voice, Fontaine
also adds: “I had to open this door, I did not have any plans for later on.” The
door is central to the movie; getting it opened is more important than everything
it will lead to. The last shot of the film shows Fontaine and Jost, his young cell-
106 céline scemama

mate, as they disappear into the misty night. The idea of freedom is wholly con-
tained within this shot and does not call for anything else. Moreover, Fontaine
does not seem to have anybody to go back to on the outside: no past, no family,
no wife, no children. He was just a prisoner in front of a door that had to be
opened. The breakout is both the means and the end, which is why the film ends
this way. This is how Bresson’s film acquires a dimension that leaves no place for
either suspense or psychology. Jost, on the contrary, has a past, a psychology,
which is why he says at the end: “If my mother could see me now.”
Many of Bresson’s choices participate in this expression of a being’s inner
world through a strange kind of exteriority. Among those choices, the splitting
up of a character’s voice and body plays an active part in rendering any form of
psychology and identification utterly impossible. Before we even consider the im-
possible act of identification between the viewer and the character, we must ob-
serve the manner in which the character is himself characterized by this strange
separation between his body and his voice. The movie itself falls into two worlds
with the pictures in the present and the voices coming from the past. But this
disjunction is not total because the sounds from the present are mingled with the
voice from the past, and this voice provides very precise comments upon the pre-
sent image appearing here and now. This voice seems to have traveled through
time to get back to the present tense of the image, while it hovers beyond the
image, as it were, and in another time. It is via such configurations that Bresson
most successfully manages to express the inner soul of a being, while preventing
any kind of identification with him.
Apprehending the Inner World from a Distance. Bresson’s Style and

the Impossible Identification
The distance that lies between the present image and the voice from the past is
not a constant one. More often than not, it is of an ambiguous nature, and con-
tributes in creating the expression of a character’s self-detachment, as well as
rendering any identification on the part of the viewer impossible. Bresson’s stor-
ies could have something psychological, sociological, pathetic, or melodramatic
about them, but that is not the case at all. These disembodied voices never let the
viewer become as one with the character’s body. He is compelled to stay out even
when he feels he has a very deep access to the character’s inner experience. In
order to understand this phenomenon which characterizes one of the fundamen-
tal aspects of Bresson’s style, we must base our detailed analysis upon certain
subtle and meaningful configurations drawn from films.
A movie is composed of images and sounds, which is why it is irrelevant to
analyze voices and sounds separately from images. This holds particularly true of
a filmmaker like Bresson who considers “images and sounds like people who
make acquaintance on a journey and can no longer grow apart.”16 This distance

between the character’s voice and body does not only originate in the discrepancy
between past and present, it also comes from the transition between shots and
the frequent use of wide shots. Editing can either consist in cuts or dissolves, two
very different techniques which nevertheless both contribute in creating a succes-
sion of pictures rather than the illusion of a continuous flow. Bresson rarely uses
close-ups – especially in Pickpocket – he prefers keeping his models at a dis-
tance, filming them from afar or from behind a windowpane, for instance –
which is very frequent in Diary. The interior retrospective voices – even if it is
not always the case in Diary – acquire their full dimension through this techni-
que, which we will now illustrate with a few examples.
The case of Diary may be the most convincing because, among all of Bres-
son’s characters, the priest is perhaps one of the most endearing, and his story is
truly heartrending. Everything in this character induces empathy and compassion,
yet Bresson prevents the spectator from being as one with him, in the same way
as he forbids his models from “playing” this character. In fact, Bresson directs
the spectators of his films the same way he directs his models: he keeps them at
a distance but, paradoxically, he does it to reach the inner soul of a being. Diary
“is the first film about inner life,” Mauriac wrote.17
The first shot of the film is a diary in which a hand is writing with a pen. This
shot announces that the story will be a first-person narrative. But a shift from the
present to the past tense soon happens, which causes confusion between the
genre of the diary and that of the memoirs. The film’s temporality is of a very
subtle nature because the present is being revisited by the past, and these two
temporalities may thus appear together within the frame.
“I do not think I am doing anyone any harm when I write in here, day after day,
with absolute sincerity, the very humble, the insignificant secrets of this life de-
void of mystery,” writes the priest. Only the writing hand is visible within the
frame. At this point of the film, nothing can let us infer that the voice we hear, as
it speaks out loud what is being written at that very moment, is not that of the
character, partially hidden off-camera. The diary is indeed written in the present
tense but, all throughout the movie, certain passages are told in the present while
others are told in the past. The latter passages appear as a retrospective reading,
as if the priest commented on his life and his suffering on earth from beyond the
grave.
The priest is a voice and a writing hand before being a face. The second shot of
the film shows a signboard indicating the number of the road, D71E, and a sec-
ond one announcing the village of Ambricourt. When the priest arrives on his
bicycle, he is filmed through the iron gates of a big house. He looks left and right
before a link shot shows a couple embracing – the Count and his mistress, the
teacher – who both give him an ominous look. In this dreary and whitish light,
which seems the visual equivalent of silence, only a dog can be heard, barking in
the distance. The priest moves into the background and the couple shifts on to
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Film still from Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951).
the other side of the frame. In a medium shot, the priest lays his bike against the
wall of a house. He climbs the stoop of the house and a low-angle shot shows
him repeatedly turning the door handle and pushing the door open with one
hand. He takes a few steps and goes back to the stoop. He looks far away into
the distance, as if he were looking at nothing in particular or into himself and he
says: “My parish. My first parish.” At this point, without having seen the rest of
the film, the spectator may very well be under the impression of having seen his
lips move, as if the priest had been talking to himself out loud. Nevertheless, this
voice is interior and, the sentence being verbless, it is timeless as well. Whether
he speaks in the present or past tense, this indetermination does not alter one of
the most surprising features in this scene: the diegetic sounds remain audible –
probably a cart passing by – mingled with the interior voice. The fact of hearing
this voice and these noises blended together contributes in expressing an inner
world, as if everything were retrospectively perceived in the character’s mind. But
it is also possible for this interior voice to be actually superimposed to the sounds
and images of the present, in which case this voice becomes “over,” absolutely
exterior to the images. At this point of the story and of the analysis, the way the
viewer perceives the character is ambiguous, at once very close and far away from
himself. Nevertheless, the first-person singular and possessive “my” submits the
interior narrative to certain specific literary codes, associated with the diary and

first-person interior monologue as specific genres. The kind of distance which
had already been observed when the priest was filmed from behind the iron gate
of the house will appear time and again during the film, including in more accen-
tuated forms. Certain well-chosen examples will explain how the inner and outer
worlds are made to combine in Bresson’s cinematographic universe.
The priest is very often filmed from behind a window, and subjective cameras
are very rare throughout the film. This external point of view is particularly strik-
ing when the voice confesses its most intimate doubts. Without being weakened
by the distant point of view, it seems it no longer belongs to the body it emanates
from, which is also why the viewer cannot give in to any identification process.
He is thus obliged to explore the interiority of another being while remaining
himself all along.
The distance grows even bigger and more enigmatic when the priest starts off
on his journey to Lille, where he will confront death. An unusual low-angle shot
makes him seem very remote and very high up on the hill he is tediously climbing
in the night. This image gives the impression that the death he will meet at the
end of this long and winding road is the vantage point from which he speaks all
throughout the movie.
This technique based on the feeling of being “outside” and at a distance pre-
vents any kind of identification from taking place between the spectator and the
character, and yet it allows the expression of a deeply interior experience.
The pickpocket’s interior adventure is communicated through a very similar
type of system, as it opens on a hand writing in a notebook, like in Diary: “I
know that usually, people who have done these things remain silent, and those
who talk about them haven’t done them. Well, I have.” There is a kind of legato, as
it were, from the hand that writes to the hand that steals, which, however, does
not give way to any feeling of identification with the main character. In this case,
identification is even made more difficult because Michel is such a cold and opa-
que character, a lot more so than the priest. He even is a little unpleasant. He
seems to have no feelings at all and yet, the viewer will be made to feel the slight-
est tremor of his heart. If it were not for the sound of his voice, we could even
doubt he has a heart. But no sooner has the movie begun than his retrospective
interior voice declares: “My heart was beating so hard I thought it would stop.”
Later on, upon receiving a letter from Jeanne in his prison cell, he interiorly con-
fesses: “As I read this letter, my heart was racing.” His voice from another time is
filled with an emotion Michel’s body does not show on screen.
Even if the viewer gets to know the slightest details of his life, he can never
explain why Michel steals, or why he is so ungrateful towards Jeanne and his
friend Jacques, and especially towards his mother whom he refuses to see until
she lies dying – and after having stolen from her too. Any psychological explana-
tion is absolutely impossible in a movie where everything – every gesture, every
word – is presented in such a cold and austere fashion that it reminds one of a
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Film still from Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959).
police report written in telegraphic style. The soundtrack participates in produ-

cing this credibility gap, this abstraction in the scene where Michel enters the
metro to steal for the second time:
[T]he noises in Bresson’s films are immediately recognized and identified, but
the dubbing produces a contradictory effect: whereas the noises are very much
in keeping with the diegesis, bigger than life in their abstraction and rarefac-
tion, it is precisely this very perfection which produces an artificial effect […].
The sound is superimposed upon the image and does not really stick to it.18
This scene also gives the weird impression of reading a novel where every detail is
described with extreme precision. In the same way as sounds do not “stick” to
images, the viewer cannot symbolically enter the thief’s body, because it remains
absolutely exterior and unfathomable. However, Michel gives us every detail of
how he feels, tells us about his doubts, his fears and interrogations. And Bresson
combines his shots and edits the movie the same way as Michel and his accom-
plices manipulate wallets during the theft sequences, which attain an amazing
degree of abstraction. The virtuosity of the gestures and the succession of shots
are so gracious that they transcend mere representation.

Michel explains everything, he does not hide anything from us, he even com-
municates his method in a documentary way. He also confesses he does not earn
much with his thieving, but explains it is not really the question. Even he himself
does not seem to know why he acts like this, which is one of the main reasons
why it is so difficult for the spectator to identify with him. Michel is not confiding
in the viewer, his words are addressed to no one. Furthermore, he is almost mute:
“We weren’t talkative. All the time we spent together, he didn’t know any more
about me than I knew about him,” he says about his relationship with his first
accomplice. Later on, Jeanne tells him: “You don’t live in the real world. You are
not interested in anything others are interested in.” Indeed, Michel does not seem
to belong in the real world, he is like an idea, a state of being which will forever
remain unexplained. This lack of explanation endows him with a mysterious
grace, echoed in the state which he himself described: “I couldn’t feel the ground
under my feet, it felt like I dominated the world.”
The story of A Man Escaped, like that of Diary, could inspire great empathy.
Nevertheless, Bresson’s way of proceeding once again takes his movie someplace
else, to a different domain. Fontaine is a member of the Resistance who gets
beaten up, mistreated, locked up in miserable conditions and sentenced to death
by the Germans. Everything is in place for a pathetic story to begin and a catharsis
to happen, with the spectator showing compassion – suffering with, that is – for the
prisoner. But at no point in the film is such fusion or identification made possi-
ble. Fontaine, without being as unpleasant as Michel, is not really more likable:
he even becomes almost inhuman when he wonders if he will have to kill Jost, his
young cellmate, to make sure he does not jeopardize his plan. His inner doubts
show his humanity, but the tone of his voice and his inexpressive face keep us at a
cold distance. His voice expresses his fear, his tears and despair but his face never
shows anything. Of all Bresson’s characters, he may be the least talkative. This
has of course something to do with his being a prisoner – for that matter, in every
scene where the prisoners have a wash, for instance, the German guards keep
saying: “no talking.” But this explanation is not enough: Fontaine is like all Bres-
sonian characters: he is heard a lot, but he hardly ever speaks.
The first sequence of the movie, which is so beautiful in itself, is one of the
finest examples of Bresson’s style. As far as the plot is concerned, it should in-
stantly create suspense and lead to our immediate identification with the charac-
ter. Fontaine is in a car, being transferred from one jail to another. Sitting next to
him are two handcuffed prisoners, whereas his hands are untied. A multiplicity of
shots show many different objects but no faces – or only really quick face shots of
the other prisoners. Fontaine remains faceless for quite a while, he is just a pair of
hands. However, this opening scene is not in the least formalistic; on the contrary
it carries on its usual function of announcing what the film will be about: namely,
hands and objects. We see Fontaine’s hands, the car door handle, the cuffed
hands, the driver’s hand on the gearstick. These shots are repeated like the every-
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day gestures Fontaine repeats with the patience of a saint and the furious deter-
mination of a fool to get his door opened or make ropes and hooks: “I planned
everything that was feasible and even everything that wasn’t,” says his retrospec-
tive interior voice. Fontaine’s hands, like Michel’s, are to his exterior adventure
what his voice is to his interior adventure, and all throughout the film the same
gap prevails between voice and hands, which does not permit us to identify with a
character who is only a voice and a pair of hands.
In this opening sequence, Fontaine’s face does not appear right away and his
voice is not heard yet. The outside world is only perceived through noises. This
sequence is neither talking nor silent; it is literally audio-visual. It prefigures the
rest of the film as it is only through sounds that Fontaine can picture the space
outside his prison cell,19 in the same way as the report of gun shots explain that
Fontaine has been caught, when this first scene ends. Gun shots keep ringing out
throughout the whole film, for that matter; they give it a certain rhythm at the
same time as they let Fontaine know who is being executed.
In this movie, nothing is perceived in an objective way, all information arrives
through Fontaine’s consciousness. Nevertheless, Bresson almost never uses any
point of view shots, and there is no real subjective hearing either, as André Bazin
comments:
Bresson is not in the least interested in verisimilitude but in reality at one end,
and a certain kind of spiritual truth at the other, with reality more or less mys-
teriously paving the way for the latter. Everything that stands in-between,
whether it partakes of drama or psychology, not only leaves him indifferent,
but is totally foreign to him!20
Thus, Bresson takes apart every element of suspense characteristic of an escape

movie. And the viewer cannot identify with a character who himself has become
the receptacle for an experience that he communicates without living it. He may
thus remain a pure experience devoid of any human subject because the character
is embodied by a model and not an actor playing the role of someone else. Bazin
notes:
Such and such protagonist will think and feel this way or that, therefore he will
act in this or that manner, and above all, his face, his body and his voice will
express his own specific intentions. Bresson’s actor, François Leterrier, was
well chosen regarding his physical aspect but not as far as theatrical roles are
concerned. He is determined by a certain essential conformity which is not
psychological but rather ontological, with regard to the character he embod-
ies. Consequently, he has not been asked to mime, represent, or ‘act’ anything:
on the contrary, Bresson is intent upon breaking to pieces the puppet of feel-

ings that is inside his characters, which is why the choice of giving the latter a
toneless voice is so important, both in commentaries and dialogues.21
The Voice of a Text, Not of a Man

What Bazin explains holds true for A man escaped and all of Bresson’s charac-
ters since Diary. This “toneless voice” does not only characterize interior voices,
as all of Bresson’s characters talk the same way. Marcel L’Herbier, when discuss-
ing Diary, subtly describes the singularity of the specific voice Bresson gives all
his models: the priest of Ambricourt “knows how to confer what he keeps to
himself unto his voice, and when he keeps silent, he actually speaks. […] He thus
speaks from the depth of his consciousness and his voice does not follow the
resonant inflexions of language […], the erosion of language could cause cinema-
tography – neither silent nor talking but of a second degree – to rise […] up to
what Brice Parain calls the expression of a ‘superior silence.’”22 Bresson reaches a
very singular cinematographic mode of expression, because even though his mo-
vies are filled with words and sounds, they still seem very silent. These voices and
sounds paradoxically seem to reveal the silence and its substance, which is not
really surprising, coming from a filmmaker who wrote: “Soundtrack films in-
vented silence.”23
As far as voices are concerned, whether interior or exterior – on or off screen –
they always seem to be “removed” from the present image and from the body they
originate in: “To your models: ‘Speak as if you were speaking to yourselves.’
Monologues instead of dialogues.”24 This is why it is sometimes so difficult to
distinguish an on-screen voice from an interior voice in a Bresson film. It is be-
cause the elocution is the same. This is also why they may often superimpose, as
frequently happens in Diary: “I would have liked to tell him about the cabaret,”
interjects the priest’s interior voice in a dialogue with the deputy mayor who paid
him an unexpected visit. Sometimes, in a dialogue, the characters will also seem
to be talking to themselves, which not only applies to main characters, as all of
them have this very special “Bressonian voice.”
It is therefore not really surprising to learn from Bresson himself that he pre-
ferred calling his models over the telephone so he could hear their voices before
he even saw them:25 “Telephone. His voice makes him visible.”26 His Notes on the
Cinematographer correspond exactly to what is being put into practice in his mo-
vies. When he asked his models not to try to embody their character, his method
was the exact opposite of what was being taught at The Actor’s Studio, where
actors had to explore the psychology and attitudes of their character so as to ex-
press it using their own bodies. On the contrary, according to Bresson: “The actor
who learns his part presupposes a ‘self’ he knows in advance (and which does not
exist);”27 “Your models must not feel dramatic.”28 Nevertheless, it is because he
refuses the expression of affects, and because he asks his models to remain as
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neutral as possible, that Bresson may spontaneously bring to life the depth of a
state of mind and of a consciousness, however remote they may remain.
According to Jean-Louis Provoyeur, “Being oneself thus means, for the model,
not to be the character, escape the dictatorship of the story in which he is caught,
resist the story.”29 The model cannot identify with the character, no more than the
viewer can identify with him. For the model as well as for the viewer, it is through
exteriority and not identification that the experience of otherness is attained.
These voices that seem to come from beyond the picture and let us hear the
sound of a conscience have nothing to do with any kind of familiar language.
Provoyeur goes back upon the notion of acousmêtre to characterize these voices
which, even though they are visualized on screen, are not synchronous with the
images. He applies this to voices speaking in the past tense on images of the
present: “The acousmêtre is the voice of the power which the subject is deprived
of. It is the voice of the Narrator, the voice of the Totality. It is the Narrative.”30 In
the first quote, Provoyeur speaks about the posture imposed upon the model and,
in the second one, about this voice which seems to come from out of the frame.
There is no contradiction here. The status Provoyeur confers upon the voice –
“The Totality, The Narrative” – can be brought about via the model, who para-
doxically resists the Narrative.
Nevertheless, if the “Bressonian voice” can easily be recognized, the film direc-
tor never seems to appear in his movies as an omniscient narrator: “It is impossi-
ble not to notice Bresson and Dostoyevsky’s common predilection for stories seen
‘through the prism of a narrator.’”31 As Mireille Latil le Dantec observes,
“Dostoyevsky refuses omniscient narration and chooses to write epistolary novels
[…], memories of a dreamer […], memoirs […], writings.”32 It just so happens
that “eleven out of the thirteen movies directed by Bresson were adapted from
written texts.”33 Without drawing a comprehensive list of these adaptations, we
will limit ourselves to the movies we have studied: Diary was based upon the
eponymous novel by Bernanos, Pickpocket was a transposition of the Journal of
Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s original idea for Crime and Punishment, and A Man Es-
caped was based upon The Memoirs of Commandant Devigny.34 Many filmmakers
directed adaptations, but they very seldom let the style of the author – and even
the text’s fabric – appear as Bresson did through the diction and elocution of his
models. The “Bressonian voice” reminds one of what Barthes calls “writing out
loud (which has nothing to do with speech).”35 Even though The Memoirs of Com-
mandant Devigny may not be compared to the literature of Dostoyevsky or Berna-
nos, it nevertheless remains that the written text survives on the screen. This ex-
teriority does not prevent one from following the never-ending paths of the
interior adventure, but forbids the psychological adherence to the character – a
character who is also a text.
This dimension sheds new light on the impossible identification that prevails
in Bresson’s films. The priest’s voice often sounds like that of a soul escaped

from its body, speaking from out of the frame and even out of the world. This is
because this voice is drawn out of a text, it has the inflexions of a text which is
“written out loud” and cannot be played. Instead of incarnating itself within a
voiceless body, speech becomes the embodiment of the text: “In place of the
powerfully concrete evocations of the novelist, the film offers us an increasingly
impoverished image which escapes us because it is hidden from us and is never
really developed. The novel of Bernanos is rich in picturesque evocation, solid,
concrete, strikingly visual. […] When you compare the two, it is the film that is
literary while the novel teems with visual material.”36
Hence it is not surprising that Mauriac “saw” Bernanos in Bresson’s film:
“When André Gide was dying, I stepped into a movie theater. I could have seen
the Diary of a Country Priest when it was presented to the press, or any
time in the following days. Maybe it had to be on this very evening of February
the 19th and not any other, Bernanos appeared to me on the screen.”37
Bresson writes, “The right intonations when your model exercises no control
over them.”38 And the accuracy of these intonations is that of the text, which the
model must find in just being its own voice: “The cast is not being asked to act
out a text, not even to live it out, just to speak it. It is because of this that the
passages spoken off-screen so perfectly match the passages spoken by the char-
acters on-screen. There is no fundamental difference either in tone or style. This
plan of attack not only rules out any dramatic interpretation by the actors but also
any psychological touches either. […] This language which no lips could speak is,
of necessity, from the soul.”39
Conclusion
Robert Bresson despises small talk as well as the decorative use of music, and
above all, psychology.
His cinema is extremely rigorous, both where sounds and images are con-
cerned. Hence it is not surprising that his movies have been called “ascetic.” But
his asceticism is of a lyrical kind, an oxymoron which may very well epitomize
Bresson’s profound style: a deep silence which persists underneath the voices
and sounds, an impression of redundancy between what is said and what is
shown, an obvious manifestation of the author’s style, whereas the author him-
self literally hides behind the text and seeks its essentiality in the making of his
films.
This lyrical asceticism perfectly defines the way in which he tells the stories of
his characters.
In his universe, everything is disconnected from everything else. The same way
as sounds do not stick to images, the characters’ voices are not rooted in their
bodies. The stories Bresson tells are very often of a solemn and dramatic nature.
However, it is without either empathy, psychology or compassion that he man-
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ages to reach his characters’ innermost depths. In the Diary of a Country
Priest, A Man Escaped and Pickpocket, the three main characters resemble
one another. One is a priest, the other a thief, and the last one a prisoner sen-
tenced to death, but all three of them have the same voice, the same silence, and
especially the same determination in following their own particular paths.
Whether their voices come from beyond the film, whether their thoughts appear
retrospectively, from outside their bodies, as it were, and even from beyond the
screen, or whether they talk to someone else, they have the same tone of voice,
the same manner of speech. The disjunction between body and speech does not
prevent their face from expressing the contents of their soul, although unwil-
lingly, as Bresson’s models do not play, they pronounce a text: “your camera
passes through faces, provided no mimicry (intentional or not) gets in-between.
Cinematographic films made of inner movements which are seen”;40 Bresson con-
cludes, “It is not about acting ‘simple’ or acting ‘inward,’ it’s about not acting at
all.” 41
Bresson asked his models not to interpret anything: “Naturally Bresson, like
Dreyer, is only concerned with the countenance as flesh, which, when not in-
volved in playing a role, is a man’s true imprint, the most visible mark of his
soul. It is then that the countenance takes on the dignity of a sign. He would
have us be concerned here not with the psychology but with the physiology of
existence. We can truly say that Bresson strips his characters bare.”42
This method brings about a real detachment between the model and his char-
acter, as well as between the latter and the viewer. Bresson’s films allow the spec-
tator to perceive all the movements of someone else’s inner experience, without
ever being able of putting himself in his place. It is possible to be close to him,
with him, but never in his place. This impossible identification begins with the
work of models who are strictly forbidden to identify with the character they lend
their voice and body to on the screen.
This body has to receive a text and every word he says has nothing to do with
natural speech; the model voices the text, the same text that Bresson is seeking
after in his compositions of sounds and images. This supremacy of the text per-
mits the deepest and subtlest expression of an inner experience to take place
without any identification on the spectator’s part. When he imposes a text upon
his models, Bresson imposes an unusual experience upon his viewer: perceiving
the inner experience of another without sharing it. This impossible identification
paradoxically gives birth to the greatest expression of an inner life, but it is some-
one else’s.
Translated by Maxime Shelledy.

The Silence of the Lenses: Blow Up and
the Subject of Photography
Pierre Taminiaux
The now classical work by Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, adapted from a
short story by Julio Cortázar, remains today one of the most important films dedi-
cated to the role of photography in cinematographic storytelling. The cultural and
sociological context of its production was that of the 1960s, arguably the most
turbulent period of post-World War II European history.1 This period was not
only characterized by political upheavals and moral revolutions: it also and maybe
more decisively resulted in the creation of radically new forms of representation.
In the field of the visual arts, in particular, an international avant-garde move-
ment like Fluxus helped to define original aesthetic forms that broke not only
with pictorial classicism but also with many of the aesthetic canons of the early
twentieth-century avant-garde. Art was then turned into an everyday practice
based on collective performances and “happenings.” The so-called immediacy of
art that Dada and surrealism had advocated so vehemently was now fully accom-
plished by artists who situated themselves outside of all traditional institutions
and protested the socio-economic conditions of art in capitalist societies.2 In an
original way they expressed the death of art in Western culture by moving beyond
any established concept of the artwork and its ongoing sacred identity. In other
words, they truly realized the utopian project of Marcel Duchamp, who stated first
and foremost that anything could be a work of art, as long as the artist questioned
the laws of aesthetic judgment dominated by the artistic supremacy of pictorial
representation.3
During the same period, cinema itself became the subject of a radical evolution
of forms, through the influence of directors such as Godard in France as well as
through the underground work done by experimental filmmakers such as
Michael Snow and Jonas Mekas. In many ways, these new cinematographic per-
spectives echoed many of the concerns of the aforementioned artists by stressing
the need for alternative modes of production and the deconstruction of well-en-
trenched narrative norms. Therefore, the 1960s not only put forward deep politi-
cal problems stemming from the failure of Western democracies to bring real
personal freedom to its citizens, they also revealed a crisis of representation that
art was destined to explore.
119
This predicament was evidently linked to a profound crisis of subjectivity, since
major educational and cultural institutions, from universities to museums, were
seen by many as instances of bourgeois repression and capitalist alienation.4 This
negative situation was clearly at the center of the student movement in May 1968.
In this perspective, the strict political discourse, although powerful and almost
ubiquitous, could not alone define a new cultural order in which the very notion
of an establishment had no place on its own. Subjectivity itself had been asso-
ciated for too long with the goals and the ambitions of the ruling classes: it had
engendered a form of individualism largely driven by material and economic rea-
lities and was now fully integrated into the “society of the Spectacle.”5 Art became
thus an essential tool for the expression of an original worldview, beyond the
obvious influence of revolutionary ideologies such as Maoism and Trotskyism at
the time.
A New Time of Storytelling

The case of Antonioni is particularly interesting in this regard, to the extent that
the Italian director remained largely indifferent in his work of fiction to political
issues. His first films, such as Il Grido (The Shout), appeared in the shadow
of Italian neo-realism, from a purely aesthetic perspective, but they quickly broke
with its spirit by ignoring the fate of the lower classes and focusing instead on the
life of the upper-middle class. The filmmaker therefore located his critique of
post-World War II European culture inside a bourgeois environment. He consid-
ered this microcosm of Italian society to be the mirror of an existential malaise
and ennui that was widespread and actually existed regardless of class belonging.
The modern subject that he chose to depict, from Il Deserto Rosso to L’Av-
ventura, was doomed to destitution, defined by a deep sense of a vacuum that
was largely the result of contemporary industrialization and economic growth.
His philosophy of critical representation emphasized the idleness and the social
inadequacy of those who seemed to enjoy most of the benefits of this process.
This philosophy implied above all the profound questioning of the time of
storytelling in film. From the start, Antonioni’s work relied upon the expression
of an inner time, a time that was essentially alien to the pace of both social life
and narrative realism. This particular time had a sort of Oriental quality: it actu-
ally shared many features with that of Japanese filmmaker Ozu, in his numerous
chronicles of modern everyday life in his home country. This original approach
remained misunderstood and underappreciated by a great number of viewers: for
many of them, it entailed the very negation of storytelling.6 The Italian director
did not seem to be preoccupied with the development of a particular plot and its
inevitable conclusion, nor did he seem to care for a sort of basic rhythmic inten-
sity that characterized most mainstream feature films of his time, both in Europe
and in the United States.
120 pierre taminiaux

This critique of representation relied therefore upon the definite slowness of its
expression, as if the time of cinema existed solely in a state of prolonged suspen-
sion. What was at stake in this process was the revelation of a sheer presence
within the image, and not the account of events that were unlikely to happen any-
way. It is through this radical alteration of perception that the identity of the sub-
ject could appear and dwell within images. In many ways, for Antonioni, the clas-
sical time-structure of narrative cinema, inspired by the formal logic of the realist
novel, had failed to enlighten the ongoing conflict between modern man and the
time imposed upon him by society: its pretense to objectivity was largely irrele-
vant. As opposed to painting, which does not contain by essence a particular defi-
nition of time, but rather of space, cinema could then reflect upon the relation-
ship that tied visual representation to the issue of a “time differed.” In his films,
the time of narrative is being perpetually delayed in order to underline man’s
natural estrangement from it.
Punctum, Violence, and Death

Blow Up was the first work that the Italian director shot outside of his native
country. It is located in London, a city that was at the center of a radical cultural
change in the 1960s. Its main character, played by the late David Hemmings, is a
fashion photographer who, almost randomly, takes some casual shots of a couple
in a park one day. Slowly but surely, he becomes intrigued by the apparently banal
situation that he witnessed, and by enlarging several of his own shots, he ends up
discovering the reality of a crime behind them. To refer to Roland Barthes’ fa-
mous distinction, the image is defined here by a punctum, a slight detail that
catches the eye of the photographer and unveils the dark nature of the scenes in
the park. The main punctum is that of a hand hidden in the bushes that holds a
gun pointed at the couple. This detail is almost invisible: it needs precisely a ser-
ies of “blow ups” (the technical jargon in photography for enlargements), in or-
der to display the presence of a crime. In other words, photographs must be frag-
mented here so that they can assert the existential identity of the visible world. To
go back to Barthes’ own explanation of the punctum, in contrast with the studium:
The second element will break (or punctuate) the studium. This time it is not I
who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign con-
sciousness). It is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like
an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this
prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better
in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs
I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these
sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points.
This second element which will disturb the studium, I shall therefore call
the silence of the lenses 121

punctum; for punctum is also: sting, cut, little hole – and also a cast of the
dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also
bruises me, is poignant to me).7
Film still from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966).
The author insists here upon the wound that this detail inflicts on the viewer. It is
barely noticeable but nonetheless powerful. The metaphor of the point also refers
to a strong sense of focus within the image, as if this wound was targeting a very
specific space of consciousness. In Barthes’ perspective, a sort of inner and quiet
violence shakes the receiver of the photograph. In his own words, it “animates”
and unsettles him in a subtle way. This form of hidden or even tamed violence is
very present in Blow Up: one never sees the actual crime being committed and
one can only suspect it or speculate about it. This constitutes one of the most
remarkable characteristics of this film: violence is never actually shown but only
recomposed and reconstructed through the eye of the photographer. This is evi-
dently very different from most Hollywood-style mysteries where violence, some-
how, always ends up becoming the source of a spectacle. This particular violence
is therefore internalized through the photographic image: this process stresses in
this regard its imaginary nature, as if it first had to be sublimated before becom-
ing an actual part of reality.
But the image of crime in Blow Up inevitably leads to the issue of death and
its representation. Someone, indeed, has been murdered: the photographer must
therefore take this fact into account and acknowledge the presence of death with-
in photography. It is actually the only presence that he is looking for, in his own
personal investigation. In his landmark essay, Barthes has in this regard under-
lined the strong link between photography and death, as he writes:

Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to
the intrusion in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of reli-
gion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death. Life/Death: the
paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from
the final print.
With the Photograph, we enter into flat Death. One day, leaving one of my
classes, someone said to me with disdain: “You talk about death very flatly.” –
As if the horror of Death were not precisely its platitude! The horror is this:
nothing to say about the death of one whom I love most, nothing to say about
her photograph, which I contemplate without ever being able to get to the
heart of it, to transform it.8
Barthes reflects here upon the decline of traditional rituals which, in modern so-
cieties, deprives death of its original symbolic power. Photography, in this sense,
imposes a literal image of death.9 In Blow Up, the image of the crime is con-
fused with that of a couple walking in a park, a scene that one could describe as
almost trivial. Death is thus fully integrated here within the realm of the everyday:
it dissolves itself within this mundane reality and does not possess any true thea-
trical or dramatic quality. It exists as a mere shadow, as something that is by
essence destined to oblivion. It is, in other words, the unnoticeable, a presence
that is being absorbed by the surface of things.10
But it is precisely this platitude of death that makes it quite disturbing. The
photographer in Blow Up cannot leave behind the images that he has enlarged:
they come to haunt him and force him to go back to the scene of the crime. The
horror of reality is therefore enlightened by this very “banality of evil.”11 It seems
to be impossible to distinguish between all the pictures that the photographer has
taken in the park: they seem to all look alike and do not apparently reveal a trans-
cending truth.
By unveiling the dark secret of reality, photography signifies here the quiet
death of an objective world dominated by the image of its own disappearance.
After all, the main character of the film lives in the cultural environment of fash-
ion and advertising. It constitutes a perfect universe of ephemeral illusions, be-
yond its pretense to eternal youth and physical beauty. The “swinging London” of
the period was doomed to vanish after a while: Blow Up represents thus the
fragile identity of a world in which people rapidly come and go, agitated by the
force of trends and short-lived passions. By insisting upon the fading nature of
such a cultural environment, the filmmaker asserts the pivotal role of photogra-
phy in its ability to express a lasting meaning within a social context that contra-
dicts it. What remains, in all the pictures of the couple in the park, is the percep-
tion of deeper layers of reality, beneath all that moves and glitters.
From its origin in the mid-nineteenth century, photography has attempted to
conceal death by all means. To this end, the daguerreotype was used by the

emerging middle classes of the time to preserve the physical image of the dead,
whose picture would then forever remain among the other members of the fa-
mily. In Blow Up, this work of concealment is being deciphered and investigated
by the photographer himself. He is the one who carefully and methodically seeks
to unmask a reality that the world around him does not want to see. There is an
almost ethical dimension to this endeavor, although the main character is in no
way trying to act as a true representative of justice.
The Deceptive Strategies of Photography

We want to refer here to the work of René Magritte in his famous Trahison des
images to better understand the nature of such an endeavor. In the painting, a
pipe is being shown while the message that goes with it actually says that this
object is not a pipe. The surrealist artist reflected here on the conflict between
reality and representation, between material objectivity and imagination. If we
were to add the same kind of message at the bottom of the pictures taken by the
photographer in Blow Up, we could thus write: “this is not a couple in the park.”
By nature, images imply a strategy of deception, as Magritte showed us. In other
words, what we think we see (the pipe, the couple in the park) is not actually what
we see.12
As long as this situation prevails, the subjective identity of photography re-
mains blurry. Any subjectivity, in fact, implies the belief in some form of authen-
ticity, whether it is that of speech or of images. In Blow Up, the photographer
must therefore move deliberately beyond the deceiving dimension of photography
in order to reach a state of self-expression. He must dig deeper into reality by
engrossing particular details that will provide him with definite clues about the
crime in the park. The paradox of this process, though, is that the more he ex-
plores the unknown part of reality, the more this reality stresses its own enigmatic
quality. In other words, beyond the deception of images one can only find their
uncanny nature. This sense of the uncanny was evidently at the core of surrealist
aesthetics and philosophy, in particular in Magritte’s paintings. But the difference
is that, in Blow Up, the enigma of reality is never embodied in a set of dreams
and visions. The uncanny, therefore, does not superimpose new images on the
visible world: it extracts instead certain fragments from reality (the image of the
hand holding the gun in the bush, for instance) in order to demonstrate the
power of subjectivity.
The struggle of photography, for the main character, is thus a fight against
disappearance: the crime in the park is not supposed to leave any trace. The work
of representation entails in this case the thorough erasure of all signs that could
lead to its presence. Photography points the finger at what truly happened, as
Barthes would have said, at a “Ça a été” (“it has been”). One could interpret this
fight against disappearance as the mirror of a definite longing for remembrance.

But in the case of Blow Up, it is more the evidence of a subject who seeks to
maintain his grip on reality, in spite of his personal distance from it.
The deception of images is not only an important issue for modern art: it is
also at the center of contemporary critical discourse, in particular in the work of
Jean Baudrillard. In his perspective, modernity rested upon the sovereignty of the
Symbolic over the Real, what he called in his later writings the “Simulacrum.”13
In a world overwhelmed with a constant flow of images, through the media, tele-
vision, cinema and now the Internet, man is confronted with an excess of signs
which, ultimately, provoke an irresistible loss of reality. Baudrillard developed his
main philosophical argument in the late 1970s and 1980s, more than ten years
after the production of Blow Up. Antonioni’s film, in many ways, anticipated
such sensitivity, although it still asserted the belief in the preservation of a form
of secrecy within images. In other words, Antonioni was not ready to succumb to
the rule of absolute transparency in representation, a rule that Baudrillard would
himself celebrate later on. For the Italian director, the possibility of an entirely
objective world had to be resisted, since the essence of art, of photography and
film, was precisely to disturb the so-called order of things by demanding a radical
and original gaze on reality.
It is quite clear that Antonioni foresaw the rise of a new culture in which the
power of illusion was becoming paramount. But his own background was still
that of a humanist, of a man who was convinced that art and representation pos-
sessed an inherent truth-value. In this regard, the philosophy of Blow Up is cer-
tainly influenced by Plato and his myth of the Cave: the pictures that the photo-
grapher takes in the park are only shadows hiding a more profound reality (the
reality of a murder) that one cannot see straight away. Illusion is not to be em-
braced but rather questioned with an attitude of suspicion. To put it differently, it
constitutes a form of alienation from which one has to escape in order to express
oneself freely.
The profound existential malaise stemming from a world of illusions becomes
visible particularly in the final scene of the movie: the fake tennis match in the
park, a true “simulacrum.” Here, the photographer is physically separated from
the group of mimes who are performing this staging. He can only see them
through a wire fence, as if he was unable to get closer and to make contact with
them. He is, so to speak, stuck in the position of a viewer, of someone who only
passively relates to his environment. The feeling of an insurmountable distance
inhabits these pictures, as if the photographer were estranged from the others
and already living in another world. He is truly and literally an outsider, for the
very reason that he has strived to solve the enigma of reality by highlighting its
falsehood instead of ignoring it or merely taking it for granted.
Blow Up represents therefore the inner conflicts that modern society creates
within man by distorting the very notion of truth. Two opposite attitudes are pos-
sible in this particular case: either man surrenders completely to the world of

signs that dictate his own social life, or he chooses to decipher them in order to
assert his own existential integrity. The main character of the film is somehow
caught in the middle: through his profession he belongs to the deceiving universe
of instant commercial images while at the same time he adopts a skeptical and
detached attitude towards it. In this sense, he is the ultimate figure of the “divided
subject”: his cynicism is that of someone who cannot really believe in the modes
of representation that mainstream culture constantly imposes and reproduces in
everyday life.
This particular subject, who is evidently torn between two opposite worldviews,
has to take into account the almighty power of images but, simultaneously, he
has to find his own identity within them. The film stresses this search for self-
identity within the realm of illusions quite well. The photographer, concretely,
builds his own niche in his darkroom: it is there that he enlarges the pictures
that will eventually lead him to the discovery of the crime. This closed space iso-
lates him from the social order of the Simulacrum: it enables him to take a closer
look at reality and to better grasp its dark and destructive character.
Photography, here, is bound to frame a crime scene. It participates therefore in
a criminal investigation although the photographer himself is not part of any ju-
diciary power. This peculiar relationship between photography and crime was al-
ready stressed by Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay, The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction. He linked it to the increasing exhibition value of the art-
work in modernity and the parallel decline of its cult value. He notices this special
relationship in particular in the pictures of Atget, one of the first great masters of
the medium:
To have pinpointed this new stage constitutes the incomparable significance

of Atget, who, around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has
quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime.
The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of
establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for
historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They de-
mand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropri-
ate to them. They stir the viewer, he feels challenged by them in a new way.14
In Blow Up, photographs are actually used as material evidence, although they
are not integrated into the judicial process of a trial. To establish evidence, in this
case, is not so much to confirm reality as to ask for a new perspective towards it.
The scenes in the park are characterized by the strong sense of a vacuum: the
couple is shot alone, without anyone walking next to them or even seeing them
(except, of course, for the photographer). One can talk therefore of a deserted
space, like in Atget’s pictures. It is the very structure and purpose of the evidence
that requires this void. The subject matter of this evidence must remain detached

from any external influence: it exists by itself within a neutral location and this
situation underlines its sheer objectivity.
The Silence of Photography

The sense of emptiness is also strengthened by the absence of any dialogue or
music during the picture-taking session of the couple in the park and later, when
the photographer goes back to the crime scene at night to find a dead body or at
the end, when he encounters a group of mimes. The only noises that the viewer
can distinguish are that of the wind that agitates the branches of the trees. In
Blow Up, therefore, the soundtrack plays an essential role in defining an aes-
thetics of absence. It is primarily the absence of speech, as if silence were the
best way to reach the hidden truth behind reality. More precisely, silence in this
film constitutes the means through which representation achieves its own subjec-
tive identity.
This silence is of course not that of silent movies: it is a deliberate cinemato-
graphic strategy that allows for the expression of the uncanny within images. The
crime scene, therefore, is a silent one. This silence can be a metaphor for death,
but it also stirs a process of suspension within representation, as if images were
suddenly frozen in time and separated from the hectic pace of everyday life. The
subjective gaze of the photographer asks for this suspension: it is through this
process that reality reveals its own secret.
In this film, one can talk thus of an existential nature of silence. Blow Up
remains today one of the rare works of modern cinema that has been able to
draw attention to this nature. This philosophy of silence, in twentieth-century
thought and art, has actually been more thoroughly explored by both philoso-
phers and musicians. One must consider in this regard Heidegger’s reflection on
silence and its meaning for the definition of a poetic language and also and
maybe even more importantly, the musical works of a foremost avant-garde com-
poser such as John Cage.
For Cage, silence constituted an ecstatic experience that enabled man to reach
a state of perfect inner peace and harmony with nature and the outside world. His
perspective was undoubtedly inspired by Oriental religions, in particular Zen Bud-
dhism. Silence was an essential step on the road to Nirvana. The American com-
poser was engaged in radical musical experiments: they stemmed from the idea
that the composer was not truly a creator of musical forms, but rather the ulti-
mate listener of his own environment. This spirit prolonged that of Marcel Duch-
amp, to the extent that it imposed the image of the modern and avant-garde artist
as someone who was more interested in elaborating concepts than in producing a
series of actual art works.15
In Blow Up, one does not really find the same influence of Far Eastern cul-
tures and religions. Nonetheless, the close attention paid by Antonioni to the role

of silence in the representation of the modern subject’s identity enabled him to
question through cinema and photography the fundamental belief that, in classi-
cal Western thought, the expression of subjectivity necessarily implied the exis-
tence of speech.
In other words, silence could then speak as much as words or sounds. In
Blow Up, it possesses a remarkable power of fascination. The viewer is perfectly
aware of the fact that, because of its presence during the various scenes in the
park, something important is happening from a strict narrative point of view. In
his own reflection on photography, Baudrillard stressed in this regard the silent
quality of photography in contrast with other modern and contemporary media
such as cinema, television and advertising. He noticed the lack of motion inher-
ent to photography and underlined therefore the often contemplative nature of
such a medium in an era of constant noises and obsession with the speed of
images. Photography is speechless, but it is also slow, indeed, and these two
dimensions actually enhance the identity of this visual language instead of weak-
ening it. With photography, one can thus go through the world in silence, as if
one were traveling in an imaginary fashion.16
It is important to notice that Baudrillard’s comments are included in a book
entitled The Perfect Crime, as if photography unveiled the criminal nature of a world
ruled by the Symbolic. In his perspective, this silence recreates the “equivalent of
a desert,” that is, of a wide space that is deprived of any human presence. The
park in Blow Up, therefore, could very well be the main metaphor for a modern
urban wasteland of which London is only one example. Interestingly enough, this
metaphor reappears regularly in the work of Antonioni, from the desolated indus-
trial landscape of Northern Italy in Il Deserto Rosso to the actual desert of the
American West in Zabriskie Point.
Silence, in Blow Up, leads therefore to the issue of the void and its possible
meaning for the modern subject. This void entails many aspects: it can be under-
stood at a purely existential level, but it can also, from an aesthetic viewpoint,
define a radical formal change in the image of both cinema and photography. In
other words, it can stress the development of an aesthetics of scarcity, of a
minimalist artistic project that was precisely at the core of the Fluxus movement
in the 1960s. The photographer’s studio, in this regard, is barely furnished and is
characterized by white walls with very little decoration, as if his own working and
living space reflected the need for such aesthetics.17
Moreover, the pictures taken in the park are not so much objective or realist but
rather abstract. In fact, the more the photographer manipulates them and en-
larges a few details in order to find the key to their enigma, the more they resem-
ble non-figurative artworks in black and white. The technical process of the
“blow up,” in this sense, makes reality more distant as the subject matter of re-
presentation: what is instead at stake here is the appearance of new and intri-
guing forms that stir the reflection of the photographer and provide him with

essential clues for his investigation. Photography, thus, needs the very abstraction
of representation in order to reach its deepest truth-value.18
The issue of silence is a difficult one in modern cinema. It is almost completely
alien to the tradition of Hollywood filmmaking, with its emphasis on the dramatic
identity of the soundtrack, and barely more present in the French New Wave,
which still relied heavily upon quality dialogues. More generally, economic, social
and cultural modernity stemming from the ever-increasing power of technology
and the media is essentially defined by its capacity to disseminate sounds and
images at a record speed. By contrast, silence leads to the possibility of both inac-
tion and contemplation. In Blow Up, it does create breaks in the development of
storytelling and also turns the main character of the film into a mere spectator of
the world. By stressing this contemplative dimension, Antonioni definitely links
the aesthetics of photography with that of painting, as opposed to that of the
modern mass media. Photography is neither used here as a purely practical tool
for reporting news and information nor as a mere means to publicize commercial
objects and products, as it is usually the case in modern Western societies, but
rather as a sophisticated language that allows us to explore the mystery of the
visible world. In order to accomplish this process, the viewer (as well as the
photographer) must focus his gaze on a particular detail (a punctum) which is
charged with great significance.
In other words, he needs to accomplish a freeze-frame (a pause on the image)
which stresses the fundamental stillness of things around him. Silence calls for
the suspension of motion: it leads the viewer to a world where looking is doing
(and being), and not the other way around. Motion, in this perspective, becomes
an illusion, as demonstrated by the fake tennis match between the mimes at the
end of the film. Here the bodies seem to execute a kind of surreal ballet: the
gestures of the players gradually fade in the empty space, since the tennis ball
that should be their target only exists in their imagination. The photographer,
ultimately, participates in this peculiar performance: he ends up throwing the
tennis ball back at the mimes, following their request. His own move becomes
therefore the evidence of a generalized make-believe.
It is clear that this perspective defines an original subject for the image. This
subjective identity stands in sharp contrast with many of the features usually as-
sociated with both cinema and photography. After all, cinema is nothing else,
etymologically, than the writing of motion. In Blow Up, the “sound and fury” of
modern society (as in the anti-war demonstration, the sex scene with the two
young female models in the photographer’s studio and the rock concert of the
Yardbirds) calls for an entirely different perception of the external world. The

Film still from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966).
stillness that responds to it is in no way a sign of a lasting harmony, though. It

represents and entails the chaos of things, but it also opens to the possibility of a
more meaningful relationship between man and his environment. The park, in
this perspective, becomes a metaphor for the lost order of nature, an order which
emphasizes the meditative character of the elements (the wind blowing in the
trees) and the introspective quality of the gaze.
The Crime of Modern Art

Artistic modernity has often been fascinated by the image of crime. One can of
course think of the popular tradition of mystery novels and movies, but also of the
less commercial field of the avant-garde. In his most recent book, Jean-Michel
Rabaté underlines in this regard the aesthetic power of crime as a means of moral
transgression.19 Referring at the beginning of his introduction to a statement by
Adorno in Minima Moralia (“Every artwork is a crime that is not perpetrated”), he
attempts to establish a link between the early twentieth-century modernist avant-
garde, in particular, and the work of contemporary popular writers such as James
Ellroy or Dan Brown. One can legitimately cast a doubt on the validity of such a
link. Nonetheless, Rabaté raises the important issue of the criminal imagination
and its role in the construction of modernism, a movement which from the start
had to take into account the ongoing presence of violence and evil in the modern
world.20
As the title of his book suggests, the main source of his argument is the work
of Marcel Duchamp, and more precisely his last known work, an installation

called Etant donnés, which is part of the Duchamp permanent collection at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art. Most critics have interpreted this work as an original
and rather ironic peep show. For them, the artist conceived of this work as a mere
(and last) provocation which was destined to stir the voyeuristic impulses of the
general public, since the viewer can actually see a naked woman lying on the back
on a bed of leaves through two holes on an old wooden door.
Rabaté, though, takes a different approach: beyond the obvious erotic content
of the work, he sees an allegory of crime and death while guessing the presence
of a dead body. This reminds us, then, of Blow Up, and of the dead body that the
photographer finds in the park after identifying a large spot on his own pictures.
In this context, Rabaté stresses the numerous reactions that the original display of
Duchamp’s work in Philadelphia stirred among the viewers in July of 1969. Sev-
eral viewers noticed the resemblance between the nude female body at the center
of the artwork and that of a corpse similar to those used in anatomy classes for
dissection purposes.
This is of course pure speculation.21 Nonetheless, these comments by Jean-
Michel Rabaté allow me to discuss the possible aesthetic and philosophical rela-
tionship between Blow Up and the modernism of the early-twentieth century
avant-garde, to the extent that a crime scene apparently constitutes the main sub-
ject matter of representation both in Duchamp’s installation and in Antonioni’s
film.22 One could argue that the photographer in this film stands in the position
of a voyeur à la Duchamp and goes back in a perverse way to the scene of the crime
he has witnessed. But this analogy is quite misleading. A true voyeur finds perso-
nal gratification and sexual pleasure in his actions. This is obviously not the case
with the main character of the film. To the contrary, his position as an accidental
investigator leads him ultimately to a deep sense of unease and discomfort. This
is precisely the case because he cannot really solve the mystery of this crime. His
own enlargements (as well as his negatives) are in the end stolen from him,
which prevent him from completing his investigation. Moreover, the dead body
that he discovers at night in the park is later removed from its original location. In
other words, the set of evidence that he has been gradually gathering is subject to
a thorough process of disappearance: the crime itself ends up vanishing from his
own existential horizon, just like the woman who first came to him and asked for
his pictures from the park.
Therefore, the photographer only feels the burden of his own powerlessness:
he cannot find the keys that would open the doors of truth. He is caught in the
position of a mere spectator (as in the fake tennis match) who can only observe
things and events without even being able to act upon them. For Antonioni, evi-
dently, such identity is essentially negative. It reflects the crisis of the modern
subject who is constantly being deceived by the signs around him. This process
of deception is in no way pleasurable: it expresses instead a sense of profound
alienation and isolation that today, more than forty years after the production of

Blow Up, still characterizes the human psyche in Western culture.23 The silence
of the lenses, to quote the title of my own essay, responds thus to the noises of a
world where the gaze has lost a large part of its ethical and aesthetic value. The
understanding of such a predicament was definitely at the core of artistic mod-
ernism: in other words, the crime of the avant-garde could never have existed
without a deep awareness of this particular loss.

PART III
Subjectivity and the
Epistemology of Film
Studies
Beyond Subjectivity. Bakhtin’s
Dialogism and the Moving Image1
Karl Sierek
Formalism and the Bakhtin Circle

With the first publication of essays from Russian literary theorists on the Soviet
cinema of the 1920s and their translation in the early 1970s in Germany, and a
few years later in the United States, the literary and text-theoretical discussions of
so-called Formalism were shifted into the center of film theoretical theory devel-
opment.2 In the early 1980s, one started talking about a paradigm change in film
theory that began with Neo-formalism. This instigated a fruitful discussion of
Formalist theories, and thus the impact of the concepts of Eikhenbaum, Shklovs-
ky, Tynjanov and others reached a temporary zenith. Even if the intensity of these
debates on the meta-theory of film studies has noticeably diminished in favor of
image-political, media-theoretical and film-philosophical lines of inquiry, several
crucial theoretical and methodological questions regarding the importance of
Formalism in literary theory and its consequences for the analysis of film have
remained either unasked or unanswered. Some of these questions revolve around
the problems in regard to the perception of film images, the constitution and
connecting of chains of meaning and their contextualization that are all involved
in the construction of filmic subjectivity.
This blind spot is all the more remarkable, if one considers that even back
then, in the 1920s and early 1930s, those fundamental deficits of the Formalist
literary theory for an application on moving pictures were much disputed. In par-
ticular among members of the so-called Bakhtin Circle: the literary, cultural and
text theorists Valentin Vološinov, Pavel Medvedev and Mikhail Bakhtin commen-
ted on these questions. Alongside the most well-known critical consolidation of
the Formalist literary theory by Medvedev3 many attempts have been made to
further develop the Formalist approaches through the use of a dynamic and mul-
tiplied notion of subjectivity. An early critique of psychoanalysis developed by the
Bakhtin Circle, essays on novel theory, and a monograph on Dostoyevsky are ex-
amples of this. The crucial point here is: How can the problems which have been
broached be discussed using a shared basis in the face of the evident medial dif-
ferences between literature and film? What about the concept of subjectivity re-
garding the definition of picture which can be used in literary theory and which
135
also meets the specific requirements of use in film analysis? Summarizing the
discussions between Formalists and the Bakhtin Circle could therefore also result
in some meta-theoretical insight regarding the current importance of the term of
filmic subjectivity as a meaning-generating agency and effect of filmic text, which
has been pushed into the background by the Neo-formalist and Cognitivist para-
digms of current film theory.
Differential Subjectivities
The discussion of the subject status in art historical discourse took an interesting
turn with the publication of the popular scientific critique of psychoanalysis en-
titled Freudianism,4 written between 1925 and 1927 by Vološinov, a friend and col-
league of Bakhtin. In this work, human subjectivity is understood as a platform
for various instances of speech (parole) and seen as a relational mesh of the cir-
culation of meaning between signifying powers. The subject, which stands at the
center of the reflections of the Bakhtin Circle, already shows itself in this early
work as something which is not in itself identical or consistent. It is understood
more as a dialogue which makes the inner psychic dynamic analogous to social
speech situations. Inner and outer speech5 are intimately interwoven and are con-
stantly in motion directed to the other. This conception will – particularly for the
analysis of films – have wide-reaching consequences. On the one hand, the sub-
stantialization and hypostasizing of the conception of the subject is prevented by
this: subjectivity does not see itself as having a fixed position and being a key to
the world, but rather as a process which constantly renews itself, and which, like
the images in film, produces its effects initially in a progressive movement. On
the other hand, this notion of subject eludes the difficulties pointed out by the
Saussure affiliated film-linguistics: instead of an a priori cutting off of language
as a system in contrast to speech (parole) according to the example set by Saus-
sure, Vološinov, in Freudianism, derives the notion of subject from the direct inte-
gration of communicative and reflexive social and cultural practices. The differ-
ence between the ego and the other, using a hierarchically ordered treatment of
subject and object, is therewith not dealt with.
These dynamic subjectivities are also placed in time through yet another char-
acteristic. The synchronic relationship between the “me-self” and “you-other,”
me and you, or “own” and “foreign,” which is schematically traced out in speech,
experiences an extension in the form of a third instance in Freudianism. This in-
stance tears open the relationship of the individual to its environment which is
constantly threatened by conclusion, and integrates a diachronic function of the
observing third party instance into the synchronic relationship. This function not
only guarantees the connection to the social space, but can also be understood as
an “historical collective memory.”6
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In Bakhtin’s essays on Dostoyevsky’s works, this pluralization and dynamiza-
tion, both inside and outside of the subject, as well as inside and outside of the
arts, is increased. First published in the late 1920s, these essays by Bakhtin derive
a new type of artistic thought from the great novels of Dostoyevsky, an author
who up till now had been seen for the most part exclusively as a realist: polypho-
nic writing. This technique not only interprets the novel as an arena of different
co-existing voices, but also disassembles the subject-construction of monologue-
holistic positions and perspectives of heroes into a multitude and diversity of
“consciousnesses.” By putting this term, which usually exists only in the singular,
into the plural, Bakhtin creates a concept of subjectivity that interweaves diverse
processes of exchange and transformation in a “fundamental plurality of un-
merged consciousnesses.”7
Seeing Speech: Subjectivity in Image

In the course of the 1930s the Bakhtin Circle developed an understanding of sub-
jectivity, based on the dynamic qualities of speech subjects, into a trans-linguistic
subject theory which, within the framework of general aesthetics, can claim valid-
ity far beyond literature and other forms of art. This theory of subjectivity also has
to include non-verbal expressions like gestures, facial expressions and the con-
structed and natural circumstances found in the environment in which expression
takes place. Every expression, understood as an inter-subjective and also aesthetic
event – whether acoustic, visual or graphic – is correlated with the social situation
in which it occurs. Therewith the specific way in which subjectivity is considered
becomes a prerequisite for approaching the principle of Bakhtinian dialogue in
applied arts and visual media.
The step from literature to film using Formalist methods is decidedly more
difficult to take. In spite of the valuable pioneer work which recognized film as a
subject of studies already in the 1920s, the Formalist studies on film style and
inner speech, subject and fable, film language and aesthetics remain strangely
foreign. That is, they radically ignored the eventfulness of film-produced percep-
tion in the cinema as the new image art of the modern era. A number of argu-
ments which were put forward some fifty years later appear to have their starting
point in Pavel Medvedev’s critique of the Formalist view of poetic construction,
which he describes as “the bare converse of a fabricated practical language.”8
One further difference between the Formalist essays on film and the theoretical
prerequisites of the Bakhtin Circle to understand film lies first of all in the varying
problems revolving around consciousness in relation to the status of moving
images in the discourse on aesthetics. While the Formalists tend to limit them-
selves to the questions of poetical and narratological dimensions, the Bakhtin
Circle supports a broader and more open-minded view. They conceptualize the
problems, but also the possibility of a theoretical setting of references of both
beyond subjectivity. bakhtin’s dialogism and the moving image 137

image and words on a fundamental basis. In his (in some parts rather crude)
critique of the Formalists, Medvedev devotes an entire chapter to the “problem of
sight,” with references to art theorists such as August Schmarsow, Adolf von Hil-
debrand, Heinrich Wölfflin, Wilhelm Worringer, Konrad Fiedler and Ernst Cas-
sirer. He also does not forget to mention the importance of hearing in music
theory, as seen in the works of theorists such as Eduard Hanslick. In Medvedev’s
critique, the focus of attention shifts from the construction principles of the
works to the act of producing and observing subjectivities in the dialogical conflict
between the material and the reader: “It was not what was seen that was new, but
the forms of seeing themselves.”9
Bakhtin tries to equalize the author’s, hero’s, or reader’s own image with that
of the respective others in his strategies to expand the concept of dialogue on
aesthetics in general. In doing so, he tries to level out one of the most important
hindrances; the difference between the “ego” and the “you,” the own and the
other, the subject and the object. By suggesting that there is an affinity between
thing-representations and word-representations, he, in effect, follows the same
line of thought as explored in Freudianism. In these relational chains made up of
views and speech acts, Bakhtin argues, these thing- and word-representations
flow together. Together and yet still conflicting with each other, they make up
what one may call the “dialogical image-text of differentiated subjectivities.” Or-
ganized according to the model of speech, it creates word and image clouds
which, in dialogue with other subject clouds, carry out the task of the animated
and active distorting of one’s conception of the other: “In becoming aware of
myself, I attempt to look at myself, as it were, through the eyes of another person,
another representative of my social group, my class.”10
Thus the thinking figure of the one in the other receives a key role. Within the
framework of our formative Identitätsphilosophie this is not easy to imagine. It is
based on a nearly paradoxical line of thought which also marks the deciding dif-
ference between dialogic and dialectic: each individual statement is thought of as
being in itself differential, as being composed of components of the self as well as
of components from the dialogue partner. Without (dialectically understood) the
step of sublating the one in the other, both dialogue-units persist in their differ-
ence, and yet are still extremely closely connected to one another, intertwined.
Bakhtinist trans-linguistics insists upon the differing materiality and mediality of
image and words, but it still assumes that a close network of reference and rela-
tions exists between artistic works and non-artistic artifacts, and that this pertains
to every act of comment. That is, a statement can just as well come from linguistic
subjects as from visual subjects. In this case sight is not a linear process which
starts with the object that is seen and catches one’s eye simply because it falls
within one’s field of vision. The theorists of the Bakhtin Circle see the complex of
the sight, conception and recognition of images as a reciprocal and vibrant pro-
cess of exchange, of dialogue, just like in speech. Visual subjects change, in the
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course of constantly changing views, into objects of sight, just as subjects in
speech change in the course of dialogue between the one speaker and the other,
from one position to the other. This extension of the concept of Jakobson’s
“shifters” into the field of socio-aesthetic processes does in fact start with the
material. That is, with the visually and acoustically perceptible superficial appear-
ance. However, fundamentally it can be understood only as a fleeting, materially
unbound and drifting process:
Thus, the aesthetic component (we shall call it for the present an image) is
neither a concept, nor a word, nor a visual representation, but a distinctive
aesthetic formation which is realized in poetry with the help of the word, and
in the visual arts – with the help of visually apprehended material, but which
does not coincide anywhere with the material or with any material combina-
tion.11
The concept of film subjectivity which can be extrapolated from this thesis is
therefore released from the brusque counter-agent to the object and transported
from an oscillating interaction to other respective subjectivities. On closer reflec-
tion they are discoverable as dynamic processes of “image-speech,” as dialogical
acts of visual-acoustic enunciation.
From Shot/Countershot to Multiple Viewings

Starting with this concept, the scheme of filmic flow set out in film studies in the
1970s, with its successive ordering of shots and coupling of subject-gaze with
object-gaze, should be revised. Some of the filmic problems, for example, the
understanding of film processes in extremely turbulent and, according to the
view/object logic, hardly fathomable constructions, or the “a-logical” view/space
arrangements made possible through CGI techniques, should theoretically be
made presentable in their consistence and brilliance, which is not easily conceiv-
able using conventional point-of-view (PoV) models.
According to the dialogical understanding of the image-text, each individual
shot could be understood as a principally polyphonic arrangement which func-
tions as a platform for numerous and diverse consciousnesses and subjectivities.
The shot therefore shows itself not as one position,12 but rather as many, from
which the attribution to each of the different subjectivities can be placed in order.
It can assume the role of the camera, the position of a deictic gesture, but also, in
reciprocal form, the role of the object which the gaze is locked on, or the visual
object. Visible and audible components are integrated into polyphonic chains of
image-speech elements and develop a dialogue between the subjects at eye level.
The most striking way in which this methodological concept horizon proves
itself successful is in complex image and sound sequences, for example those

which are cultivated in the works of Robert Altman. Without the theoretical back-
ground and the analytical concept horizon of the Bakhtin Circle, these processes
can be only rudimentarily reflected upon. In fact, these processes are the epitome
of tonal and visual polyphony and polyglossy. But also simpler, smoother film-
aesthetical concepts, like those in the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle
Huillet, demonstrate their brilliance and singularity best in the light of such in-
struments of analysis.
The first steps to this approach can be seen in Robert Stam’s analysis of Woody
Allen’s Zelig.13 This work, however, concentrates mainly on the narrative as-
pects and leaves the here intimated dimensions of the polyphonic image con-
struction untouched. Martin Flanagan’s recently published attempt also goes in
this direction.14 But the most broadly growing method of image-analytical differ-
entiation of various components of subjectivity comes from Edward Branigan.15
His scheme of six elements constituting a basis for the analysis of PoV structures
can be understood as a pragmatically applied attempt to deal with the complexity
of components of filmic subjectivity which oppose one another working with op-
erationally usable categories.
However, the problem with Branigan’s theory of subjectivity can be found ex-
actly in this pragmatism. That is to say, while Bakhtin situates his pluralization of
subjectivity in an aesthetic, cultural-historic, and critical political context, Brani-
gan presents his hypothesis only as an antithesis and further development of the
behaviorist process of trial and error. He avoids a crude dichotomy of “right” or
“wrong” acts of perception. He persists in using the scheme of an alignment of
“successful” assignments of meaning in the sense of an exclusion process: hy-
potheses are formed only to be subsequently accepted or dismissed, verified or
found invalid over the course of narration. Still, the understanding of image se-
quences in dialogue form is to be interpreted as a cumulative process. One which
does not annul the respective other as an error of understanding, but rather al-
lows it to be and to make it productive as one of the possible, but not necessarily
subsumable options of narrative logic.
This many-sided discourse on multiple subjectivities therefore opposes a one-
dimensional analogue extension through the succession of shots or syntagmas.
Instead, this discourse unfolds a multidimensional space of reading and re-read-
ing, seeing and remembrance, which develops from the various sides and ad-
versely proceeding vectors of image and head movements as well as from the
visual axis. This caption produces a richness of facets of the image-text and rules
out a lack of contradiction. This richness can develop itself even outside the mea-
surable dimensions of film space and narrative stringency.
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From Formalism to Dialogue
At the time of the first publication of his Dostoyevsky book and his subsequent
banishment to Siberia in 1929, Bakhtin and his colleagues had already formulated
their most distinctive differences into Formalist methods. These can be summarized
– in regard to the question of the construction of plural subjectivities – as follows:
– From the linguistic system to the process of enunciation: The sign is under-
stood through its function in the “process of living interaction”16 of expression.
– From style to polyphony: Bakhtin’s main work “Discourse in the Novel” pro-
motes the understanding of manifold layered linguistic and presentational
practices of varying “consciousnesses” and makes the valuation of polyphoni-
cally arranged films first understandable in their comprehensiveness. Without
this perspective, the analytical work on the image-text remains on the level of
close-meshed detail perceptions and stylistic features: “A stylistic analysis of the
novel cannot be productive outside a profound understanding of heteroglossia,
an understanding of the dialogue of languages as it exists in a given area.”17
– From an individual work to diachronic intertextualization: Without laying bare
the immanence of the individual work and its embedding in the greater cor-
pora, the principle of being unsecluded and the dialogical openness of the
artistic world cannot be portrayed. The genre, as an example of this overlap-
ping unit of analysis, is thus made clear as the historical memory of an art-
work: “A genre lives in the present, but still always remembers its past, its be-
ginning.”18
Image-Text and Productive Sight: Author/Hero/Figure

What effect does this spatiotemporal dynamization of the research on texts and
image-texts have on the relationship between the various levels inside the text, be
it in novels or films? How do authors, heroes and figures act in this differential
play? And finally: how do the dynamics between the text and the viewer in the
cinema, or in front of the screen or monitor form themselves?
For all three subject spheres, that of the author, of the inner diegetic figures,
and that of the viewer, one must “affirm someone else’s ‘I’ not as an object but as
another subject.”19 The both parallel running and criss-crossed path of the three-
part dialogue of the viewer with the work – the dialogue between the viewer and
the inner diegetic characters and other agents or actors in the film, as well as the
author’s relationship with “his” heroes throughout the making and presentation
of the film – is not tied to mono-causal or hierarchical subject/object relation-
ships, they approach each other eye to eye.
This upward revaluation of the material to a living, contestable and idiosyn-
cratic movement takes over the productive dynamics of the author as well as the
viewer with the elements of “his/her” text. Those elements can either be the time-

space elements, or the figures from the story being told. Both relationships are
carried by the dialogical principles which unmistakably appear to be shaped by
social, or more exactly, by very specific social circumstances. All of the partici-
pants in this discourse engage themselves in a relationship, answer each other
and resolve their conflicts in this image-textual arena or agora.20
Thereby Bakhtin takes the respectively existing circumstances which accom-
pany and frame the dialogue with the work as the starting point. The radical
trans-linguistic perspective of this theorem for the understanding of both the
creation and the presentation of image-text can also be readily used in film theo-
retical paradigms. The film viewer manifests him/herself as a productive agent of
text creation, as a subject next to other subjects which are part of the process of
film production and presentation. The viewer composes his/her accents, creates
connections, and reorders the signifying elements of the work respectively ac-
cording to their own individual perceptive background.21 This text producer has
emancipated him/herself from the empirical subject of the author and the cinema
viewer. As a result, every direct set reference between the author and the text is
rejected as “faulty biographism.”22 Instead of looking at traces of the author’s life
on an author-theoretical level, or hermeneutically getting to the bottom of his/her
intentions, the image-text producing subjectivities create reservations, build hin-
drances, distance themselves, or bring unwanted direct proximity to the described
object or subject as well as to the empirical counterpart. In other words, the view-
er changes from a monistic, formalistic subject-constitution in which the poten-
tial possibilities for understanding are limited in order to be made operational
and measurable, to a dialogical constitution, in which polymorphism, the many-
sidedness and the equivocation in a pluridimensional space for expression are
stressed and seen as a prerequisite. His subjectivities differentiate themselves.
These acts of social subjectivization still do not remain free floating and with-
out concrete vectoral alignment within the space of enunciation. In trans-linguis-
tics, statements are interpreted as being sent to their addressees instead of being
embedded in abstract systems. Utterances take place in concrete situations and
can be understood only in these situations. Image-speech is also always “collo-
quial speech, always addressed to somebody or talking for him or about him.”23
In his fundamental work on the theory of literary chronotopes, written during his
years of exile, Bakhtin emphasized the idea that every work, understood as a
rhetorical agency, is principally directed to the hearer or the reader and, to a cer-
tain extent, anticipates their possible reactions. Directed, because the acoustic
and visual statements are applied to the reader, listener or viewer; at the same
time these utterances are, in a rhetorical sense, also directing because the image-
text is able to anticipate the audience’s answers. Read, hear, see: No sensory or-
gan is on principle privileged in this process; no location of interaction – reading
room, orchestra hall, or cinema – as determining factor is suppressed. The con-
text of the respective utterance is broad.
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Subjectivity and/as Corporeality
In his studies on the culture of laughter in the Renaissance which he carried out
in the 1930s and 1940s, Bakhtin was ultimately successful in adding an extremely
lasting facet to the understanding of the subject which is important for the cur-
rent discussion on corporeality. In Rabelais and His World he builds on the idea of a
subjectivity which is open and which, at the same time, overflows the world of
objects, and transfers this idea to the discourse on human corporeality. He was
fascinated by the descriptions of the physical nudes, by the radical Volte in Rabe-
lais’s Gargantua, who drew the attention of the reader away from the physical
presence and onto the backside, the missing parts of the body, the flaws, open-
ings, coverings and masks. The subject which was developed out of this therefore
initially encloses its corporeality, in order to secondly, determine this corporeality
out of these absences. This inversion consequently enables an immense dynamic
in the presentation of human subjectivities which undergo a constant suction
from presence to absence, a dynamic from here to there, an extension from one’s
own to the foreign. Like a whirlwind, a textual hunt begins to loom on the hor-
izon, a whirlwind in which the subject extends him/herself, stretching from his/
her innermost and most intimate core, crossing the boundaries to the purely ma-
terial and physical manifestations of the self and one’s surroundings.
With this last step in the opening of the understanding of the subject leading to
the theories of unbound corporal subjectivities, Bakhtin’s contribution to subjec-
tivity research in text and art theory has conclusively distanced itself from the
lucid groundwork of the Formalists.24 It is not surprising that, for some para-
digms of film theory, this secession is hard to accept, even today. Especially for
those who cultivate a special affinity to Formalistic literary theory of the first years
of the Soviet Union.
Form/Dialogue/Neo-form
A subjectivity which forms and differentiates itself through corporal experience?
Perhaps it is exactly this thought which impeded a consideration of decisive
points of criticism to be made by the Bakhtin Circle in regard to the Formalistic
theorems in the field of modern film theory since the 1970s. One argument which
would support this idea is the fact that the School of Wisconsin, which explicitly
builds on Formalism, chose, as the second pillar of its meta-theoretical premise,
an approach that also distanced itself from corporeal modes of perception: Cog-
nitivism.
The remarkable combination of Formalism and Cognitivism that to this day
can be established, albeit only with considerable bending, into a consistent set of
film-theoretical premises, was initially assumed to be a thoroughly reasonable
extension of text-analytical questions to viewer-theoretical problems. Instead of

explaining the activities of the reader-subjects out of complexly networked, im-
age-based manners of speech within a certain concrete ensemble of social, cultur-
al and corporal environments (as in the further development of Formalistic ax-
ioms through the Bakhtin Circle), Kristin Thompson, David Bordwell, and other
Neo-formalists chose the approach of applied psychology, which was derived
from behaviorism: “Film has attractions too, and these function as stimuli for
spectatorial response.”25 This approach limits itself to the processing of cues and
accommodation to formerly learned schemes. In its “more modest”26 concept,
the cognitivist approach locates the individual communication process in con-
trolled situations, where the dialogicity theorems postulate a concept-historical
and transdisciplinary applied theory of human subjectivity. While the representa-
tives of the Bakhtin Circle critically incorporate the perceptions of the cultural
philosophy and art studies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries27
into their understanding of the complex exchange processes between differing
subjectivities, the reductionist approach of Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell
makes do with psychological-learning theories of middle-level range28 which,
even after the cognitive turn of the 1960s, do not fundamentally dissociate them-
selves from the models of stimulus/response: “Neo-formalism as an approach
does offer a series of broad assumptions about how artworks are constructed and
how they operate in cuing audience response.”29 So Neo-formalistic strategies of
inquiry that take the stimulus of a formal construction of the artwork and the
response of the audience into consideration hold on to methodological para-
digms of a philosophy of science. In retrospect, one can say that this approach
was already counterposed by Konrad Fiedler’s concept of image perception,
which he developed near the end of the 1920s and which had a considerable im-
pact on the works of the Bakhtin Circle. Fiedler established this model on a dif-
ferentiated and specific perception theory of art, without any reductions in the
analysis of the formal construction characteristics of individual works. It is there-
fore particularly suitable for figurative works of art, namely narrative: “Realistic
art is just as constructivist as constructivist art.”30
It seems that the cognitivism of the School of Wisconsin still adheres to the
premises of positivism found in the discussions which took place in the late
1920s. According to Medvedev, this also replaced the extensively perceivable sub-
ject through a recipient model, which “reduced the sensual quality to a physical
and physiological element, juxtaposing the eye, like an abstract physiological
camera, to the phenomenon as an abstract physical quantity.”31 But what Kristin
Thompson was able to distill out of the critical texts of the Formalists in her pro-
grammatic study at the end of the 1980s, was to be incorporated as a scheme in
Bordwell’s contributions barely ten years later. A scheme in which the subject,
following Talcott Parsons’32 social alignment theory of structural-functionalism
from the 1930s, is reduced to a role in the social system: the “subject is, most
obviously, a role in the social system.”33
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Indeed, the analysis of sign stimuli and schemes provides a suitable reference
grid for explaining relatively simple processes for understanding film. However, it
does not suffice to explain aesthetically relevant nuances and to find their func-
tion in the dynamics of the productive reading; a function which in many films is
not to be found in the solving of problems, but rather in the creation of a certain
problem-consciousness in the first place. And exactly this problem-oriented, even
refractory, reading emanates from a dynamic relationship between the production
and presentation of film texts and the equally dynamic subjectivities. We are not
talking about an abstract understanding of film “as a specific category of phe-
nomena,”34 but rather about the “how of the production” of this phenomenon.
Just as Bakhtin proposed to formulate a set of requirements for the study of litera-
ture, film analysis should also start out with five prerequisites for its research
strategies, all of which then can work together in the production of the dialogical
image-text. What should such a set of requirements contain? Firstly, the auditory
and visual material values, which Bakhtin describes as “the phonic side of the
word, the musical constituent proper.”35 Secondly, the denotative sign function
with all of its connotative varieties and nuances. Thirdly, the contextual moments of
verbal and visual utterances in their temporal flow. Fourthly, that palette of inten-
sities of intonation and coloration during the presentation, also known as “immer-
sion,” that serves the purpose of making cinema imaginable as a “festival of feel-
ings.” And finally, the cumulative feeling of the corporal images on the part of the
viewer, the absorbing capacity of the gestures and mimicry of the characters, of
the becoming aware of the eventfulness of film processes in the “feeling of verbal
activeness”36 of audio-visual speech, which is often analyzed in current media
theory as the effect of the attainment of presence value, and in film-theoretical
contributions as the problem area of enunciation. This five-layered set should
basically be used as a guideline during every analytical endeavor. It is obvious
that the findings of this type of analysis are more comprehensive than the results
of an analytical strategy in which “we can think of norm-driven subsystems as
supplying ‘cues’ for the spectator.”37
Nevertheless, one advantage of the formalist-cognitivist theory-amalgam is ob-
vious, especially in the discussion of the importance of cinematic subjectivities:
the skepticism toward an inflationary use of the term subject, as seen in Bord-
well’s critique on the “subject-position theory,”38 could serve to curb the substan-
tialization and hypostasizing of this concept, as well as its vague use in quite a
number of film-theoretical concepts of the 1970s and 1980s. However, that the
rather striking idea of a subjectivity without a subject is not easy to sustain is
indeed proven by Thompson and Bordwell’s own use of it – which is not too
seldom found in their own work. Reducing the multi-layered concepts of plural
subjectivity to measurable indicators and workable variables, as seen in applied
psychology, and to the two measurable factors of “perceptual and mental subjec-
tivity,” Thompson ascribes to the films invariable characteristics, the possession of

which should distinguish them: “The BIG SLEEP has little perceptual subjectivity,
while THE BIRTH OF A NATION contains numerous PoV shots.”39 With this
“have” and “contain,” a relational category which describes an interplay between
filmic utterances becomes a product of objectification, which is either “in” a film
or not. So what Bakhtin already called for in 1924 seems yet to find expression in
the texts of Neo-formalism: “What is repeated, what returns, what establishes
connections are not constituents of meaning immediately (in their objectiveness,
i.e., their complete detachment from the speaking personality of a subiectum),
but – constituents of the relational self-activity of the living self-sensation of the
activity.”40
Conclusion
With this plea of a not only active, but also productive subjectivity, the prerequi-
sites of the current debate on the importance of cinematic subjectivities can be
summed up in three premises: Firstly, psychic processes can be understood as
speech events (parole) and as such do not differ fundamentally from verbal utter-
ances in the social and aesthetic sphere. Secondly, these utterances always in-
clude not only the spoken words, but also the (situational, imaginary, social, or
material) environments in which these words are said: they are to be understood
as image-realization within the framework of a creating process, comparable to a
text in context. Thirdly, the formulations of the Bakhtin Circle are not limited to
the explanation of the relationship between psychic processes and those of a ver-
bal nature, but principally lay claim to validity for all significant movements,
therefore also for film. While the Formalists drew on literary studies and linguis-
tic theorems, the theorists of the Bakhtin Circle developed a trans-linguistic con-
ception of subjectivity out of these premises. These ideas reflected similar dis-
courses in the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, art studies, and sociology.
Therefore, what already provided occasion for intense disputes back in the
mid-1920s appears to stir the meta-theory of film studies to this day. Is it sensible
to pursue research with an open horizon in transdisciplinary perspectives? Is it
necessary, especially in art and film studies, to incorporate and reflect upon the
circumstances and point of view of both the research and researcher, which is
fundamentally a question of subjectivity? Is it possible to combine the broad hor-
izon of culture-theoretical reflection with the attention to detail involved in film-
analytical research? Or will a self-limited restraint lead to limited results? The
answers to these questions can already be found in the Bakhtin Circle’s critique
on all forms of Formalism.
146 karl sierek

Imaginary Subject
Jacinto Lageira
Experience often shows that the notion of subjectivity presupposes a psychophy-

sical base frequently related to the subject. This experience is not a natural given
but a historical construction, evidenced by the fact that Western thought has long
been able to refer to “self” and “I” without a foundation in the concept of subject,
nonexistent at the time, not to mention other traditions of thought (Chinese, for
example) where neither the notion of subject nor subjectivity exist. There were
then, paradoxically, one or several subjectivities without a subject. Sometimes, its
absence from Ancient Greece to the modern era dates back to the advent of the
subject. However, the origin of the modern notion of the subject is still much
debated from dating its emergence (Saint Augustine, Montaigne, Descartes,
Locke, or Kant?) to figuring its content and signification, all of which are further
obscured by integrating other sociocultural and philosophical constructs such as
“person” and “individual.” Strange as it may seem, individual subjectivity is not
the same as the subjectivity of a person or that of the subject. We therefore have
to find out on what base subjectivity is founded, “base” being the translation of
Aristotle’s term hupokeimenon (from hupokesthai, “placed under, serving as base or
foundation for”), from which the Latin term subjectum (“that which lies beneath,”
but also “that which is constant”) was forged, followed by subjectity, subjectivity,
and subjectification.
Definitions
Subjectivity thus belongs to the rich history of the subject and although it shares
several elements with the notions: “I,” “self,” “ego,” “me,” “ipseity,” and “same-
ness” – their complex overlapping is clearly articulated in the often ironically used
English expression, “me, myself, and I” – subjectivity distinguishes itself from the
rest ontologically, logically, grammatically, and sociologically. Without retracing
here the whole history of the concept,1 two moments should be noted: the pres-
ence of the subject to itself, explored for the first time by John Locke in An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding,2 and the notion of aesthetic subjectivity concep-
tualized by Immanuel Kant in Critique of Judgment.3
For me to apprehend my aesthetic subjectivity, I first have to understand what
makes me myself through all the vicissitudes of existence that bitterly or happily
transform that very subjectivity. The latter inevitably changes through space and
147
through time, yet I am still me, conscious that I am myself, that I am only myself,
that my subjectivity is unique and can belong to none other than myself. Accord-
ing to Locke – who does not use the term subjectivity – “personal identity” can
only refer to:
A thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it
self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it
does only by that consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking, and as it
seems to me essential to it: it being impossible for anyone to perceive, without
perceiving, that he does perceive. [...] For since consciousness always accom-
panies thinking, and it is that, that makes everyone to be, that he calls self; and
thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone con-
sists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being: and as far as this
consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far
reaches the identity of that person, it is the same self now it was then; and it is
by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action
was done.4
Other than the significant reference to memory contributing to a definition of

self, Locke introduces the unprecedented notion of self-consciousness (not pre-
sent in Descartes) which leads him to conclude that “consciousness is what
makes personal identity”5 and “consciousness makes the same person.”6
Although corporal identity is not valorized, the author nonetheless highlights its
determining role, to which one must add considerations of language and signs in
language since Locke is the first to introduce the term semiotics to philosophy in
this same essay. Self-consciousness, the body, language, and memory are thus
joined in a radically innovative conception, the repercussions of which will be
duly examined.7
The interest, richness, and strength of the Kantian conception of the aesthetic
subject lies in that it denotes a subjectivity without subjectivism, in other words, a
private, solipsistic sensibility or intelligibility closed in on itself, that would thus
not be able to be shared or communicated. Since aesthetic judgment is subjective
with a pretension to universality, while judging works of art, I claim that my sub-
jectivity is a sensibility that can be understood and felt by all, without the judg-
ment itself being a general one addressed to a select few or specific community.
The aesthetic universality of human beings would reside then in a universally
shared subjectivity – also true for practical reason – which goes against all parti-
cularisms, relativisms and pluralisms that since then, under the pretense of over-
tures and tolerance for all sorts of differences, are in the end, but a way of keep-
ing the other at a distance as radically different rather than a mutual recognition
of subjectivities.
148 jacinto lageira

Sociocultural categorizations in the field of aesthetics, in this case the aes-
thetics of cinema, are peculiar in that they seem to naturalize clearly historical
stages of thought in order to transform them into raw data. It is remarkable that
in certain Anglo-American trends,8 the major influences on the recent notion of
subject in film theory are attributed to Louis Althusser and Roland Barthes. “The
death of man” to which Michel Foucault refers at the end of Les Mots et les Choses,9
should also be mentioned, and a whole pan of structuralist thought that gave
primacy to structures over the subject. This is to sideline the quantity of philoso-
phical works on the concept of the subject that continue to be published, still
using structuralist approaches that apply a single frame or paradigm to a complex
and diversified problematic, constantly shifting at least as frequently as there are
practices and actions performed by subjects outside the world of film.
Upon examination, one realizes that only a small number of texts address the
question, and those that do, focus on the sociopolitical or ideological dimensions
of the subject, notably those with psychoanalytic and gender studies angles.
These often deal with formal, sometimes formalist typologies, to which notions
of subjectivity are submitted without examination of what is or might be a or the
subject, in such a way that the frames of reference actually construct the notion
that they purport to explain. The term subjectivity itself only appears sporadically
throughout these specialized works, or indirectly in other forms that are, in rea-
lity, quite different, such as narration, narrator, speaker, enunciator, statement,
enunciation, spectator, spectatorial, discourse, diegesis. These are all terms that
imply subjects or bases (hupokeimenon) for speakers.
Between ideological reductionism and isotopic formalism, that have both prof-
fered excellent analyses, a third way seems practicable that would not excessively
invest films with a focus on the real life social conflicts that cinema is supposed to
be the magnifying or deforming mirror of, nor excessively formalize notions de-
fined solely by functions, modalities, structures and models; codes far removed
from our existence as subjects, even faced with the worst or best of films.
Being Imaginary
This preamble was necessary to understand the processes of projection, identifi-
cation, distanciation, empathy, or rejection by the spectator before the fictional
object of the film. Although the base is still clearly the subject (me, here and
now, in flesh and blood, watching), the subjectivity that transports or transposes
itself momentarily by its aesthetic attitude toward the film is not completely real.
The film is an imaginary object that requires a game of make-believe so that its
functions and significations can gain sufficient grasp of my subjectivity. Knowing
that none of this is real, one can only presume that my subjectivity is also engaged
momentarily in a game of make-believe in which I am no longer quite myself but
another, having constructed a different subjectivity capable of sharing the fic-
imaginary subject 149

tional status of what is perceived. For the duration of the viewing, my subjectivity
has become imaginary.
The “imaginary subject” is not other to myself such that it would remain inac-
cessible. On the contrary, it has its source in the subject and subjectivity that
make me who I am, while differentiating itself by an engagement with the world
during which my consciousness is situated in two distinct ways: either by stipulat-
ing the existence of concrete reality, or by distinguishing certain things, states or
actions that only exist in the imagination. This fundamental phenomenological
conception was extensively developed by Edmund Husserl and later by Jean-Paul
Sartre, thus establishing two modes of thought: realizing consciousness and ima-
ging consciousness. Indivisible, the first perceives, thinks and interacts with the
tangible world; the second relates to images, beings, imaged and imagined things
that are purely fictional – what Husserl calls fictum, and ficta. What is the state
then of our subjectivity whilst relating to the fictional?
From a phenomenological perspective, the “subjective camera” perfectly corro-
borates the idea that all consciousness is consciousness of something, therefore
consciousness for someone or some instance. The spectator is faced with per-
ceived and transmitted ficta from this other person or instance of the film; what
he sees is not directly what is represented but what is represented through what
the representation offers. In Robert Montgomery’s remarkable film Lady in the
Lake (1947), we are meant to see what detective Philip Marlowe perceives. We are
not so much in his place – taking the place of his subjectivity – contrary to what
we might hastily assume, as we perceive the representation of what his subjectiv-
ity perceives. This game of mise-en-abyme is reinforced in Spike Jonze’s film,
Being John Malkovich (1999) since we are placed in the situation of seeing
what other characters in the film see from inside the head of John Malkovich, and
because the latter also finds himself at times spectator inside his own head while
maintaining his psychophysical presence. Thus we see either what the characters
see of what Malkovich sees, or what Malkovich perceives himself of himself as a
perceiving subject of perception. It is further complexified by the fact that the
actor John Malkovich plays himself. In this case, the subject of perception is him-
self in the act of perceiving with the philosophically bizarre exception that the
Malkovich inside his own head is different from the one having a conversation,
and clearly does not realize that he is observing himself from the inside or that he
is being observed from the inside by another “himself.” More precisely then, are
there two consciousnesses in a single body or two bodies with a single conscious-
ness? An eminently Lockean question since the English philosopher himself had
pondered this enigma.10
The spectator is the one whose consciousness can both realize the concrete and
material reality of the cinematic apparatus (realizing consciousness) and project
itself imaginatively into the ongoing film (imaging consciousness) without leav-
ing its psychophysical base, so to speak. My capacity to divide and duplicate (dé-
150 jacinto lageira

doubler) my imaginary self explains how the base can maintain its state of same-
ness so that my subjectivity can simultaneously locate itself aesthetically in the
film while remaining itself. The spectator creates himself as a subjective double
that allows him to perceive, feel and live all sorts of experiences through and by
way of the film solely within the ambit of his imagination. During the time of
viewing, my subjectivity doubles itself into realizing and imaging without ever
being separated from one another in such a way that the effect of the real acts
upon me concretely. I cannot pretend to be moved or affected either positively or
negatively, the subjectivity caught in the fiction being neither false nor illusory,
simply imaginary.
The imaginary is not only grounded in the real, it is itself a kind of reality.
Edgar Morin sees in this a fundamental anthropological dimension, taking up
elements of Sartre’s Imaginaire, beyond our dynamic relation to the moving image:
The more powerful the subjective need, the more the image on which it is
fixated tends to be projected, alienated, objectified, hallucinated, fetishized
[…], the more the image, despite its apparent objectivity and because of its
apparent objectivity, is full of this need to the point that it takes on a surreal
aspect. In the hallucinatory encounter of the greatest subjectivity and the great-
est objectivity, in the geometrical location of the greatest alienation and the
greatest need, there is the double, specter-image of man. This image is pro-
jected, alienated, objectified to such a degree that it manifests itself as an
autonomous, foreign specter with an absolute reality of its own. This absolute
reality is also an absolute super-reality: the double is concentrated there, as if
all the needs of the individual were realized through it, first and foremost his
most crazily subjective need: immortality.11
In the make-believe game with the film, my imaginary subjective double’s aim is
much more existential than it seems, seeking to escape, through the imagination,
the finite nature of every subjectivity that characterizes the modern subject since
Kant. If my imaginary double allows me to detect what might be the full realiza-
tion of my subjectivity, as it belongs to the fictional realm of all possible worlds, it
still continually refers me back to my real subjectivity: finite base, limited in space
and in time, but necessary for the apparition of what is not actually there.
The image is but a double, a reflection, in other words, an absence. Sartre says
that “the essential characteristic of a mental image is the way the object is
absent within its very presence.” To which we must add its reciprocal clause:
to be present within its very absence. As Sartre says himself: “the original is
incarnated, it descends into the image.” The image is a lived presence and a
real absence, an absence-presence.12

This synchronic double status of the image – effective presence and a just as
effective absence – inevitably generates in me a two-folding (dédoublement) of my
subjectivity, with the fundamental consequence that it is not the totality of my
subjectivity – if indeed I could ever be certain of grasping it entirely – that inter-
acts with the fiction, but only the imaginary part.
Twofoldness
It is thus inaccurate to say that “I” identifies with the film, its characters, the
diegesis, or that “I” empathizes with this character, as the other subject in the
film, given that my entire subjectivity does not adhere to the whole fiction, thank-
fully enough. All the more so as the subjectivities presented in various instances
of the film are never completely given, being just aspects, versions, or snatches.
The incompleteness of subjective instances means that by their nature, they can
never be filled by my subjectivity, which does not try to complete their reality but
rather their imaginary part. S.T. Coleridge foresaw this in his “suspension of dis-
belief”13 as did psychologist Edward Bullough in his definition of the proper aes-
thetic distance, halfway between psychical over-distance which is excessively dis-
invested from the fiction and a psychical under-distance which is too invested;
both being serious obstacles to the proper aesthetic experience of an object.14
The game of make-believe, or “as if,” requires a subjectivity that is not engaging
itself as strictly subjective but rather developing into an imaginary subjectivity.
Because this imaginary subjectivity is dynamic, investing the object as Kant de-
monstrated, it is productive, participating in the fulfillment of the entire aesthetic
experience. The work of film-makers – be it fiction, documentary, or experimen-
tal film – is to disassociate, more or less thoroughly, realizing from imaging sub-
jectivity, tending either to bring them closer by all kinds of subterfuges and man-
euvers, or to distance them to the point of having one triumph over the other.
One example of this powerful distortion device is to make the status of the
spectator’s imaginary subjectivity shift during the time frame of the film, thereby
demonstrating two things: that this subjectivity is indeed imaginary and that it is
quasi infinitely plastic. In John Woo’s Face/Off (1997), the dovetailing and later
disjoining of subjectivities, instead of losing the spectator by too great a de-sub-
jectification – which does however take place for a time – on the contrary, rein-
forces her capacity to invest simultaneously or successively various subjectivities.
To find the location of a chemical bomb hidden in the city by terrorist Castor Troy
(Nicolas Cage), FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta) undergoes plastic surgery
in order to have Troy’s face grafted onto his, allowing him to infiltrate the prison
in which Troy’s brother Pollux is an inmate and access information about the
bomb’s location. Dispossessed of his identity, Troy then takes on Archer’s face.
In this inversion of bodies but not minds, we accept or reject their respective
mental states while their bodies have undergone a specifically Lockean change: a
152 jacinto lageira

consciousness of self in another body. For the viewer, her imaginary subjectivity
is thus redoubled since she is now in the psychophysical imaginary of the charac-
ter’s transformed imaginary. The other’s subjectivity is thus emotionally invested
thanks to the play of fiction which presents several subjectivities inside the film’s
internal permutation of subjects. The dovetailing of imaginary subjectivities is dizzy-
ing in that we penetrate fictionally the image of a subject (character) that has
himself integrated another psychophysical image of himself (character in another
character), hence experiencing himself as an entirely different subjectivity – not to
mention the fact that Castor and Pollux are twins. We have thus eased our way
into what Husserl called the power of perception of an image within an image,
within an image, each according to his imaginative capacities. This propensity to
integrate another subjective image, then another and another, is proof that the
primary identification or empathy with the “effect of subjectivity” of the first ap-
pearance of this or that character is not more exact, true, valid or even plausible
than a third or a fifth.
In an entirely different genre, Cet Obscur Objet du Désir (1977) by Luis
Buñuel, tells the strange story of Matthieu Faber (Fernando Rey), in love with one
and the same psychical woman, Conchita, incarnated in two separate bodies (Car-
ole Bouquet, Angela Molina). This seems to be the first instance of the like in
cinema. There is a scene where, while Faber is speaking to Conchita 1, she moves
toward the window and, transitioning through a foreground shot of Faber, she
turns around and we now see Conchita 2, which does not perturb her lover in the
least. It makes sense: he is subjectively in love with Conchita’s subjectivity, not
directly with her body, which is simply a vessel. In such cases, with one subjectiv-
ity in two distinct bodies, which subjectivity(ies) are we to identify with? In the
end, once the initial surprise is subsided, we have no problem moving from one
to the other as Faber does. The problem is precisely that it does not pose our
subjectivities any problem to integrate this or that character, to change our own
psychophysical feelings during the course of the film, as if it were all perfectly
normal. This is due to the plasticity of our imaginary subjectivities, otherwise
well anchored and founded in our consciousnesses and concrete, real, tangible
selves. Because I have stayed myself and my subjectivity has maintained its state
of sameness, I can project an imaginary subjectivity precisely because it is imagin-
ary without endangering my realizing consciousness. This film exacerbates the
subjectivity of the desiring imaginary simultaneously and on different levels, of
the author, the character and the spectator; the desire for the desire of another
imaginary subjectivity, a movement that appears subtly in the title since the film is
not about the obscure subject of desire but about the object of desire of the subject.

Fictional Imaginary
By a curious psychoanalytic transgression, a number of authors have constructed
Lacanian analyses of the imaginary present in various works, expressly prohibited
by Lacan himself, which he justified by the fact that the psychoanalytic relation-
ship can only occur between two speaking subjects, each of us endowed with our
own imaginary subjectivity which remains literally speaking. And yet, in the at-
tempts at a psychoanalytic reading of film, it is the receiving imaginary subjectiv-
ity that speaks of and for the film. Without delving into this Verneinung, both affec-
tive and intellectual of the Lacanian proscription, we still have to recognize that
regrettable confusions take place when attempts are made to superimpose the
Lacanian and the fictional imaginary. Because they come from and return to the
subject, to any subject (different instances in the film or present in the spectator),
the identification of the fictive imaginary – that of the subject’s fantasies – and the
fictional imaginary – the projections and reception of the spectator – as concrete
cases of transference is a bit hasty. In the former, there can be fiction, hence
falsehood, denial, lack (manque), negation, repression, fantasy, imaginary experi-
ences of the subject; in the latter, what is felt and thought in an imaginary way is
postulated from the start as fictional. Hence the subjective and fictive imaginary
in psychoanalysis is based on a psychical truth about the subject that can even-
tually be brought to light whereas the subjective and fictive imaginary in film is
neither true nor false, being simply conceived and received as fictional. And as-
suming there were a fictional truth, as most theory dealing with fiction suggests,
it is only true or valid within the fiction that bears it. That the fictive imaginary
subject be present and active during the viewing of the film does not automati-
cally make it a fictional imaginary subject by the action of inserting fictive materi-
al (his real and personal imaginary) into fictional material (neither true nor false
generic imaginary).
Since Jean-Louis Baudry’s article, “Le dispositif: approches métapsychologi-
ques de l’impression de réalité,”15 the analogy between cinematic apparatus and
psychical system in its psychoanalytic construction by simple superimposition of
the unconscious imaginary and the fictional imaginary, has falsified both the no-
tions of subjectivity and imaginary. Especially by not clearly differentiating the
“unreal” (which Sartre did do, after Husserl, at the end of L’Imaginaire16) of art
works, that is, the fiction imagined by a subject with no references to concrete
reality, from the more common imaginary that allows one to imagine certain ac-
tions, persons, places that exist in the tangible world, which I can make present
through the production of my imaginary, even when they are concretely absent in
the here and now. This subjective state of my imaginary is an invention that
places me in fictive situations, since I do not unrealize contexts, actions or desires
like when I paint an artwork, write a novel or make a film. The first are objects
154 jacinto lageira

that exist for the subject, the second are literally nonexistent – or phenomenolo-
gically “unreal.”
Christian Metz’s approach in Le Signifiant imaginaire17 added pertinent phenom-
enological insight to the Lacanian theory of the imaginary of the subject, thus
integrating much-needed nuances such as the notion of unrealization. A whole
new angle was introduced to notions of identification, the mirror-play between
receiving subject and the subject(s) of film, holding together reality and imagin-
ary:
In film, the subject’s knowledge takes on a very specific form without which
films wouldn’t work. It’s a two-pronged understanding (but held as one): I
know that what I see is imaginary (hence I am not disturbed by the sometime
extreme strangeness being depicted) and I know that I myself am doing the
seeing. This second understanding is itself split: I know that I am really per-
ceiving this, my sensory organs are at work, I am not hallucinating/fantasizing
[…] and I also know that I am responsible for this perception, that this ima-
ginary material is deposited in me as if I were a second screen […] and hence, I
am the location in which this really perceived imaginary gains symbolic
ground […].18
My subjective consciousness posits both the real and the imaginary. Or, more
precisely referring to a game of make-believe, my subjective consciousness posits
the work as unreal and my psychophysical reality, which itself subdivides, as Metz
underlines, into a projection of my subjective imaginary into the unreal of the
work. We thus cut short the process of pure transference between one uncon-
scious and another, between a supposed “grand subject” that would be the film
and my subjectivity that submits to it, left to comply with the knowledge of that
other “grand subject,” a new avatar for the “grand image-maker” (grand imagier).
The second fundamental advantage of Metz’s approach, even though he does
not himself draw all the conclusions from it, is that the clear distinction made
between unreal and reality, imaginary and fiction, allows me to make subjective
aesthetic judgments from elsewhere than my inaccessible unconscious since I am
not judging from a fantasized vantage point (by me or through a third person) the
imaginaries portrayed in a film but as if they were fictional imaginary. This osten-
sible tautology is due to the division and duplication (dédoublement) of conscious-
ness into realizing and imaging, revealing an imaginary unique to all subjects
through the receiving subjectivity, in such a way that “the spectator, in effect,
identifies with himself; himself as pure act of perception (rendering awake or alert):
as a condition of the possibility of perception, hence as a sort of transcendental
subject, preceding all that there is.”19
Not only is there no need to shy away from establishing the origin of this two-
fold (dédoublement) consciousness in a transcendental conception of the subject – a

Kantian notion attached to the aesthetic subject’s “faculty of judgment” – but it
helps explain our ability to take on, and subjectively apprehend, other subjectiv-
ities, often far removed from our own, despite all kinds of sociocultural, ideologi-
cal, political, moral, and hence subjective differences. The cases of division and
duplication (dédoublement) due to some kind of madness of one or several charac-
ters are extreme cases of what our subjective imaginaries can perform faced with
unhinged, delirious, quasi-de-subjectivized subjectivities, never to the point of
losing our own subjectivities. Sometimes, this kind of encounter even helps to
reinforce them.
The complex plays of de-subjectification both internal and external to certain
films, as they slide insidiously from film to spectator so that they too are momen-
tarily de-subjectified, have brilliantly attempted to detach subjectivity from its
base, without managing to entirely sever it, perhaps because we are dealing with
a “transcendental subject, preceding all that there is.” Whether in Persona (In-
gmar Bergman, 1966), The Tenant (Roman Polanski, 1976), Barton Fink
(Joel and Ethan Coen, 1991), Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) or more recently
Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010), we see that all sorts of differences –
evidently, quite real – from the characters, to situations and aesthetic forms can
cause distress, notably through their capacity to destroy the subjectivity both on
screen and in the audience. Nevertheless, the de-subjectification remains imagin-
ary, unreal, illusory, in the space of the fictional game where subjectivity can be
infinitely transformed. In this respect, Donald W. Winnicott’s often forgotten
analysis in Playing and Reality,20 nicely completes the notion of imaginary subjec-
tivity by what he calls transitional objects or phenomena where the play and illu-
sion of art develops in a “potential space” located between internal (subjective)
reality and external (objective) reality. What he alternatively refers to as “the inter-
mediary realm of experience” is akin if not identical to the various games of
“make-believe” and “as if” through which our experiences are “done” and un-
done; where notably, a subjectivity is formed that is never entirely real or entirely
fictional which Winnicott designates as the space of illusion, art being its most
accomplished form. Imaginary subjectivity would then be an intermediary, poten-
tial, illusory place from which the play of art departs and returns, producing its
own reality within the reality of the world.
Documents of the Self

As long as we know we are dealing with fictional subjectivities perceived through
our own imaginary subjectivity, the interaction between play and reality, thanks to
the intermediary realm of various experiences, takes place in a fairly simple and
straightforward manner. This is less evident with filmed autobiographical forms
(cinema, video, blogs; webcams, cell phones, computers…) since the aim here is
to show a naked subjectivity by documenting it without adornment, appendage or
156 jacinto lageira

fictional transformation – what Michael Renov calls “performing the self.”21 The
subjectivity simultaneously authored and belonging to the author, the subject and
object is thus presented as real and true rather than simply plausible. Although it
is unlikely that all imaginary or fictional elements can be eradicated from docu-
mentary,22 reality and subjectivity do move toward the realizing consciousness
and away from the imaging. I can certainly project a portion of my imaginary
subjectivity onto a documentary film, leaving unaltered the fact that the represen-
tation now coincides with the represented and that a large part, if not the whole
of what I am watching is not imaginary. The difficulty is less to adopt a realizing
consciousness before the documentary subjectivity but to note that it is absolutely
impossible for me to silence my imaginary subjectivity. In the end, the more
powerful, violent, insufferable, or unacceptable the content of a documentary
film, the more I resort to my imaginary subjectivity in order to balance its realiz-
ing hold on me. The documentary produces a sort of split subjectivity giving more
space than we think to the imaginary that saves us from too much reality. This
split subjectivity is the reverse and also the complement of what takes place in
fictions which continually return us to our lived reality so that our imaginary sub-
jectivity is not solely the consequence of our relation to the fictional.
It has been well established that any fictional film borrows from the field of
documentary and vice versa; it is only a question of gradation. Films are made by
subjects, themselves caught in a “social subjectivity” of the images.23 Any subjec-
tive consciousness is always simultaneously realizing and imaging. That one
adopts this attitude more than another is itself just a question of degree. The only
difference being that in a documentary, the subjectivity’s base is endowed with a
very different ontological status. Even if it is performed or represented, its “rea-
son for being” is never questioned: it is, it exists, and it is present in the material
world. Our imaginary subjectivities are more fully solicited when faced with
works in which the status of the base is called into question or tends to disappear,
or has all but disappeared, and the subjectivity it is meant to carry or incarnate is
thus itself on the verge of annihilation. We are then in the presence of a voluntary
destruction of the hupokeimenon, consisting in the dislodging or eradication of that
subjectivity by a threat to its psychophysical base. These are not de-subjectifica-
tions due to personal mental pathologies – whether fictional, as discussed earlier
or real, like in Frederik Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967) – but de-subjectifica-
tions planned and programmed by other subjects in order to nullify the subjectiv-
ity of the other. Documentaries on executioners and their victims, torturers and
tortured come to mind. How do our subjectivities respond when seeing and hear-
ing the other crushed, ghostly, spectral, like a hupokeimenon emptied of its subjec-
tivity?
More precisely, a subjectivity so utterly transformed in body and in spirit that it
no longer seems of this world, appearing like a parallel subjectivity. Yet it all
depends on the subjectivity expressing itself, for the torturer is not interchange-

able with the tortured, as Rithy Panh’s documentary, S21, La Machine de
Mort Khmer Rouge (2002), horrifyingly demonstrates. When we see the tor-
turers and the few surviving victims standing together in the same places, repeat-
ing the same gestures of violence or horrified fear (separately), it is clear that the
split subjectivity is not only between the protagonists of the documentary but is
integrated by the spectator as empathy for the survivors and anger toward the
extreme cruelty of the torturers. Yet the torturers are also subjects with subjectiv-
ities.
Before such excesses of reality, we have to muster a great effort of the imagina-
tion to understand both victim and persecutor. For the question remains: how can
a human being do this to a fellow human? Are these men that have tortured,
killed, and raped still subjects, do they still have subjectivities, or should we con-
sider this type of subject and subjectivity without pity as part of our nature? In this
kind of documentary film, sociopolitical, moral, and ethical questions can be
comprehended by what is called in moral psychology – an approach focused on
agency, self, and subjectivity – “moral imagination,”24 allowing us to imagine the
kinds of solutions, attitudes, and decisions that might be appropriate to our prac-
tical moral conduct. To this end, art works present themselves as experiences of
moral thought processes that can provide modes of reflection in relation to our
lives, as both Iris Murdoch25 and Martha Nussbaum26 developed regarding lit-
erary works, and easily transposed to the field of film, itself never morally neutral,
be it fiction or documentary.
Contemporary approaches in cinema to empathy, identification, the projection
of one’s subjectivity with or on the various subjective entities in film must there-
fore also integrate that share of the imaginary in works dominated by the real,
fact and historical event. This can be done by “factitious emotions” (Robert Gor-
don) stemming from objects or beliefs understood as true or real (contrary to
emotions toward fiction).27 In the case of S21, my subjectivity transposed onto
the subjectivity of the protagonists can only empathize or de-empathize with
them if I imagine the content of their experiences not as my own but as represen-
tations of a universal threat to all subjects, all persons, all individuals, hence all
humans endowed with subjectivities. Without denying the psychophysical reality
of the person testifying on the screen, I can only grasp the other in her suffering
through my imagination. It is impossible for me to feel what she feels, to suffer
what she has suffered, that my subjectivity be allowed to flow into hers or hers
slip into mine and replace it. Because fictional works and even more so documen-
taries, are never morally, ethically, or sociopolitically neutral, my moral imagina-
tion is the fundamental modality of my subjective aesthetic relation to other sub-
jects, to the other subject of or in the film, to its narration or its intrigue, narrative
and representations it offers up, in which I perceive myself both as self and other.
This complex and subtle dialectic between Self and Other, accurately analyzed by
Paul Ricoeur,28 and building on Metz’s intuition concerning the “transcendental
158 jacinto lageira

subject preceding all that there is”29 should lead to a complete shift in the ontolo-
gical status of self and other; a shift through the works and in the works as it
opens onto intersubjectivity and trans-subjectivity, the “dialogic principle” con-
ceived by Mikhail Bakhtin in literature and surely transposable to the aesthetic
experience of film. The subject is only fully himself in the “other’s alterity” (P.
Ricoeur), and my subjectivity being always alterity to the other, it follows that
subjectivity is in great part constituted by the image that the other has of me as
alterity and not as pure subjectivity.
Intersubjective Subjectivity
In the case of aesthetic experience then, I am not only dealing with an object but
with a subject, the subject of the work, since the latter, although imaginary, still
has a subject in every sense of the word. We can therefore displace the accent
from the traditional conception of the subject toward a “poetic subject of the
work” and the “principle of individuation” of the work by the subject. According
to Henri Meschonnic, “in writing, in art, a subject has become her work. This is
indicated by the common designation: the name of the author does something
different than the name of a person that is not an author’s name. It signifies as
well as designates. It gathers semantic signification.”30 Drawing on the elements
proposed here regarding self, alterity, and dialogism, the aesthetic experience no
longer takes place between subject (producer and receiver) and object (the work)
but between different forms of subject(s) and subjectivity(ies). According again to
Meschonnic, “If writing produces a perhaps indefinite renewal of reading, its
subjectivity is an intersubjectivity, a trans-subjectivity. Not an intra-subjectivity
that we pretend to confuse with subjectivism, individualism. Writing is an enun-
ciation that doesn’t simply result in a statement but in a chain of re-enuncia-
tions.”31 As it has been developed here, the imaginary subject is a fundamental
component of this intersubjective subjectivity.
Translated by Lisa Damon.

A Philosophical Approach to Subjectivity
in Film Form1
Dominique Chateau
“Let us say that grief is to be represented on the screen”: with this sentence,
strange as it may seem, Eisenstein introduced one of his most profound texts on
the issue of representing feelings from the standpoint of film form.2 The topic of
subjectivity requires such a generalizing: let us say that subjectivity is to be rep-
resented on the screen and, following Eisenstein, let us try to consider a theory of
subjectivity in relation to film form. By form, we simply mean, as Eisenstein
would have it, “determined much more profoundly than by a superficial ‘trick.’”3
So is subjectivity involved in some profound determination? I am inclined to say
yes. Instead of raising a theoretical barrier between film and subjectivity, I pro-
claim that they are strongly connected from various viewpoints. More precisely, it
would be required for our present theory, in order to achieve its aim, that it en-
compasses both the concept of subjectivity and the concept of film form. Further-
more, I am convinced there is no better way to fulfill this task of fashioning
together a theory of subjectivity and a theory of film form than within a philoso-
phical framework. Nevertheless, I am quite aware that the topic of subjectivity is
rather extensive and equivocal. Obviously, the relevance of this comprehensive
subjectivity theory has yet to be confirmed, but its development embraces a wide
range of issues. I will therefore introduce only those elements that concern the
question of how film form and subjectivity can theoretically complement and ben-
efit each other within a philosophical framework.
Subjectivity as an Ontological Category

Subjectivity is a philosophical issue, insofar as philosophy invented it as a possi-
ble and somewhat crucial object of thought. It does not follow that this issue
belongs to the philosopher like the proud owner of a classic car: not only has it
always been, and still is, an object of thought and controversy in philosophical
trends, but it also concerns many other disciplines, like psychology, psychoanaly-
sis, and cognitivism. If we assume that philosophy today needs the help of these
disciplines, notably in the field of its own development, any controversy over the
ownership of the topic is pointless. At the same time, however, if we want the
research to aim at some unifying point, I have no difficulty to speak in philoso-
161
phy’s favor, insofar as, to my mind, it provides the most appropriate system for
synthesizing various contributions. Philosophizing subjectivity means thinking
from the viewpoint of a discipline that has much to tell about what subjectivity is
like, but the strongest argument for proposing this union is that philosophy has
the capacity to build a general concept of subjectivity. In order to sustain the close
co-operation of philosophy with film theory, I will use John R. Searle’s philosophy
of mind as line of inquiry, without excluding other philosophical trends.
“For scientific purposes,” Searle writes, “we might […] define a pain in the
elbow as a sequence of certain sorts of neuron firings occurring in such and such
a place in the brain. But we leave something out in this case, something essential
to our concept of consciousness. What we leave out is subjectivity.”4 First of all,
subjectivity refers to consciousness. It is clear there is no subjectivity without con-
sciousness, but it is equally crucial to consider that there is no consciousness
without subjectivity. Subjectivity certainly is a feature of consciousness, but as
Searle argues in The Rediscovery of the Mind,5 “consciousness is subjective” as well.
He goes on to consider that we also need to distinguish subjectivity from what is
called the subjective judgment. His examples speak for themselves: “Van Gogh is
a better artist than Matisse” is an example of subjective judgment, while “I now
have a pain in my lower back” is an exemplification of how subjectivity works.6 By
subjective judgments, we mean that their “truth or falsity is not a simple matter of
facts, but depends on certain attitudes, feelings, and points of view of the makers
and the hearers of the judgment.”7 This is “an epistemic mode,” while subjectiv-
ity refers to “an ontological category.”8 The statement about the lower back pain
is, on the one hand, “completely objective in the sense that it is true by the exis-
tence of an actual fact and is not dependent on any stance, attitudes or opinions
of observers,” and, on the other hand, “the phenomenon itself, the actual pain
itself, has a subjective mode of existence, and it is in this sense […] that con-
sciousness is subjective.”9
To begin with, I will confine myself to this ontological definition of subjectivity.
This idea of subjectivity refers essentially to mental states and contents as long as
they really take place in someone’s mind and are really experienced as such by
someone. In a sense, really here means objectively. The measuring device of this
kind of objectivity is not the criterion of truth that prevails in subjective judgment,
but the mere fact of the inner experience as such. If Searle stresses this kind of
fact by statements like “I have a pain in my lower back,” it is not necessary that
this kind of objectivity has to be expressed verbally. Not only can it be expressed
in another way, for instance by onomatopoeia or facial expressions, but it can also
exist without being expressed at all. However, it is exactly when we begin to ex-
press our state of mind linguistically that we come to the subjective judgment. I
can really suffer and not say it, or say that I suffer while I am actually pretending.
We could also argue that a subjective judgment can be mute or distinguish be-
tween mental and linguistic judgments, or latent and manifest content (as Freud

puts it). What matters most is the crucial idea of subjectivity as both an objective
and internal experience, insofar as it is strictly linked to someone’s conscious-
ness. What we first have to decide then is if there is some film property that looks
like this ontological category of subjectivity, so that we can consider film subjec-
tivity as being grounded on a kind of consciousness. If “every conscious state is
always someone’s conscious state,” as Searle emphasizes,10 can we consider a film
as a kind of someone?
Is Film Subjectivity Literal or Metaphorical?

I find “nothing in this poem or in this film or in this painting, and then someone
else comes and says this poem or film or painting is the greatest, it changed my
life”: this is how filmmaker Jonas Mekas11 adopts one possible way of considering
an artifact as an aesthetic object. This sort of judgment does not refer to the prop-
erties of the artifact as such, but to the beholder’s point of view by making a
judgment of aesthetic value based on his/her taste. It seems quite evident for
most of us that subjectivity lies in this notion of some beholder’s point of view. A
film itself has objective properties, and only from the moment we begin to watch,
does it become a subjective experience. Nevertheless, even if this view could seem
enhanced by the fact that cinema exists concretely as an object, as, in Susan Son-
tag’s words, “an inanimate thing, every element of which is determinate,” while,
for example, “theater is a performance,”12 the question arises as to whether or not
subjectivity as an ontological category must be radically excluded from the so-
called determinations of this inanimate object. The main reason to question such
an exclusion would be that, despite it being an inanimate object when not
screened, a film is essentially made for screening purposes, so that from that
moment on, as a spectacle, it becomes fully animated.
To be honest, animated film is an elusive moving form, like a flow of water
trickling through our fingers. Indeed, the film flow is spatially defined, like a river
it flows, but in a given space or, more precisely, in a given place, so that the
substance of film actually differs from the substance of subjectivity which seems
evanescent compared to it: the film flow is made of specific signs, of concrete
moving (or successively still) images and sounds. Coincidently, from the moment
motion was recognized as a salient property of film, argumentations in favor of
film subjectivity emerged. Such argumentations can, for example, be found in
Jean Epstein’s theories, who was of course a member of the avant-garde move-
ment in French cinema, and especially well known for his adaptation of Edgar
Allan Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher (1928). As a film critic and theorist, he was the
first leading figure to promote a philosophical view of cinema in the strict sense
that the medium was supposed to have a philosophical power in itself (it had,
however, nothing to do with an analogy with philosophical texts). He was also
one of the first theorists to speak of filmic thought, long before Godard, Deleuze,
a philosophical approach to subjectivity in film form 163

Frampton, and so on. Film as a medium would be exceptionally apt for thinking.
Cinema, Epstein says, is an “intelligent machine” – an idea that Alain Badiou and
others tried to revive when they called THE MATRIX a “philosophical machine.”13
Being not simply a spectacle, but “a special knowledge, because it represents the
world in its continuous motion,”14 cinema changes the spatiotemporal dimen-
sions so that it has a new effect on our brain, different from ordinary perception.
Therefore, Epstein claims, it has “its own subjectivity insofar as it does not repre-
sent things as they are seen by the human eyes, but only as it sees them itself,
according to its special structure, that imparts to it a personality.”15 Invented as a
recording machine, it progressively became an “intellectual robot,” a “mechanical
brain,” developing a specific thought, its own philosophy, the “philosophy of a
brain-robot” partially irrelevant to “the rules of the human intelligence of which it
is indirectly born.”16 Cinema is “superhuman,” he says enthusiastically; he seems
to want to personify cinema, to incorporate it in systemic theory: “the complexity
of the structure and the internal interactions of a mechanical organism leads to
the individualization of the machine […].”17 But, syncretically, the scientific refer-
ences of his discourse are contaminated by another kind of speech: cinema is said
to be a spiritualistic or mystical art,18 a magic art comparable to the philosopher’s
stone,19 or an animist art “that reveals the life of things.”20
Beyond this syncretism, Epstein’s description of film structure as spatiotem-
poral, self-determinate and so on is obviously more serious than his youthful ani-
mism. His theory at least has the merit of suggesting that one considers the rele-
vance of the question of subjectivity not only as an aesthetical reaction to a film,
which entails the projection of some human internal content onto an object (as
long as that object could possess the projected feeling by itself), but also as a
possible inherent quality of the filmic structure itself. Jean-Paul Sartre, in a stu-
dent exercise (to be precise), wrote that cinema is “a Bergsonian art,” so that we
can apply to it what Bergson said of music: it is “a consciousness like ours.”21
Similarly, we find “[t]he shot, that is to say consciousness” in Gilles Deleuze.22
And Stanley Cavell is no exception when he defends the idea that “objects pro-
jected on the screen are inherently reflexive, they occur as self-referential, reflect-
ing upon their physical origins.”23 This latter statement introduces a very interest-
ing dilemma, depending on whether we emphasize “inherently reflexive” or
“upon their physical origins.” For this kind of reflexivity seems rather similar to
the reflexive consciousness that characterizes the human mind. That is, the capa-
city to think to myself – and to think that I have the capacity to think – or the
capacity of logical reflexivity, by which the mind can detect relations between ele-
ments. In the same way, we can ask if subjectivity in film should be considered as
a kind of substance distinct from its physical properties – as if it were a brain on
its own, as Epstein puts it – or if it is just produced by the film and its structure,
so that it could be only an effect, perhaps a very superficial one – an epiphenome-
non that film theoreticians in the field of philosophy tend to overemphasize.

In point of fact, subjectivity is an essential property of human beings. When we
speak about subjectivity in relation to human beings we use the word literally,
but, when we speak of subjectivity in film, we use it metaphorically. According to
Nelson Goodman, a painting is literally gray and metaphorically sad.24 The same
happens in film: when we speak of subjectivity in film we project onto an inani-
mate object (physical images and sounds), a property normally (and essentially,
as we said) belonging to an animate object, the human being insofar as he/she
possesses a mind and is capable of feeling. One could say: it is as if the film were
provided with subjectivity – or, in other terms, something operates in the film in
the same way subjectivity, or even consciousness operates. Epstein wrote that film
is, in French, “une sorte de psychisme.”25 This quasi-psychisme – quasi, from the
Italian quasimente, which means “a kind of,” “almost,” “more or less” – can be
interpreted in two ways: either the idea that cinema has some mental properties is
literal, or the idea is metaphorical. It seems more reasonable to consider it as
metaphorical insofar as the challenge would be to maintain filmic properties are
mental while we experience them as obviously physical. In the same way, ani-
mism can also be interpreted literally or metaphorically. Interpreted literally, it
leads to certain thoughts we have no way of verifying, like the belief that a ma-
chine has a soul. However, the fact that film is a special sort of inanimate object, a
complex composition of animate pictures and sounds in interaction, in contrast,
can be verified. But hypothesizing about animism in film oversteps the bound-
aries of scientific wisdom. Moreover, this composition of animated sounds and
images is the filmic representation of someone’s thought. Animism in film is a
metaphorical way of interpreting this kind of composition proceeding from a hu-
man thought.
Subjectivity and Film Form

“The mind-like working of movies” is Epstein’s way of referring to subjectivity in
film. An analogy which, though useful, remains rather sketchy and is after all
only an analogy. To be more precise, insofar analogy means both similarity and
difference, some aspects being similar but defined within different fields, our
concept of the mind-like working of movies can be refined both in terms of film
and subjectivity. Film, to begin with, is clearly an objective object in the sense of
being absolutely external to any mind; above all, it is observable like any other
physical thing. In comparison, as Searle indicates, “there is no way I can observe
someone else’s consciousness as such; rather what I observe is him and his beha-
vior and the relations between him, the behavior, the structure, and the environ-
ment.”26 This observation matches the thoughts of phenomenologists, like Hus-
serl and Sartre, who, when considering the relation of consciousness with the
world that exists outside a person’s subjectivity, believed that its exteriority was a
challenge to consciousness. This applies both to knowledge and affect, to an ob-

ject we observe or to which we react. Consciousness, in order to grasp this pure
exteriority, must transcend itself as Sartre would have it.27 As belonging to the
exteriority of the world, film would then propose the same challenge to the viewer
as any other object of the world, but, at the same time, before being viewed, it was
made as a view of the world and thus, later, watched as such. It is not a simple
object, but a medium or, more exactly, a kind of message determined by the
structural conditions of the cinematic medium. Thus, film is a very complex ob-
ject in that both its physical form as well as its objectivity are complex. It is a
commonplace we do not need to develop further. But, as we have already seen,
one aspect of this complexity weighs heavily in the discussion on the subject: the
fact that film is a form in progress. Sartre said that cinema is a “Bergsonian art,”
because “it introduces motion in aesthetics.”28 Motion is, from Eisenstein to De-
leuze, the common denominator that justifies considering film as thinking. When
viewers experience a film, they are not simply sitting in front of an object they can
use like a tool or recognize, but they are invited by an audiovisual stream to con-
template and to interpret what the audiovisual stream puts in front of them for
the duration of the film. The challenge with this exteriority is also a challenge
with this specific form that is a material combination, like painting, but moving
and lasting, unlike painting. In view of the topic subjectivity in film form, it may be
emphasized that form, in this sense, is the intermediate term between subjectivity
and film by which we can hope to negate the contradiction that exists between
them. Or, in other words, we might rule out the barrier between the outer and
the inner world. If film has something to do with subjectivity, it is to the extent
that its moving form bears the imprint of a subjectivity.
Considering this, we realize the need to distinguish three degrees of subjectiv-
ity, from the first level of the ontological category, via the second level of signs, to
the third level of texts:
1. Subjectivity refers to the mental activity of a human being who reacts to the
environment, or reflects on the other or the self.
2. Subjectivity refers, by extrapolation, to the result of this activity, both its prod-
uct and its signs.
3. Subjectivity refers to the text itself: We have to extrapolate further in consider-
ing that an organized structure of representations (text, film, etc.) is itself
subjective: this subjectivity at a third degree is justified, partly because it can
involve subjectivity of the first and/or second degrees, partly because it is de-
signed to activate human minds.
One should keep that in mind when using metaphorical expressions like “film
thinks” or “film reflexivity.” Marguerite Duras poignantly reminds Jean-Luc God-
ard of this commonsensical idea in the following dialogue:

Godard – I feel that what makes me less afraid of cinema, with the camera
and the editing table, it’s that the film thinks. Me, I do not have to think.
Whereas if I write, I have to think.
Duras – Don’t ramble. The film doesn’t think alone. Without you, there is no
film.29
Hegel’s dialectics may provide an additional refinement. W. T. Stace writes that

Hegel’s synthesis has a “two-fold activity,” expressed by the word aufheben, which
is sometimes translated as “to sublate.”30 The German word has two meanings. It
means both to abolish and to preserve. “To sublate” refers to the idea that,
throughout the dialectic process, some aspect of a phenomenon or an object in-
volved in this process is negated, eliminated, while another aspect is preserved at
the same time. This way of thinking seems particularly relevant since dialectics is
defined as a process; moreover, the kind of unity to which this process leads is
the process itself: “Being and nothing and the opposition between them are
merged in the unity of becoming.” Considered from this dialectic viewpoint, Ep-
stein’s suggestive theory, in my opinion, becomes reasonable. When Epstein says
that the screen is “the place where creative thought meets beholder thought,”31
he is right, but we need to make it clear that the “creative thought” is converted
into filmic signs. The physical properties of the film can partially consist of an
encoding of mental properties; the mental substance, through the encoding,
through the representation, is abolished as such but preserved insofar as it is
mediated by a specific semiotic process. Through this process, the effect of mo-
tion abolishes the distance the viewer has in relation to what the picture depicts,
while preserving its nature. Tempting us to believe that moving pictures are ani-
mated by a kind of vital force; such an anima (i.e., the feeling of animation) does
not seem to be strictly outside the image, but rather inside the image. Similarly,
we may imagine there is something like a soul underneath the artificial medium,
because we communicate by way of showing sensations, feelings or affects, as-
suming that the necessary abstract composition of the film is abolished in the
beholder’s mind at the time. At last, the idea that “the film thinks” may be consid-
ered true, but only where it denotes the way filmic form is a materialized media-
tion of a human thought both abolished as such and preserved as sign. A film
does not think because it is supposed to be a pure consciousness by itself; how-
ever it does think in instances where it transmits the human thought, that is,
where it translates its own physical substance. Therefore, Duras and Godard’s
opinions are reconcilable.
The Positional Camera

Reviving the analogy between film and consciousness, Arthur Danto suggests:

Perhaps films are like consciousness is, as described by Sartre, with two dis-
tinct, but inseparable, dimensions: consciousness of something as its inten-
tional object, and a kind of nonthetic consciousness of the consciousness itself
– and it is with reference to the latter that the intermittent reminders of the
cinematic processes as such are to be appreciated.32
Although the question of reflexivity, addressed by Danto here is an interesting

aspect of subjectivity, it is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead I would like to
consider another aspect of subjectivity not addressed by Danto’s remark: the re-
presentation of internal phenomena. When Searle writes, “Conscious states al-
ways have a content. One can never just be conscious, rather when one is con-
scious, there must be an answer to the question, ‘What is one conscious of,’”33
we immediately understand what he means. We come across a similar statement
in Paul Valéry’s article on the subject, who notes, “conscience loathes empti-
ness.”34 Now, Searle adds an argument that could change our mind:
[T]he ‘of’ of ‘conscious of’ is not always the ‘of’ of intentionality. If I am con-
scious of a knock on the door, my conscious state is intentional, because it
makes reference to something beyond itself, the knock on the door. If I am
conscious of a pain, the pain is not intentional, because it does not represent
anything beyond itself.35
Following this track, we can more readily distinguish not only the conscious state
enclosed in our inner world from the one that is produced by meeting something
in the outer world, but also the simple reaction to the latter from projecting men-
tal states or contents on the object. Perhaps, it is now time to consider the “con-
sciousness of something as its intentional object.”
Long before Searle, Husserl said that “the word intentionality signifies nothing
else than this universal fundamental property of consciousness: to be conscious of
something […].”36 For example: “The house-perception means a house – more
precisely, as this individual house – and means it in the fashion peculiar to per-
ception; a memory-house means a house in the fashion peculiar to memory; a
house-fantasy means a house in the fashion peculiar to fantasy.”37 What about
the house-shot? We know that the shot of a house can be perceived as a mere
representation of it, or as a memory or mental picture, if the house is shown as
being in the mind of some film character thinking about the house or imagining
it. But what about the shot itself? It is not a perception but a duplicate, regardless
of the way of representation (in black and white for example). As duplicate, it
results from some “physical connection,” in the same vein as what Peirce says
about photography, established one day between the camera and a real house.38
If we assume that the camera is a neutral mechanism that cannot project any
internal representation, that is, as long as it is bereft of any state of mind, could

we say that the camera-relation as such is analogous to the pure intentional rela-
tionship?
This hypothesis can be linked to Sartre’s theory of the positional or unreflexive
consciousness, which he defines as the immediate awareness of objects. In which
case we could speak of a positional camera. Indeed, in the finished movie, after
many transformations with regards to editing and other technical devices that
have been applied to picture and sound, this neutrality is removed by a cascade of
imprinted representations and meanings. This is why the positional camera char-
acterizes less the film in general than the borderline cases, special film forms,
starting with comedy, that originate in the real: “[…] before becoming comedy by
unsuccessful representations,” Clement Rosset says, “everything is first comical
[…] merely by the fact that it exists.”39 Let us return to subjectivity as an ontologi-
cal category. Jacques Tati’s character M. Hulot, “l’Ange Hurluberlu” as André Bazin
calls him,40 perfectly exemplifies the idea of the immediate awareness of things
caught in their ontological purity when, in Mon Oncle (1958), he exchanges his
familiar world – the small-town world represented by the street sweeper, the post-
man, the caretaker, the vegetable merchant and the bicycle – for the modern
world represented by the cubic house of the Arpel family (modeled on Le Corbu-
sier’s Villa Savoye). At ease in the first world, Hulot, in the second, looks like an
angel, that is, in the words of Jean Cocteau, like an angelic poet walking with a
Film still from Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958).

limp, “one foot on the ground, the other in the void,” prone to clumsiness now
that he cannot fly anymore.41 Visiting the Arpels, he is confronted with all sorts of
unfamiliar things such as hyperfunctional kitchen equipment and a modernist
garden. Here, M. Hulot embodies the positional consciousness foreign to the
new world, which must feel uncanny, seeing as he is forced to transcend himself,
but incapable of doing so.
Putting aside the question of comedy, the same idea of a filmic positional rela-
tion seems to apply to Robert Bresson’s films, not so much in the relationship
between characters and the real, but more in the way of shooting and organizing
shot pieces. If the positional camera is somewhat relevant, it seems so to be the
case in L’Argent (1983), in which, as Clement Rosset notices, “Bresson shows
often the presence [of a] place before something happens.”42 In the same way, we
can observe that many sequences in his films start with a simple presentation of
the things and places, before the drama unfolds in this material context: “It is
necessary that the effect of the things arrives before their cause.”43 In terms of
genres, not many people will see the connection between Tati and Bresson, but
let me recall what François Truffaut said:
A work of Bresson or Tati is a priori by mere necessity, brilliant according to

the very rare authority with which a unique and absolute will imposes itself
from the first picture until the word end, the kind of will that orders in princi-
ple, or should order, any work having an artistic pretension.44
A new stage in the comparison of film with the conscious relationship with the
outer world could be reached if we consider that, most frequently, we are not in
relation with the thing as a single entity, but with one or some of its aspects. As
Husserl writes:
Constantly seeing this table, and meanwhile walking around it, changing my
position in space in whatever way, I have continually the consciousness of this
identical table as factually existing ‘in person’ and remaining quite unchanged.
The table-perception, however, is a continually changing one; it is a continuity
of changing perceptions.45
These changing perceptions are, what Husserl calls “adumbrations,” which per-
tain to color as well as to “every sensuous quality and also [...] every spatial
space.”46 Adumbrations translates as Abschattungen; more simply, we could use
the words sketch, draft, hint, or shadow, but none of them is quite appropriate;
etymologically, the German word means “the action (-ung) of a shade (Schatten)
that stands out (ab-) as an emerging silhouette.”47 Subjectivity is, on the one
hand, this catching of something so splintered and transcendent as conscious-
ness, “a multifarious system of continuous multiplicities of appearances and

adumbrations,” and, on the other hand, the experience of the continuum itself
just as it is present within consciousness. We are interested here in the former;
the second one traces the limits of the analogy between film and the human mind
and will not be discussed here. In movies, an approach by adumbration, means to
anticipate and infer meanings or intentions, narrative wise or other, by looking at
the successive fragments. For instance, the beginning of Dziga Vertov’s The
Man with a Movie Camera (1929) shows a set of views of a city in the small
hours, quiet, even sleepy, except for some scattered movements; the city awakens
before our eyes. The awakening moment unwinds a descriptive set of suspended
time where the spatial coexistence is the main syntactic operator.
The concept of intentionality has two different meanings: the first one is the
simple relation between our mind and the objects, while the second presupposes
an implication of some desire or belief about the objects. Beyond the adumbra-
tions, which are limited to a pure perceptual relation, the point of view involves at
least the design to consider (locate, feel, think) the thing. Beyond the series of
adumbrations, we have to consider the viewpoints strategy. Giving a philosophi-
cal account of this classical issue in narratology, that is, an account of the point of
view as such, is not so much about knowing if the act of subjectivity is preceded
by representations, if it comes with them, if it determines them, and so on, than it
is to consider the sort of relation by which this act itself puts us into contact with
reality. It is less about considering some mental state that alters the relation to
reality, whether absent or present, than about the stance on the present reality we
adopt when we watch it. With regard to the movies, such a stance indeed exists
and is simulated by the camera’s eye; everything happening on the screen pre-
sents itself as if it were observed by someone, but, literally, this “someone” is not
necessarily represented as a person with a substantial state of mind. We can
either assume that the look on the object belongs to a human being (a character),
or to some implied author. Jumping from an approach of subjectivity by a series
of adumbrations to a strategy of points of view, means that we jump from an
immediate discovery of the world to the invention of its representation as a scene
shaped by the film machine.
Beyond the Controversy over Auteurism

Before discussing the subjective aspects of film form, it should be noticed that the
subjective effect of the film, if we decide to start from such a restricted hypoth-
esis, can also be considered as a sort of feedback effect, produced by the fact that
someone who has the essential ability to think has continually been thinking,
making, and organizing the film. Now, we may be inclined to call such a person
an author or not, the main point is that he/she is a human being or a group of
human beings! If we claim, following another minimal hypothesis, that a film
contains a concrete set of visual and auditory inscriptions, without considering the

several interpretations it may yield already, it is clear that the presence and rela-
tions of these inscriptions rest upon someone’s mental work, so that we do not
have to make an effort to consider that this mental work is filmically inscribed in
some ways. Not surprisingly, terms like “inscription,” “inscribed” or “imprinted”
can be found in realistic or constructivist philosophy – “the language elements in
the concrete world are rather inscriptions or marks, the shaped objects rather
than the shapes” as Goodman and Quine write48 – but in order to make up our
minds about these “inscriptions or marks” in the concrete world, we need to con-
sider the possible existence of abstract entities as well. We do not need a world of
abstract entities, at least not to begin with, but we need some scheme or device
allowing us to conceptualize shapes under shaped objects, form under film, and
subjectivity under such and such filmic inscriptions.
There is a very simple case in this respect, the PoV shot that shows, through the
camera-eye, what a character is looking at. This kind of shot uses the camera as a
subjective device and, in many cases, this does not denote a specific character, but
an impersonal eye or the narrator’s eye. There are also a lot of other ways a filmic
representation can exemplify a most subtle inscription of subjectivity in film.
When considering the camera angle, for instance, it seems that low-angle shots,
as they appear outstandingly in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), fulfill this
subjective functioning, while also suggesting an idea of domination: not only
does x look at y, but x dominates y. Because of this, we know that, with regard to
Susan, Kane assumes the position of “master,” as in Hegel’s master-slave rela-
tionship: he needs both to negate (dominate) and to preserve (look at) her as a hu-
man being; he could not reduce her to an object, to a singing-machine, if she
would not decide, even with regret, to continue singing, despite the fatal weak-
ness of her voice. As Seymour Chatman puts it, beyond the literal sense of the
point of view – “through someone’s eye” – we can distinguish other ones that
deal respectively with the world’s view or some character’s interests.49 Many parts
of films share the characteristic of a double or plural subjective function attached
to a shot or combination of shots, even when this combination has nothing to do
with a literal PoV shot. And Chatman also points out that the filmic point of view
has “not one but two, cotemporal channels, visual and auditory (and in the audi-
tory, not only voices but music and noises)” and that “these can occur indepen-
dently (soundtrack with black screen or full picture with complete silence), or
they can be combined in various ways.”50 The filmic subjectivity depends both
upon this complexity of the filmic-material basis of representation, and on the
fact that this representation does not simply amount to reproducing the profilmic
data as such, the difference being the gap between the reality and its artistic use.
By profilmic, we mean, following Souriau, something in the world placed in front
of the camera and/or imprinted on the film.51
This gap can be considered as the objective difference between reality and film,
or as an author’s expression through its use of reality. Subjectivity can be consid-

ered as the simple difference between the impossible duplication of the world as
it is, and what the film represents it is. That is, insofar as we recognize, in this
difference (however tenuous it may be), not only some aesthetic properties that
are left to our appreciation, but also an intention to impart an aesthetic value to
these properties. Clearly, we identify a design in the same way we would detect an
arrangement of things that were previously in disorder. In other words, we identi-
fy an “interpretant,” as Peirce would have it – a sign, according to his definition,
stands for an object through an interpretant. A film is designed to be interpreted
in the sense that it makes us think of things, worlds, feelings, concepts, and so
on, provided that we have the means to establish (and make an effort to establish)
the connection between them; some of these means are in our mind, one is in-
scribed in the film: the design itself.
Leaving this rather basic idea of filmic subjectivity behind, I would now like to
turn to the author’s mind and what proceeds from it. This particular aspect has,
since a few years, given rise to the most vigorous criticism in film studies. Auteur-
ism is principally criticized from a sociological standpoint. For it would be con-
sidered an ideological illusion from a sociological point of view, especially when
it concerns the kind of art work that is the result of teamwork. The issue is so
controversial that it is difficult to maintain that one’s argument about the subject-
matter could be discussed quite objectively. But, if we proceed from the restricted
idea of subjectivity, it seems easier to open up the debate. Sometimes, the design
we detect in the film directs our minds towards projects, feelings or concepts that
refer explicitly or implicitly to an author. In other words, sometimes we are well
aware of the fact that such film has been made by such author, so that we are
possibly influenced by this information, by what we know about this author and
his/her work; in such a case, we normally infer that the film’s design refers to the
author and his/her intention. Other times, we are unaware of a possible author-
ship, and we are not able to assign a single author to the film. It does not mean
that we do not feel that there is any design in the film, that it does not commu-
nicate to us any thought, feeling, world view, or way of thinking. The question is
not whether what it communicates is a banal idea or a brilliant one, but whether
it communicates something that testifies to the existence of a subjective-like content
– ideas or feelings that could be considered as the intentions of a single subjectiv-
ity.
This alone does not lead to the polemic about auteurism. After all, as Béla
Balázs puts it: “Of course there are also purely mechanical photographs that are
produced with no particular goal in mind. But even this testifies to an inner atti-
tude, even if it is one of dull inertia or inner blindness!”52 With regards to the
imprint of subjectivity, we merely want to suggest that something is impressed
on the film that testifies, at least before its completion as an object, to the exercise
of a more or less anonymous, more or less idiosyncratic subjectivity. The viewer is
not alone in front of inert objects, he/she is facing something that is dynamic and

exhibits numerous traces of a subjective activity. These traces, moreover, not only
testify to the deliberate intention of someone inclined to transmit their internal
representations (images, feelings, dreams, ideas, etc.), but also to the presence of
inner representations, cognitive or emotional, attributed to characters or people.
Return to the Point of View

“The world itself,” Searle writes, “has no point of view, but my access to the
world through my conscious states is always perspectival, always from my point
of view”; correlatively, “all my conscious forms of intentionality that give me in-
formation about the world independent of myself are always from a special point
of view.”53 I have taken that as an axiom in this paper. So, starting from the idea
that subjectivity, as mediated by film form, is concretely present in the film, im-
printed in its material and its structure, we can now turn to some specialists that
consider the point of view as objectively imprinted in the object of their research.
Such are the landscape theoreticians. Malcolm Andrews, for example, says that
“land rather than landscape is the raw material,” and that “in the conversion of
land into landscape a perceptual process has already begun.”54 In order to specify
“what constitutes landscape as distinct from land,” he underlines that “in judging
what is a ‘good view’ we are preferring one aspect of the countryside to another.
We are selecting and editing, suppressing or subordinating some visual informa-
tion in favour of promoting other features. We are constructing a hierarchical
arrangement of the components within a single view so that it becomes a com-
plex mix of visual facts and imaginative construction.”55 There is a striking simi-
larity between this theory – defining a kind of editing – and what I called the jump
from the immediate discovery of the world to the invention of its representation
as a scene shaped by the film machine. We find the same similarity or analogy
when Andrews notices that “a frame establishes the outer boundaries of the view;
it gives the landscape definition. The frame literally defines the landscape, both in
the sense of determining its outer limits and in the sense that landscape is con-
stituted by its frame; it wouldn’t be a landscape without that frame.”56
It seems sensible to follow Andrews and most of the landscape theorists when
they consider that landscape is not nature as such, but land shaped by the eye
and/or hand. The metamorphosis of land into landscape, as Alain Roger puts it,
works in visu and/or in situ.57 Likewise, the camera activates specifically in visu
transformation, and the work on a movie set operates in situ transformation. A
landscape, according to Yves Lacoste (who draws attention to its military origin,
the one also of cartography), is a three-dimensional view (or representation) of a
part of land of which the shape is determined both by the shapes of the relief and
by a point of observation, in particular at some altitude.58 Here, we again find an
analogy with films. When Poudovkine needs to exemplify the idea that film is not
only the “simple record of the events passing before the lens,” but has “special

methods, proper only to itself,” he takes as an example “a demonstration that
files by upon the street” and an “observer” that begins to “climb upon the roof of
a house, to get a view from above of the procession as a whole and measure its
dimensions,” then “come[s] down” to observe from “the first-floor window,” and
down again to “mingle with the crowd.”59 Poudovkine uses this example as a
metaphor – the three stages can be directly interpreted in terms of the well-
known shot scale – he writes, “three times the observer has altered his viewpoint,
gazing now from nearer, now from farther away, with the purpose of acquiring as
complete and exhaustive as possible a picture of the phenomenon under review.
The Americans were the first to seek to replace an active observer of this kind by
means of the camera.”60 With regard to film form, we find exactly the same inter-
action, both relational and active, between the objective basis (land/profilmic) and
a point of view throughout the film (understood as consisting of raw material and
tools), so that this transformational relation is inscribed on, or inside, this objec-
tive basis, creating a new form. As Poudovkine emphasized, through the discov-
ery of editing as a means of combining shots that capture the object at various
distances, a dynamic interaction was also discovered: “The camera, until now a
motionless spectator, at last received, as it were, a charge of life. It acquired the
faculty of movement on its own, and transformed itself from a spectator to an ac-
tive observer.”61
The main point about the issue of subjectivity is that, even if we follow Searle,
agreeing that “the world itself has no point of view,” we have some serious rea-
sons to assume that the point of view is objectively inscribed in some aspects of
the world around us, such as land and profilmic material. If profilmic is to film
what land is to landscape, it is clear now that if we want to fashion together a
theory of subjectivity and a theory of film we not only need to know what can be
wisely considered as subjective on a literal level (the filmmaker, the viewer) or on
a metaphorical level (the film), but we also need to determine very precisely what
can be considered as a filmic sign or mark of subjectivity. We need to be very
careful of the specific literality of film as it possibly underlies subjectivity, up to
and including a metaphorical sense. We consider a shot or a series of shots as a
sign of subjectivity (or as containing such a sign), when a possible source of sub-
jectivity (a human being or a being diegetically defined as human-like – for exam-
ple an animal or a robot) is imprinted, that is, represented or presupposed. For
example, a PoV shot can be taken over the shoulder of a character, it can be
signified by a combination of two (or more) shots where one shot represents
something looked at, more or less objectively, by someone who is represented in
the other shot, or by the representation of somebody looking out of frame or
listening to a sound coming from that direction. A PoV shot can also be sug-
gested when the viewer is not present in any shot, but only presupposed to exist
somewhere or nowhere (God for example). In all these cases, subjectivity is lim-
ited to perception, but it can be modulated by any peculiar representation, for

example in order to signify that the viewer suffers from vertigo the shot is modu-
lated in some way (as we will see later on).
Thus, like in many other kinds of subjective representations, shots or series of
shots are modulated. A sign of subjectivity can be material and/or relational, it can
be a plastic modulation of image and sound or an inference about a combination
of shots. In any case, the human or human-like source of subjectivity must be
represented or presupposed: the modulation of a shot or series of shots can sig-
nify that they are the representation of something felt, imagined, dreamed, fanta-
sized, and so on. The modulation can be considered as the interpretation of what
is represented from the viewpoint of a subject defined in the diegesis (a charac-
ter), which is the most straightforward modulation. But what is represented can
also be interpreted as the viewpoint of an implied subjectivity (a narrator who
oversees, at times even omnisciently, the storytelling), or as what is known as an
“implied author” (who oversees the entire film). We can even go a step further
and say that what is represented on screen is the viewpoint of the actual author
insofar as his/her life or his/her thoughts are explicitly or implicitly inserted into
the film. As Seymour Chatman shows, the filmic point of view may be ambigu-
ous, when it is not “clear whether we have seen the object separately from the
character, conjointly with him, or through him,” but it may be more clear because
“the director of the film can completely identify our vision with the character’s,
positioning his camera lens not only alongside the character, but inside.”62 The
Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1947) is an example par excellence of
this latter type, but the most interesting feature of film subjectivity is its complete
opposite: “the camera can make very fluid changes in point of view because of its
ability to move abruptly or smoothly in any direction.”63 The main characteristic,
with respect to subjectivity in film form, is this fluidity, the fact that subjectivity
and objectivity may interchange without disrupting the continuity, and without
disorienting the audience. A sequence of Brian de Palma’s Body Double (1964),
among many others, perfectly illustrates this: As Jack Scully (Craig Wasson) re-
turns home after the exciting opening of a vampire movie, he walks through a
series of rooms and corridors, followed by the camera that alternately shoots him
and what he sees with great fluidity, until the moment he discovers his wife in the
company of the opposite sex.
Film Form and the Interior Landscape

At the moment a film represents something, it can, as I said, choose to represent
it modulated by means of any peculiar representation. Eisenstein, in the seminal
text I quoted at the start, said that the problem of representation is “the problem
of portraying an attitude toward the things portrayed.”64 Experiencing a film does
not consist only of projecting on it what is inside our brain; quite the opposite, we
often have a sense that it is the film that introduces a lot of representations in our

brain. Sometimes we receive these representations as if they were causa sui, some-
times we have some reason to assume they originate in an individual subjectivity.
Insofar as our concern is the hypothesis of subjectivity in film, not around it, but
inside it – and to avoid to have to resort to an expedient that is supposed to save
this hypothesis – we need to define the film by certain precise conditions. That is,
conditions concerning the means of a filmic representation that can embody sub-
jectivity and, more generally, the structural characteristics that determine the
possibility of such a representation, whether it objectifies subjectivity or subjecti-
fies objectivity. I am not trying to cut corners here to avoid the difficulties of our
hypothesis of subjectivity. Even with an esteemed philosopher such as Maurice
Merleau-Ponty you will find both a good definition of film as form as well as a
radical doubt about the relevance of any filmic representation of subjectivity. I
only agree with the first half of his theory, but, as we will see, the second half,
although somewhat authoritarian, nevertheless provides a good launching pad
for my problem.
In a lecture delivered in 1945 at l’IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Études Cinémato-
graphiques),65 Merleau-Ponty said that “a film is not a sum total of images but a
temporal gestalt.”66 This translation of the original phrase, “une forme temporelle,” is
not incorrect insofar as in French there is no better way to translate gestalt than by
“forme.” Furthermore, Merleau-Ponty refers explicitly to the well-known principle
of gestaltism that asserts that the whole is different from (or greater than) the
sum of its parts. Translators, however, seem to hesitate between using gestalt and
form, as we see below:
[The film] seems to be an extremely complex form inside of which a very great
number of actions and reactions are taking place at every moment. The laws of
this form, moreover, are yet to be discovered, having until now only been
sensed by the flair or tact of the director, who handles cinematographic lan-
guage as a man manipulates syntax: without explicitly thinking about it and
without always being in a position to formulate the rules which he sponta-
neously obeys. What we have just said about visual films also applies to sound
movies, which are not a sum total of words or noises but are likewise a ge-
stalt.67
The notion of gestalt concerns essentially the perceptual forms, the visual recogni-
tion of figures. Kant, for example, distinguishes die Gestalt and das Form by this a
priori criterion: a gestalt (or figure) is what is determined as an empirical appear-
ance, and the form is what determines a priori our perception. Although Merleau-
Ponty refers to the gestalt principle – he is the celebrated author of Phenomenology
of Perception, after all – he insists that form accords much better with his idea than
gestalt. It seems he wants to define the film as the structuring of representations on the
basis of raw visual and auditory material by means of editing. So he emphasizes that

image and sound “put together makes another new whole, which cannot be re-
duced to its component parts,” and that “the union of sound and image occurs
not only in each character but in the film as a whole,” while also convinced that
the same is true of the relations between music and film: “music should be incor-
porated into it, not juxtaposed to it.”68 Furthermore, besides the perceptual side
of the audiovisual structure, he also looks at its semantic side – he asks for in-
stance: “What […] does the film signify: what does it mean?” – without forgetting
that this semantic side is profoundly linked to the formal status of film. The fol-
lowing answer should convince his skeptics:
Kant’s remark that, in knowledge imagination serves the understanding,

whereas in art the understanding serves the imagination, is a profound one.
In other words, ideas or prosaic facts are only there to give the creator an
opportunity to seek out their palpable symbols and to trace their visible and
sonorous monogram. The meaning of a film is incorporated into its rhythm
just as the meaning of a gesture may immediately be read in that gesture: the
film does not mean anything but itself. The idea is presented in a nascent state
and emerges from the temporal structure of the film as it does from the coex-
istence of the parts of a painting.69
However, Merleau-Ponty diminishes the philosophical frame of reference in favor

of his personal philosophy, emphasizing with delight that, although “motion pic-
tures are first and foremost a technical invention in which philosophy counts for
nothing, […] philosophy is in harmony with the cinema, […] thought and techni-
cal effort are heading in the same direction,” and he concludes that “the philoso-
pher and the moviemaker share a certain way of being, a certain view of the world
which belongs to a generation.”70 This up-to-date analogy between film and phe-
nomenology leads him, without concession, to the statement that the movies do
not give a sense of what is inside a man’s mind by attempting to show the inter-
ior, instead “his conduct or behavior,” his “way of being in the world, of dealing
with things and other people” is the key to establishing filmic subjectivity. Think-
ing it important to drive the point home, he adds:
If a movie wants to show us someone who is dizzy, it should not attempt to

portray the interior landscape of dizziness, as Daquin in Premier de Cor-
dée and Malraux in Sierra de Teruel wished to do. We will get a much
better sense of dizziness if we see it from the outside, if we contemplate that
unbalanced body contorted on a rock or that unsteady step trying to adapt
itself to who knows what upheaval of space. For the movies as for modern
psychology dizziness, pleasure, grief, love, and hate are ways of behaving.71

Here Merleau-Ponty seems to be in harmony with Searle’s statement that we can-
not “observe someone else’s consciousness as such,” but only “him and his be-
havior.”72 We have to decide if the problem of representing subjectivity filmically
is reducible to the representation of ordinary beings in the world – in other
words, whether film theory is reducible to philosophy! Furthermore, is there any-
thing in the nature of film, in film as a medium, that hinders the representation
of “the interior landscape” (an attractive turn of phrase for me, considering what
I discussed earlier!) as Merleau-Ponty claims it? Between his definition of the film
as a form and the outright refusal of attempting to represent subjectivity by the
movies, there is a questionable idea about the general purpose of the film. This is
a crucial point, because it is here that the theory of medium seems to switch to
the theory of aesthetics. Instead of considering that we are faced with a radical
rigid choice – nature of medium versus aesthetics – I suggest we combine the
theory of medium with the theory of art and place them within a philosophical
framework. By doing this, one can call special attention to the filmic signs that
testify to the relationships between the film and the viewer. In the same spirit, we
then have to consider whether the project reveals filmically any aspect of inward-
ness. We have to wonder if it is necessary to code subjectivity into specific filmic
signs, if film form is naturally designed to express subjectivity or not, and if, in
addition to objectifying subjectivity, film is also capable of subjectifying objectiv-
ity.
Towards the Representation of an “Interior Landscape”

Before I go on discussing the strategies by which film represents subjectivity, I
would like to take a moment to sum up what I have explored so far: starting from
the ontological mode of subjectivity, I have firstly considered the direct or posi-
tional relation of film with reality (or the profilmic), I then looked into the scatter-
ing of this confrontation through adumbrations, and, finally, I discussed the
viewpoint strategies. Now, whether Merleau-Ponty would have liked it or not, this
gradual process leads me to consider the internal representations and the ques-
tion if and how they can be filmically represented. The way I am formulating the
point is not incorrect, but ambiguous on account of the double meaning of repre-
sentation: on the one hand, representation can refer to a mental or internal phe-
nomenon like a feeling, on the other, to anything that physically represents some-
thing like an image. We have to now consider how internal representations are
filmically formed by representing them concretely. In this case, the source is not
physical anymore, but mental; in other words, in the process of my study, we are
guided less and less by reality, and more and more by the mind. But be that as it
may, we also have to take into account the fact that, in every film, the most men-
tally-related phenomenon becomes a physical inscription exactly like any other
physical phenomenon. Merleau-Ponty does not throw a great deal of light upon

this question because he avoids it with the postulate that a movie can or must
exclusively show the behavior: can if we relate the problem to the medium proper-
ties, must if we relate it to aesthetical standards. His attitude towards this duality –
medium theory or aesthetics – is ambiguous, but his analysis is rather useful
because he raises the question about the relevance of the representation of dizzi-
ness with respect to film medium and form. He mentions Premier de Cordée
(1943), Louis Daquin’s movie (adapted from a Roger Frison-Roche’s novel),
where we see a spinning and disorienting landscape as the alpinist in the film is
supposed to see it during climbing, and Sierra de Teruel or Espoir (1939-
1945), André Malraux’s movie on the Spanish Civil War (adapted from his own
book), where we see through a haze what the pilot is supposed to see when he
lands after a flight. It is not quite correct to consider these two cases as exemplifi-
cations of mental landscape representations, but rather as landscape transforma-
tions caused by the dizziness of the person looking. This constitutes another step
in the process of moving away from the pure positional camera to the representa-
tion of interior landscape, but focusing on this penultimate step we come closer
to the last one.
This brings us back to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) where the effect of dizzi-
ness, specified as fear of heights, is represented three times by a high-angle shot
animated by a concurrent combination of dolly traveling and forward zoom. The
first time we see this vertiginous shot is when Scottie powerlessly witnesses the
fall of a policeman from the top of a building, and the two other times when
Madeleine and Judy fall from the bell tower. It must be noted that in Vertigo,
dizziness is also represented as a way of behaving, as Merleau-Ponty would have
it; by way of showing accompanying shots that give away the mental state of mind
of the character, the signs of weakness on Scottie’s face (the French title is
Sueurs Froides, i.e., cold sweat!) for instance, we have a better understanding
of what the representation of someone’s interiority actually means to convey. In-
stead of obeying the philosopher’s law as I mentioned above, the movies are com-
posed alternatively of objective and subjective shots in different combinations that
succeed when the transition is soft, without attracting attention to it. We are, on
the contrary, surprised when the subjectivity is notably accentuated – an extreme
case of this is of course The Lady in the Lake where, from the beginning to
the end of the film, the camera literally is the detective’s look. Such a look of the
camera that fully substitutes that of the narrator or the implied author makes it
almost impossible for the spectator to identify with the character/look, because
he/she will constantly be distracted by the device, and it will not take him/her
long to get tired. On the contrary, the shots showing what Scottie sees are very
short; they do not fully substitute one subjective look of the movie, but intervene
punctually as snapshots that symbolize the dizziness. These shots, however, do
look very artificial because, as Hitchcock said to Truffaut, it was necessary to
build a miniature model of the bell tower staircase to keep costs down. Just as in

landscape invention where land transformation can use artificial means in order
to induce a natural effect, this kind of filmic subterfuge rests upon a device in situ
that gives a natural sensation in visu.
Film still from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).
Whether you consider Hitchcock a visionary or not, the point of fact remains that
he was able to manipulate cinematic language like no other. Consider the follow-
ing quote from him: “I always remember one night at the Chelsea Arts Ball at
Albert Hall in London when I got terribly drunk and I had the sensation that
everything was going far away from me.”73 Some might find it a bit tasteless or
macho to openly discuss one’s drinking habits as Hitchcock did, but that is be-
side the point here, what is important is that it stresses a fundamental question
about subjectivity: can we understand what it feels like to suffer from dizziness if
we have never suffered from it ourselves? Thomas Nagel asks this question with
the help of a particularly striking example: “[…] bat sonar, though clearly a form
of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and
there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experi-
ence or imagine.”74 What interests us here again is Searle’s ontological mode of
subjectivity. What Hitchcock in his anecdote basically proposes is using a trick to
circumvent the incommunicability of the ontological subjectivity in the case of
dizziness: we need only think about similar situations that have occurred to us
such as drunkenness or blacking out and think about how that made us feel. By
this analogy, while it is difficult to have “the notion of what it is like to be a bat,”
as Nagel puts it, we do have a sense of what it is like to be a human being who
suffers from vertigo. As Eisenstein suggested, we need to think beyond the trick,

on the formal or structural side of film, but it is also clear that the trick is the
means by which subjectivity is imprinted in the film.
To return to Truffaut’s remark addressed to Hitchcock about the feeling of
“contemplative rhythm” conveyed by Vertigo, Gilles Deleuze says that Scottie
lives “in a strange state of contemplation which is communicated to the whole
movie,” so that we can generalize the occasional representation of dizziness to
the whole thematic underlying Vertigo: “what is vertiginous, is, in the heroine’s
heart, the relation of the Same with the Same that passes through all the varia-
tions of its relation with others (the dead woman, the husband, the inspector).”75
He concludes that “including the spectator in the film, and the film in the mental
picture,” Hitchcock “accomplishes […] the whole of the cinema,” touching on, in
this respect, another one of Truffaut’s remarks about the resemblance of Verti-
go to “filmed dreams.” Hitchcock responded to Truffaut by arguing that the im-
pression of “contemplative rhythm” was due to the fact that the film tells “the
story from a viewpoint of a man who’s in an emotional crisis.”76 That this design
of representing Scottie’s quest for truth through his emotional world view would
amount to a mental picture or a filmed dream is clearly questionable. Obviously,
there are a lot of other movies that more explicitly take aim at a dreamlike film
form. Vertigo tells and shows a supposedly real story, so that the feeling of
uncanny is due to the way of telling and showing.
To summarize, the representation of dizziness is not a representation of an
interior landscape as such, but a representation of the way according to which
the inside changes the outside: we see what Scottie sees, but at the same time we
see it as he sees it.77 Incidentally, hallucination is a strange kind of process trans-
forming the outside through the inside. In this case, the percepts produced by the
mind are introduced among the percepts of the world itself. In his analysis of
Jacques Becker’s Falbalas (1945), Merleau-Ponty also condemns the filmic re-
presentation of hallucination. Falbalas tells the story of Clarence (Raymond
Rouleau), a top fashion designer and incorrigible womanizer, who falls madly in
love with Micheline (Micheline Presle) but she rejects him. At the end of the mo-
vie, when Clarence confounds a wooden mannequin with Micheline, this delir-
ious hallucination is represented by the picture of Micheline superimposed on
the mannequin; at the very end, Clarence, driven mad by his obsessive love for
Micheline, throws himself from a window holding the mannequin. Merleau-
Ponty thinks that the filmmaker “does not convince us when he shows what Clar-
ence sees” and that the delirious hallucination “would be more moving if it ap-
peared, as by a sort of incarnation, following his looks and his gestures.”78 Here
again he asserts his film as an art of behavior postulate.
So, we can argue that hallucination, like dizziness, is more or less successfully
represented in film. For example, the first hallucination Myrtle Gordon (Gena
Rowlands) experiences in John Cassavetes’ Opening Night (1977), allusively
produced by light strokes, is all the more successful given the fact we are not

Film still from Jacques Becker’s Falbalas (1945).
used to seeing such a device in a John Cassavetes film: his films tend to have a
more physical style. Such a judgment can be considered as a second kind of
aesthetical judgment, insofar as it does not evaluate the film from a standard
(related or not to the medium definition) but as it is. Apart from these two kinds
of judgments, Becker’s attempt (as much as Cassavetes’) calls our attention to the
fact that a represented hallucination makes visible something that only the hallu-
cinating character is supposed to see because his mind produces the percept of
something that does not exist. However, the requirement, at the same time, that
this fantasy objectification needs to cling to something real like Falbalas’ man-
nequin, that is to a percept that the mind receives instead of creates, refers signif-
icantly to the definition of film itself. Following Freud, Christian Metz defines the
relation between a hallucination and a film as a “paradoxical hallucination.” He
sees it as a hallucination because we take fiction for a kind of reality and as “para-
doxical because unlike a true hallucination it is not a wholly endogenous psychi-
cal production: the subject, in this case, has hallucinated what was really there,
what at the same moment he in fact perceived: the images and sounds of the
film.”79

Subjectivity in Film Form Has a Good Future…
In the words of Edgar Morin, “[W]e experience the cinema in a state of double
conscience,” because “the illusion of reality is inseparable from the awareness
that it is really an illusion.”80 Paradoxical hallucination or double conscience shift
the attention to the beholder. My view in this paper is that our stance toward film
as we experience it on screen is partially determined by certain objective condi-
tions of screening, like those we find in the theories of the cinematic apparatus
(based on Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the mirror stage), but also by
the way film form subjectifies objectivity and objectifies subjectivity, so that, be-
yond the more or less deterministic conditions of screening, we also need to con-
sider the filmic details of each movie.
A supplementary step in my undertaking of exploring the representation of the
mental landscape would be to examine the explicit representation of a dream,
and, as last step probably, the dreamlike film form of some kinds of movies. A
character’s dream representation is as difficult to visualize as representing dizzi-
ness or hallucination is, and for similar reasons. As for the dream, this difficulty
relates to the gap between the latent dream and the manifest one: from the one to
the other. According to Freud, there are all sorts of transformations and distor-
tions, like the displacement of psychical intensities so that the most significant
ones may be more in the details than in the storytelling.81 From a psychoanalytic
viewpoint, this gap separates the dreamed content from the account of the dream
– as Paul Valéry said, the “dream is the phenomenon we observe only during its
absence.”82 In a movie the dream is made present on the screen. The filmic
dream is not a dream as such, but a dream narration and, moreover, a narration
that is not so much told as it is visualized, perhaps with added sound. The visua-
lized dream is supposed to be an analogy of the latent dream, but this analogy is
rather ill-conceived. It seems more suitable to consider it as a manifest represen-
tation; filmic representation is always too real to externalize the internal without
transforming it, too visually explicit to let the mind free to imagine. The posi-
tional camera, that keeps the real at a distance without resorting to any additional
mental content, seems to represent reality as it is. At the opposite end of the
spectrum, we have the dream representation that is supposed to visualize a men-
tal image. In order to accomplish this it requires some aspects of reality as its
source material, not to mention a delicate touch to avoid awkwardness: bizarre
objects and strange associations turn easily to kitsch. As far as I know, this risk
mainly concerns the representations of a character’s dream (see Vertigo,
among others), but it does not concern the dreamlike movies or sequences where,
beyond a concrete dream telling, the whole structure as such is in places or on the
whole supposed to be a mentalist one (see Buñuel, Robbe-Grillet, and others).
With this category of films we come close to “quasi-psychisme,” so that, concern-

ing the other categories or genres, and cinema generally, Epstein’s theory seems
retrospectively to be too generous.

PART IV
Conversation
Subjectivity in Artistic
Coupling
Conversation with Maria Klonaris and
Katerina Thomadaki
Dissident Subjectivities: The Filmmakers as a
Double Subject
Marina Gržinić
Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki are among the most famous avant-garde
artists working in France. Their collaborative work combines experimental film
poetics with radical feminist theory, a reflection on intersexuality, and strong the-
oretical inputs on the formation of political subjectivity and on the role of the arts
in today’s world. Experimental film remains at the core of their work, however,
and since the mid-1980s they have been increasingly crossing film with photogra-
phy, video, digital images, and multimedia projects. Rethinking women’s identi-
ties, reworking female agency and reconceptualizing the nomadic body are con-
stant topics for Klonaris and Thomadaki. More particularly, the question of the
“dissident body” as a counter-subjectivity of the body that thinks and acts, rebels
and disrupts, but also disfigures, is at the basis of their interaction with issues of
gender, reproducibility, equality, and difference.
Klonaris’ and Thomadaki’s “dissident bodies” force us to see defamiliarizing
modes of perception, new paradigms of memory and loss. The artists produce
eroticized, emphatic, and longing disfigurations of the body, deeply rooted in the
social and natural environment. Exile and alterity are the main positions of the
politics of the body they develop. Their path is a query about the position of the
human within sexual, physical, and spiritual relationships. Their creatures bring
to the fore the unstable and tenuous nature of “gender” in itself. In short, most
border identity events take place in the perspective of radically performed stereo-
scopic visions.
Klonaris and Thomadaki create an immersive mental space, where the human
body – intersexual or female – meets with the outer space. They tend to provoke
both a confrontation and contact between visualized bodies and the spectator’s
body. Within this confrontation/contact, some “monstrosity” is waiting to be re-
versed, re-imaged, re-imagined. The work deals overtly with the relation between
gaze/screen/image/mirror. Here the gaze as a concept is central to the description
of the subject’s psychic engagement with the cinematic apparatus. Even when
189
their work abandons the cinematic apparatus to move towards exhibition space,
the relation between gaze/screen/image/mirror remains central.
Klonaris’ and Thomadaki’s dissident bodies are critical of liberal capitalism
and the accumulation of capital, which is the process of pinning down identities
of certain bodies in time and space. Their juncture of art, culture, and politics
reflects how artists, intellectuals, and activists intervene within culture and poli-
tics and how they try to make visible and reverse the logic of capital in a critical
way. Reacting to the horror of exile, of brutalized migration, and to the penaliza-
tion of alterity is equally a fundamental political position for them.
The result is a politics of ideas, and not an ontology of beauty. At work in
Klonaris’ and Thomadaki’s universe is not simply an exhaustion of imagery or a
simple cloning of images, their work pays attention to the technology of reprodu-
cibility as an important source of new possible future subjectivities.
Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki, Tri-X-Pan, Double Exposure

(Double Self-Portrait) – Black-and-White photographic series and projection per-
formance, 1977 & 2000.
190 marina gržinić

MG: Where does your artistic practice meet your life?
MK/KT: Our artistic practice IS our life. There is a high degree of personal expo-
sure in our films, particularly in our first cycle of works, The Body Tetralogy
(1975-1979). These are practically autobiographical films and film performances,
even if they entirely dismiss pre-existing narrative structures like those of docu-
mentary films, cinéma vérité, film journals, etc. Each one of these pieces (Double
Labyrinth, 1975-76, The Child Who Peed Glitter, 1977, Soma, 1978, Ar-
teria Magna in Dolore Laterali, 1979) is a structural invention where per-
sonal and collective experiences, memories and desires are transposed in ritua-
lized stagings of our bodies and faces. Sometimes autobiographical materials
appear in the form of texts, that we read live during the projection through a
microphone among the public (The Child who Peed Glitter, 1977). In
these four works of The Body Tetralogy, where we are the only performers,
our bodies become projection screens of our unconscious and our mental struc-
tures. From A to Z the process is “non objective.” We are installing ourselves as
“viewed women-subjects,” as a double subject, through an overtly subjective film
language.
MG: You co-sign your films since the mid-1970s and you have underlined the idea
of a “double auteur femme.” What is the history of this double signature that you
have maintained for more than three decades?
MK/KT: We met in high school in Athens. The mutual discovery of our works
(Katerina’s theatrical performances and Maria’s drawings and paintings) was an
overwhelming emotional experience for both of us. A shock. This was an encoun-
ter for life.
Soon after, we started working together. In our university years in Athens, we
created a theater group and put on plays like The Maids by Jean Genet (1968) and
Salomé by Oscar Wilde (1969), directed by Katerina who also performed main
parts (Claire, Salomé…) and with set designs, lights, costumes and make-up by
Maria. Our experimental approach developed into a new formation, the Space for
Theater Research, which we founded in Athens in 1972, a laboratory where we
explored the limits of theater. In this context we started merging the distinct
functions of director and set designer. When we came to Paris in 1975 for post-
graduate studies, we oriented our practice towards performance and film.
It is then that we assumed our double signature. Double Labyrinth (1975-
76) is the first film we shot in Paris and that we co-signed. Our double signature
meant our equal involvement in the genesis and the making of the film. It also
implied a common vision, due to an intense mental kinship, in spite of our quite
opposing personalities.
conversation with maria klonaris and katerina thomadaki 191

It is true that we share many common points in our personal histories: same
age, same maternal language (Greek) and same acquired languages, same initial
religion and social solidarity principles, a middle-class background where educa-
tion was the major commodity, same city (Athens), same Greek-American high
school in our adolescence. We have also undergone together the political trauma-
tism of the colonels’ dictatorship in the late 1960s and early 1970s. However
Maria came from the Greek diaspora and grew up in cosmopolitan Alexandria,
with Egypt as her original land and English as the first language she was taught
to read and write. In her childhood she suffered the traumatism of the exodus
after the Suez Canal crisis, when her family decided to migrate to Athens. Kater-
ina grew up in Athens, a city “under (re)construction” after the German occupa-
tion and the civil war, her parents came from the islands – Crete and Naxos. Our
migration to Paris was motivated by political, social, and cultural conditions. We
also wanted to undertake postgraduate studies in the arts and theater which did
not exist in these particular disciplines in Greece in the 1970s. This passage im-
plied a socio-cultural leap, a rupture and a synthesis on which we have been
working all our lives.
Our first task in Paris, in order to survive existentially, was to construct our-
selves as subjects. Intercultural subjects, women subjects, creative subjects, un-
submissive to sexual and artistic norms. The conception of ourselves as a “double
auteur” contained all these dynamics.
The double signature came as the result of a long process and elaboration be-
tween us. We had to harmonize our personal necessities and temperaments. And
it was not easy to let go of power residues implied in any relationship so as to
achieve total equality.
We thus became a restraint collective. We already had a culture of collectives
from our theatrical experience. The politicized praxis had at that time invaded
experimental theater, but we still had to let go of our leadership instincts and all
sense of hierarchy in the construction of our own relationship. The fact that we
were two women did not necessarily resolve antinomies, because gender roles are
complex anyway inside one single individual. But it certainly helped in the pro-
cess. We had to invent a co-authoring ethics and this was a private creation, a
thrilling experience, and a rewarding conquest.
With Double Labyrinth, we laid down the foundations of our Cinema of the
Body1 and all the works to come. Along with our double signature, another “dou-
bling” took place then. We doubled our roles in front of and behind the camera.
Double Labyrinth has a mirror structure: in the first part Katerina performs
and is filmed by Maria and the second part is performed by Maria and filmed by
Katerina. This meant a rejection of the fixed cinematic roles of “subject” and
“object” of the gaze (traditionally the subject being male and the object being
female). We introduced the term “actante” (grammatically feminine) to signify
our function in front of the camera not as “objectified” actresses but as “looked

at subjects.” Each actante acted out and staged her own unconscious. This is how
we initiated our apparatus of reversibility of the gaze and our intercorporeal appara-
tus.
In other words the new cinematic subject that we introduced and underlined –
an alternative, “non-neutral” subject, a dissident subject, TWO WOMEN film-
makers as a double subject led to further reversals which, in parallel to our films,
we articulated theoretically in the various texts and manifestos we published at
that time.2
MG: In fact, what does the double subject double?
MK/KT: The double subject enhances the awareness of the importance of dialo-
gue. It doubles perceptions of the world and of the self, consciousness, sensory
aptitudes, visions, mental wavelengths, personal experiences and desires but also
relational politics.
Together, we are constantly in dialogue, exchanging and sharing experiences
and ideas. Our double signature means that a fundamental connection is at the
center of the cinematic process. This overthrows the profoundly rooted idea of
the One and all powerful male director as only legitimate “auteur.”
Our relational politics, active during the conception and the making of each
film, were partly extended to the other women actantes in our films. We also
applied some of our principles (the reversibility of the roles filmer/filmed, the
actante, the collective processes in editing, etc.) in the various cinema workshops
for women that we led during these years.3
On the other hand, throughout our intensely filmic period, which runs roughly
from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, we were able to thoroughly develop our
connection with audiences. During that period, our main productions were fea-
ture length Super 8 films and multi-screen expanded film performances.4 We
have conceived them all as live events. The performative dimension is crucial to
us. We rarely sent a film to a venue without accompanying it ourselves, present-
ing it, projecting it, and then extensively discussing and exchanging with the pub-
lic.
We wanted to create laboratory situations: we projected our syn-subjectivity to
viewers as an open system into which each of them had the space to project in
exchange her/his own subjectivity. As a social process, our practice takes its full
meaning through the audience’s experience. The numerous ruptures operated by
our film works called for an exchange with the public, even if this were risky for
us in terms of personal exposure and vulnerability. In our eyes an audience is
never a general or statistic fact, but a mosaic of concrete subjects. In fact we want
to know who they are and what they experience while watching our films, how
the films interact with their lives and how the viewer’s subjectivity unfolds into
our images.

We thus discovered to what extent the films acted as social, mental, and visual
agitators. On the one hand, the exchanges we provoked with the public revealed
the tenacity of the cinematic norms which we were consciously disrupting, the
social norms regarding gender which we were attacking and the cultural clash
that we were provoking with film works which came from hybrid cultural origins
and histories. On the other hand, these debates carried the extraordinary political
energy of that period and the active search for alternatives: our cinema, our lives
and our double signature were part of them. The films shattered some certainties,
raised personal questionings, unveiled desires and encouraged creation experi-
ences. To strongly committed feminist audiences we tried to communicate the
importance of cinematic alternatives and visual inventions. To avant-garde film-
goers we tried to communicate feminist awareness. All this generated battles as
well as passionate encounters. We learned a lot from our spectators. Their open-
ness and sensibility helped our work grow and their resistances allowed us to test
the tenacity of norms and frontiers in the mind.
We liked to challenge limits and dig deeper to the very point where the percep-
tion of the film seemed to meet an obstacle. For example, for a feature length
non-narrative film, duration is an obstacle, as experimental films are generally
identified as shorts. Silence is another frequent “obstacle.” The audiovisual char-
acter of film is a deeply rooted cinematic norm. Double Labyrinth is a 55-
minute-long silent film and spectators often reported this silence as “unbear-
able,” in relation of course to the content of the film and its interior tension. We
wanted to dig deeper into this “unbearable” and went on producing feature-
length silent films and performances, until the spectators would let go and accept
the immersion into the music of silence. The inner space and time of our films
are enhanced by silence, as with the three-hour-long silent film Unheimlich II:
Astarti (1979-80), which is our most far-reaching experiment in duration and
silence.
What does a double subject double? Communication risks and adventures, but
also determination, endurance, empowerment.
MG: Such a double subject allows fighting binaries and forming a practical theory
and an artistic practice to resist the violence of heteronormativity. You have put
forth a certain program of politics, which is queer and feminist. Where does it
come from? Where and when was it developed? On which points does it reside in
a certain double history of art and of your lives?
MK/KT: Before becoming, as you say, a program, it was a life urgency. A politics
in acts. Acted in our own bodies in our everyday life.
When we arrived in Paris and made Double Labyrinth in 1975-76, we cur-
iously had not heard about the feminist movement although we were pursuing
postgraduate studies in the arts (including experimental film) and the theater de-

partments of La Sorbonne. This demonstrates to what extent the feminist move-
ment, in its most vital years, was left outside the academy in France. We met the
movement in Italy with Double Labyrinth, which was considered by Italian
activists as a feminist manifesto.
It is then that we started getting acquainted with women’s political groups and
theories of that period – Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva, Wittig. With the text accompa-
nying Double Labyrinth and with our widely published “Manifesto for a Ra-
dical Femininity, for Another Cinema” (1977)5 we laid down the theoretical foun-
dations of our feminist position, which drew together two necessities: the re-
invention of the “feminine” and the re-invention of cinematic alternatives. We
proposed a gender-inclusive, empowered “feminine,” opposing, among others,
the Lacanian concept of the feminine as “lack.” This proposal went along with a
film practice out of/against the cinematographic system and its heavy masculinist
infrastructure. We also defended the “political dimension of poetics” a question
generally eluded by political movements.
Katerina Thomadaki in Unheimlich I: Secret Dialogue (1977-79) by Maria

Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki – Super 8, color, silent, 70 minutes, restored in 35mm
by the French Film Archives with additional support by the J.F. Costopoulos Foundation,
Athens (French Film Archives/CNC Film Collections).

At that time, psychoanalysis was at the front stage. Our contestations of the nat-
uralized “feminine” and our preoccupation with the unconscious as well as the
analytical dialogues we promoted were recognizable territories to audiences and
scholars. With our film Unheimlich I: Secret Dialogue (1977-79), recently
restored in 35mm by the French Film Archives/CNC, we introduced the concept
of the Freudian Unheimlich, which at that time had not yet fueled the extensive
discussions that we know today.6 In our reading of the Freudian essay we saw a
subterranean link between the uncanny and the feminine. This provided the theo-
retical postulate underlying our feature-length films of the Cycle of the Un-
heimlich, Unheimlich I: Secret Dialogue (1977-79), Unheimlich II:
Astarti (1979-80), Kha. The Embalmed (1979-80), and Unheimlich III:
The Mothers (1980-81). In these films, we stage the “feminine” as “uncanny.”
At the same time “uncanniness” characterizes our “unfamiliar” film poetics.
Our involvement in the early 1980s with a Lacanian research group exception-
ally composed by women and led by Eugénie Luccioni-Lemoine brought us closer
to the psychoanalytic milieu in Paris. However, our gender politics and our dou-
ble authorship as women clashed with the naturalized heteronormal foundation
of the Freudian heritage.
When at the beginning of the 1980s we introduced the figure of the hermaph-
rodite with our projection environment Mystery I: Sleeping Hermaphro-
dite at the Museum of Modern Art within the 1982 Paris Biennale, we stood
apart from the surrounding feminist movement which was still mainly preoccu-
pied by the “feminine.”
In the mid-1980s a crucial “encounter” from the past came to the surface. In
her adolescence Maria had discovered an astonishing anonymous photograph of
an intersexual in the archives of her father, Dr. G. Klonaris, an obstetrician and
gynecological surgeon. The blindfolded figure had made an overwhelming im-
pression on her, an impression shared by Katerina later on. The photograph
came with us to Paris but stayed in a latent state until our reflection on gender
involved the hermaphrodite. In our Paris Biennale installation, which opened the
Cycle of the Hermaphrodites (1982-1990), the central figure was the
mythological hermaphrodite as it is represented by the Sleeping Hermaphrodite
Hellenistic statue of the Louvre. Shortly after, the real body of the medical archive
intersexual figure emerged powerfully in our vision. We called her/him Angel. We
started reworking the medical photograph superimposing it with astronomic
landscapes. The projection performance Mystery II: The Angel Ablaze
(1985) introduced The Angel Cycle (1985-…), a vast series of works that is still
ongoing today. Both the concept of intersexuality and that of the angel were once
again alien to our artistic and intellectual milieu. The queer movement had not yet
emerged as such at that time. We first heard about it in the early 1990s in London,
when we created our Night Show for Angel (1992)7 monumental installation
in the Hornsey Road Baths’ abandoned building. Since then we have been re-

elaborating the feminist-queer connection, but as free electrons, within our own
poetic, theoretical and aesthetic system.
Where do our feminist and queer politics come from? Certainly from the de-
gree of repression we had absorbed in Greece, due both to dictatorship and to
social and family conservative conditions. Such a repression inevitably creates vic-
tims or rebels. We were not victims.
MG: Feminism is today split from within. The white heterosexual feminists from
the past cannot understand the revolutionary positions brought by the black body,
immersed in processes of migration, anti-racist politics, decoloniality: bell hooks,
Grada Kilomba, Gloria Anzaldua open a different platform for politics. Where do
you stand with your work in relation to this?
MK/KT: What is so difficult to understand? That there are degrees of brutality and
that black bodies and more particularly black female bodies have received (and
receive) a much higher degree of brutality than white Europeans or Americans
do? And that this is a fact that no one can elude and which necessarily transforms
our views and our theories? We are totally concerned with all these struggles. Be-
sides, migration, racism and coloniality take constantly new forms and really ex-
plode at present. See for instance the ferocity of the new forms of intra-European
neoliberal colonization unleashed on the populations of “bankrupt” countries.
Not to mention the new forms of racism brought up by forced flows of migration
from the East and South. Wherever one may live, in any country, in any “degree”
(or pedigree) of “world,” “first,” “second,” “third,” etc…, one is necessarily
touched by these processes in one’s everyday life. We believe all struggles, past,
present, or future should stay connected in one way or another. One single per-
son, artist, theorist, or activist can probably not engage in all, but the essential is
to engage at least there where the pressure is most unbearable in one’s own life.
In this sense we have rarely dealt with the black question in our films. How-
ever, in Arteria Magna in Dolore Laterali (1979), a multiple projection
performance, we overtly raise the question of sexual mutilations on African young
girls. Otherwise, we have often worked with mixed origin or métis performers
like Parvaneh Navaï or Syn Guérin, as well as Mylène Glykou, a protagonist along
with us in Kha. The Embalmed (Kha. Les Embaumées, 1980) by Maria Klo-
naris (one of the rare films that we did not co-sign, but to which we had collabo-
rated for the editing, the camera, the performance, etc.) Kha means the etheric
double in Ancient Egyptian and the word “embalmed” (which in French we apply
in the feminine gender) has the double meaning of embalming the dead and of
being fragrant.
MG: You work with figures, among which two are particularly important and
reoccur as a political program: the hermaphrodite and the angel. Sexuality in

them is a key point. Can you explain what these two figures stand for? What kind
of sexual alternative do they propose to us? And in which way can we understand
their politics?
MK/KT: In terms of Greek mythology, the hermaphrodite (a masculine noun in

Greek) was the result of the merging of two oppositely sexed bodies into one. The
hermaphrodite is a sexual synthesis, a composite sex figure incorporating female
and male visible sexual attributes. Now, if we consider real human bodies, her-
maphroditism or pseudo-hermaphroditism are variations which occur in different
layers of the biological construction of sexual identity and involve inhabitual com-
binations of the two sexes. The term “intersexuality,” invented by Havelock Ellis
in 1897 and which came largely in use in medicine in the 1950s, enlarges the
concept of hybrid sexual identities to all kinds of departures from the dichotomic
masculine/feminine pattern, presumed “normal.” This covers a large scope of
anatomic, hormonal or genetic discontinuities, including chromosomic variations
mixing the two sexes, more often referred to as mosaicism, another term that we
have used in our work, in particular in our Linz site specific installation of 1994
entitled XYXX Mosaic Identity.8
The research that we undertook in the mid-1980s when we started working on
intersexuality, once more confirmed the methods of the brutal inscription of bi-
nary sex “normality” on “outlaw” bodies, to use Foucault’s expression.
However, the intersexual figure that we had discovered did not convey suffer-
ing, but a majestic distance, a proud “standing up” and emanated a powerful
eroticism. S/he was literally sublime. As a medical document the photograph was
exceptional. This clinically observed body, which combined a feminine external
sex and a male anatomic construction, seemed to resist objectification to which
usually the medical gaze reduces subjects under the pretext of scientific “objectiv-
ity.” On the contrary, a curious reversal was taking place: the photographed sub-
ject transgressed the medical context and unveiled the limits of the binary sexual
norm. We associated her/him with the angel. The sexual ambiguity of this figure
subverts standardized sexual difference as a biological and social construct.9
For us, this real body inscribes within human histories a private and public
dream of the late twentieth century, the dream of a shift from the rigid dichoto-
mic sexual pattern, responsible for so many exclusions and damages, to a com-
plex, inclusive perception of sexual identities. The opening up of physical and
social frontiers of sexes means the acceptance of an elementary and major free-
dom: the freedom to live and experience one’s sex and sexuality as multiple and
moving.
MG: You talk about alternatives brought about by queer bodies and by the me-
dium of experimental film/video art. How do these alternatives question the bio-
political in general, especially the biopolitical of the institution of art present in

the last decades. The institution of art is a frightening bureaucratic machine with-
out alternatives.
MK/KT: We would say with fewer and fewer alternatives, but not without any
alternatives at all. This is why we can presently work creatively with some institu-
tions that still allow freedom and respect for artists and art works, like for in-
stance the Archives Françaises du Film/CNC with whom we have a rare collabora-
tion for the restoration of our Super 8 films in 35mm. Besides, all the people
employed by an institution do not necessarily identify with the institutional poli-
tics. There may be resistance or at least frustration from the inside. Of course, the
more an institution is “central” and rich, the more it is pervaded by power con-
flicts, snobbism, arrogance, and deafness to non-canonic art, whatever the ca-
nons of the moment may be. Since the 1990s, art institutions conform more and
more to commercial objectives and market policies under the pressure of ad-
vanced capitalism’s globalization as you have yourself often underlined. This is
clear when we compare to what was happening in the 1970s and 1980s. For in-
stance, we have had various commissions by the Pompidou Center at that time –
its golden age – when the institution was still “open” enough to bring center
stage emerging critical thought and art works that came from alternative scenes
bursting with inventions and political energy (i.e., experimental film, video art,
etc.). Therefore the cultural institution could act as a mediator for critical art and
ideas. Ah! The happy days!
To go back to your question about the alternatives we cherish and how they
question the biopolitical. With our work we stage female bodies and subjects
through a non-heteronormal consumerist or voyeuristic gaze and ideology. On
the other hand we focus on extraordinary bodies, currently considered as abnor-
mal or even “monstrous,” like the hermaphrodite, the “angel” or the nineteenth-
century conjoined twins in Sublime Disasters. The Twins (1995-…).10 We
call them dissident bodies.11
However, within current media language and trendy first-degree sensational-
ism, this kind of political position is undesirable and “illegible,” to use Judith
Butler’s expression about gender complexities. This “illegibility” reoccurs in var-
ious theoretical fields, as for example that part of film theory which has not yet
revised its profoundly machistic, voyeuristic, and normative consideration of
bodies, in particular female bodies and their figuration in cinema.
Now what happens with the spectators is entirely different. This spring, In
Athens, we presented an environmental installation commissioned by the Onassis
Foundation for their inaugural exhibition.12 According to our architectural plans,
a specific space was constructed, where our digital video Quasar (2002-2003),
one of the “extragalactic” pieces of The Angel Cycle, was projected on the
central screen while extending into the space through multiple projections on the
walls and ceiling, as well as through mirrors. In Quasar our own faces and eyes

merge with astral worlds and energies. The organization of the projection space
is ritual. The sound is diffused in crossed stereo and the exceptional technical
projection and sound conditions enhance the images’ and sound’s presence.
While in Athens, we witnessed a strong response of the general public, in spite
of the intensely subjective and experimental character of this work. Systemati-
cally, the spectators reported an overwhelming emotional experience and often
pressed their chest as if something had directly struck their inner being, their
heart and breath. Something psycho-physical. Some referred to eroticism, others
to an “echographic” experience of a cosmic conception. These reactions came
from women and men of various generations. Children spent much time inside
the space, which both relaxed and scared them, some of them said they preferred
it to the planetarium! The public’s response moved us and intrigued us. What
exactly did this work activate? A shared unabolished connection with a multi-
layered time/space perception? Cell memory? Underskin poetics? Pythagorian re-
miniscences?
MG: I would like to bring up the dimension of time in your work. Your treatment
of intervals and repetitions provokes a disorienting experience of time. How do
you conceptualize time in your work, what is time for you, and what kind of time
do you use to construct the “subjectivity” which characterizes your films and vi-
deos?
MK/KT: We work with states of modified perception. The time-space in our films,
videos, and installations is never “realistic.” Causality and chronological time are
replaced by a “transfigured time” (Maya Deren’s expression) which allows free
circulation within inner spaces.
We have always been interested in interior temporalities and time perceptions,
in time extracted from the everyday perception norms, in temporal estrangement.
This focus does not mean an indifference to historical time, but an attachment to
temporalities which are culturally marginalized, although vital. Temporalities of
dreams and visions, temporalities of memory, imagination, and desire. We often
create immersive hypnotic states which imply non-linear and non-hierarchical
time structures. In our films and projection installations we have worked a lot on
circularity or reversibility of time. Time is a tissue that can be weaved in many
manners within time media. Electronic and digital media enhance its plasticity.
This is why our works are generally constructed outside of historical time,
although we may use historically situated documents, i.e., the presence of World
War II newsreels in Requiem for the XXth Century, a video we made in
1994 during the Bosnia-Herzegovina war. In that particular case we did not want
to use found footage that was contemporary to the making of the film, but mate-
rials that have already imbued collective memory.

The interval and repetition patterns that you evoke, reflect poetic or musical
patterns of recurring strophes and motives. Repetition and variation may also
change cerebral wavelengths.
Possibly our conceptualization of time has to do with our life experiences.
From our respective childhoods in Greece and Egypt we have been exposed to a
multi-layered and diachronic awareness of time and its collapses. The fascinating
or haunting ruins and survivances present in our everyday life environment sensi-
tized us to the moving depth of time running from the neolithic to classical ages
and from the Hellenistic years to the Byzantium and more recent times. Survi-
vances include ancient rituals still performed today. Ruptured but boundless time
is another face of ruptured and boundless cultural mixtures. The moving depth of
time runs from past to future, from body to out-of-the-body perceptions.
In our recent digital works, where we extensively use astronomic references –
scientific photography but also energy and time patterns – we explore dimensions
of the infinite as an intracellular experience and a state of the mind. Repetitions
and variations mix with genetic 3-D curves, like the ones of our two faces dyna-
mically merging and mutating in Quasar.
MG: Is doubling a question of repetition? After all, what does repetition mean in
relation to your work, and do you expose it as a dimension of agency?
MK/KT: The double subject is not repetition but combined difference. Repetition
is echo and mirror, it is rhythm and circularity, it is haunting and obsession, it is
incantation and ritual, it is hypnosis, it is disruption of evolutive time, it is breath
and heartbeat. It is the profound structure of memory and desire, and, possibly in
that sense, a dimension of agency.
MG: Performativity is a crucial factor in your work. It seems to develop in two

directions: the one is you as performers in the early works and the other one is
the re-performing of your work, for example your way of going back to your films
and your commitment to their restoration. Can we discuss this?
MK/KT: Our performance work is conceived for the camera and addressed to the
camera. We are not gallery performance artists and our films are not “filmed
performances” – apart maybe from Double Labyrinth where we keep the
time-space unity of each “action.” Immediately after, we broke up this unity, by
the use of slides or closed circuit video alongside film, as well as multiple screens
and complex editing principles.
Stylistically, the performances in our films owe much to our prior theatrical
experience and to our interest in rituals or traditional Oriental theaters like, for
example, the Noh. We never use acting devices – no role playing and no psycho-
logical expressivity. We perform in silence gazing at the camera, and through the

camera (exclusively held by us two), gazing at one another and, in extenso, at the
spectator. Our Double Labyrinth performances have many affinities with the
Body Art of the 1970s, with which we established a dialogue through this film.
After The Body Tetralogy, with the Cycle of the Unheimlich, we moved
away from Body Art into more cinematic structures. And our recent Angel Cy-
cle performances are tightly woven with digital technologies’ transformative po-
tential.
Our performances are explorations of the self and iconic translations of inner
dimensions and experiences. The fact that no one, apart from us filmmakers and
the performers, is present in our shootings, gives us maximum freedom of ex-
pression. Once again a laboratory situation, an intimate laboratory of self trans-
mutations and revelations where the camera lens acts as a magnifying glass.
The act which we do perform live among the public is projection. Our theory of
corporalization of the projection implies our presence, the presence of our own real
bodies among the spectators. This is an additional exposure and additional ten-
sion and risk, as we always work with precise projection scores which do not
tolerate equipment deficiencies. Our expanded film performances grew more and
more complex and reached a climax with the ten projectors piece Unheimlich
III: The Mothers, commissioned by the Pompidou Center in 1981 and pre-
sented in the Museum’s cinema for two weeks. Or the much screened
Hermaphrodite II: Orlando (inspired by Virginia Woolf’s homonymous no-
vel), a fresco for seven simultaneously projected images which, in its inaugural
performance, we orchestrated seated on the stage of the theater auditorium of
the Pompidou Center equipped with a 20-meter-long screen (1983).13 The techni-
cal complexity of these projection performances, along with the disappearance of
the equipment for which they were conceived (Xenon Super 8 and slide carousel
projectors) make them practically impossible to re-perform as such today.
Are they definitely “lost”? Are they destined to survive through fragments,
stills, textual testimonies, and spectator’s memories? Or can they be technically
retrieved one way or another?14 They certainly cannot be re-performed by anyone
else, as they rely on memorized scores and not written descriptions – and on our
presence, whatever the word presence may encompass. By the way, we think that
the recent trend of re-performing body actions from the 1970s is problematic,
because these works are inextricably woven with the presence of the artist who
conceived and performed them in the hic et nunc. Presence means also inscription
of personal history and subjectivity as well as historical context on the artist’s own
body. The density of concentration, the subject tension between conception and
performance generate a dramatic effect which is unique. No one can shatter a
glass leaping through it the way Gina Pane did!15 In some cases, “replaying” is
pointless.

Maria Klonaris, Katerina Thomadaki, and Syn Guérin in Orlando: Hermaph-
rodite II (1983) by Klonaris/Thomadaki – multi-screen performance for seven film and
slide projectors, stereo sound, 45 minutes. Theater auditorium of the Pompidou Center,
Paris.
On the contrary, the other “rescue” process, to which you refer, film restoration,
may be rewarding. Why this commitment to the restoration of our films? Maybe
because the meta-life of our ephemeral works has always preoccupied us, and
parallel to our creation we have been keeping and constructing traces, records,
and extensive personal archives.
Parvaneh Navaï in Selva (1981-83) by Maria Klonaris – Super 8 film, color, sound,
70 minutes. Restored in 35mm Dolby Surround by the French Film Archives (French Film
Archives/CNC Film Collections).

Since 2003 we are involved in an innovative initiative of the French Film Archives/
CNC which consists in the restoration in 35mm of our non-narrative Super 8
films from the 1970s and 1980s.16 This implies considerable technical research,
as current restoration processes generally cover visually standardized feature
films. The first question that was raised concerned the format. Could Super 8 be
successfully enlarged into 35mm? After the extraordinary results of the tests, the
Film Archives, the technical team and ourselves concluded that it was possible.
The next major question then was the aesthetic criteria that should be applied,
due to our non-standardized, utterly subjective film language. This question was
further complexified by the performative dimension of our single screen films.
For example, in our Super 8 films, whenever we used sound, we synchronized
image and sound through speed variators during the projection. Once again, no
written scores, just memory patterns. It was obvious that this restoration could
not be done in our absence. The Film Archives decided to entrust us with the
direction of the restoration works. The process that followed was a thrilling emo-
tional and technical adventure which implied to imagine solutions at each step.
The challenge consisted of staying faithful to the originals, while amplifying their
audiovisual input. This format leap granted a new visibility to our films, a literal
renaissance.17
We would like to underline here our commitment to the cinematic apparatus
and its experiential power. As filmmakers and artists we strive to keep it alive.
Since long we have been working on the transposition of the cinematic apparatus
in visual arts’ spaces – museums, art centers, etc., in the form of environmental
projection installations aiming to multiply its immersive potential. The consider-
able work that we presently dedicate to the restoration of our Super 8 films aims
to preserve and enhance the auratic potential of cinematic images. The attention
brought to the intensification of the visual components of the image, as well as
our immersive post-cinematic spaces defy the reduced states of perception pro-
moted by the most dynamic “new” medium, the network. Internet allows an un-
limited connectivity, with doubtless political agency, but remains an information
medium as opposed to what we could call an experiential medium. Live confronta-
tion situations in art provide shared presence communication. Encounters and
connections through crossed subjectivities may be a strong antidote to alienation
and a fuel for life.
MG: I would like to conclude by asking you the question you yourselves ask in
your powerful texts entitled “Film, Gender and Anthropology” that you wrote for
the book New Feminism:18 To what extent is an artist or intellectual still allowed by
contemporary society in which we live to develop independent critical positions?
Or, I will say, dissident subjectivities, that you definitely constitute in life and you
develop in your film/video works, in order to allow for another perspective of art
and politics to form us here and now?

MK/KT: We want to believe that in spite of the shrinking of podiums for indepen-
dent critical positions, whether these are artworks or philosophical, literary and
research statements, there is still some room left for dissident subjectivities, and
some more room to conquer, as long as we can adjust our weapons, build
shields, adapt to harsher life conditions, and have the chance to survive!
We are aware that the worldwide landscape gets darker and darker and our
lives more and more ruthlessly dominated by neoliberal capitalism that Achille
Mbembe accurately terms “necrocapitalism” – as it increasingly produces the ex-
propriation of life. You have underlined this in your own texts.19 The problem is
who or what can stop necrocapitalism, when and how? Apparently, neither hu-
man suffering, nor massive demonstrations and popular upheavals, nor scientific
warnings, not even the earth’s terrifying reactions have, up to now, succeeded to
do so. Immense global disasters like the one at Fukushima continue to be viewed
as “local accidents.” Let’s hope that harsh economic mechanisms of repression
and destruction operating in the world will go on awaking collective resistance
and will end up triggering drastic changes through, among others, ecological,
anti-nuclear movements, etc.
Meanwhile, what we can do is become all the more aware of our personal and
collective responsibilities and keep active in our scale defending critical positions,
unsubmissive practices, alternative bodies, and re-invented selves – while remain-
ing receptive to the world’s still existing splendors. Ultimately, it is maybe
through them that we can invent new horizons.

Notes
Introduction: Rethinking Subjectivity in Film

1. Yosefa Loshitzky, The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci (Detroit: Wayne State Univer-
sity Press, 1995), 51.
2. See: Eleanor Rosch, “Principles of Categorization,” in Cognition and Categorization, eds.
Eleanor Rosch and Barbara B. Lloyd (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
1978), 27-48.
3. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? trans.
Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 15.
4. Ibid., 13.
5. Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992), 10.
6. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (London & New York: Routledge, 1995), 3. She refers to
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (probably before he enters into the “Freud wars”), see: The
Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988);
and The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, and Affect, trans. Douglas Brick et al.,
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
7. Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, trans. Jonathan Griffin (Copenhagen:
Green Integer, 1997), 81.
8. Marina Gržinić, Fiction Reconstructed: Eastern Europe, Post-Socialism and the Retro-Avant-Garde
(Vienna: Edition Selene in collaboration with Springerin, 2000); Une fiction reconstruite,
Europe de l’est, post-socialisme et rétro avant-garde (Paris: L’Harmattan, Ouverture philoso-
phique, 2005).
9. Klonaris, and Thomadaki, “Cinema of the Body,” available from http://www.klonaris-
thomadaki.net/artsite.htm.
The Cinema as Art of the Mind: Hugo Münsterberg, First Theorist

of Subjectivity in Film
1. Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Fictions, published in Labyrinths:
Selected Stories & Other Writings (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation,
1964), 9.
2. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1950), 171.
3. “Henri Bergson nous parle du cinéma,” remarks collected by Michel Georges-Michel
in Le Journal (20 February 1914), 7.
4. Rémy de Gourmont, Le Deuxième livre des Masques (Paris: Mercure de France, 1898), 74.
207
5. Hugo Münsterberg (1863-1916) was a member of the Harvard Philosophy Department,
a leader in the field of applied psychology.
6. Münsterberg’s The Photoplay: A Psychological Study was first published in April 1916,
eight months before his unexpected death. The book was soon forgotten and redis-
covery had to wait until the 1970s when it was republished otherwise unaltered except
for the modernized name The Film: A Psychological Study and Richard Griffith’s fore-
word.
7. Noël Carroll, “Film/Mind Analogies: The Case of Hugo Münsterberg,” in Theorizing the
Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 294.
8. See Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art [1932] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957).
9. Hugo Münsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study (New York: Dover Publications, Inc.,
1970), 79.
10. Ibid., 19.
11. J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1976), 24-25.
12. Hugo Münsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study, 19.
13. Ibid., 22.
14. Ibid., 24.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 26.
17. Ibid., 30.
18. Ibid., 30.
19. Ibid., 31.
20. Ibid., 74.
21. Ibid., 31-32.
22. Ibid., 32.
23. Ibid.
24. Other film theorists of the silent era (Béla Balázs, Jean Epstein) emphasized the power
of the close-up, but Münsterberg was certainly among the first. And he was the first to
analyze the close-up in terms of the psychology of attention.
25. Ibid., 37-38.
26. Ibid., 39.
27. Ibid., 40-41.
28. Ibid., 41.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 42.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., 43.
34. Ibid., 44.
35. Ibid., 48.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 53.
38. Ibid., 48.
39. Ibid., 52.
208 notes
40. Ibid., 52.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 53.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., 53.
46. Ibid., 54.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 55.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., 55-56.
52. Ibid., 56.
53. Ibid.
54. Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc,
1989), 67-68.
55. Louis Delluc, Pierre Lherminier, Drames de cinéma: scénarios et projets de films (Paris: Cah-
iers du cinéma, 1990), 41
56. Emile Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran,” Le Temps (10 October 1917).
57. Paul Souday, “Bergsonisme et cinéma,” Paris-Midi (12 October 1917).
58. Marcel L’Herbier, “Hermes and Silence,” in French Film Theory and Criticism, volume I:
1907-1929, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 149.
Written in 1917 and originally published as “Hermès et le silence,” in Le Film, n°110-
111 (29 April 1918), 7-12
59. Emile Vuillermoz, “Before the Screen: Les Frères corses” in Richard Abel, French Film The-
ory and Criticism, 3.
60. Ibid.
61. Yhcam, “Cinematography,” in Richard Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism, 75-76.
62. Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film, 24.
The Representation of Experience in Cinema

1. Some material from my essay “Bergman and the Film Image,” Midwest Studies in Philo-
sophy, 34 (2010), appears here in a revised form. Thanks to Paisley Livingston, Jenefer
Robinson and Murray Smith for discussion.
2. Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1992), 10.
3. Thus I agree with George Wilson who says that “what film viewers imagine seeing in a
veridical PoV shot are the fictional circumstances that the character perceives.”
(“Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
64 (2006): 84).
4. See Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft, Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and
Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 96. See also Jane Heal, Mind, Rea-
son and Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) especially part III,
and Kendall Walton, “Projectivism, Empathy, and Musical Tension,” Philosophical To-
notes 209
pics 26 (1999): 407–440. I have taken the term “inflection” from Wilson (“Transpar-
ency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film”), though I assign it a different meaning.
5. This “lying flashback” is much less noted than the later one in Stage Fright (Hitch-
cock, 1950), presumably because we are cued in to the character’s unreliability in
Crossfire much earlier than we are in Stage Fright.
6. Cases like this have been perceptively discussed by George Wilson in “Transparency
and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film.”
7. One thing indicated by The Woman in the Window is that the material which is
true according to the film is not always the focus of the viewer’s interest; viewers are
likely to find the content of the dream much more engaging than the fact that these
events are dreamed. There is a corresponding tendency to subvert the film’s formal
structure and take the content of the dream, and not the dreaming itself, as the story
told.
8. A shot of this kind is anomalous if we see in it something contrary to what the char-
acter thought was happening. This is sometimes the case.
9. Interviews with Stig Björkman, Torsten Manns, and Jonas Sima, Bergman om Bergman,
eds. Stig Björkman,Torsten Manns, and Jonas Sima (Stockholm: Norstedts Förlag,
1970), Bergman subsequently denied this account: see Images: My Life in Film (Stock-
holm: Norstedts Förlag, 1990).
10. One might insist that Borg did in fact hear them, and that his much later imaginings
are based on these recollections. My point is that we are not obliged to think of such
scenes in this way.
11. Smith, personal communication.
12. Wilson, “Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film.”
13. Things may in fact be a little more complicated. I am not sure that we are supposed to
think that Marlow is having a visual experience with exactly this property. Perhaps we
are to take the web-like threads as a sort of visual metaphor for his befuddled percep-
tual state. However, an earlier shot in the film tells against this hypothesis. At a certain
point, Marlow is struck from behind and falls unconscious. As we see this, the screen
image starts to go black at the edges and the blackness quickly fills the whole screen.
At this point presumably we are to imagine that Marlow’s experience of falling uncon-
scious is like the experience we are having while watching: similar, that is, in respect
of the spreading blackness, but not in another respect, for we see Marlow and he does
not see himself. (Confusingly, the image does not correspond to the description in the
voice-over, since Marlow talks of a black pool opening at his feet, which suggests that
the blackness should start at the center of the screen and work its way out.)
14. See Wilson, “Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film,” 87.
15. Some shots contain elements which are representational prompts, but which do not
prompt us to imagine features of the character’s experience. A shot of the Eiffel Tower
with “Paris, 1940” superimposed is such a shot. (Alternatively one might make a dis-
tinction between the image and something imposed on the image, thereby denying
that such an image contains any non-representational but representation-prompting
element.)
16. Bergman apparently did not zoom in to create the effect, but blew up the shot.
17. Robinson, personal communication.
210 notes
Beyond Subjectivity: The Film Experience
1. A shorter version of this essay has been previously published as “Filmic Experience” in
Screen 50. 1 (spring 2009): 56-66.
2. The concept of film experience was first elaborated within the field of filmology, in
which it was linked to particular modalities of the perception of images in movement:
see Edward Brian Lowry, The Filmology Movement and Film Study in France (Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press, 1985). Beginning in the 1990s, the term entered into a theoretical
debate as an application of phenomenological reflections to cinema; see: Vivian Sob-
chack, Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1992); and as a continuation of Benjaminian reflection see: Miriam
Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Tech-
nology,’” New German Critique 40 (winter 1987): 179-224. Even when not directly thema-
tized, the concept of film experience has sustained the reflection of other scholars:
e.g. Edgar Morin, especially at the beginning of his career, when his work, not coin-
cidentally, was linked to filmology – see: in particular, Le Cinéma ou l’Homme imaginaire.
Essai d’anthropologie sociologique (Paris: Minuit, 1956); Sigfried Kracauer, especially in his
last large volume, which, in my opinion, should be read precisely in this sense: Theory
of Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960); and, finally, Stanley Cavell, in parti-
cular, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (New York: Viking Press, 1971);
Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1981); and Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
3. See Roger Odin, Cinéma et Production de sens (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990); and De la fiction
(Bruxelles: De Boeck Université, 2000).
4. See especially Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1989), and Teresa De Lauretiis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloo-
mington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
5. An exhaustive study of film presentation can be found in: Douglas Gormery, Shared
Pleasure: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: University of Wis-
consin Press, 1992).
6. For a historical reconstruction of the forms of interpretation of some films, see: Janet
Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); and Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception
(New York: New York University Press, 2000).
7. For a historical investigation into forms of cinematic consumption, see: R. Maltby,
and M. Stokes, eds., American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early
Sound Era (London: British Film Institute, 1999); Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Percep-
tion of Cinema Audiences (London: British Film Institute, 1999); Hollywood Spectatorship:
Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences (London: British Film Institute, 2001). For a
broader history of spectatorship, see: Gian Piero Brunetta, Buio in sala (Venice: Marsi-
lio, 1989); and Il viaggio dell’icononauta. Dalla camera oscura di Leonardo alla luce dei Lumière
(Venice: Marsilio, 1997).
8. See, for example: Annette Kuhn, Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (London &
New York: Tauris Publishers, 2002).
notes 211
9. See: Linda Williams, ed., Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1994).
10. Among the most influential essays on the apparatus, see Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideolo-
gical Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Film Quarterly, 28:2 (winter
1974-1975): 39-47 – or in Cinéthique (7-8, 1970); “The Apparatus: Metapsychological
Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A
Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 299-
318 – or; “Le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité,”
Communications 23 (1975): 56-72; and Christian Metz, Le signifiant imaginaire. Psychana-
lyse et cinéma (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1977).
11. Emmanuel Levinas, among others, reminded us of the need to respond not “only to
the question of knowing ‘what is it?’ but also to the question ‘how is it what it is,’” in
Éthique et Infini. Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo (Paris: Librarie Arthème Fayard, 1982).
12. Luigi Pirandello, The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio (Cambridge: Dedalus, 1990) – or Si
gira, Nuova Antologia (June-August 1915); later republished with the title, Quaderni di
Serafino Gubbio operatore (Florence: Bemporand, 1925).
13. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illumi-
nations, (New York: Schocken, 1968), 217-51 – or “L’œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa re-
production mécanisée,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung I (1936).
14. “Beginning with the invention of the press, the word became the primary channel of
communication between men […] However, in the culture of words, the soul, after
having become so audible, became almost invisible […] Now the cinema is marking a
shift which is just as radical as that of the printing press. Millions of men come to
know every evening – through their eyes, sitting in front of a screen – human desti-
nies, characters, sentiments and moods of every sort, without having need of words
[…] Man has once again become visible.” Béla Balázs, Der Sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des
Films (Vienna & Leipzig: Deutsch-Osterreichisches Verlag, 1924).
15. “The camera lens […] is an eye endowed with inhuman analytic capabilities. It is an
eye free of prejudices and morals, and immune to influence, which sees traits in the
faces and movements of men, which we, full of likes and dislikes, habits and reflec-
tions, are no longer able to see.” Jean Epstein, “Le cinématographe vu de l’Etna”
(Paris: Les Écrivains réunies, 1926); now in Écrits sur le cinéma, vol. 1 (Paris: Seghers,
1974).
16. For the concept of “unconscious optics,” see, at least: Benjamin’s “The Work of Art.”
17. This image appears in the essay “Experience and Poverty,” Selected Writings, Vol. II
(Cambridge, MA & London: Belknap/Harvard University Press 1999), 731-36 – or “Er-
fahrung und Armut,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 2.1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), 219.
However, the theme is present throughout Benjamin’s works: see, at least: “The
Story-Teller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, op. cit. – or
“Der Erzähler. Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows,” Orient und Occident (Oct.
1936), now in Gesammelte Schriften, 2.2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 438-465. An inter-
esting take on the theme of the crisis of modern experience can be found in Odo
Marquard. See, in particular: “Krise der Erwartung – Stunde der Erfahrung. Zur
aesthetischen Kompensation des modernen Erfahrungsverlust,” in Skepsis und Zustim-
mung. Philosophische Studien (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994), 70-92; and “Zeitalter der Welt-
212 notes
fremdheit? Beitrag zur Analyse der Gegenwart,” Apologie des Zufaelligen (Stuttgart: Re-
clam, 1986), 76-97. Finally, an important reconsideration of the theme can be found
in: Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience (London & New
York: Verso, 1993) – or Infanzia e storia. Distruzione dell’esperienza e origine della storia (Tur-
in: Einaudi, 1978).
18. I am thinking of the famous essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt” in
Sense and Non-Sense (Chicago: Illinois University Press, 1964) – or “Le doute de Cé-
zanne,” Sens et Non-sens (Paris: Nagel, 1948).
19. The idea that a text (and, more in general, an event) “permits” a rereading of reality is
put forth by Michel de Certeau. I will limit myself here to recalling the extraordinary
passage in which, in speaking about Playtime by Tati, he writes: “Ainsi, au sortir de
Play-Time, le spectateur se met-il à remarquer l’humour des rues, comme s’il avait le
regard de Tati. Le film a rendu possible une observation humoristique qui, sans lui, ne se
serait pas produite. Il en va de même pour la lecture d’un poème, la rencontre de
quelqu’un, le remuement d’un groupe. Si le registre de la perception ou de la compré-
hension s’en trouve modifié, c’est que l’événement a rendu possible et, en un sens très
réel, a permis cet autre type de rapport au monde.” Michel de Certeau, La Faiblesse de
croire (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 210. On the ability of a text to “figure” the real, see also:
Pietro Montani, L’immaginazione narrativa. Il racconto del cinema oltre i confini dello spazio
letterario (Milan: Guerini e Associati, 1999).
20. I am referring here to the work of the video-artist Douglas Gordon, who, with his 24
Hour Psycho, projected Hitchcock’s masterpiece at a pace which dragged it out for
twenty-four hours.
21. On convergence, see, at least: Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New
Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006). The subject of cinema’s
contemporary transformations now fills a considerable bibliography. I will limit my-
self to mentioning three works, which are useful in light of the prospective being
developed here: Janet Harbord, Film Cultures (London: Sage, 2003); Charles R. Acland,
Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (Durham & London: Duke University
Press, 2003); and Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex. Cinema, New Technologies, and the
Home (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: California University Press, 2006).
22. The definition of media as anesthetic instruments is implied in the concept of “numb-
ness” by Marshall McLuhan in his Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1964). The question has been re-raised recently by Pietro Montani, Bioestetica (Florence:
Carrocci, 2007). The advancement of “inexperience” in a media-saturated world is
passionately described by Antonio Scurati, in: La letteratura dell’inesperienza (Milan: Bom-
piani, 2007).
23. For more on this double definition of experience, which recalls, in a certain sense,
Benjamin’s Erlebnis and Erfahrung, see, at least: Paolo Jedlowski, Il sapere dell’esperienza
(Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1994); and Martin Jay, “Songs of Experience,” in Cultural Seman-
tics. Keywords of Our Time (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).
24. The idea that to gain experience means that something happens to us, meets us, inter-
rupts us, disturbs us and transforms us, is foregrounded by Martin Heidegger, Unter-
wegs zur Sprache (Neske: Pfullingen, 1959). Jacques Derrida focuses on the couple ex-
perience-event in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen
notes 213
Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). See also the
insightful analysis of September 11, 2001, in: Mauro Carbone, Essere morti insieme (Tur-
in: Bollati Boringhieri, 2007).
25. These two meanings of the term recognition are clearly illustrated, respectively, in the
following sentences: “Argus recognized his master, Ulysses,” and “The candidate re-
cognizes that he has lost the election.” The convergence of agnition and admission evi-
dently causes the real and legal dimensions of the experience to overlap: to recognize
an experience is to identify it as legitimated, and vice versa.
26. Having said this, I am not aiming toward a radical constructivism, for which recogni-
tion becomes the constructive condition of experience. When I say that recognition is
the element that allows an experience to construct itself as such, I mean to say that it
leads to the revelation of that which is happening to a subject, and it leads to a sanc-
tioning of it as “experience” and as the subject’s experience.
27. It is interesting to read, in this light, a series of Italian contributions from the first
fifteen years of the twentieth century: for instance, Giovanni Papini, “La filosofia del
cinematografo,” La Stampa, vol. XLI (18 May 1907); Enrico Thovez, “L’arte di cellu-
loide,” La Stampa, vol. XLII, no. 209 (29 July 1908); Lucio D’Ambra, “Il museo dell’atti-
mo fuggente,” La Tribuna illustrata, vol. XXII, no. 20 (17–24 May 1914).
28. On this theme see the pre-eminent contribution by Louis Delluc, Le Cinéma, art populaire
(1921), now in Delluc, Écrits cinématographiques, 11/2: Le cinéma au quotidien (Paris: Ciné-
mathèque Française, 1990), 279–88.
29. Miriam Hansen has underlined the cinema’s game-like nature in her essay “Room-for-
play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October, no. 109 (2004): 3–45
30. Ricciotto Canudo, “Lettere d’arte. Trionfo del cinematografo,” Nuovo Giornale (25 No-
vember 1908), now in Filmcritica 278 (1977): 296–302. Among the recent contributions
which retrace this period, a great insight in this direction is provided by Tom Gun-
ning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator,” in
ed. Linda Williams, Viewing Positions, cit. 114–33.
31. For a reconstruction of this regulatory process on the levels of morale, etiquette and
hygiene in relation to Italy, see Francesco Casetti and Silvio Alovosio, “Lo spettatore
disciplinato: Regole di etichetta, di morale e di igiene nella fruizione filmica dei primi
tempi,” in Storia del cinema Italiano, Volume II (Venice: Marsilio, forthcoming). For an
exemplary investigation into censorship, see Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexu-
ality, 1909–1925 (London: Routledge, 1988). On the processes of early censorship in
cinema, see Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth-Cen-
tury America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004). On Hollywood’s abil-
ity to accomplish a process of normalization of consumption, see ed. Melvyn Stokes,
American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London: Brit-
ish Film Institute, 1999); Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the
Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994).
32. Interestingly, Noël Burch names as an “institutional form of representation” what
others class as classic cinema, mainstream cinema or cinema of diegetic absorption.
33. Cf. P. M. Heu, Le Temps du cinéma: Emile Vuillermoz père de la critique cinématographique
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003).
214 notes
34. For interesting observations on this subject, see Janet Harbord, Film Cultures (London:
Sage, 2002).
35. The characteristics of “attendance” have been the subject of much discussion. The
debate has been reconstructed in Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectatorship: The Practices of Film
Reception (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 11–27.
36. In particular, viewing environments are built to contain the crowd and at the same
time to focus attention upon the screen. They also create echoes of the world rep-
resented in the film. On this theme, see Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in
Art, Architecture and Film (New York: Verso, 2002).
37. I am referring, in particular, to the intervention of a “film grammar” that smooths
over any distance between observer and observed. The writings of such theorists as
Pudovkin, Arnheim or Spottiswoode contribute to this grammar. Vsevelod I. Pudov-
kin, Film Technique: Five Essays and Two Addresses (London: G. Newnes, 1933); Rudolf
Arnheim, Film (London: Faber and Faber, 1933); Raymond Spottiswoode, Grammar of
the Film: An Analysis of Film Technique (London: Faber and Faber, 1935).
38. On the concept of “looking at” and “looking through” in media, see David Bolter and
Victor Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1999).
39. At the center of attendance there is that “to-be-looked-at-ness” which is examined by
Laura Mulvey in Visual and Other Pleasures. Under this aspect, the theory of “subject
position” of the 1970s and 1980s becomes a theory of attendance.
40. On the film, see Andrew Norton, ed. Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997); in particular the essay by Henry Jenkins, “‘This Yellow Keaton
Seems to Be the Whole Show:’ Buster Keaton, Interrupted Performance, and the Vau-
deville Aesthetic,” 29–66.
41. Alexandre Astruc, “Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde: la caméra-stylo,” Écran Fran-
çais, no. 144 (1948).
42. On the advent of multiplexes and new forms of viewing, see Charles R. Acland, Screen
Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes and Global Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
The relationship between digital technologies (particularly the Internet) and spectator-
ial attitudes is examined in Michele White, The Body and the Screen (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2006).
43. On remediation, see Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media.
44. The quickest medium to answer to this need of expressivity is, perhaps, fashion: cine-
ma can only provide symbolic identification; that is, purely abstract or psychological
“clothing.”
45. Television is better able to adapt to this growing need: in the 1980s, it went from being
a dispenser of programs to being a medium of contact with viewers, thanks to the
opportunity that audience members had to phone in during shows and to have their
calls broadcast live.
46. Régis Debray, examining the passage to the “videosphere,” talks about the “end of the
show,” also linking it to a general weakening of the role of sight. See Debray, Vie et
Mort de l’image: une histoire du regard en Occident (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 228.
notes 215
47. The word “performance” is first used in Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls:
Movies and Culture after Vietnam (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). In
the present essay, the term has a more specific meaning.
48. In relation to this, see Maria Grazia Fanchi, Spettatori (Milan: Il Castoro, 2006).
49. From this point of view the consumption practices of fans are exemplary. On fandom,
see Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York,
NY: Routledge, 1992).
50. On the emotional dimension, see Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, eds. Passionate
Views (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); and from a different
perspective, M. Brütsch et al., eds. Kinogefühle: Emotionalität und Film (Marburg: Schü-
ren, 2005).
51. On this type of doing, see Francesco Casetti and Maria Grazia Fanchi, eds. Terre incog-
nite (Florence: Carrocci, 2006).
52. On the expansion of cinema outside its traditional borders, see Anne Friedberg, “The
End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change,” in Reinventing Film Studies,
eds. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2000), 438-52; Malte
Hagener, “Where is Cinema (Today)? The Cinema in the Age of Media Immanence,”
Cinema&Cie 11 (fall 2008,): 15-22. For the concept of “relocation of cinema,” see Fran-
cesco Casetti, “Filmic Experience,” Screen, 1. 50 (spring 2009): 56-66; Francesco Case-
tti, “Back to the Motherland: The Film Theatre in the Postmedia Age,” Screen 1. 52
(2011): 1-12.
53. On this theme, see Montani, Bioestetica.
The Man Who Wasn’t There: The Production of Subjectivity in

Delmer Daves’ Dark Passage
1. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press, 1969), 61.
2. Emmanuel Levinas, “On Obliteration: Discussing Sacha Sosno,” trans. R. Cohen, Art
& Text 33 (winter 1989): 38.
3. J.P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1989), 122.
4. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 17.
5. Žižek, The Parallax View, 17.
6. Ibid.
7. Delmer Daves, “Notes on Experimental Camera Work on Dark Passage,” received 23
October 1946 by unknown recipients from Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. Story Depart-
ment (Delmer Daves, “Notes on Experimental Camera Work on Dark Passage / Observa-
tions on the Camera Acting as a Person: Dark Passage” (Los Angeles, CA: USC Warner
Bros. Archive: Box or File: D-61), n.p.).
8. The other two cameras tested were the extremely mobile “Cunningham [Combat]
Camera” developed during World War II and the “American camera” (its make unspe-
cified). As to the make and origin of the “German camera,” in a later interview, Daves
claims he “was the first one to use the Ariflex [sic] in the United States. We got it
through the United States’ government. It was a captured Nazi camera.” Christopher
216 notes
Wickering, “Interview with Delmer Daves,” Screen 10, 4-5 (1969): 61. Film historian
Barry Salt offers some confirmation: “Captured Arriflexes were in occasional use in
Hollywood soon after the war,” although actual “application of the camera remained
very limited” for some time, despite its use in Dark Passage. He also notes that the
Arriflex “had continuous through-the-lens viewing, could hold 400 ft. of film, and
weighed 13 lbs. unloaded.” Barry Salt, “Film Style and Technology in the Forties,”
Film Quarterly, 31, 1 (autumn 1977): 46.
9. David Goodis, Dark Passage (New York: Messner, 1946).
10. Wickering, “Interview with Delmer Daves,” 61.
11. In this regard, studio head Jack Warner was none too happy that the film’s star would
not be fully visible for more than half the film’s length.
13. Daves called for more experiments with simulating a “dropping eyelid,” in all likeli-
hood for when Vincent is anesthetized prior to his surgery. “Oiled paper” was appar-
ently too translucent for the “proper effect” and he suggests “that a fringed arch, a
fuzzy outline to represent the lashes should be tried and that a red semi-opaque paper
or glass be used so that while somewhat translucent, the effect of an actual eyelid
closing can be achieved.
14. Daves also indicated in a later interview that, in using “two men being the two arms,”
both men had to be “right up next to the camera,” so he “even had to use three opera-
tors on one shot to keep the flow of continuity” (Wickering, “Interview with Delmer
Daves,” 62).
15. Daves says in interview: “Every shot was a problem, and instead of cutting, I did
whips. I whipped the camera, if we turn quickly, we whip, and I did the next shot to
cut in on that whip. I developed that technique early because I discovered I had to pan
and I had to get to another set-up and another location figured. So I did it all in
whips” (Wickering, “Interview with Delmer Daves,” 62).
17. Ibid.
18. For elaboration of the concept of “inner speech” in cinema as differentiated from ex-
ternalized signification although based as the latter in the realm of the linguistic and
verbal, see Boris Eichenbaum, “Problems of Film Stylistics,” trans. Thomas Aman,
Screen 15 (autumn 1974): 7-32.
19. Slavoj Žižek, “‘The Thing that Thinks’: The Kantian Background of the Noir Subject,”
in Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1993), 211.
20. Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992).
21. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 66.
22. Ibid., 194.
23. Emmanuel Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writ-
ings, eds. A.T. Peperzak, S. Critchley, and R. Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1996), 53.
25. Chloé Taylor, “Hard, Dry Eyes and Eyes That Weep: Vision and Ethics in Levinas and
Derrida,” Postmodern Culture, 16. 2 (2006): 1.
notes 217
27. Marty Slaughter, “Levinas, Mercy and the Middle Ages,” 12. This unpublished version
of a chapter in Levinas, Law, Politics, ed. M. Diamantides (London: Routledge-Cavend-
ish, 2007) can be found online at http://kar.kent.ac.uk; (accessed 11/26/2010).
28. Slaughter, “Levinas, Mercy and the Middle Ages,” 11.
29. Ibid., 12. Slaughter here is glossing Philippe Crignon’s argument in “Figuration: Em-
manuel Levinas and the Image,” trans. Nicole Simek and Zahi Zalloua, Yale French Stud-
ies 104 (2004): 100-125.
30. Crignon, “Figuration: Emmanuel Levinas and the Image,” 124.
31. Slaughter, “Levinas, Mercy and the Middle Ages,” 12. Slaughter notes Levinas wrote
“two little-known essays” in which “he discussed the work of the painter Jean Atlan
and the artist-sculptor Sacha Sosno,” calling the latter an “artist of ‘obliteration.’” See
“On Obliteration,” op. cit., and Emmanuel Levinas, “Jean Atlan et la tension de l’art,”
in Cahier Lévinas, eds. C. Chalier and M. Absensour (Paris: L’Herne, 1991).
32. Dana Polan, Power & Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema 1940-1950
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 196.
33. Polan, Power & Paranoia, 195.
34. Ibid., 196.
35. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pitts-
burgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 101.
36. Crignon, “Figuration: Emmanuel Levinas and the Image,” 124.
38. Telotte, Voices in the Dark, 125.
39. Ibid.
40. Slaughter, “Levinas, Mercy and the Middle Ages,” 12. The interior quote comes from
Levinas, “On Obliteration,” op. cit., p. 30.
42. The other 1947 noirs that experimented with subjective camera were Possessed and
High Wall, both directed by Curtis Bernhardt (not surprisingly an émigré German
filmmaker schooled in expressionist techniques, who had fled to Hollywood when the
Nazis came to power). See Telotte, Voices in the Dark, 19.
43. Telotte, Voices in the Dark, 19.
44. Quoted in David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (Reading,
MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), 148.
45. I discuss these issues at length and somewhat differently than in the present essay in
The Address of the Eye, op. cit., 230-246.
46. Pascal Bonitzer, “Partial Vision: Film and the Labyrinth,” trans. Fabrice Ziolkowski,
Wide Angle 4, 4 (1981): 58.
From Aesthetic Experience to the Loss of Identity, in Three Steps

1. Joachim Ritter, Subjectividad. Seis ensayos, trans. R. de la Vega (Barcelona-Caracas: Alfa,
1986), 10. [My translation].
2. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey
(New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1961), 2058 ss.
218 notes
3. Ibid., 2514.
4. Jacques Lacan, “Du Cosmos à l’Umheimlichkeit,” in Le Séminaire, Livre X, L’Angoisse
(Paris: Seuil, Champ freudien, 2004). Jacques Lacan definitely connects anguish to the
uncanny.
5. See Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV, ed. James Stratchey (London, 1953-74). Uncanny,
inquiétante étrangeté, unfamiliar(ity), siniestro are some of the terms used to describe Das
Unheimliche.
6. Sigmund Freud, “Lo siniestro,” in Obras completas, VII, trans. L. López-Ballesteros (Ma-
drid: Edit. Biblioteca Nueva, 1974), 2484-2505.
7. Otto Rank, Don Juan et Le Double, trans. S. Lautman (Paris: Payot, 1973), 26.
8. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Double, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Dover Publica-
tions, 1997), 38.
9. Ibid., 97-98, 108, 171.
10. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Double, 86.
11. Guy de Maupassant, Le Horla et autres récits fantastiques (Paris: Pocket, 1989), 67-68 [my
translation].
12. Ibid.
13. From the homonymous play by Tennessee Williams. Screenplay by Anthony Veiller
and John Huston. Principal characters: Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr,
Sue Lyon. The film’s story revolves around a defrocked priest working as tourist guide
and two women, one who runs a hostel by the sea and the other is a painter who takes
care of her elderly grandfather in a wheelchair. Both take pity on him, each in their
own way.
14. Words and phrases in this part are quoted from the Tennessee Williams’ play (1976).
15. In Williams’ play, on the contrary, he goes “faintly, drifting off.” Tennessee Williams,
Three by Tennessee (Sweet Bird of Youth, The Rose Tatoo, The Night of the Iguana), with a fore-
word by the author (New York: Penguin, Signet Classics, 1976).
16. Tennesee Williams, “The Night of the Iguana,” in Three by Tennessee (New York: Pen-
guin, Signet Classics, 1976), 125.
17. Charles S. Peirce, Pragmatism and Pragmaticism. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce,
eds. Ch. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965),
5: 5.44. Peirce also calls it an “emotional interpretant” (5.475). As the Peircean inter-
pretant is an idea, or mental content, we may say that it is an embryonic thought or a
thought still un-thought, a latent thought.
18. Cf. Pere Salabert, “Aesthetic Experience in Charles Sanders Peirce: The Threshold,” in
Peirce and Value Theory: On Peircean Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Herman Parret (Amsterdam &
Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1994).
19. Charles S. Peirce, Principles of Philosophy. Collected Papers, 1:328-9.
20. Ibid.
21. See Karl Abraham, Contribuciones a la teoría de la libido, trans. D. R. Wagner (Buenos
Aires: Eds. Hormé, 1973), 210-211. From Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, with an intro-
ductory memoir by Ernest Jones, trans. Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey (London:
Maresfield Library, 1988), XXVI.
notes 219
22. Screenplay by Henri-Georges Clouzot. It is the story of Paul and Nelly, a young couple
who run a hotel in the country. As Nelly is the most beautiful woman in the region, all
the men are jealous of Paul. But after their first child, when things seem to be going
well enough, Paul becomes jealous: Nelly, he thinks, is unfaithful. Some problems,
and his doubt about his wife’s faithfulness lead him to an excessive anxiety or obses-
sive behavior. He drinks in an attempt to silence the voices that he begins to hear in
his head. Paul’s madness goes to extremes as he spies upon Nelly when she goes into
town, or when she is having fun with her friends. Gradually, the couple’s life, which
was meant to be idyllic, becomes a living hell.
23. Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et Psychologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
2010), 28-29 [my translation].
24. See Sandor Ferenczi, L’Enfant dans l’adulte, trans. J. Dupont and M. Viliker (Paris: Payot-
Rivages, 2006), 63.
25. Cf. Foucault, Maladie mentale et Psychologie, 64 s.
26. Director and writer: Jim Jarmusch. Production: Demetra J. Macbride. Main characters:
Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Crispin Glover. William Blake receives a letter with an
offer of work in the city of Machine. So, he leaves his work as a bookkeeper in Cleve-
land, Ohio, and travels to Machine in the western US. After a train journey that makes
us think about an initiation process, he reaches a strange industrial city. When he gets
there, the owner of the factory, Dickinson, has already employed somebody else. Now
that he had missed his chance, everything changes. He kills Charlie Dickinson, after
Charlie has killed his own wife who he finds in bed with Blake. As a result, William
Blake has to flee the place, turning into an outlaw pursued, day after day, by bounty
hunters. During this long getaway (his life, in fact), which will finish with a last trip,
that of death, William has a unique companion: Nobody, a Native American who takes
care of him, convinced that he is another person, his English homonym from the
eighteenth century, a painter and poet.
27. Charles S. Peirce, Principles of Philosophy. Collected Papers, 1.321.
28. Carl G. Jung, Présent et Avenir, [1957] trans. Roland Cahen (Paris: Buchet/Chastel,
2008), 81. See: “The Undiscovered Self (Present and Future),” in The Collected Works of
C.G. Jung, vol. 10, eds. Gerhard Adler, Michael Fordham, and Sir Herbert Read, trans.
R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge, 2009).
29. Ibid., 51 s.
30. Or makes him what he already is… The story may be compared to another one that
Binet quotes from M. Ball. See: Alfred Binet, Le fétichisme dans l’amour (Paris: Payot,
2001), 38, 40 s.
Robert Bresson and the Voices of an Inner World: “I” Can Never be
“You,” or the Impossible Identification
1. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Vsevolod Poudovkine, and Grigori Alexandrov, “Statement on
Sound,” [1928)] in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. Richard Taylor and
William Powell (London: British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 80-81. See
also: “L’Avenir du film sonore,” [1928] in Poudovkine, eds. Luda and Jean Schnitzer
(Paris: Seghers, Cinéma d’aujourd’hui, 1966), 108-11. Robert Robertson’s book is, in
220 notes
this regard, very interesting: Eisenstein on the Audiovisual: The Montage of Music. Image and
Sound in Cinema (New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2009).
2. Alain Boillat, Du bonimenteur à la voix-over (Lausanne: éditions Antipodes, 2007), 17.
3. “La voix-d’outre-film,” an expression used by Philippe Arnaud in Robert Bresson, (Paris:
Cahiers du Cinéma, Auteurs, 1986), 78.
4. Philippe Arnaud, “La voix-d’outre-film,” 78.
5. Review of Michel Chion’s The Voice in Cinema, trans. and ed. Claudia Gorbman (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1999) by Tim Anderson, Echo, 2.1, 2000. Available
from http://www.echo.ucla.edu/volume2-Issue1/book-reviews/cinematic-voice.html.
6. Jean-Louis Provoyeur, Le Cinéma de Robert Bresson: de l’effet de réel à l’effet de sublime (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2003), 192.
7. Evelyne Jardonnet and Marguerite Chabrol, Pickpocket by Robert Bresson (Neuilly:
Atlande, Clés concours-cinéma, 2005), 7.
8. Marcel L’Herbier in “Journal d’un curé de campagne,” Robert Bresson. Éloge, ed. Philippe
Arnaud (Milan, Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta; Paris: Cinémathèque française, 1997), 26.
9. Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio, “Le Voyage initiatique,” [1983] in Robert Bresson. Éloge, 63.
10. Literally speaking, as Bresson sometimes used to dictate the text to his models pro-
gressively.
11. André Bazin, “Le Journal d’un curé de campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” in
What Is Cinema? vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005), 134. See: “Le Journal d’un curé de campagne et la stylistique de Robert Bresson,” in
Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1985), 116.
12. Bresson’s film is a transposition of Diary of Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s initial idea be-
fore he wrote Crime and Punishment.
13. The theory outlined by Raskolnikov in his article is very close to Michel’s. In both
cases, the superior man – whom Dostoyevsky calls extraordinary – can allow himself
to commit a crime if he deems it legitimate.
14. “Something illuminated her face,” says Michel, in Bresson’s film, a few minutes be-
fore embracing Jeanne; “a light of infinite happiness came into her eyes” says Raskol-
nikov about Sonia at the end of Crime and Punishment, trans. Constance Garnett, first
published in 1866, republished by Forgotten Books, 2008, 560. Available from http://
www.forgottenbooks.org.
15. Published in the “Figaro Littéraire” 20 January, 1954.
16. Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, trans. Jonathan Griffin (Copenhagen:
Green Integer, 1997), 47. Translated from the French edition: Notes sur le cinématographe
(Paris: Gallimard, Collection Folio, 1975).
17. Claude Mauriac, as quoted by Marcel L’Herbier, in Robert Bresson. Éloge, 29.
18. Jean-Louis Provoyeur, Le Cinéma de Robert Bresson, 264-265.
19. Regarding this issue, see also Michel Chion’s fine analysis in The Voice in Cinema.
20. André Bazin, “Un condamé à mort s’est échappé,” in Robert Bresson. Éloge, 31.
21. Ibid.
22. Marcel L’Herbier, in Robert Bresson. Éloge, 28.
23. Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, 48.
24. Ibid., 84.
notes 221
25. In Ni vu, ni connu, a documentary film about Bresson, directed by François Weyergans
in 1994.
27. Ibid., 92.
28. Ibid., 90.
29. Jean-Louis Provoyeur, Le Cinéma de Robert Bresson, 202.
30. Ibid., 192.
31. Jacques Catteau, La Création littéraire chez Dostoïevski (Paris: Bibliothèque russe de l’Insti-
tut d’études slaves, 1978), 125.
32. Mireille Latil le Dantec, “Bresson et Dostoïevski,” Cinématographe, 73, Spécial Dostoïevski
(December 1981), 16.
33. Jean-Louis Provoyeur, Le Cinéma de Robert Bresson, 9. The author mentions each and
every adaptation, which will not be done in this article.
34. First published in the Figaro Littéraire, it was made into a novel after the film was re-
leased.
35. Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, Essais, 1973), 104. The Plea-
sure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).
36. André Bazin, “Le Journal d’un curé de campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 127-
128.
37. François Mauriac, “Un condamé à mort s’est échappé,” [1951] in Robert Bresson. Éloge,
22.
39. André Bazin, “Le Journal d’un curé de campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 133,
137.
41. Ibid., 98.
42. André Bazin, “Le Journal d’un curé de campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 133-
134.
The Silence of the Lenses: Blow Up and the Subject of Photography

1. The film actually came out in 1966.
2. This international artistic movement actually included the active participation of nu-
merous pre-eminent artists of the period, from Joseph Beuys in Germany to Robert
Filliou in France. Its interdisciplinary nature (visual arts, music, theater) was one of
its most striking characteristics.
3. For a study of Duchamp’s post-Kantian perspective, see in particular Thierry de Duve,
Au Nom de l’Art. Pour une Archéologie de la Modernité (Paris: Minuit, 1989).
4. For a critique of the institutional power of the museum by the artists of the 1960s, see
in particular Rosalind Krauss, Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London:
Thames and Hudson, 2000), and her analysis of conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers’
Musée des Aigles.
5. I refer here to Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (London: Rebel
Press, 1983). La Société du Spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel) first came out in 1967.
222 notes
6. I want to stress in this regard the very cool reception that L’Avventura received dur-
ing its premiere at the Cannes international film festival.
7. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 26-27.
8. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 92-93.
9. For a study of both the aesthetic meaning of the punctum and the relationship between
photography and death in Camera Lucida, see my book, The Paradox of Photography (Am-
sterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2009) and in particular the chapter “The image. One
image. Image,” 97-142.
10. This relationship between Barthes and Antonioni has an important biographical di-
mension, in the case of the French literary critic, since his last public appearance
before his accidental death in 1980 was actually his participation in a tribute to Anto-
nioni that took place in the city of Bologna.
11. I refer here to the concept developed by philosopher Hannah Arendt in regard to Nazi
totalitarianism in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New
York: Viking Press, 1963).
12. This work stresses in many ways the conceptual dimension of Magritte’s work, be-
yond its historical belonging to the surrealist movement in his native Belgium. I refer
here in particular to Michel Foucault, This is not a Pipe, trans. and ed. James Harkness
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
13. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 1994).
14. In Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. and introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Har-
ry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 228.
15. For a poetic perspective on the role of silence in John Cage’s music and its philosophi-
cal relationship to Zen, see the poem “Reading John Cage,” in Octavio Paz, East Slope
(Lado Este, 1962-1968), in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987, ed. and trans.
Eliot Weinberger et al. (New York: New Directions Books, 1990) 235-240.
16. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (London & New York: Verso,
2002).
17. For a study of the important aesthetic role of the void in contemporary art (particularly
in Fluxus), see Voids, eds. John Armleder, Mathieu Copeland, Gustav Metzger, Mai-
Thu Perret and Clive Phillpot. (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2009).
18. One must notice in this regard that the roommate (and ultimately lover) of the photo-
grapher’s girlfriend is himself an abstract painter. One of the paintings that are dis-
played in his studio is actually a work by Antonioni himself, who had a background in
architecture and fine arts.
19. Jean-Michel Rabaté, Given: 1° Art 2° Crime: Modernity, Murder and Mass Culture (Brighton:
Sussex Academic Press, 2007).
20. For a contemporary perspective on this issue, see in particular Jonathan Eburne, Surre-
alism and the Art of Crime (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).
21. Rabaté also refers here to the work of fellow modernist Man Ray and to his sadistic
inspiration, particularly though a portrait that he painted of the Divin Marquis. The so-
called sadism that characterizes Man Ray’s art can be questioned here. It is far from
obvious if one considers his Rayographs, which are essentially optical and technical
notes 223
experiments of a formalist nature in the field of photography. A sadistic nature does
not appear clearly in his numerous portraits of women either, which can be defined as
both sensual and post-romantic in nature.
22. It is interesting to notice in this regard that the year of the completion of Etant donnés
(1966) by Duchamp is the same as that of Antonioni’s film.
23. Antonioni’s critique of this modern alienation would later be developed in Zabriskie
Point, a film which expresses a profoundly critical discourse on the “American
dream” and its consumerist obsession. In this case, the deception of signs stems lar-
gely from the ongoing presence of advertising and commercials in the American
everyday life of the late 1960s.
Beyond Subjectivity. Bakhtin’s Dialogism and the Moving Image

1. Supported by a Senior Fellowship of the State Innovative Institute for the Studies of
Journalism & Communication and Media Society at Fudan University, Shanghai.
2. See Wolfgang Beilenhoff ed., Poetik des Films (Munich: Fink, 1974); Herbert Eagle ed.,
Russian Formalist Film Theory (Michigan: University Press, 1981).
3. Pavel Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Studies, trans. A. J. Wehrle (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
4. It is still a matter of debate as to whether or not Bakhtin himself worked with Vološi-
nov on this book or other articles, or if he even, as some people claim, wrote them
completely himself. For unknown reasons, these works were published under another
name. See Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad God-
zich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 8: “The works signed Medve-
dev and Voloshinov, but supposedly written by Bakhtin […]”; Neal Bruss, I.R. Titunik
(translator), in: V.N. Vološinov, Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (New York, San Francisco
& London: Academic Press, 1976), xiii: “Then, in 1973, the enigma of Vološinov was
given an extraordinary twist by the published declaration of the eminent Soviet philol-
ogist V.V. Ivanov that all the key writings of V.N. Vološinov (as well as a book by P.N.
Medvedev) are actually the work of Bakhtin himself, with Vološinov and Medvedev
merely having served as editors and proofreaders – but with their names on the title
pages.”
5. “From the objective point of view, both sets of motives, those of the unofficial as well
as the official conscious, are given completely alike in inner and in outward speech
and both alike are not a cause of behavior but a component, an integral part of it”:
Vološinov, Freudianism, 85f.
6. See: Herta Schmid, “Bakhtins Dialogizitätstheorie im Spiegel der dramatisch-theatra-
lischen Gattungen,” in Dramatische und theatralische Kommunikation: Beiträge zur Geschichte
und Theorie des Dramas und Theaters im 20. Jahrhundert, eds. Herta Schmid and Jurij Stried-
ter (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1992), 86 [my translation].
7. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minnea-
polis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973), 9.
8. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Studies, 98. See Deleuze’s suggestion that “nar-
rations are not a given of visible images”: Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986), 28; or Martin Jay’s accusation of “anti-
224 notes
ocularcentrism” against the early writings of Metz: Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Deni-
gration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Los Angeles, Berkeley & London:
California University Press, 1993), 437.
9. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Studies, 43.
10. Vološinov, Freudianism, 87.
11. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Content, Material and Form in Verbal Art” in Art
and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, eds. Michael Holquist and
Vadim Liapunov, trans. Kenneth Brostrom (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press,
1990), 300.
12. Here the rather martialistic expression of the film “shot” used in English is not as
suitable as the word “Einstellung” which is the German expression used in this con-
text. This word can be translated not only as film shot, but also as positioning.
13. Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore & Lon-
don: John Hopkins University Press, 1989), 103ff.
14. Martin Flanagan, Bakhtin and the Movies: New Ways of Understanding Hollywood Film (Ba-
singstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
15. Edward R. Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema. A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in
Classical Film (Berlin, New York & Amsterdam: Mouton Publishers, 1984).
16. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by
M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Aus-
tin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1981), 276.
17. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 417.
18. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 106.
19. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 10. To what extent this premise, which in this
case refers to Dostoyevsky, was influenced by the dialogue-based principles of Martin
Buber has not, as far as I know, been sufficiently examined. In any case, the temporal
coincidence of the development of both of these great dialogicity philosophies in the
first half of the twentieth century is striking. In 1923 Buber finished Ich und Du (I and
Thou), in 1930 Zweisprache (Dialogue) appeared. See Martin Buber, Das Dialogische Prinzip
(Gerlingen: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1992).
20. See Karl Sierek, Ophüls/Bakhtin. Versuch mit Film zu reden. Nexus (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld,
1993), 170-176.
21. With the use of the term perceptive background we are reminded of Medvedev’s
knowledge of Gestalt theory and the importance which this had for the development
of his conceptualization of the image, he also used the term “Gestaltqualität” (Gestalt
quality), cited in German in the Russian original, in his critique on Formalism: “The
perception of form, the perception of the quality of form (Gestaltqualität), became one
of the most important problems of not only art scholarship, but of theoretical es-
thetics and psychology,” Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Studies, 49.
22. M.M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984),
438.
23. Ibid., 420.
24. Traces of the theory of this textual embodiment are still to be found today in the most
divergent aesthetical discourses from phenomenology to the theory of film. See Vivian
Carol Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: Univer-
notes 225
sity of California Press, 2004); Raymond Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions,
animalités (Paris: P.O.L., 2009).
25. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1985), 14. [my italics].
26. David Bordwell, “Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory,”
in Post Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, eds. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 3.
28. “Middle-level research”: See David Bordwell, Post Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, 3.
29. Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: A Neoformalist Approach to Film Analysis (Prin-
ceton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 6.
31. Ibid., 49f.
32. See Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Re-
ference to a Group of Recent European Writers, McGraw-Hill Publications in Sociology (New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1937).
33. David Bordwell, “Grand Theory,” 14.
34. Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor, 7.
35. Bakhtin, Problem of Content, Material and Form in Verbal Art, 308ff.
36. Ibid., 309.
37. David Bordwell, “Cognition and Comprehension. Viewing and Forgetting in Mildred
Pierce,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 6.2. (spring 1992): 185.
38. David Bordwell, “Grand Theory,” 6-9. Without repeating the chauvinistic blanket sus-
picions of Bordwell regarding the “French theory” (19) and the unqualified diatribes
against the “esoteric merger of anti-rationalist philosophy, unorthodox psychoanaly-
sis, and the frequently changing views of an official philosopher of the French Com-
munist Party” (14).
39. See Kristin Thompson, and David Bordwell, Observations on Film Art, 2008, available
from http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=2927.
40. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Problem of Content, Material and Form in Verbal Art, 310.
Imaginary Subject
1. On the history of this problematic, see the article “Sujet,” in Vocabulaire européen des
philosophies, ed. Barbara Cassin (Paris: Seuil/ Le Robert, 2004), 1233-1253; Michel Fou-
cault, Herméneutique du sujet [1981-1982] (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2001); Alain de Libéra,
Archéologie du sujet, vol 2. (Paris: Vrin, 2007-2008).
2. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1694] (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975), “Of Identity and Diversity,” book II, chapter xxvii. 328-348.
3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, [1790] trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2007). Original publication date: 1952, Oxford World’s Classics.
4. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 335.
5. Ibid., paragraph 10, 335.
6. Ibid., paragraph 16, 340-341.
226 notes
7. For an analysis of film from a Lockean perspective, see Christian Dours, Personne, Per-
sonage. Les Fictions de l’identité personnelle (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes,
2003).
8. See: Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London & New York: Routledge: 1993).
9. Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines, [1966] chapters
X, VI (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 398.
10. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 336-340.
11. Edgar Morin, “L’homme et le double,” in Le Cinéma ou l’Homme imaginaire (Paris: Min-
uit, 1956), 33.
12. Ibid., 31 [my translation].
13. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, [1817] chapter xiv. Available from http://
www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/biographia.html.
14. Edward Bullough, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,”
British Journal of Psychology, vol. v (June 2, 1912): 87-118.
15. Jean-Louis Baudry, “Le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de
réalité,” Communications. Psychoanalyse et cinéma, no. 23 (February 1975): 56-72.
16. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Imaginaire, [1940] “Conclusion” II, “L’œuvre d’art,” (Paris: Galli-
mard, folio essais, 2005), 361-373.
17. Christian Metz, Le Signifiant imaginaire [1977] (Paris: Christian Bourgois editions,
2002).
18. Ibid., 3 [my translation], “Identification, mirror,” 69.
20. Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London & New York: Routledge, 1971); Jeu et
Réalité, trans. Cl. Mondo and J.-B. Pontalis (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).
21. Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis & London: University of Minne-
sota Press, 2004), 176-181.
22. See: Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991);
Blurred Boundaries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
23. Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary, Part I, “Social Subjectivity,” 3-89.
24. See: Marlene Jouan, ed. Psychologie morale (Paris: Vrin, 2008).
25. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good [1970] (London & New York: Routledge Classics;
2001).
26. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge. Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1992).
27. Jean-Pierre Cometti et al., eds. Revue Francophone d’Esthétique. Emotion, Fiction, Cinema,
no. 2 (Paris, 2004): especially Emmanuelle Glon’s article “Le paradoxe de l’horreur au
cinéma,” 49-77, quoting Robert Gordon, The Structure of Emotions, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
28. See Paul Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, Points essais, 1990).
30. Henri Meschonnic, Poétique du rythme. Anthropologie historique du langage (Lagrasse: Ver-
dier, 1982), III, 69 (see also, 85-98).
31. Ibid., 86-87.
notes 227
A Philosophical Approach to Subjectivity in Film Form
1. This chapter is a shorter version of my book La Subjectivité dans le film, forthcoming;
some discussions here refer to more extended ones in the book, which is to be ex-
pected, I suppose, because of the length. However, sometimes the reverse is also true;
to be more precise, in this chapter I do not consider some kinds of subjective repre-
sentations studied in the book, such as dreams.
2. S.M. Eisenstein, Film Form, Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1949), 150.
3. S.M. Eisenstein, “The Problem of the Materialist Approach to Form,” [1925] in The
Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. Richard Taylor and William Powell (Lon-
don: British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 55.
4. John R. Searle, Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World (New York: Basic
Books, 1998), 57.
5. John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press, 1992),
94.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 95.
11. Jonas Mekas, “The Other Direction,” in The Movies as Medium, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New
York: Garrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 317.
12. Susan Sontag, “Film and Theater,” [1966] in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Read-
ings, eds. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York & Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1979), 368-369.
13. Alain Badiou et al., Matrix: machine philosophique (Paris: Ellipses, 2003).
14. Jean Epstein, “Le cinéma continue…,” in Écrits sur le cinéma, vol. 1 (Paris: Seghers, Cine-
maclub, 1974), 224.
15. Epstein, L’Intelligence d’une machine, [1946] in Écrits sur le cinéma (Paris: Seghers, Cinema-
club, 1974), 263.
16. Ibid., 331.
17. Ibid., 307.
18. Epstein, “Ciné mystique,” [1921] in Écrits sur le cinéma (Paris: Seghers, Cinemaclub,
1974), 100.
19. Epstein, L’Intelligence d’une machine, 322.
20. Epstein, “Photogéne de l’impondérable,” [1935] in Écrits sur le cinéma (Paris: Seghers,
Cinemaclub, 1974), 244.
21. Jean-Paul Sartre, Écrits de jeunesse, eds. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka (Paris: Galli-
mard, 1990), 389-390.
22. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (London: Athlone Press, 1986), 20.
23. Stanley Cavell, The Word Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, Harvard Film Studies, 1979), foreword to the enlarged edition,
xvi.
228 notes
24. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis/New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Com-
pany, 1968), 50-51.
25. Epstein, L’Intelligence d’une machine, 282. As far as I know, in English, “psychism” refers
to a notion in theosophical doctrines (a connotation we find in Epstein’s animism!).
26. John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, 97.
27. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Être et le Néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 17-18.
28. Jean-Paul Sartre, Écrits de jeunesse, 389.
29. Taken from a broadcasted interview, Texto, Océaniques, 28 December 1987 [my transla-
tion].
30. W.T. Stace, The Philosophy of Hegel: A Systematic Exposition (New York: Dover Publica-
tions, 1955), 106.
31. Jean Epstein, “Quelques notes sur Edgar A. Poe et les images douées de vie,” [1928] in
Écrits sur le cinéma, 187.
32. Arthur Danto, “Moving Pictures,” [1979] in Philosophizing Art: Selected Essays (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999), 231.
34. Paul Valéry, “La conscience a horreur du vide,” in Tel quel II (Paris: Gallimard, Idées,
1943), 224.
36. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion
Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), 33.
37. Ibid.
38. Charles Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. I-VI, ed. Ch. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (Cambridge,
MA & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960), 2.281, 159.
39. Clement Rosset, L’Objet singulier (Paris: Minuit, Critique, 1979), 36 [my translation].
40. André Bazin, “M. Hulot et le temps,” in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? Ontologie et Langage vol.1.
(Paris: Cerf, 7e art, 1958), 112. Ange Hurluberlu seems to be possibly translated by
“Crank Angel”; but I do not know if this respects the positive connotations of the
French word retained by Bazin: more eccentric or clownish than crazy. There is a
translation of Bazin’s text on Internet (by Bert Cardullo) evading the difficulty: “a kind
of angel…” available from http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/64/64bazintati.php.
41. Jean Cocteau, “Les anges,” Plaisir de France (December 1949), quoted by Clément Bor-
gal, in Jean Cocteau ou De la claudication considérée comme l’un des beaux-arts (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, Écrivains, 1989), 5.
42. Clement Rosset, Propos sur le cinéma (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, Perspec-
tives critiques, 2001), 122.
43. Interview with Robert Bresson by Bernard Stéphane, 1969, on Au hasard Balthazar de
Robert Bresson, 2005, Paris, DVD Argos Films, Arte France Développement.
44. “Une œuvre de Bresson ou de Tati est forcément géniale a priori simplement par l’au-
torité rarissime avec laquelle s’impose de la première image jusqu’au mot fin une
volonté unique et absolue, celle qui en principe ordonne, ou devrait ordonner, n’im-
porte quelle œuvre à prétention artistique.” François Truffaut, “Arts,” [14 May 1958]
available at http://www.cinematheque.fr/fr/expositions-cinema/precedentes-exposi-
tions/tati/index/projections/revue-presse-mononcle.html [my translation].
notes 229
45. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philoso-
phy, First Book, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten, Edmond
Husserl Collected Works, vol. II (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983), § 41, 86.
See Allan Casebier, Film and Phenomenology: Toward a Realist Theory of Cinematic Represen-
tation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 30-31; Véronique Campan, L’É-
coute filmique, Écho du son en image (Saint-Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes,
Collection Esthétique hors cadre, 1999); and “Phénoménologie en écho à la sémiolo-
gie: approche de l’écoute filmique,” in Après Deleuze, Philosophie et Esthétique du cinéma,
eds. Dominique Chateau and Jacinto Lageira (Paris: Dis Voir, 1996).
46. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philosophy, 87.
47. Jacques English, Le Vocabulaire de Husserl (Paris: Ellipses, 2002), 54.
48. Nelson Goodman, and Willard Van Orman Quine, “Steps Toward a Constructive No-
minalism,” The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 12, no. 4 (December 1947), 106.
49. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction Film (London: Cornell
University Press, 1978), 151-152. About the narratological approach to filmic phenom-
ena involving subjectivity more or less explicitly, see also François Jost, L’Œil caméra,
Entre film et roman (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, Linguistique et sémiologie,
1987); Christian Metz, L’Énonciation impersonnelle ou Le Site du film (Paris: Méridiens
Klincksieck, 1991).
50. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse, 158.
51. Etienne Souriau, L’Univers Filmique (Paris: Flammarion, 1953), 7.
52. Béla Balázs, The Spirit of Film, [1930] in Béla Balazs’ Early Film Theory: Visible Man and the
Spirit of Film, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2010),
115.
53. John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, 95.
54. Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford
History of Art, 1999), 3.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., 4.
57. Alain Roger, “Histoire d’une passion théorique ou comment on devient un Raboliot
du paysage,” in La Théorie du paysage en France, 1974-1994, ed. Alain Roger (Seysel:
Champ Vallon, Pays / paysages, 1995), 444.
58. Yves Lacoste, “À quoi sert le paysage? Qu’est-ce qu’un beau paysage?” [1977] in La
Théorie du paysage en France, 1974-1994, ed. Alain Roger (Seysel: Champ Vallon, Pays /
paysages, 1995), 53.
59. Vsevolod Poudovkine, Film Technique and Film Acting (1926-1934), trans. Yvor Montagu
(New York: Grove Press, 1970), 81-82.
60. Ibid., 82.
61. Ibid.
62. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse, 159.
63. Ibid., 160.
64. S. M. Eisenstein, Film Form, 150.
65. This famous French film school, established in 1944, became la FEMIS (Fondation
Européenne pour les Métiers de l’Image et du Son) in 1985.
230 notes
66. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology,” in Sense and Non-Sense,
trans. L. Dreyfus and P. Dreyfus Allen (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1964), 54.
67. Ibid., 55.
68. Ibid., 56.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid., 59.
71. Ibid., 58.
73. Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, Hitchcock-Truffaut (New York: Simon & Schuster
Paperbacks, 1983), 246.
74. Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” reprint from The Philosophical Review, 83
(1974), available from http://www.clarku.edu/students/philosophyclub/docs/nagel.pdf.
75. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 204-205.
76. Ibid.
77. Cf. David Sterritt, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993). Jean-Pierre Esquenazi, Hitchcock et l’aventure de Vertigo: l’Invention d’Hollywood
(Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2001).
78. This part of Merleau-Ponty’s commentary is not in Sense and Nonsense, but in Jean Mi-
try’s version of the lecture “The Film and the New Psychology” at the IDHEC, in Esthé-
tique et Psychologie du cinéma, II, Les Formes (Paris: Éditions universitaires, 1965), 65.
79. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: In-
diana University Press, 1977), 104.
80. Edgar Morin, The Cinema or the Imaginary Man, trans. Lorraine Mortimer (Minneapolis:
University of MInnesota Press, 2005), 225; author’s preface to the 1978 edition.
81. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, [Die Traumdeutung 1899] trans. A.A. Brill
(New York: Bartleby.com, 2010).
82. Paul Valéry, “Le rêve est le phénomène que nous n’observons que pendant son ab-
sence,” Tel Quel II, 205.
Conversation with Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki

1. Cécile Chich, ed., Klonaris/Thomadaki. Le Cinéma corporel. Corps sublimes/ Intersexe et intermé-
dia, preface by Marie-José Mondzain (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006).
2. Klonaris and Thomadaki, Manifestes 1976-2002, Cahier no 9 (Paris: Éditions Paris expéri-
mental, 2003).
3. On this topic see Michèle Brandini, “Vers une socialisation du Cinéma Corporel. Une
pratique d’enseignement artistique singulière: les ateliers Super 8” in Klonaris/Thoma-
daki, Le Cinéma corporel, op. cit.
4. In the period that followed, multi-media projection installations and photography
were central in our practice. It is at the beginning of the 1990s that analogue video
became our main time-based medium, replaced by digital video since 2000. For a gen-
eral overview of our work see our essay “Traversée du corps, traversée des médias” in
the catalog of the retrospective Jeune, dure et pure! Une histoire du cinéma d’avant-garde et
notes 231
expérimental en France, eds. Nicole Brenez, Christian Lebrat (Paris: Cinémathèque Fran-
çaise/Mazzotta, 2001).
5. Klonaris/Thomadaki, Manifestes 1976-2002, and available from http://www.klonaris-
thomadaki.net.
6. See: “Conversation with Laura Mulvey,” in Ostrannenie. On “Strangeness” and the Moving
Image: The History, Reception, and Relevance of a Concept, ed. Annie van den Oever (Amster-
dam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010).
7. See: Cécile Chich, “Night Show for Angel,” available from http://www.klonaris-tho-
madaki.net.
8. Exhibition curated by Sigrid Schade at the Offenes Kulturhaus Linz. Catalog Andere
Körper (Linz: Passagen Verlag, 1994).
9. Klonaris and Thomadaki, “Dem Geschlecht nicht unterworfen. Ein Manifest (Aus-
zug),” in exhibition catalog, Engel: Engel, ed. Catherin Pichler (Vienna & New York:
Kunsthalle Wien-Springer, 1997).
10. Klonaris and Thomadaki, Désastres sublimes (Paris: A.S.T.A.R.T.I./Galerie Donguy,
2000).
11. See Stranger than Angel. Dissident Bodies retrospective personal exhibition catalog, eds.
Nina Pirnat Spahic and Marina Gržinić, in collaboration with the artists (Ljubljana:
Cankarjev Dom, 2002).
12. Polyglossia, catalog and exhibition, (Athens: Center for Arts and Culture, Onassis Foun-
dation, 14 March-30 June 2011).
13. The last time we performed Orlando: Hermaphrodite II was at the London
Filmmakers’ Coop within the London Film Festival in 1992.
14. Some years ago, curator Mark Weber invited a number of international filmmakers to
re-perform expanded films from the 1970s. These public projection performances
were recorded on video and photography at the Hartware MedienKunstVerein Dort-
mund in September 2004 and at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart in De-
cember 2006. This was a very special podium, as the works were replayed with their
original equipment. This Expanded Cinema Archive, kept in Dortmund and Stuttgart,
was exhibited in London at the Tate Modern, during the Expanded Cinema Sympo-
sium, in 2009. Our performance archived in that context is Soma (1978), a double-
screen projection with slides and Super 8 film from The Body Tetralogy.
15. Performance Laure by Gina Pane, Isy Brachot Gallery, Brussels, 1977.
16. On the process of the restoration of our films see Eric Le Roy, “A propos de la restau-
ration des films Selva de Maria Klonaris et Chutes. Désert. Syn de Katerina Thomadaki
par les Archives Françaises du Film” and Maria Klonaris/Katerina Thomadaki, “Du
Super 8 au 35mm,” Journal of Film Preservation, no. 72 (November 2006), FIAF-Interna-
tional Federation of Film Archives.
17. Our restored films Selva (1981-83, 70 min., 35mm, sound Dolby Surround), Chutes.
Désert.Syn (1983-85, 18 min., 35mm, silent), and Unheimlich I: Secret Dialo-
gue (1977-79, 70 min., 35mm, silent), have been showcased in venues like the Ciné-
mathèque Française, BFI/National Film Theater, London, MoMA, New York, National
Gallery of Art, Washington, Swiss Cinémathèque, Lausanne, Lux-Scène Nationale,Va-
lence, and various international film festivals (Thessaloniki, Créteil, Taipei, etc.).
232 notes
18. Marina Gržinić, and Rosa Reitsamer, eds., New Feminism. Worlds of Feminism, Queer and
Networking Conditions (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 2008).
19. Marina Gržinić, Guest editor, 2010. Pavilion #14: Biopolitics, Necropolitics and De-Colonial-
ity, available from http://www.pavilionmagazine.org/pavilion_14.pdf.
notes 233
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Notes on Contributors
Francesco Casetti is professor in the Humanities Program and the Film Program
at Yale University. He has previously taught at Università di Genova, Università di
Trieste and Catholic University of Milan, and he has been Visiting Professor at the
University Paris III, at the University of Iowa, and at the University of California,
Berkeley. He is the co-founder of the Permanent Seminar on the History of Film
Theory, an international network of scholars. His research focuses on film theory,
film and modernity, and post-cinema. Major publications, several of which were
translated into French, Spanish, Hungarian, and Czech, include: Inside the Gaze.
The Fiction Film and its Spectator (1998), Theories of Cinema. 1945-1995 (1999), and Eye
of the Century. Film, Experience, and Modernity (2008). Together with Roger Odin he
co-edited the 1990 special issue of Communications (no. 51) entitled “Télévisions/
Mutations.”
Dominique Chateau is professor at the UFR d’arts plastiques et sciences de l’art at

the Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Paris 1. He teaches aesthetics, philosophy of
art, and film studies. He is the author of La Question de la question de l’art (1994), Arts
plastiques: archéologie d’une notion (1999), Qu’est-ce que l’art? (2000), Cinéma et Philoso-
phie (2003), Sartre et le cinéma (2005), Esthétique du cinéma (2006), Introduzione all’este-
tica del cinema (2007), Qu’est-ce qu’un artiste? (2008), Philosophie d’un art moderne: le
cinéma (2009), L’Art comptant pour un (2009), Cine y filosofía (2009), Philosophies du
cinéma (2010), Estetica del cine (2010), and L’Expérience esthétique: intuition, expertise
(2010).
Gregory Currie was educated at the London School of Economics and the Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley. He is professor of philosophy at the University of
Nottingham, where he was dean of the Faculty of Arts (2004-2007). He is the
author of The Nature of Fiction (1990), Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive
Science (1995), Recreative Minds (with Ian Ravenscroft, 2002), Arts and Minds (2005),
Narratives and Narrators (2010) and other books. He has written recently on the
films of Hitchcock and Bergman. His current research is into the idea that litera-
ture is a source of insight into the nature of mind – an idea about which he is
skeptical. He is an editor of Mind and Language and a fellow of the Australian
Academy of the Humanities.
249
Marina Gržinić is professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Institute of Fine
Arts, Post Conceptual Art Practices, and a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy
at the ZRC SAZU (Scientific and Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of
Science and Art) in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She also works as freelance media theor-
ist, art critic, and curator. In collaboration with Aina Smid, from 1982 on Gržinić
realized more than 40 video art projects. Gržinić is the co-founder and co-editor
of REARTIKULACIJA, an artistic-political-theoretical-discursive platform from
Ljubljana. Her current research is focused on processes of decoloniality, the ana-
lysis of global capitalism, and the questions of biopolitics and necropolitics. Her
books include Une Fiction reconstruite. Europe de l’Est, Post-socialisme et rétro-avant-garde
(2005), Re-Politicizing Art, Theory, Representation and New Media Technology (2008),
and Biopolitics/Necropolitics/Decoloniality (2010).
Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki are internationally acknowledged film-

makers, interdisciplinary artists and theorists. They have produced over 130
works organized in cycles (films, performances, installations, analog and digital
videos, photographic series, artists’ books, sound pieces, and experimental radio
broadcasts). Retrospectives of their works have been showcased in different
countries. They have published numerous catalogs and essays. Their publications
include Incendie de l’Ange (1988), Désastres sublimes. Les Jumeaux (2000), Stranger than
Angel. Dissident Bodies (2002), Manifestes 1976-2002 (2003). As founders and artistic
directors of A.S.T.A.R.T.I. for Audiovisual Art they have curated three editions of
the quadriennale Rencontres Internationales Art Cinéma/vidéo/ordinateur and edited Tech-
nologies et Imaginaires (1990), Mutations de l’image (1994), Pour une écologie des médias
(1998). A monographic study on their work, Klonaris/Thomadaki: Le Cinéma corporel,
was published by Cécile Chich (2006). In 2008 a symposium was dedicated to
their work at the National Institute of Art History (INHA), Paris. Katerina Thoma-
daki is associate professor at the University Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Jacinto Lageira is professor at the University Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne and an

art critic. He is the author of L’Image du monde dans le corps du texte (I, II) (2003),
L’Esthétique traversée. Psychanalyse, sémiotique et phénoménologie à l’œuvre (2007), La Dé-
réalisation du monde. Fiction et Réalité en conflit (2010). He has contributed to many
catalogs (James Coleman, Julião Sarmento, Angela Detanico/Rafael Lain, Claire Savoie, Jordi
Colomer, Claire Chevrier, Joseph Kosuth, Edgar Martins). He has also edited Michael
Snow, Des écrits. 1958-2005 (with Jean-Michel Bouhours, 2005), and an anthology,
Du mot à l’image & du son au mot (1897-2005) (2006).
José Moure is associate professor (Maître de conférences) of cinema studies and

dean of the UFR d’arts plastiques et sciences de l’art at the University Paris 1,
Panthéon-Sorbonne. He teaches film aesthetics and film analysis. His current re-
search interests concern the writings on cinema and pre-cinema, the relationship
250 notes on contributors

between literature and cinema, the figure of shot-countershot, and the question of
“decoupage.” His books include Vers une esthétique du vide au cinéma (1997), Miche-
langelo Antonioni, cinéaste de l’évidement (2001), Le Cinéma: naissance d’un art. Premiers
écrits 1895-1920 (with Daniel Banda, 2008), Le Cinéma: l’art d’une civilisation 1920-
1960 (with Daniel Banda, 2011).
Pere Salabert is professor at the Department of History of Arts of the University of

Barcelona where he holds the Chair of Aesthetics and Theory of Arts. He was
director of the research program on aesthetics and contemporary art at the Uni-
versity of Barcelona (1994-2001), and he is at present director of GREGA, a pro-
gram about anthropological aesthetics related to action arts, theater, and cinema.
He has published a number of books, including (D)defecto de la pintura (1985), In-
imágenes. Representación y estilo (1997), Pintura anémica, cuerpo suculento (2003), El pen-
samiento visible (2003), La redención de la carne. Hastío del alma y elogio de la pudrición
(2004), Sphairos. Geografía del amor y la imaginación (2005), El cuerpo es el sueño de la
razón (2009).
Céline Scemama is associate professor (Maître de conférences) in film aesthetics

at the University Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne (UFR. d’arts plastiques et sciences de
l’art). She is a member of the Laboratory of Theoretical and Applied Aesthetics
(LETA) and is in charge of international relations for the film department (UFR.
04). She specializes in film analysis. Her books include Antonioni: le désert figuré
(1998) and Histoire(s) du cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard: la force faible d’un art (2006). In
order to carry out her study of Histoire(s) du cinéma, Jean-Luc Godard’s epic work,
she developed a method of analysis that led her to the creation of a “partition” of
film spread over two hundred pages. She is currently preparing a book dedicated
to Robert Bresson, as well as a book on film analysis that will provide both a
theoretical and an analytical approach.
Karl Sierek is a film theorist. He works as professor and Chair of History and
Aesthetics of Media at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena/Germany. He has
been a visiting professor at the University of Salzburg, the Free University in Ber-
lin, the University Paris III, Nouvelle Sorbonne, the University Paris I, Panthéon
Sorbonne, and at Meiji University, Tokyo. Senior fellowships include the Interna-
tional Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna (IFK), and the State Innova-
tive Institute for the Studies of Journalism & Communication and Media Society at
Fudan University Shanghai. His books include Ophüls: Bachtin. Versuch mit Film zu
reden (1994), Aus der Bildhaft. Filmanalyse als Kinoästhetik (1993), Images, Oiseaux. Aby
Warburg et la théorie des médias (2009), and Das chinesische Kino nach der Kulturrevolu-
tion. Theorien und Analysen (edited with Guido Kirsten, 2011).
notes on contributors 251

Vivian Sobchack is professor emerita in the Department of Film, Television, and
Digital Media and former associate dean at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and
Television. She was the first woman elected president of the Society for Cinema
and Media Studies and served many years on the Board of Directors of the Amer-
ican Film Institute. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Film Quarterly,
Film Comment, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Camera Obscura, and the Journal of
Visual Culture. Her books include An Introduction to Film (1980), The Address of The Eye:
A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992), Screening Space: The American Science Fiction
Film (1987), and, most recently, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Cul-
ture (2004). She has also edited two anthologies: The Persistence of History: Cinema,
Television and The Modern Event (1995), and Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and
The Culture of Quick Change (1999).
Pierre Taminiaux received his PhD in French literature at the University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley. He is currently professor of French and francophone literatures at
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. He has also been a visiting professor at
the University of Strasbourg and Paris I-Sorbonne. His most recent scholarly re-
search focuses on the relationship between literature and art in the twentieth cen-
tury, particularly in surrealism. He is the author of several critical works both in
French and English, including Robert Pinget (1994), Poétique de La Négation (1997),
Surmodernités: Entre Rêve et Technique (essays on Jarry, Beckett, Debord, Duchamp,
Magritte, 2003) and The Paradox of Photography: Baudelaire, Breton, Barthes, Valéry
(2009). He is also the co-editor of various volumes and special issues of journals,
including Cinéma/Art(s) Plastiques(s) (2004), Surrealism and its Others (2006), and Poésie
et Politique au XXe siècle (2011). He has published numerous articles of literary criti-
cism, art criticism, and cultural theory. Besides his research activities, Pierre Ta-
miniaux is pursuing creative activities in the fields of literature and the visual arts.
He is the author of a novel and three plays, as well as the artist of numerous
photographs and paintings on paper that he has exhibited in his native Belgium
and in the United States.
252 notes on contributors

Index of Names
A Barthes, Roland 17, 115, 121-124, 149,

Abraham, Karl 219 222-223
Acland, Charles R. 213, 215 Baudrillard, Jean 125, 128, 223
Adorno, Theodor 130 Baudry, Jean-Louis 154, 212, 227
Alexandrov, Grigori 99, 220 Bazin, André 11, 113-114, 169, 207, 221-
Allen, Woody 140 222, 229
Alovosio, Silvio 214 Becker, Jacques 182-183
Althusser, Louis 149 Beilenhoff, Wolfgang 224
Altman, Robert 140 Bellour, Raymond 226
Anderson, Tim 102, 221 Benjamin, Walter 54, 126, 211-214, 223
Andersson, Bibi 45 Bergman, Ingmar 45, 48, 156, 209-210
Andrew, Dudley 25, 208 Bergson, Henri 13, 23, 37, 164, 207
Andrews, Malcolm 174, 230 Bernanos, Georges 104-105, 115-116
Antoine, André 38 Bernhardt, Curtis 218
Antonioni, Michelangelo 17, 100, 119- Beuys, Joseph 222
121, 125, 127-129, 131, 223-224 Binet, Alfred 220
Anzaldua, Gloria 197 Björkman, Stig 210
Arendt, Hannah 223 Bogart, Humphrey 72, 75, 77
Aristotle 147 Boillat, Alain 221
Armleder, John 223 Bolter, David 215
Arnaud, Philippe 221 Bond, Ward 43
Arnheim, Rudolf 25, 208, 215 Bonitzer, Pascal 82, 218
Aronofsky, Darren 156 Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel 207
Astruc, Alexandre 60, 215 Bordwell, David 144-145, 218, 226
Atget, Eugène 126 Borges, Jorge Luis 23, 207
Borradori, Giovanna 213
B Bouquet, Carole 153
Bacall, Lauren 76 Brandini, Michèle 231
Badiou, Alain 164, 228 Branigan, Edward 140, 225
Bakhtin, Mikhail 17-18, 135-146, 159, Bresson, Robert 16, 99-117, 170, 207,
224-226 221-222, 229
Balázs, Béla 54, 99, 173, 208, 212, 230 Brown, Dan 130
Barrington, George 106 Brunetta, Gian Piero 211
Barry, Iris 59 Bruno, Giuliana 215
Buber, Martin 225
253
Bullough, Edward 152, 227 D
Buñuel, Luis 16, 91-94, 96, 98, 153, 184 Danto, Arthur 167-168, 229
Burch, Noël 214 Daquin, Louis 178, 180
Burton, Richard 88, 219 Daves, Delmer 15, 69, 71-75, 78, 83,
Butler, Judith 199 216-217
De Amicis, Edmundo 23
C De Lauretiis, Teresa 211
Cage, John 127, 223 Debord, Guy 222
Cage, Nicolas 152 Debray, Régis 215
Canudo, Ricciotto 58, 214 Deleuze, Gilles 100, 163-164, 166, 182,
Carbone, Mauro 214 224, 228, 230-231
Carroll, Noël 24, 208, 226 Delevanti, Cyril 88
Casetti, Francesco 14-15, 53-54, 56, 58, Delluc, Louis 36-37, 209, 214
60, 62, 64, 214, 216 Depp, Johnny 95, 220
Cassavetes, John 182-183 Deren, Maya 200
Cassin, Barbara 226 Derrida, Jacques 213-214
Cassirer, Ernst 85, 138 Descartes, René 147-148
Catteau, Jacques 222 Devigny, André 106, 115
Cavell, Stanley 164, 211, 228 Dmytryk, Edward 43, 47
Certeau, Michel de 213 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 16, 18, 87, 105-
Chabrol, Claude 92-93 106, 115, 135, 137, 141, 219, 221, 224-
Chabrol, Marguerite 221 225
Chaplin, Charlie 99 Dours, Christian 227
Chateau, Dominique 11-12, 14, 16, 18, Dreyer, Carl Theodor 117
20, 161-162, 164, 166, 168, 170, 172, Duchamp, Marcel 119, 127, 130-131,
174, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184, 230 222, 224
Chatman, Seymour 172, 176, 230 Dujardin, René 23
Chich, Cécile 231-232 Duras, Marguerite 166-167
Chion, Michel 99, 102, 221 Duve, Thierry de 222
Cixous, Hélène 195 D’Ambra, Lucio 214
Cluzet, François 92
Cocteau, Jean 169, 229 E
Coen, Joel and Ethan 156 Eichenbaum, Boris 135, 217
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 152, 227 Eisenstein, Sergei 99, 161, 166, 176,
Cometti, Jean-Pierre 227 181, 220-221, 228, 230
Copeland, Mathieu 223 Ellis, Havelock 198
Córdova, Arturo de 91 Ellroy, James 130
Corrigan, Timothy 216 Epstein, Jean 33, 36, 54, 163-165, 167,
Cortázar, Julio 119 185, 208, 212, 228-229
Crignon, Phillipe 79-80, 218
Currie, Gregory 14, 41-42, 44, 46, 48, F
50, 209 Fanchi, Maria Grazia 216
Ferenczi, Sandor 220
254 index of names

Fiedler, Konrad 138, 144 Heal, Jane 209
Filliou, Robert 222 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 167,
Fincher, David 156 172, 229
Flanagan, Martin 140, 225 Heidegger, Martin 127, 213
Fontaine, Jean de la 12 Hemmings, David 121
Ford, John 43 Heu, P.M. 214
Foucault, Michel 93, 149, 198, 220, Hibbard, Fred 58
223, 226-227 Hickox, Sid 71
Frampton, Daniel 164 Hildebrand, Adolf von 138
Freud, Sigmund 16-17, 85-86, 162, Hitchcock, Alfred 34, 50, 180-182, 210,
183-184, 207, 218-219, 231 213, 231
Friedberg, Anne 216 Hoffmann, E.Th.A. 87
Frison-Roche, Roger 180 hooks, bell 197
Fuss, Diana 207 Hugo, Victor 23-24, 36, 39-40, 208
Huillet, Danièle 140
G Husserl, Edmund 18, 150, 153-154,
Gance, Abel 33, 36 165, 168, 170, 229-230
Garcés, Delia 92 Huston, John 16, 88, 90-91, 96, 219
Gardner, Ava 88, 219
Genet, Jean 191 I
Gide, André 116 Irigaray, Luce 195
Glykou, Mylène 197
Godard, Jean-Luc 11, 61, 119, 163, 166- J
167, 207 Jakobson, Roman 99, 139
Goodis, David 217 Jardonnet, Evelyne 221
Goodman, Nelson 165, 172, 229-230 Jarmusch, Jim 16, 95, 220
Gordon, Douglas 213 Jay, Martin 224-225
Gordon, Robert 158, 227 Jenkins, Henry 213, 215-216
Gormery, Douglas 211 Jonze, Spike 150
Gourmont, Rémy de 23, 207 Jordan, Dorothy 43
Grieveson, Lee 214 Jouan, Marlene 227
Grusin, Victor 215 Joyce, James 23
Gržinić, Marina 19, 189-190, 192, 194, Jung, C.G. 97, 220
196, 198, 200, 202, 204, 207, 232-
233 K
Guérin, Syn 197 Kant, Immanuel 18, 85, 147, 151-152,
Gunning, Tom 214 177-178, 226
Keaton, Buster 60, 215
H Kerr, Deborah 88, 219
Hagener, Malte 216 Kilomba, Grada 197
Hansen, Miriam 211, 214 Kirsanov, Dimitri 37
Hanslick, Eduard 138 Klinger, Barbara 213
Harbord, Janet 213, 215 Klonaris, Dr. G. 196
index of names 255

Klonaris, Maria 19-20, 189-192, 196- McLuhan, Marshall 213
197, 207, 231-232 Medvedev, Pavel 17, 135, 137-138, 144,
Koenekamp, H.F. 71 224-226
Koszarski, Richard 214 Mekas, Jonas 119, 163, 228
Kracauer, Sigfried 211 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 19, 177-180,
Krauss, Rosalind 222 182, 213, 231
Kristeva, Julia 195 Meschonnic, Henri 159, 227
Kuhn, Annette 211, 214 Metz, Christian 18, 155, 158, 183, 212,
225, 227, 230-231
L Metzger, Gustav 223
Lacan, Jacques 154, 184, 219 Miéville, Anne-Marie 11
Lacoste, Yves 174, 230 Molina, Angela 153
Lageira, Jacinto 18, 147-148, 150, 152, Montaigne, Michel de 147
154, 156, 158 Montani, Pietro 213, 216
Lang, Fritz 43, 102 Montgomery, Robert 81, 150, 176
Latil le Dantec, Mireille 115, 222 Morin, Edgar 34, 151, 184, 211, 227,
Le Clézio, Jean-Marie G. 104, 221 231
Leterrier, François 113 Moure, José 13, 23-24, 26, 28, 30, 32,
Levinas, Emmanuel 15, 69, 77-81, 83, 34, 36, 38, 40
212, 216-218 Mulligan, Robert 43
Libéra, Alain de 226 Mulvey, Laura 211, 215, 232
Livingston, Paisley 49, 209 Münsterberg, Hugo 13, 23-40, 208
Locke, John 18, 147-148, 226-227 Murdoch, Iris 158, 227
Loshitzky, Yosefa 207
Lowry, Edward Brian 211 N
Luccioni-Lemoine, Eugénie 196 Nagel, Thomas 181, 231
Lumière, Auguste and Louis 54 Navaï, Parvaneh 197
Lyon, Sue 88, 219 Nichols, Bill 227
L’Herbier, Marcel 36-37, 104, 114, 209, Norton, Andrew 215
221 Nussbaum, Martha 158, 227
M O
Magritte, René 124, 223 Odin, Roger 211
Malkovich, John 150 Oever, Annie van den 232
Malraux, André 178, 180 Ozu, Yasujiro 120
Maltby, R. 211
Manns, Torsten 210 P
Matisse, Henri 162 Palma, Brian de 176
Maupassant, Guy de 16, 87, 219 Pane, Gina 202
Mauriac, Claude 108, 221 Panh, Rithy 158
Mauriac, François 116, 222 Papinim, Giovanni 214
Mayne, Judith 227 Parain, Brice 114
Mbembe, Achille 205 Parsons, Talcott 144, 226
256 index of names

Pasolini, Pier Paolo 100 S
Peirce, Charles S. 16, 91-92, 96, 98, Saint Augustine 147
168, 173, 219-220, 229 Salabert, Pere 16, 85-86, 88, 90, 92, 94,
Perret, Mai-Thu 223 96, 98, 219
Phillpot, Clive 223 Salt, Barry 217
Pirandello, Luigi 54, 212 Sartre, Jean-Paul 18, 150-151, 154, 164-
Plantinga, Carl 216 166, 168-169, 227-229
Plato 125 Saussure, Ferdinand de 136
Poe, Edgar Allan 163, 229 Scemama, Céline 16, 99-100, 102, 104,
Polan, Dana 80-81, 218 106, 108, 110, 112, 114, 116
Polanski, Roman 156 Schelling, Friedrich von 86
Porter, Edwin S. 58 Schmarsow, August 138
Poudovkine, Vsevolod 99, 174-175, Schmid, Herta 224
220, 230 Searle, John R. 18, 162-163, 165, 168,
Powell, Dick 47 174-175, 179, 181, 228-231
Powell, William 220 Sennett, Mack 58
Presle, Micheline 182 Shklovsky, Viktor 135
Provoyeur, Jean-Louis 115, 221-222 Sierek, Karl 17-18, 135-136, 138, 140,
Pudovkin, Vsevelod 215 142, 144, 146, 225
Sjöström, Victor 45
Q Slaughter, Marty 79, 218
Quine, Willard Van Orman 172, 230 Smith, Greg M. 216
Smith, Murray 47, 209-210
R Snow, Michael 119
Rabaté, Jean-Michel 130-131, 223 Sobchack, Vivian 14-15, 69-70, 72, 74,
Rabelais, François 143, 225 76, 78, 80, 82, 207, 209, 211, 217,
Rank, Otto 86, 219 225
Ravenscroft, Ian 209 Sontag, Susan 163, 228
Renov, Michael 157, 227 Souday, Paul 13, 37, 58, 209
Rey, Fernando 153 Souriau, Etienne 172, 230
Richter, Jean-Paul 86 Stace, W.T. 167, 229
Ricoeur, Paul 158-159, 227 Staiger, Janet 211, 215
Ritter, Joachim 218 Stam, Robert 140, 225
Robbe-Grillet, Alain 184 Stokes, M. 211, 214
Robertson, Robert 220 Straub, Jean-Marie 140
Robinson, Jenefer 50, 209-210 Sydow, Max von 48
Roger, Alain 174, 230
Rosch, Eleanor 11, 207 T
Rosset, Clement 169-170, 229 Taminiaux, Pierre 17, 119-120, 122,
Rouleau, Raymond 182 124, 126, 128, 130, 132
Rowlands, Gena 182 Tati, Jacques 169-170, 213
Ruttman, Walter 99 Taylor, Chloé 78-79, 217
Taylor, Richard 220
Telotte, J.P. 69, 80-81, 216, 218
index of names 257

Thomadaki, Katerina 19, 189-192, 196, Wasson, Craig 176
231-232 Wayne, John 43
Thompson, Kristin 144-145, 218, 226 Welles, Orson 172
Thovez, Enrico 214 Wetker, Frédéric 227
Todorov, Tzvetan 224 White, Michele 215
Travolta, John 152 Wickering, Christopher 217
Truffaut, François 170, 180, 182, 229, Wiene, Robert 33
231 Wilde, Oscar 87, 191
Turim, Maureen 36, 40, 209 Williams, Linda 212, 214, 216
Tynyanov, Yuri 135 Williams, Tennessee 88, 90-91, 219
Wilson, George 47, 209-210
U Winnicott, Donald W. 156, 227
Unamuno, Miguel de 87 Wiseman, Frederik 157
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 11
V Wittig, Monique 195
Valéry, Paul 168, 184, 229, 231 Wölfflin, Heinrich 138
Van Gogh, Vincent 162 Woo, John 152
Vertov, Dziga 171 Woolf, Virginia 202
Vološinov, Valentin 17, 135-136, 224- Worringer, Wilhelm 138
225
Vuillermoz, Emile 13, 37-38, 58, 209, Y
214 Yhcam 14, 38-40, 209
W Z
Walton, Kendall 209 Žižek, Slavoy 15, 70-72, 75, 79, 216-
Warner, Jack 217 217
258 index of names

Index of Film Titles
A Man Escaped 16, 100, 102, 115, 117 Kha. The Embalmed 196-197
A Movie Star 58 La Dixième Symphonie 33, 36
A Passion 48 La Femme de Nulle Part 36
Arteria Magna in Dolore Later- La Glace à Trois Faces 37
ali 191, 197 La Roue 36
Barton Fink 156 Lady in the Lake 15, 81, 83, 150
Being John Malkovich 150 Le Silence 37
Black Swan 156 Les Frères Corses 38
Blow Up 17, 100, 119, 121-122, 127, L’Argent 170
131 L’Auto Grise 39
Body Double 176 L’Avventura 120, 223
Cet Obscur Objet du Désir 153 L’Enfer 92
Chutes. Désert. Syn 19 Mabel’s Dramatic Career 58
Citizen Kane 172 Masculin, Féminin 61
Cœur Fidèle 33 Ménilmontant 37
Crossfire 43, 210 Mon Oncle 169
Cycle of the Hermaphrodites Mystery I: Sleeping Hermaphro-
196 dite 196
Cycle of the Unheimlich 202 Mystery II: The Angel Ablaze 196
Dark Passage 15, 69, 71, 76, 78, 81, Night Show for Angel 196
83 Opening Night 182
Dead Man 95-96, 98 Persona 156
Diary of a Country Priest 16, 100, Pickpocket 16, 100, 102, 105, 115,
104, 117 117
Double Labyrinth 19, 191, 194, 201 Premier de Cordée 178, 180
Él 91, 98 Quasar 20, 199
El Dorado 36 Requiem for the XXth Century
Espoir 180 200
Falbalas 182 S21, La Machine de Mort Khmer
Farewell my Lovely 47-48 Rouge 158
Fièvre 36 Selva 19
Fight Club 156 Sherlock Jr 60
Hermaphrodite II: Orlando 202 Sierra de Teruel 178, 180
Il Deserto Rosso 120, 128 Soma 191
Il Grido 120 Stage Fright 210
259
Sublime Disasters. The Twins The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
199 102
The Angel Cycle 196 The Wind Bloweth Where it Lis-
The Big Sleep 146 teth 100
The Birth of a Nation 146 The Woman in the Window 43-
The Body Tetralogy 191, 202 44, 210
The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari Titicut Follies 157
33 Uncle Josh at the Moving Pic-
The Child Who Peed Glitter 191 ture Show 58
The Lady in the Lake 176, 180 Unheimlich I: Secret Dialogue
The Man With a Movie Camera 196
171 Unheimlich II: Astarti 194, 196
The Matrix 164 Unheimlich III: The Mothers
The Night of the Iguana 16, 88, 196, 202
91-92, 96, 98 Vertigo 50, 180, 182, 184
The Other 43 Wild Strawberries 45-46
The Searchers 43 XYXX Mosaic Identity 198
The Tenant 156 Zabriskie Point 128, 224
Zelig 140
260 index of film titles

Index of Subjects
3 alterity 77-80, 159, 189

3-D 54 alterity (penalization of) 190
constitutive alterity 82
A destabilizing self-alienation 83
acousmêtre (notion of) 115 radical alterity 79
acousmatic voices 102 androgynous identity 19
actante 192-193 intersexuality 198,
acting/transcribing 19 anesthesia 55, 65
adumbrations 170-171, 179 angel, the 196-199
aesthetics 13, 137-138, 149, 166, 180 animism 164-165
aesthetic canons (of the early twenti- animate/inanimate 165
eth-century avant-garde) 119 animist art 164
aesthetic conditions (of cinema) 24 Arriflex 71-72, 217
aesthetic dimension (of cinema) 65 art historical discourse 136
aesthetic event 16, 88, 91, 94, 97 art studies 144, 146
aesthetic forms 119, 156 artistic coupling 19
aesthetic judgment 119, 148, 155, artistic specificity 28-29
183 attendance 59-60, 64
aesthetic specificity 24, 29 attention 28, 32, 34
aesthetic subjectivity 147 involuntary/voluntary attention 28
aesthetic value 18, 132 attractions 144
aesthetics (discourse on) 137 auctorial cooperation 19
aesthetics (theory of) 179 audience 58
aesthetics of absence 127 audience’s experience 193
aesthetics of cinema 149 feminist audiences 194
aesthetics of photography/painting interpretive community 61
129 auteur see also author 171, 191-193
aesthetics of scarcity 128 authenticity 124
affective state (of individuals) 86 author 11, 16, 60, 100, 115-116, 141-142,
afterimages (phenomenon of) 27 157, 171, 173, 176
agency 158, 201 authorial thought 61
female agency 189 double author 19, 191-193
political agency 204 autobiographical forms 156
agnition 56 avant-garde 127, 130, 132, 163
allegory (of crime and death) 131 avant-garde artist(s) 127, 189
261
avant-garde film 194 sanctification 58-59
early-twentieth century avant-garde silent cinema 33, 36
130-131 social institution (cinema as) 58
Fluxus movement 119, 128 Soviet cinema (of the 1920s) 135
French avant-garde 36 standardization (of the filmic prod-
uct) 59
B X-rated cinema 61
Bakhtin Circle, the 17, 135 Cinemascope 54
Bakhtinian dialogue 137 cinematic apparatus 12, 53, 150, 154,
Bakhtinian trans-linguistics 138 184, 189, 190, 204
behaviorism 144 apparatus of reversibility (of the
behaviorist process (of trial and er- gaze) 193
ror) 140 cinematic apparatus and psychical
Bergsonian art 164 system 154
biopolitical 199 intercorporeal apparatus 193
black question, the 197 cinematic device 30, 32
blurred vision 47 cinematic device (of the flash-for-
Bressonian voice 100, 114-115 ward) 30
cinematic device (of the flashback)
C 29
camera 35-36 cinematic devices (as the objectivica-
camera-character 74 tion of mental processes) 28
camera-eye 171-172 cinematic enunciation 76
positional camera 169-170, 180, 184 cinematic image (perception of) 27
subjective camera 36, 72-73, 76, 81- cinematic language 25, 28
83, 100, 110, 150, 218 cinematic metaphor 23
third-person camera/vision 76-82 cinematic norm 194
catharsis 112 cinematic process(es) 23-24, 28, 193
CGI-techniques 139 cinematic processes/mental pro-
chronotopes 142 cesses 13
cinema 85, 129 cinematograph 24
aesthetic specificity 24, 29 cinephiles 58, 61
cinema (as a locus of experience) cinephobes 58
53 Circorama 54
cinema machine 24, 54, 59 close-up 28-30, 33, 80-81, 108, 208
cinema of fantasy 32 co-authoring ethics 192
cinema of the body 20 cognitivism 143, 144
history of cinema 57 cognitive turn 144
institutionalization of cinema 58 cognitivism of the School of Wis-
intelligent machine 164 consin 144
modern cinema 60, 127 collectivity 58, 60
primitive cinema 39 coloniality 197
re-mediation process 61 coloration 145
concrete reality 24, 37
262 index of subjects

consciousness 18, 27, 35, 85, 98, 148, dialogue (three-part dialogue of the
162, 165, 193 viewer) 141
altered state of consciousness 95 dialogism 159
consciousness and imaging con- dialogic 138, 159
sciousness 150 dialogical image-text 138, 145
duplication of consciousness 155 dialogical principles 142, 144
film and consciousness 167 diegesis 149, 152
realizing consciousness 150, 153, digital media 200
157 digital technologies 202
reflexive consciousness 164 discourse 149
self-consciousness 12, 18, 96, 148 art historical discourse 136
space of consciousness 122 political discourse 120
subjective consciousness 155, 157 displacement 70, 184
unreflexive consciousness 169 dissident bodies 189, 190, 199
contextual moments 145 dissolve 31, 39
corporeality 143 distanciation 149
corporalization 202 documentary film 18, 157-158
corporal identity 148 doppelgänger 96
cult value 126 double signature 191, 193-194
double subject 193
D double, the 20, 85-87
Dada 119 dream interpretation (Freud) 17
Death dreams 44
asymbolic death 123 duality (as pragmatic device) 19
flat Death 123 dyadism (pure) 92
Life/Death (paradigm) 123
literal death 123 E
deception 124 editing 29, 35, 108, 175
deception (process of) 131 editing techniques (dissolve, fade,
deception (strategy of) 124 cut) 39
decoloniality 197 ego 85, 136, 138
dédoublement 156 emotion 32
depersonalization 16, 85-87 cinematic emotion 33
depersonalization process 88 factitious emotions 158
depersonalized body 94 emotionalizing of nature, the 33
paranoid depersonalization 91 empathy 34
depth, illusion of depth 26 empathy (approach of) 158
derealization 16, 85-86 enunciation 141-142, 145, 149, 159
diachronic intertextualization 141 visual-acoustic enunciation 139
dialectic(s) 54, 76, 138, 167 enunciator 149
dialogue 17, 61, 75114, 129, 136, 138- epistemology 18
140, 143, 193, 196 equality 189, 192
Bakhtinian dialogue 137-138 estrangement 70, 121
étrangement 85
index of subjects 263

temporal estrangement 200 feminine, the (as uncanny) 196
excess 56-57 feminist manifesto 195
experience 14, 55 feminist movement 194, 196
aesthetic experience 152, 159 fetishism 92-93
collective experiences 191 fictional imaginary 154-155
depersonalization experience 86 fictum/ficta 150
disorienting experience of time 200 film 135
echographic experience 200 autonomous production 28
experience of a diegetic world 59 film (as an authorial, creative act)
experience of a place (the theater) 60
59 film (as independent art form) 24
experience of a situation (real and imaginary object 149
unreal) 59 new viewing conditions 61
experiential states of characters 42, subjective and fictive imaginary 154
49, 51 film consumption 61, 63
experiential states of viewers 49, 51 film form 13, 161, 166, 175, 179, 184
film experience 15, 49, 54, 57-58, concept of film form 161
61-62 film form (subjective aspects of) 171
history of the cinematic experience film form (theory of) 18
57 film image 47
inner experience 18 film machine 12, 24, 54, 59
media experience 15 film style 137
non-standard metaphysics of experi- film text 12
ence 49 filmic properties 165
experimental film 152, 189, 194 mental properties 167
experimental film poetics 189 film language 137
experimental film/video art 198 overtly subjective film language 191
expression 121, 137, 141-142 film noir 81
aesthetic expression 91 film restoration 203
artistic expression (need for) 58 film studies 12, 17-18, 53, 135, 146
self-expression 124 film theater, the 54, 61
expressivity 62 film theory 24, 99
psychological expressivity 201 approach by adumbration 171
exteriority 69, 102, 107, 115, 165 auteurism 171, 173
exterior adventure 113 ethnographic studies 53
radical exteriority 78 Feminist Film Studies 53
external (objective) reality 156 film-linguistics 136
French film theory (of the 1920s) 38
F historical studies 53
fable 137 meta-theory of Film Studies 146
facial mimicry 33 modern film theory 143
faciality 78-80 narrative film theory 24, 40
faulty biographism 142 reception 14, 53, 154
female agency 189 film viewing 59, 65

filmic dream 12, 31-32, 38, 40, 43-44, hermaphroditism 198
50, 182, 184 hermaphrodite, the 196-198
filmic sign 167, 175, 179 pseudo hermaphroditism 198
filmic vision 57 heteronormativity 194
first-person camera/vision 69, 73-76, human mind 23, 164, 171
78, 80, 108 hupokeimenon 147, 149, 157
Firstness 16, 98 hybridization 19
flashback 30, 36-37
objective flashback 31 I
subjective flashback 31 identification 16, 34, 59, 77, 83, 107,
flashforward 30 110, 112, 115, 149, 155
Formalism 135, 143 construction of identity 63
Formalist studies 137 forced identification 82
Formalist theories 18, 135 identification (approach of) 158
formalist-cognitivist theory-amal- identification process 110
gam 145 impossible identification 117
Formalists 143, 146 primary identification 153
isotopic Formalism 149 spectatorial identification 16
French impressionism women’s identities (rethinking of)
French impressionist cinema 36 189
French impressionist films 33 identity 86-87, 91, 95, 121, 126, 131
French New Wave 129 androgynous identity 19
Freudian heritage 196 corporal identity 148
Freudian Unheimliche 196 existential identity (of the visible
Futurists, the 39 world) 121
loss of identity 85
G sexual identity 198
gaze 57, 59-60, 82, 132, 189, 192 subjective identity 127, 129
introspective quality of the gaze 130 ideology 199
object-gaze/subject-gaze 139 ideological reductionism 149
spectatorial gaze 53 illusion 125, 129
subjective gaze 127 image 30, 36, 38-40, 189
voyeuristic gaze 199 cinematic image (perception of) 27
gender 189 digital image 54
gender studies 149 image (present tense of the) 107
social norms of gender 194 image of crime 122, 130
German expressionism 33 image-realization 146
gestalt principle 177 image-speech 142
image-text 142
H images and sounds 107
hallucination 39, 43-44, 50, 182-184 imaginary, the 18, 151
paradoxical hallucination 183 fictional imaginary 154
heimlich 86 unconscious imaginary 154
imagination 31-32, 34, 124, 151

imaginary double 151 intonation 116, 145
imaginary object (film as) 18 Italian neo-realism 120
imaginary present, the 154
imaginary subjectivity 156-157 L
moral imagination 158 Lacanian concept (of the feminine) 195
visual imagination (of the character) Lacanian theory (of the imaginary of the
46 subject) 155
imitation (process of) 34 landscape theory 19, 174
immediacy of art 119 liberal capitalism 190
immersion 194 literary theory 135
immersive hypnotic states 200 literature 18, 85, 135, 137, 145
immersive post-cinematic spaces lyrical asceticism 17, 116
204
individualism 120, 159 M
inflection make-believe 18, 129, 149, 151, 155-156
experiential inflection 49 Maoism 120
inflected shot 14, 47-48 materialism 73
inner speech 75-77, 137, 217 material embodiment 15
inner world 16-17, 85, 99, 101, 107, material existence (of the character)
109, 166 74, 76
attention, memory, imagination, material values 145
emotion 28 materiality (of image and words)
inscriptions (visual and auditory) 171 138
institution of art 198 May 68 120
institutional politics 199 mediality (of image and words) 138
intentionality 168, 174 mediation 14
intentionality (concept of) 171 mediation of subjectivity 13
intercorporeal apparatus 193 medium 24, 61, 65, 163, 179
interiority 24, 83, 110, 180 cinematic medium 166
inner experience (of the character) experiential medium 204
107 film medium 24-25, 41
interior adventure 113 film medium (centrality of) 62
interior experience (expression of) filmic structure 164
102, 110 information medium 204
interior landscape 19, 179 medium (theory of) 179
interior language 24 photography 126, 128
interior retrospective voice 101, 108 memory 29, 31-32, 34, 36
interior voice 101 mental processes 13, 23-25, 28, 32, 37-
internal (subjective) reality 156 38
Internet, the 125 attention, memory, imagination,
interpretant 95-96, 173 emotion 13, 30, 32, 37
intersexuality 189, 198 mental mechanism 27
concept of intersexuality 196 mental processes and emotions 32
intersexual, the 196

objectification or externalization (of O
mental inner processes) 28 object, the 138-139, 152, 176, 192
mental properties (of cinema) 165 subject/object 19
metaphor 128, 130 objective world 36, 49
migration 192, 197 objectivity 11, 79, 97, 121, 151, 166, 176
mirror 86, 189, 199 material objectivity 124
magnifying or deforming mirror objective immanence (of the charac-
149 ter) 74
mirror structure 192 objectivist postulate 11
mise-en-abyme 150 scientific objectivity 198
modern mass media 129 subjectified objectivity 179
modernism 130-131 ontological status (of self and other)
artistic modernism 130, 132 159
economic, social, cultural 129 ontology (of the double) 19
modern art 125 other, the 19, 77-79, 87, 136, 158
modernity 54, 57, 59, 125-126 outer/outside world 24, 80, 85, 94, 99,
popularization of modernity 57 110, 113, 127, 166, 170
reinvention of the modern (by the ci- space, time, causality 28
nema) 57
modulation (as a sign of subjectivity) P
176 painting 121, 124, 129, 166, 191
mosaicism 198 Panorama (adoption of) 54
movie theater 54, 116 paradigm 149
multiplex, the 61 film theoretical paradigms 142
multimedia projects 189 neoformalist and cognitivist para-
music theory 138 digms 136
new paradigms of memory and loss
N 189
narratology 12, 18, 171 paradigm change in film theory 135
narration 25, 58, 149 paradoxical hallucination 183
narrative cinema 121 parallax 15, 71, 79
narrative norms (deconstruction of) parallax problem 15, 71
119 parallax (phenomenon of) 70
narrative realism 120 paranoia 95
narrator 149 parole 136, 146
necrocapitalism 205 pathologies 87
neoformalism 135, 144, 146 Peircean phenomenological triad 16,
neoliberal capitalism 205 91, 94
neorealism 60 Peircean firstness 16, 91, 94
neurosis 86 Peircean possibility 96
nobody space 87 Peircean reality 98
non-canonic art 199 Peircean secondness 16, 94
Nouvelle Vague 11 Peircean thirdness 19, 91, 94-95
novel theory 135 perception 28, 42, 150, 155

concept of image perception 144 autonomous and aesthetic narrative
defamiliarizing modes of perception system 25
189 formal side 35
depth and movement 13, 25, 27, 30 material side 35
modified perception 200 psychological study of the photoplay
multi-layered time/space perception 37, 40
200 specificity (of the photoplay) 29
perception (radical alteration of) physical presence 143
121 physiological camera 144
perception of film images 135 pictorial classicism 119
perception of meaning 30, 32 pleasure 85
performance 15, 63-65, 129, 201, 191 plot 17, 120
inaugural performance 202 poetic language 127
performativity 201 point of view 48, 70, 171, 174, 176
performative dimension 193 point of view (distant) 110
phenomenology 15, 18, 91, 178 PoV shot 12, 14, 42-44, 46-47, 146,
Firstness 16, 91, 94 172, 175
phenomenological perspective 150 political agency 204
phenomenologists 165 political movements 195
phenomenology (of a character’s ex- politics (queer and feminist) 194
periential state) 46 politics of the body 189
Secondness 16, 94 exile 189
Thirdness 16, 91, 94-95 polyglossy (tonal and visual) 140
phi-phenomenon 27 polymorphism 142
philosophy 18, 124, 146, 148, 161, 178- polyphony 141
179 polyphonic image 140
constructivist philosophy 172 polyphonic writing 137
cultural philosophy 144 polyphony (tonal and visual) 140
philosophy of critical representation popularity 57, 59
120 modernization of popularity 57
philosophy of identity 17 positional camera 169-170, 180, 184
philosophy of silence 127 positivism 144
photography 11, 17, 121, 123, 129, 168, possibility-sign 91
189 PoV shot 12, 14, 42-44, 46-47, 146,
photographic image 54, 122 172, 175
photography (silent quality of) 128 PoV models/structures 139-140
photography and crime 126 pragmatism 140
photography and death 17, 122 semio-pragmatics 53
role of photography in cinemato- presence 202
graphic storytelling 119 presentness 91-92
scientific photography 201 profilmic 40, 172, 175, 179
subjective identity 124 projection 34
photoplay, the 24, 27-28, 32 objectification (embodiment)
through projection 34

projection (approach of) 158 logical reflexivity 164
projection (processes of) 149 reflexivity (question of ) 168
psychic processes 146 regulation 59
psychoanalysis 18, 135, 146, 196 regulation (of the cinema) 58
psychoanalytic studies 149 relational politics 193
subjective and fictive imaginary 154 relationality 62
psychology 23, 93, 100, 107, 113-114, relocation of cinema 15, 64
116, 144 repetition 201
moral psychology 158 echo and mirror 201
psychological acts, attention, mem- Representamen 91
ory and imagination 28 representation 41, 150
psychological expressivity 201 absolute transparency 125
psychological laws (of the mind) 28 cognitive representations (theory of)
psychological processes 25 18
psychopathologies 87 crisis of representation 119
psychophysical presence 150 dreams/delusions 43
psychophysical reality 155, 158 filmic depiction of a solipsistic
punctuation (notion of) 121 world 49
punctum 17, 121, 129, 223 filmic dream 184
filmic representation (of dizziness)
Q 180
quasi-psychisme 165, 184 filmic representation (of hallucina-
Queer movement 196 tion) 42, 182
filmic representation (of thought)
R 42, 165
racism 197 mimetic representation 79
radical feminist theory 189 new forms of representation 119
ratification 56 reality and representation 124
re-invention of cinematic alternatives representation (critique of) 121
195 representation (double meaning of)
re-invention of the “feminine” 195 179
real effectiveness 92 representation (of experience) 14,
real, the 11, 125 41
realist novel 121 representation (of inner states) 12,
reality 85 13
illusion of reality 17 representation (of interior land-
loss of reality 125 scape) 180, 182
principle of reality 16 representation (problem of) 176
reception 14, 53, 154 representational prompts 14, 47-48
recipient model 144 supremacy of pictorial representa-
recognition 56-57 tion 119
reductionist approach 144 thing-representations 138
reflexivity 164 word-representations 138

world of objects (in space and time) silent cinema 33, 36
42, 49 Simulacrum, the 125-126
repression 16, 85, 197 sociology 146
economic mechanisms of repression sound (introduction of) 54
205 soundtrack 111, 127, 129
reproducibility 189 space 23, 41, 199
technology of reproducibility 190 definition of space 121
reversibility 80, 193, 200 domestic space 62, 64
immersive mental space 189
S Space for Theater Research 191
School of Wisconsin 143 spectacle 53, 60, 122
scopic compulsion 94 spectator 12, 28, 34, 55, 59, 64-65, 82,
screen, the 55, 189-190 101, 108, 131, 145, 149-150, 199
cell phone 55 early film spectator 60
computer 55 mental activity of the spectator 27
DVD player 55 nascent cinematographic spectator
iPod 55 58
media facade 55 neo-spectator 64
movie theater 55 spectator (as a subject) 53
tablet 55 spectator theory 12, 24, 40
television set 55 spectatorial response 144
Secondness 16, 98 spectator’s body 189
seeing/being seen 19 speech 124, 136, 138
self, the 85, 158-159 dynamic processes of image-speech
semiotics 148 139
sexuality 197-198 inner and outer speech 136
sexual ambiguity 198 Steadicam 72
sexual identity 198 stimulus/response (models of) 144
sexual synthesis 198 storytelling 129
shifters 139 storytelling (classical forms of) 17
shot storytelling (negation of) 120
delusional and hallucinatory 14, 49 stream of consciousness 23, 37, 57
dream sequence(s) 14, 49-50 structural-functionalism (theory of)
lying flashbacks 49 144
out-of-focus shot 35 structuralist approaches 149
PoV shot 14, 42-44, 46-49, 172, 175 studium 121
sign(s) 12, 18 subject theory (trans-linguistic) 137
excess of signs 125 subject, the 137, 143
inscribed signs of subjectivity 18 aesthetic subject 148
sign function 145 cinematic roles of subject 192
world of signs 126 concrete subjects 193
silence 17, 127, 129, 194 creative subjects 192
existential nature of silence 127 dissident subject 193
suspension of motion 129 divided subject 126

double subject 191 political and cultural functions of
fictive imaginary subject 154 subjectivity 17, 189
imaginary subject 18, 150 sign level 166
intercultural subjects 192 spectatorial subjectivity (restructur-
modern subject 120, 128, 151 ing of) 61
modern subject (crisis of ) 131 split subjectivity 158
multiple and dynamic subject 18 subjective (literal/metaphorical) 175
notion of subject 136, 147 subjective vision 71-72, 76
sociopolitical or ideological dimen- subjectivity (as an author) 100
sions 149 subjectivity (expression of) 128
subject/object 19 subjectivity (of a subject) 147
subject-position 145 subjectivity (three levels of) 166
subjective double 151 subjectivity of the character 30
women subjects 192 subjectivity of the spectator 30
subjective camera 36, 72-73, 76, 81-83, subjectivity of settings 33
100, 110, 150, 218 text level 166
subjective judgment 162 the term subjectivity 149
subjectivity 11-12, 24, 40, 79, 144, 193, trans-linguistic conception of sub-
200 jectivity 146
active and productive subjectivity trans-subjectivity 159
146 subjectum 147
concept of subjectivity 12, 147, 161 surrealism 119
corporal subjectivities 143 surrealist aesthetics 124
counter-subjectivity 189 suspense 34, 107, 112-113
de-subjectification 156-157 suspension 121
dédoublement (two-folding) 152 suspension of disbelief 152
differentiated subjectivities 138 Symbolic, the 125, 128
dissident subjectivities 205 syntagmas 140
double subjectivity 19
dynamic and multiplied notion of T
subjectivity 135, 145 technique (of distancing) 108, 110
embodied subjectivity 15, 69, 70, 75 technology 129
history of the concept 147 television 61, 125
imaginary subjectivity 152-153, 156 temporality
imprint of subjectivity 166 interior temporalities 200
individual subjectivity 147 temporal estrangement 200
intentional subjectivism 97 temporalities of memory, imagina-
intersubjectivity 77, 159 tion and desire 200
objectified subjectivity 34, 179 temporality (of the film) 108
ontological level 166 theater 24, 26-27, 99, 191
ontological subjectivity 18, 161-163, experimental theater 192
166, 169, 179, 181 Thirdness 16
philosophized subjectivity 162 three- interpretant structure 95
pluralization of subjectivity 140 time 23, 41

definition of time 121 viewer 14, 43, 125
dimension of time 200 viewer (the mind of) 50
historical time 200 visual metaphor 50
inner time (expression of) 120 visual percepts 13
reversibility of time 200 visualized bodies 189
time in suspension 17 voice 16, 75, 108
transfigured time 200 Bressonian voice 100, 114-115
trans-disciplinary perspective(s) 17, disembodied voice 104, 107
146 inner speech 75-77, 82, 137, 217
trans-linguistics 142 interior voice 17, 101-102, 108-109
traumatism (political) 192 on-screen voice/interior voice 114
trope 60 retrospective interior voice 105-106
Trotskyism 120 tone of voice 112, 117
truth (notion of) 125 toneless voice 114
voice-in 101
U voice-off 101
uncanny 15, 70, 86, 94, 97, 124, 196 voice-over 17, 100-101
feminine, the (as uncanny) 196 voyeur 17, 131
uncanny (expression of) 127
uncanny depth and interiority 79 W
uncanny experience(s) 16, 85, 87 windows (framing the viewing
unconscious, the 85 experience) 64
unheimlich 85-86, 97, 194, 196
das Unheimliche 16 Y
Freudian Unheimliche 196 YouTube 63
V Z
video recorder 62 Zen Buddhism 127
videotape, the
Betamax/VHS 61

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Subjectivity

The Key Debates

Mutations and Appropriations

Edited by Dominique Chateau

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966

Cover design: Neon, design and communications / Sabine Mannel

isbn 978 90 8964 317 9

© D. Chateau / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2011

The Cinema as Art of the Mind: Hugo Münsterberg, First Theorist of

The Man Who Wasn’t There: The Production of Subjectivity in

Beyond Subjectivity. Bakhtin’s Dialogism and the Moving Image 135

Conversation with Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki 189

London / Paris / Amsterdam

André Bazin’s objectivist postulate is well-known: cinema is a production of ob-

Subjectivity from the Standpoint of Film

introduction: rethinking subjectivity in film 13

introduction: rethinking subjectivity in film 15

Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) is amongst the most meaningful

introduction: rethinking subjectivity in film 17

introduction: rethinking subjectivity in film 19

It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tlön comprises only

The Active Mental Cooperation of the Spectator

the cinema as art of the mind 25

The Impression of Depth

That flatness is an objective part of the technical physical arrangements, but

It is a unique inner experience, which is characteristic of the perception of the

The Impression of Movement

the cinema as art of the mind 27

The Objectification of Subjective, Mental Processes of the Spectator

The Attention – the Close-up

The close-up, as the objectification of the inner act of attention contributes to

The Memory – the Flashback / the Imagination – the Flash-forward

the cinema as art of the mind 29

It should be noted that in the mental processes of attention, memory, or imagina-

Mental Images: In the Mind of the Characters...

the cinema as art of the mind 31

Emotions: “The Central Aim of the Film”

The Emotions of the Characters on the Screen

The Emotions of the Spectator Before the Screen

the cinema as art of the mind 33

Emotion Produced by Formal Means: “The Subtle Art of the Camera”

the cinema as art of the mind 35

Hugo Münsterberg and the French Film Theory of the 1910s

[...] since Bergson indeed compares conceptual thought to the mechanism of

the cinema as art of the mind 37

the cinema as art of the mind 39

The difference between Yhcam’s approach to subjectivity in film and Münster-

Many Representations of the World

Lies, Dreams, Delusions

the representation of experience in cinema 43

Film still from Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957).

the representation of experience in cinema 45

Non-depiction in the Film Image

the representation of experience in cinema 47

the representation of experience in cinema 49

Stretching the Medium

the representation of experience in cinema 51

To Gain Experience and to Have an Experience: Excess and