Doubting Vision

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 Doubting Vision
Film and the Revelationist Tradition

Malcolm Turvey

2008
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Turvey, Malcolm, 1969–

Doubting vision : film and the revelationist tradition / by Malcolm Turvey.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-532097-8; 978-0-19-532098-5 (pbk.)
1. Film criticism·Europe·History. I. Title.
PN1995.T7935 2008
791.4301·dc22 2007043642

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To my father, George Henry Turvey, and in memory
of my mother, Lorna Lesley Turvey
The concept of „seeing‰ makes a tangled impression. Well, it is tangled.
·Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book originated in a Ph.D. dissertation under the supervision of Richard

Allen in the cinema studies department at New York University. I thank him
as well as the other members of my committee, Annette Michelson, Stuart
Liebman, Noël Carroll, and William Simon. Stuart kindly recommended the
project to Oxford University Press, and his dissertation on Jean EpsteinÊs early
Ôlm theory has had a major inÒuence on my thinking about Epstein.
While completing the dissertation, I taught for a year in the communica-
tion arts department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where I was wel-
comed warmly by faculty, staff, and students. In particular I thank my teaching
assistant, Jane M. Greene, for her friendship and support. I also encountered
two formidable thinkers who made me realize (perhaps unbeknownst to them)
that I needed to fundamentally reconceptualize this project. Noël Carroll care-
fully read and criticized the Ôrst version of the manuscript, exposing its theo-
retical Òaws in the kindest way possible, while David Bordwell brought home
to me the limits of theoretical explanation. Both also proved to be generous,
supportive, and fun colleagues. While the rewriting that ensued was a time-
consuming and at times painful process, I think the dissertation, and the subse-
quent book, is much better for it. I hope they agree.
For the past ten years I have been fortunate to be associated with the
journal October, and I thank its editors, Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss,
Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, Denis Hollier, George Baker,
and Mignon Nixon, for lively and stimulating intellectual exchange. In particu-
lar I must acknowledge Rosalind, who has not only been unfailingly generous
over the years, but whose seminal book The Optical Unconscious Ôrst alerted
me to the role of visual skepticism in modernism.
viii acknowledgments

IÊm grateful to those anonymous reviewers who encouraged me to ad-

dress contemporary Ôlm theory and to better justify my theoretical approach.
Conversations with Murray Smith and Federico Windhausen have helped in
too many ways to mention. I thank my colleagues in visual culture at Sarah
Lawrence College, as well as Bella Brodzki, Gilberto Perez, Shahnaz Rouse,
and Maria Negroni, whose dedication to their own scholarship has been an
inspiration. Thanks also to my students and research assistants, especially Hill-
ary Plemons. Two Bogert grants from Sarah Lawrence College for release time
from teaching helped me complete the book.
I thank my editor at Oxford University Press, Shannon McLachlan, for
taking a chance on a work of Ôlm theory at a time when university presses
show too little interest in the subject, as well as Christina Gibson and Gwen
Colvin for their help in steering the book through production.
Most important, I thank my intellectual mentors, Annette Michelson and
Richard Allen. AnnetteÊs courses and articles on Ôlm theory, avant-garde Ôlm,
and the visual arts Ôred my imagination while a graduate student unlike any-
thing before. Richard showed me a new way of thinking and writing, one in
which clarity, precision, conceptual delineation, and a suspicion of a priori
generalization are the hallmarks. The example of their work has at all times
been in the forefront of my mind while writing this book.
The bookÊs publication coincides with the tenth year of my membership in
the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra. The music I have played in the orchestra,
along with the friends I have made while doing so, have enriched my life in
ways academia cannot.
I thank Tony and Susan Pasquariello for their support, good humor, and
the endless diversion of playing Philadelphia rummy. My wife, Lisa, is a bet-
ter writer than I could ever hope to be. She has painstakingly read every word,
correcting my grammatical mistakes and suggesting graceful alternatives to my
awkward phrasing. Much more important, she makes my life better every day.
Finally, the love of my family has sustained me through my work on this
project. I have wonderful memories of watching movies with my parents while
growing up, and the genuine pleasure they took in Ôlm led me to study it. This
book is dedicated to them.
 CONTENTS

Introduction 3
1 The Revelationist Tradition: Exegesis 21
2 The Revelationist Tradition: Critique 49
3 Revelationism and Contemporary Film Theory 79
4 The Lure of Visual Skepticism 99

Notes 131

Index 145
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Doubting Vision
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 Introduction

The major goal of Ôlm theory before the 1960s·what today is known as
„classical‰ Ôlm theory·was to prove that the cinema is an art on a par with,
or perhaps even superior to, the other arts.1 Due to its novelty, the prejudice
against its photographic medium (the claim that photography is mere mechani-
cal reproduction and therefore not art), and its quick development into a form
of mass entertainment, the cinema was not accepted as an art, at least initially.
Classical Ôlm theorists therefore set out to show why and how the cinema is
art. They did this, as Noël Carroll has demonstrated, by answering a series
of questions about the cinemaÊs unique properties, the role or value of these
properties, and the stylistic techniques best suited to exploiting such proper-
ties.2 This was because classical Ôlm theorists adhered, for the most part, to
the doctrine of medium speciÔcity, the view that in order for the cinema to be
accepted as a legitimate art, it must be shown to possess valuable attributes of
its own, ones that the other, preestablished arts do not have. Needless to say,
theorists proposed different answers to these questions. This book is about one
such answer, as well as its inÒuence on contemporary Ôlm theory. According
to this answer, the cinemaÊs most signiÔcant property, one which the other arts
do not possess (or at least do not possess to the same degree), is its ability to
uncover features of reality invisible to human vision. The value of this property
is that it can reveal the true nature of reality to viewers. And the techniques best
suited to exploiting it, for reasons I will explore shortly, are those that least
resemble human sight. I call this the revelationist answer.
The cinemaÊs revelatory capacity is often mentioned in passing by classi-
cal Ôlm theorists when making arguments about the difference between cinema
4 doubting vision

and the other arts. For example, Walter Benjamin claims that the cinema is
helping to diminish if not destroy the „aura‰ traditionally possessed by works
of art in part because it can reveal „entirely new structural formations of the
subject‰ invisible to human vision. „Evidently a different nature opens itself to
the camera than opens to the naked eye,‰ he suggests.3 The cinemaÊs revelations
in turn elicit a more analytical, „testing‰ attitude on the part of its viewers, he
asserts, one that is antithetical to the reverence encouraged by auratic art.
There are, however, four classical Ôlm theorists who view the cinemaÊs re-
velatory power as its most important attribute and who devote a considerable
amount of space to it in their writings rather than simply mention it in passing.
These are Jean Epstein (1897–1953), Dziga Vertov (1896–1954), Béla Balázs
(1884–1949), and Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966). As Epstein put it in 1935,
„cinematography renders perceptible through sight and sound individual beings
we thought invisible and inaudible and divulges the reality of certain abstrac-
tions.‰4 And, according to Epstein, one of the abstractions revealed by the cinema
is the fourth dimension of time, which human beings cannot see. As I show in the
pages that follow, Vertov, Kracauer, and Balázs make similar arguments about
the revelatory capacity of the cinema, although they differ considerably concern-
ing the truths about reality it supposedly uncovers. Epstein and Vertov, who were
Ôlmmakers, also attempted to exploit this capacity in some of their Ôlms.
In advancing their claims about the cinemaÊs revelatory power, these four
theorists and Ôlmmakers employ an analogy with considerable signiÔcance for
their theories. They compare the cinema to microscopes and telescopes, argu-
ing that, like them, it is capable of revealing truths about reality that are invis-
ible in the sense that the human eye is incapable of seeing them unaided due
to its limitations. It is this property, they seem to believe, that sets the cinema
apart, because the other arts, with the exception of photography, lack the tech-
nical means to reveal such truths. And while photography does possess some of
these technical means, as an atemporal art its revelatory capacity is limited. For
example, they frequently highlight the magniÔcatory power of the close-up,
arguing that it can reveal various mobile features of reality that human vision
is too weak to see, much like a microscope can reveal bacteria invisible to the
naked eye. Balázs wrote:

By means of the close-up the camera in the days of the silent Ôlm revealed also
the hidden mainsprings of a life which we had thought we already knew so well.
Blurred outlines are mostly the result of our insensitive short-sightedness and
superÔciality. We skim over the teeming substance of life. The camera has un-
covered that cell-life of the vital issues in which all great events are ultimately
conceived; for the greatest landslide is only the aggregate of the movements of
single particles.5

They also often invoke the fact that the cinematic image is a photographic
„trace,‰ to use philosopher Gregory CurrieÊs word, of what it depicts.6 Al-
though this property does not differentiate the cinema from photography, it
does distinguish it from representational paintings, drawings, and sculptures.
Introduction 5

For however reliable and accurate, hand-made representational art is a depic-

tion of what its maker thinks or believes he or she is seeing (or has seen).
A photograph, however, is independent of thoughts and beliefs in the following
way: when working properly, a camera records, in the form of a photograph,
what is in front of it, regardless of what the camera operator thinks or believes
is in front of it. (Of course, whether and how photographs are created is not
independent of thoughts and beliefs.) This independence from intentions has
meant that many have viewed the cinema and photography as fundamentally
different from the other arts, including Epstein, Vertov, Balázs, and Kracauer,
although none of these theorists developed a theory of the photographic trace
as others, such as André Bazin and, more recently, Kendall Walton have.

II

Nobody has investigated this answer to the question, what is cinema, although
scholars have often noted its presence in classical Ôlm theory.7 In the Ôrst half
of this book, I undertake just such an investigation of the versions of it found
in the writings, and where relevant the Ôlms, of Epstein, Vertov, Balázs, and
Kracauer. Such a study is needed not only because their work constitutes an
important but neglected tradition within the history of Ôlm theory, but because
it has profound implications for Ôlm theory today.
The basic argument made by these four theorists and Ôlmmakers is that
certain cinematic techniques·the close-up, slow motion, time-lapse photog-
raphy, editing·can reveal features of reality that are invisible in the sense that
it is impossible for the human eye to see them without assistance. This claim
is, in itself, perfectly reasonable; it is widely recognized that, in addition to
being an art form, the cinema is a revelatory visual technology much like mi-
croscopes and telescopes. Indeed, it was at least in part invented by amateur
and professional scientists, such as Marey, Muybridge, and Janssen, in order to
discover and observe features of a diverse array of natural phenomena partially
or wholly inaccessible to sight, such as the precise wing movements of birds or
the exact leg positions of galloping horses. In the cinemaÊs early years, before
the industry-wide standardization of the narrative feature-length Ôlm in the mid-
1910s, Ôlmmakers often exploited the revelatory power of the cinema for en-
tertainment purposes, making popular „scientiÔc‰ Ôlms with „views of cholera
germs, human sperm, Òeas, plant pollination, and other subjects.‰8 In his work
of Ôlm theory of 1916, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, Hugo Münster-
berg describes this use of the cinema in his characteristically elegant fashion:

After overcoming tremendous difÔculties, the scientists succeeded in developing a

microscope kinematography which multiplies the dimensions a hundred thousand
times. We may see on the screen the Ôght of the bacteria with the microscopically
small blood corpuscles in the blood stream of a diseased animal. Yes, by the mira-
cles of the camera we may trace the life of nature even in forms which no human
observation really Ônds in the outer world.9
6 doubting vision

However, in conjunction with this uncontroversial claim, the work of Epstein,

Vertov, Balázs, and Kracauer contains another, more mysterious feature: all four
invest the cinemaÊs revelatory capacity with considerable signiÔcance, arguing
that revelation is its most important property. There is, of course, good reason to
be happy about the existence of any visual technology that can uncover features of
reality inaccessible to human vision. Such technologies extend our perceptual and
cognitive access to the natural universe around us, thereby enabling us to better
explain, predict, and control it and, in turn, improve our well-being. For example,
observing through a microscope the properties of a pathogenic bacterium helps
us understand how the microbe infects the human body and Ônd ways to pro-
tect ourselves from it, thereby controlling or eradicating whatever disease it
causes.
But these four theorists and Ôlmmakers go well beyond mere happiness
about the existence of the cinema. And they do not spend much time focusing
on the way it improves our ability to explain, predict, and control the natural uni-
verse. Instead, to varying degrees in their writings, they express near-religious
extremes of euphoria about its revelatory capacity. And they conceive of it as an
awesome, even miraculous power that, rather than extending the power of the
human eye, escapes its limitations and thereby has the potential to bring about a
fundamental change for the better in human existence.
For example, in the following passage, Epstein places the Ôlm within a
lineage of inventions that, by virtue of their differences from the human body,
escapes its limitations:

The essence of living is surpassing oneself. Man had to do more than walk; he
invented the wheel, which is something other than the leg. He had to do more than
swim; hence the propeller is something other than the Òagellum. And needing
to do more than see, man augmented the microscopic and telescopic apparatuses
with the cinematic apparatus, creating something other than the eye. . . . once [the
cinema] addresses all of the senses, each will be able to surpass its physiological
limitations.10

ConÔdent in the superhuman power of its revelatory capacity, Epstein draws the
following conclusion about the cinemaÊs potential to alter human life for the bet-
ter: „Now we are approaching the promised land, a place of great wonders. . . .
This is why some of us have entrusted to [cinema] our highest hopes.11
EpsteinÊs sense of the cinemaÊs freedom from human perceptual limita-
tions and its potential to change the world for the better is everywhere evident
in VertovÊs Ôlm theory:

I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only

I can see it. Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility, I am in con-
stant motion, I draw near, then away from objects, I crawl under, I climb onto
them. I move apace with the muzzle of a galloping horse, I plunge full speed into
a crowd, I outstrip running soldiers, I fall on my back, I ascend with an airplane,
I plunge and soar together with plunging and soaring bodies.12
Introduction 7

Rather than arguing that the cinema extends the power of the human eye,
Vertov claims that, before the invention of the cinema, people couldnÊt see at
all, at least as far as social reality is concerned. As we shall discover, Vertov ar-
gues that the cinema allows people to see the true nature of social reality for the
Ôrst time, thereby escaping their condition of blindness toward it: „The eyes of
children and adults, the educated as well as the uneducated, are opening, as it
were, for the Ôrst time. Millions of workers, having recovered their sight.‰13
Balázs, meanwhile, claims that the cinema has brought about the evolu-
tion of new perceptual and cognitive abilities in human beings: „The birth of
Ôlm art led not only to the creation of new works of art but to the emergence
of new human faculties with which to perceive and understand this new art.‰
He declares that it is the task of his Ôlm theory to „investigate and outline that
sphere of the development of human sensibility which developed in mutual
interaction with the evolution of the art of the Ôlm.‰14 Because it has led to the
evolution of new perceptual and cognitive abilities, Balázs, like Epstein and
Vertov, pronounces the invention of the cinema to be an epochal transformation
for the better in human existence.

The evolution of the human capacity for understanding which was brought about
by the art of the Ôlm, opened a new chapter in the history of human culture. . . . We
were witnesses not only of the development of a new art but of the development of
a new sensibility, a new understanding, a new culture in its public. . . . WE HAVE
LEARNED TO SEE.15

Finally, in 1960 Kracauer made a claim similar to VertovÊs, although for

different reasons. According to Kracauer, it is physical rather than social reality
to which humans were blind before the invention of the cinema, because it had
been „persistently veiled by ideologies‰ prior to modernity, and then again by
„the habit of abstract thinking we have acquired under the reign of science and
technology‰16 in modernity.

Film renders visible what we did not, or perhaps even could not, see before its ad-
vent. It effectively assists us in discovering the material world with its psychophysi-
cal correspondences. We literally redeem this world from its dormant state, its state
of virtual nonexistence, by endeavoring to experience it through the camera.17

As we shall see, Kracauer thinks that the cinema enables people to escape the
condition of blindness toward physical reality, and as a result he also believes
that it can transform life for the better by helping people „escape from [the]
spiritual nakedness‰ of modernity.18
Admittedly, it is typical for people to get excited about new technolo-
gies until they become accustomed to them·to wit, the irrational exuberance
about digital technologies of the last decade of the twentieth century. Film was
certainly no exception. As historians of early cinema have shown, its invention
was greeted with a great deal of wonder, and its Ôrst viewers paid money pri-
marily to witness the technological marvel of a moving photographic image.
8 doubting vision

However, Epstein, Vertov, Balázs, and Kracauer began writing about the cin-
ema and making Ôlms at least twenty years after its Ôrst appearance, long after
it had ceased to be a technological novelty. Furthermore, visual technologies
capable of revealing features of reality inaccessible to the naked human eye,
such as microscopes and telescopes, had been around for a lot longer than Ôlm.
Why, then, did these theorists and Ôlmmakers view the cinemaÊs revelatory
power as so important?
They held this view, I argue here, because of their doubts about human
vision·their conviction that our sense of sight fails to give us genuine knowl-
edge of reality.19 Due to this visual skepticism, they desired to escape the human
eyeÊs limitations in order to see reality as it really is, not as it appears to our
Òawed visual faculty.20 And they believed that the cinemaÊs revelatory capacity,
in combination with the fact that it is a machine and therefore partially free of
human intentions, makes it something other than the eye and affords just such an
escape. Furthermore, because the cinema is not only a technology like a micro-
scope or telescope, but an art and a mass art at that, they hoped that its revelatory
power would affect humanity in general by opening the eyes of the masses to
the true nature of reality. For them, the cinema had the potential to be an art of
mass enlightenment, and this is why they held its revelatory power in such high
regard. In the Ôrst chapter of this book, I examine in detail the particular criti-
cisms of human vision made by these theorists and Ôlmmakers and the various
truths about reality that each believed the cinema could reveal. Their work, like
so much in modern culture, divides into two branches. The Ôrst, the naturalist
branch, exempliÔed by Epstein and Vertov, argues that the human eye fails to
see the true nature of reality due to innate handicaps. The second, the culturalist
branch, typiÔed by Balázs and Kracauer, claims that it is cultural forces at work
in modernity that prevent people from seeing reality or aspects of it.

III

Much excellent scholarship has already been published on the work of these
theorists and Ôlmmakers. David Bordwell, Stuart Liebman, and Richard Abel
have shed light on EpsteinÊs difÔcult theory and practice by interpreting it
within the context of French Ôlm theories, art history, and early twentieth-
century French philosophy, as have several recent volumes in French.21 Joseph
Zsuffa, Sabine Hake, and Hanno Loewy have done the same with BalázsÊs
theory in the German context.22 Annette Michelson and Vlada Petric have il-
luminated VertovÊs writings and Ôlms by situating them within the context of
debates among Soviet modernists about the role of art in the construction of
a socialist society in the 1920s, and a new wave of Vertov scholarship by Yuri
Tsivian, John MacKay, and others is Ôlling in gaps in our knowledge of the
historical landscape in which Vertov worked.23 Finally, there is now a veritable
industry of interpretation on how KracauerÊs early film theory constitutes a
response to modernity in the Weimar Republic (although much less attention
has been devoted to his later Theory of Film, 1960).24
Introduction 9

In what follows, I occasionally borrow from the insights of these scholars

while taking a different approach. Instead of investigating these four theorists
and Ôlmmakers individually, as others have done, I examine them together,
showing how they share a distrust of human vision and a concomitant desire
to escape the limitations of human seeing by way of the revelatory power of
the cinema. Nobody has examined the inÒuence of skepticism about sight on
Ôlm, but it is fundamental, at least in the case of these theorists and Ôlmmak-
ers. The considerable value Epstein, Vertov, Balázs, and Kracauer attach to the
cinemaÊs revelatory capacity, and their attendant euphoria about it, can only be
understood within the context of their distrust of human vision, and consider-
ing them together throws this distrust into sharp relief.
Additionally, and more important, their work constitutes a distinct tradi-
tion within the history of the cinema, one that has been overlooked and which
this book seeks to bring to light. This tradition differs in signiÔcant ways from
the cinemaÊs two major traditions, modernism and realism, as can be demon-
strated by examining how its adherents answer the question, what is cinema?
It is commonly assumed that two answers to this question have domi-
nated Ôlm theory and Ôlmmaking since they began. The Ôrst answer is that the
cinemaÊs most signiÔcant artistic property is „its capacity to manipulate real-
ity, that is, to rearrange and thereby reconstitute the proÔlmic event (the event
that transpires in front of the camera).‰25 This answer is identiÔed as modernist
because it is predicated on conceptions of art prevalent in modernism, particu-
larly antimimetic conceptions.
A famous example of this modernist, antimimetic answer is provided
by Rudolf Arnheim in his Film as Art, Ôrst published in 1933. According to
Arnheim, if a Ôlmmaker wishes to create a work of art, he cannot merely me-
chanically record and thereby reproduce what is in front of the camera. Rather,
he must in some way transform it using unique cinematic techniques.

The Ôlm producer himself is inÒuenced by the strong resemblance of his pho-
tographic material to reality. As distinguished from the tools of the sculptor and
the painter, which by themselves produce nothing resembling nature, the camera
starts to turn and a likeness of the real world results mechanically. There is serious
danger that the Ôlm maker will rest content with such shapeless reproduction. In
order that the Ôlm artist may create a work of art it is important that he consciously
stress the peculiarities of his medium.26

Other modernist Ôlm theorists such as Hugo Münsterberg, Soviet montage

Ôlmmakers of the 1920s such as Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein, and most
of the French Impressionist Ôlmmakers of the 1920s, such as Germaine Dulac,
concur that the cinemaÊs most important feature is its capacity to manipulate
reality.
The second of the historically dominant answers to the question, what is
cinema, is that the cinemaÊs most signiÔcant artistic property is its capacity to
reproduce, rather than manipulate, reality. The most famous exponent of this
theory is probably André Bazin. Bazin, who grew to maturity in the 1930s
10 doubting vision

when realism renewed its inÒuence on Western artists and intellectuals, offers a
number of arguments in his writings for why this is so. One focuses on the fact
that photographs mechanically record reality. When exposed, the chemicals on
the surface of a photograph automatically register the light bouncing off what-
ever the camera is pointing toward. According to Bazin, a photograph therefore
„shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model
of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.‰27 This means that photographs
allow humans to „re-present‰ reality for the Ôrst time in history.

This production by automatic means has radically affected our psychology of the
image. The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility
absent from all other picture-making. In spite of any objections our critical spirit
may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced,
actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space. Photography
enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transference of reality from the thing
to its reproduction.28

Cinema goes one step further in re-presenting reality than does still photogra-
phy, Bazin argues, because „for the Ôrst time, the image of things is likewise
the image of their duration, change mummiÔed as it were.‰29
While I do not dispute that these two answers·the modernist and the
realist·to the question, what is cinema, are inÒuential even to this day, there
are others, including the one that is the subject of this book·namely, that the
cinemaÊs most signiÔcant feature is its capacity to reveal truths about reality
invisible to the naked human eye. This revelationist answer constitutes a distinct
alternative to the historically dominant ones of modernism and realism. Like the
realist answer, it views the cinemaÊs ability to mechanically record and repro-
duce reality as a valuable one, rather than denigrating it, as do modernists such as
Arnheim. The theorists and Ôlmmakers I examine in the Ôrst two chapters of this
book constantly laud the cinemaÊs capacity to reproduce reality as it really is, and
they attribute its ability to do so, in part, to its mechanical, photographic nature.
However, they distrust human vision, and it is this skepticism that sets
them apart from realists such as Bazin, because a common feature of realism is
a belief in the capacity of the naked human eye to see reality. Linda Nochlin, in
her seminal work on realism, cites the writings of Edgar Degas as an example
of this faith in vision in nineteenth-century realism: „In his notebooks, Degas
reiterated in both words and sketches his passion for concrete, direct observa-
tion and notation of ordinary, everyday experience.‰30 In BazinÊs writings, we
often encounter a similar faith in human vision along with the view that certain
Ôlms are realist art works because they imitate features of human sight. In an
article on the Ôlmmaker William Wyler, for example, Bazin argues that „Âreal-
ismÊ consists not only of showing us a corpse, but also of showing it to us under
conditions that re-create certain physiological or mental givens of natural per-
ception.‰31 And Bazin celebrates directors such as Wyler and Jean Renoir for
their use of stylistic techniques such as the long take that, supposedly, better
imitate the „givens of natural perception‰ than editing.
Introduction 11

For Epstein, Vertov, Balázs, and Kracauer, human vision does not give us
genuine knowledge of reality. Hence, they view those stylistic techniques that
least resemble human sight as most likely to reproduce it. As Vertov put it:

Until now many a cameraman has been criticized for having Ôlmed a running horse
moving with unnatural slowness on the screen (rapid cranking of the camera)·or
for the opposite, a tractor plowing a Ôeld too swiftly (slow cranking of the camera),
and the like.
These are chance occurrences, of course, but we are preparing a system, a de-
liberate system of such occurrences, a system of seeming irregularities to investi-
gate and organize phenomena.
Until now, we have violated the movie camera and forced it to copy the work
of our eye. And the better the copy, the better the shooting was thought to be.
Starting today we are liberating the camera and making it work in the opposite
direction·away from copying.32

The techniques of slow and fast motion mentioned by Vertov at the begin-
ning of this passage, along with reverse motion, extreme close-ups or long
shots, and editing are also celebrated by modernists such as Arnheim for their
antimimetic properties. But unlike modernists, those in the revelationist tradi-
tion do not view these techniques as incompatible with reproducing reality.
Rather, they celebrate them, along with the cinemaÊs capacity to mechanically
record reality, because they supposedly better enable Ôlmmakers to reproduce
reality as it is and not as it appears to humans with their Òawed sense of sight.
Because the revelationist answer to the question, what is cinema, shares
features with both the modernist and realist answers, there has been some de-
bate about how to categorize the work of the theorists and Ôlmmakers who
propose it. Dudley AndrewÊs book The Major Film Theories, for example, has
been criticized by Sabine Hake for placing Balázs with Arnheim in the „for-
mative‰ or modernist tradition, and Kracauer in the realist; Theodor Adorno
famously called Kracauer a „curious realist‰ because his work does not Ôt the
usual deÔnition of realism.33 However, Balázs, Kracauer, Epstein, and Vertov
belong in neither camp. Rather, they propose an answer to the question that,
while sharing features with them, is distinct from both the realist and modern-
ist answers.

IV

This book also differs from the work of other scholars in that it is primarily
a work of theory, not history. My goal is not only to better understand the
theories that are its subject, but to advance arguments about them and offer a
critique of the revelationist tradition.
Like much Ôlm theory, the writings of Epstein, Vertov, Balázs, and Kra-
cauer are rife with the sort of logical and empirical errors that philosophers and
theorists of Ôlm have exposed and criticized in recent years, such as adherence
12 doubting vision

to the doctrine of medium speciÔcity.34 Instead of retreading ground already

covered so well, I focus on a mistake that has not been addressed by others.
Theorists and Ôlmmakers in the revelationist tradition, I demonstrate in chap-
ter 2, are only able to make their arguments about the limitations of human vi-
sion and the revelatory power of the cinema by misusing perceptual and related
concepts. This takes a particular form in their writings. If we look closely at the
truths about reality that, according to them, are revealed by the cinema, we Ônd
that in many cases they turn out to differ considerably from the sort of empiri-
cal phenomena (such as a distant planet, the particulate structure of an object,
or microbes) that are normally discovered and observed using visual technolo-
gies. In some cases, they are not the kinds of things that the naked human eye
fails to see because it is not powerful enough. Instead, they are things that it is
logically·not empirically·impossible for people to see, with or without the
aid of a visual instrument. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed
out, not being able to, for example, see sounds is not an empirical failing on the
part of human perception.35 It is not because eyes are too weak that they cannot
see a sound. Rather, seeing a sound is logically excluded by the meaning of
the concepts of sight and sound. It makes no sense to say, „I couldnÊt see that
sound·it was too far away‰; one can only fail to see what it makes sense to be
able to see in the Ôrst place, such as a distant planet. To state that a sound can-
not be seen is to say something about the meaning of the concepts of sight and
sound, to express a rule of logical grammar about their use. It is not to claim
that eyes fail to see sounds because they are not strong enough.
Similarly, the truths about reality revealed by the cinema in the theories
I am examining often logically exclude the possibility of being seen, with or with-
out the aid of a visual technology. The past and the future, for example, are not
things that, logically speaking, it is possible for people to see, I argue in chapter 2.
The human eye does not fail to see beyond the present because it is too weak.
Yet Epstein conceives of the fourth dimension of time as if it were an empirical
phenomenon that the naked eye is not powerful enough to see but that can be
revealed by the cinema in the same way that the position of a planet too distant
for the eye to see can be revealed by a telescope. For Vertov, as Annette Michel-
son has demonstrated, it is the true „relations of workers with each other,‰ as
theorized by Marxist-Leninism, that are made visible by the cinema.36 Again,
such relations are not the sort of thing, logically speaking, that can be seen, as
I demonstrate in chapter 2. Yet, Vertov describes social relations between work-
ers as if they were an empirical phenomenon that vision is not powerful enough
to see but that can be observed with the aid of the cinema, much like the par-
ticulate structure of an object can be observed with the aid of a microscope.
The truths about reality uncovered by the cinema in BalázsÊs and KracauerÊs
theories also bear little resemblance to the phenomena that it is logically
possible to observe using visual technologies, as we will also see in chapter 2.
For example, in BalázsÊs theory, one such truth is an individualÊs inner, mental
life. Yet the mind (as opposed to the brain) is not an empirical feature of reality
that the naked human eye fails to see because it is not powerful enough. The
Òesh and bone of the skull do not prevent thoughts and feelings from being
Introduction 13

seen in the same way that they keep the brain from being seen; we do not fail
to see what a person is feeling because we cannot open up her skull. Rather, we
fail to see that a person is feeling sad, or thinking hard, if we are not observant
enough, or if the person is hiding these things from us, not because our visual
faculty is too weak to see thoughts and feelings and we need an X-ray or some
other visual technology in order to see them, as we do, say, BrocaÊs area.
In other instances, paradoxically enough, the opposite is true. Some of
these theorists argue that the cinema reveals things that it is logically and em-
pirically possible for people to see without the aid of a visual technology. For
example, when arguing that one of the features of reality laid bare by the cin-
ema is the inner, mental life of human beings, Balázs claims that a close-up
can reveal the true thoughts and feelings in a liarÊs face, and he cites as an ex-
ample a scene from an Eisenstein Ôlm (presumably The Battleship Potemkin)
in which a priest appears, at Ôrst, „like the sublime image of a saint‰ (Ôg. I.1):

But then the camera gives an isolated big close-up of one eye; and a cunningly
watchful furtive glance slinks out from under his beautiful silky eyelashes like an
ugly caterpillar out of a delicate Òower. Then the handsome priest turns his head
and a close-up shows the back of his head and the lobe of his ear from behind. And
we see the ruthless, vicious selÔshness of a coarse peasant expressed in them.37

By means of a close-up, the camera in this scene, according to Balázs, re-

veals a „different, more profound truth‰ about the priest: the true „selÔshness‰
concealed beneath his sublime visage (Ôg. I.2). But Balázs does not acknowl-
edge that, while the close-up may be drawing the viewerÊs attention to details
of the priestÊs appearance that he or she might not have noticed otherwise, it
certainly is not revealing anything that people cannot see without assistance.
A „cunning glance‰ can be observed without the aid of a visual technology, just
as „selÔshness‰ can be seen in a personÊs face. Yet Balázs describes these and
related details as empirical features of reality that, like microbes, need to be
revealed by the cinema because the human eye is unable to see them. Kracauer
does the same. In cataloguing the cinemaÊs „revealing functions,‰ he suggests

Figure I.1. According to Balázs,

the priest at Ôrst appears „sub-
lime‰ in The Battleship Potemkin
(Sergei Eisenstein, 1925).
14 doubting vision

that „transient‰ phenomena, such as „the manes of . . . galloping horses,‰ are

a good example of the sort of thing „normally unseen‰ by people that the cin-
ema reveals.38 However, like Balázs, Kracauer seems to forget that, while a
Ôlm might draw a viewerÊs attention via a close-up or some other technique to
details of a galloping horse that he or she might not have noticed otherwise,
such as its mane, it certainly is not revealing anything that people cannot see
unassisted.
Thus, there is what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a category mis-
take running rampant in the revelationist tradition, which this book seeks to
expose and diagnose. Just as, according to Ryle, the „ofÔcial doctrine‰ of the
mind perpetuated by Descartes „represents the facts of mental life as if they
belonged to one logical type or category (or range of types or categories), when
they actually belong to another,‰39 so these theorists, in making their argu-
ments about the limitations of human vision, confuse things that the eye is too
weak to see but that can be revealed by a visual technology with things that it
is logically impossible for people to see with or without the help of a visual
technology and things that it is logically and empirically possible for humans
to see unaided.
It might be thought that exposing this category mistake can only be of
historical interest now because Ôlm theory has advanced well beyond the rev-
elationist tradition since the 1960s. Due to the linguistic and cultural turn that
occurred in the Anglo-American arts and humanities in the 1960s, Ôlm theo-
rists over the last four decades have tended to embrace the view that human
subjectivity is inescapable. Hence, they have, on the whole, abandoned the ar-
gument that the cinema escapes the eyeÊs limitations by revealing truths about
reality that it cannot see. Although this has indeed happened, it does not mean
that the revelationist tradition fell into obsolescence in the 1960s. In fact, as
I show in chapter 3, its conception of the cinema as a revelatory artistic medium,
and the distrust of human vision upon which this conception is founded, have
been renewed by semiotic-psychoanalytical Ôlm theorists, Stanley Cavell, pro-
ponents of the so-called modernity thesis, and Gilles Deleuze. Contemporary
Ôlm theorists still tend to view human seeing as limited, and the cinema as
capable of revealing truths that human beings cannot see. And, like their pre-

Figure I.2. A close-up of the

priest in The Battleship Potemkin
reveals his true „selÔshness.‰
Introduction 15

decessors in the revelationist tradition, they advance their arguments about the
failings of human vision and the cinemaÊs revelatory power at the price of mis-
using perceptual and related concepts. One of the reasons I am so concerned to
criticize the revelationist tradition is that it has bequeathed to the study of Ôlm
a careless attitude toward the meanings of such concepts that is still very much
with us. Indeed, we will Ônd in the case of DeleuzeÊs theory, the most contem-
porary Ôlm theory I examine, repetitions of some of the same mistakes made
by Epstein and Vertov. In this respect at least, the break between classical and
contemporary Ôlm theory is more apparent than real.
This book therefore might seem to be a work of destructive criticism, and
in some ways it is. Throughout, I criticize the arguments about the limitations
of human sight that have constituted one of the foundations of Ôlm theory since
the 1920s by showing that theorists and Ôlmmakers routinely misuse percep-
tual concepts in making these arguments. And in chapter 4, I brieÒy point to
some philosophical reasons why it is wrong to distrust human vision even though
it is fallible. Visual skepticism, I conclude, is probably not a solid foundation on
which to build theories of Ôlm. However, this book also has constructive goals.
First, I seek to understand why it is that theorists and Ôlmmakers have suc-
cumbed to skepticism about sight. This can be explained, I argue in chapter 4,
by the fact that such skepticism provides a powerful rationale for the purpose
of cinematic art, thereby fulÔlling the central task of classical Ôlm theory: to
prove that the cinema is an art. Second, having shown throughout in what ways
the cinema is not a revelatory art, in chapter 4 I clarify some legitimate senses
in which it is. The cinema certainly can „reveal truths about reality‰ in ways the
other arts cannot. But, as we shall see, it does not do so, at least primarily, in
the sense meant by theorists and Ôlmmakers in the revelationist tradition. They
assumed incorrectly that the revelation of inaccessible natural phenomena by
visual technologies is the paradigm of cinematic revelation in general, which is
one source of the theoretical problems I expose in this book. Once we rid our-
selves of this misleading assumption and attain a grasp of other senses in which
the cinema is a revelatory art, we can do justice to their claim that it allows
us „to see more and better‰ than the other arts by reconstructing it in a more
plausible form. Indeed, we can better appreciate their genuine insights into the
revelatory powers of the cinema and the ways cinema differs from the other arts
as they are customarily practiced.40
IÊd like to say a word or two about the philosophical tradition I draw on
to criticize Ôlm-theoretical claims about the limitations of human vision. This
is the tradition of analytical philosophy pioneered by Wittgenstein and Ryle in
the mid-twentieth century and further developed by many other philosophers,
which consists primarily of the method, on display throughout this book, of
clarifying the meanings of concepts and their interconnections to show where
and how theorists transgress the bounds of sense.41 This is not a tradition that
has been used much in the study of Ôlm. Indeed, most Anglo-American schol-
ars of the arts are unfamiliar with it. I therefore need to say a little about it and
why I turn to it.42 (Those readers already knowledgeable about this tradition
may want to skip ahead to the Ônal three paragraphs of this introduction.)
16 doubting vision

According to Wittgenstein, the subject matter, questions, problems, and

solutions of philosophy are fundamentally different from those of empirical
disciplines because they are not empirical in nature. While the natural sciences,
for example, aim to explain empirical phenomena, philosophy is concerned
exclusively with something that antecedes and is separable from empirical in-
quiry, namely, questions of sense and meaning. The basic distinction at stake
here can be illustrated, provisionally, by invoking a simple, canonical example.
The sentence „a bachelor cannot be married‰ seems to state a general proposi-
tion about bachelors that is akin to a general empirical proposition like „all
cows eat grass.‰ However, it does not state a general fact, one that can be
proven or disproven by empirical research in the way that the claim „all cows
eat grass‰ can be. Rather, the „cannot‰ of the Ôrst sentence is logical, not em-
pirical. Someone who understands the English language knows in advance of
any empirical investigation that a bachelor cannot be married, that empirical
research will never turn up a married bachelor. And he knows this because it is
part of the logic of the word „bachelor,‰ part of its sense or meaning that, if one
says that someone is a bachelor, he cannot also be married. The sentence in
question exhibits this aspect of the meaning of the word „bachelor‰ by specify-
ing a necessary condition of its use, rather than by making an empirical claim
about the world.
Wittgenstein argued that genuine philosophy is concerned purely with the
type of subject matter this sentence exhibits, with what can be known about
language in advance of any empirical research, namely, the sense or meaning
of the words, expressions, and sentences it contains. Philosophy, he thought,
has nothing of an empirical nature to discover about language or anything else.
As he put it in the Philosophical Investigations:

And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypotheti-
cal in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description
alone must take its place. And this description gets its light, that is to say its pur-
pose, from the philosophical problems. These are, of course, not empirical prob-
lems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that
in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: in despite of an urge to mis-
understand them. These problems are solved, not by giving new information.43

Philosophy is concerned with „the workings of our language,‰ with what

is already in place, not something unknown. The questions it asks are about
sense and meaning, not what is true and false; its problems result from the
transgression of sense into nonsense, not from a deÔcit of empirical informa-
tion; and its solutions consist of showing when and how such transgressions
take place, not discovering new facts.44
To those unfamiliar with WittgensteinÊs work and the tradition of philoso-
phy he helped spawn, this might seem like a trivial conception of philosophy.
Gone, for instance, is the grand enterprise of theory building in the image of
science or the construction of speculative systems found in so much philosophy.
In their place is the apparently mundane activity of describing how linguistic
Introduction 17

expressions are used in practice. However, even if one does not accept Wittgen-
steinÊs claim that philosophy should be concerned exclusively with questions
of meaning, when one realizes the consequences of failures to grasp the cor-
rect use of language, the importance of the philosopherÊs task as articulated by
Wittgenstein becomes all too clear. For although as language users we come to
master the meanings of the expressions in our language and employ them cor-
rectly with ease, we typically lack the ability to articulate the rules governing
their use, just as we follow rules when we speak and write (such as the rules that
govern the position of adjectives before nouns), yet we typically lack the ability
to state in a propositional form what these rules are (unless we have been taught
how to do so). While as ordinary language users we do not normally need to
be able to clarify the logic of our language, there are contexts in which this
inability can have major ramiÔcations·for example, when theorizing about
the mind or the senses, or employing mental and perceptual concepts in study-
ing the arts. Without this ability, we can easily violate the meanings of such
concepts and stray beyond the bounds of sense into nonsense. „A main source
of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use
of our words·Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity‰ (PI §122;
emphasis in the original).
The philosopher Anthony Kenny provides a simple example of how we can
stray beyond the bounds of sense into nonsense due to a failure to clarify the
logic of our language: the confusion between abilities and the agents of these
abilities (which Kenny calls „vehicles‰). A car in motion, for example, has the
ability to stop, and the brake mechanism makes this ability possible. Similarly,
human beings and other creatures have the ability to see, and the eye, as well as
certain parts of the brain, makes this ability possible. There is a category differ-
ence between the two. An agent of ability is a concrete, space-occupying entity,
something that can be weighed and measured, whereas an ability has neither
length, breadth, width, or location. It is identiÔed instead through its exercise
in appropriate circumstances by its possessor. Yet, as Kenny warns, there is a
temptation to „hypostatize‰ abilities, „to treat them as if they were substances
or parts or ingredients of their substances.‰45 An example would be to think of
the ability (or disposition) to act virtuously as a substance present in a virtuous
person, something which can be discovered and measured in the same way
that the alcohol present in the bloodstream of an intoxicated person can. This
may seem like an obvious category difference that no sane person would fail
to heed. Yet, as Kenny and other philosophers have pointed out, the distinction
between ability and agent is routinely lost by those contemporary philosophers
and neuroscientists who claim that the mind is the brain. The brain, as the agent
of the mind, is a physical object, while the mind is not, because it is made up of
capacities such as the ability to learn a language. Whole philosophical systems
and research programs have been built on the confusion between the two. (In
chapter 3 we will discover that at least one contemporary Ôlm theorist, De-
leuze, is not immune from the confusion between ability and agent.)
I turn to this philosophical tradition because it provides compelling answers
to questions about the meanings of perceptual and related concepts. Without a
18 doubting vision

solid grasp of their meanings, it is easy to misuse these concepts and thereby
participate in conceptual confusion. As this book shows, such confusion is rife
in the writings of theorists in the revelationist tradition, and it remains rife in
the writings of their descendants. Although Ôlm theorists routinely make em-
pirical claims about what we see when watching Ôlms, few have stopped to ask
what it makes sense to say that we can see when doing so. Indeed, few have
asked what „seeing‰ means. The later philosophy of Wittgenstein in particular
provides answers to these questions in its careful examination of how percep-
tual concepts are customarily used in practice.46
It might be objected that Ôlm theorists do not use perceptual concepts in an
ordinary fashion, and therefore that an investigation into how they are normally
employed in the way Wittgenstein did has little relevance to Ôlm theory. Instead,
it could be argued, Ôlm theorists use perceptual concepts in a technical or meta-
phorical sense, as is common in science and the arts. This is an objection often
used to defend theory against conceptual analysis and critique.47 However, one
of the reasons I bring analytical philosophy to bear on the revelationist tradi-
tion is that revelationists do not clarify precisely in what way they are using
perceptual concepts. By elucidating how we customarily use these concepts,
at the very least we can tell whether their use by Ôlm theorists conforms to our
ordinary one, and, if it does not, we can conclude that their claims do not apply
to perception as we normally conceive it. More important, all the evidence
suggests that these theorists do believe that their arguments are of relevance
to perception as normally understood, for if they did not, they would not draw
the conclusions that they do. Nor would they attach so much importance to the
cinema. If it was vision in some secondary sense that their arguments applied
to, they would not claim that the cinema is a revolutionary artistic medium be-
cause it reveals reality as it really is and not as it appears to our Òawed sense of
sight for the simple reason that their arguments would not be about sight in the
literal, ordinary sense. For instance, when Epstein, following Henri Bergson,
blames the eye for „ManÊs physiological inability to master the notion of space-
time and to escape this atemporal section of the world, which we call the pres-
ent and of which we are almost exclusively conscious,‰48 it must be normal,
literal perception that he is speaking of; otherwise he would not also claim that
the cinema, in making „another perspective of matter evident, that of time,‰49
is forcing us to abandon the „Ôxed, discrete notions‰ of reality typical of both
„philosophy‰ and our „common-sense‰ view of the world.

No more than twenty years have been spent on tentative research, and we can
already measure the signiÔcance of the change that the cinema·in its expression
of the external and internal movement of all beings·has brought to bear on our
thinking. Even now, we correct ourselves according to a reality where time never
stops, where values only exist so long as they vary, where nothing exists except in
becoming, where a phenomenon without velocity is inconceivable.50

If it was only vision in some technical or metaphorical sense that EpsteinÊs

arguments about the failures of human sight applied to, he would not make
Introduction 19

euphoric claims like the one above about the transformative impact of the cin-
ema on human life, because he would not be arguing that the human eye is
literally incapable of escaping „this atemporal section of the world,‰ or that the
cinema is literally capable of doing so.
But even if readers are not swayed by the speciÔc criticisms I make of the
revelationist tradition and its descendants, I hope that at the very least this book
will draw attention to the importance of questions about sense and meaning.
Scholars of Ôlm, like scholars of the arts more generally, devote perilously
little time to clarifying the meanings of the concepts they use, a problem which
this book aims to begin rectifying. I also hope this book will bring to light
the revelationist tradition and its contemporary inÒuence. Classical Ôlm theory
was a much richer, more complex and more varied enterprise than the argu-
ment between modernists and realists about the nature of cinematic art that it
is often reduced to, and it continues to inÒuence contemporary Ôlm theory to
a greater extent than is often realized. Epstein, Vertov, Balázs, and Kracauer
each made imaginative but Òawed contributions to this enterprise by propos-
ing original versions of the revelationist claim that the cinema uncovers truths
about reality that cannot be seen with the naked human eye, and their argu-
ments and assumptions are inÒuential to this day.
This page intentionally left blank
 1

The Revelationist Tradition

Exegesis

Not all of Jean EpsteinÊs Ôlm theory is informed by a distrust of human vision.
In one of his Ôrst major articles on Ôlm, published in 1921, he argues that sight
is our most advanced perceptual and cognitive faculty, and praises the cinema
for being primarily a visual art.

Although sight is already recognized by everyone as the most developed sense,

and even though the viewpoint of our intellect and our mores is visual, there has
nevertheless never been an emotive process so homogeneously, so exclusively op-
tical as the cinema. Truly, the cinema creates a particular system of consciousness
limited to a single sense.1

According to Epstein, because of the size of the screen onto which Ôlms are
projected as well as stylistic techniques such as the close-up, the cinema is
able to capture and occupy the viewerÊs attention through his or her eyes alone,
relegating information from the other senses to a minor or nonexistent role.2
„The cinematic feeling is therefore particularly intense,‰ he concludes, because
it is free of supposedly inferior perceptual and cognitive capacities such as
hearing.3
Elsewhere in his writings, however, Epstein is less enamored of human
vision, especially when he turns his attention away from the cinemaÊs emotional
effects toward its capacity to reveal truths about reality invisible to the naked
eye. One of these truths, on which he focuses throughout his writings, is mobil-
ity. Epstein, like many artists and intellectuals of his generation, was inÒuenced
by the philosopher Henri Bergson, and, according to BergsonÊs metaphysics,
22 doubting vision

reality is an indivisible, continuous whole that both endures and changes unpre-
dictably. This is because everything is connected to, and constantly interact-
ing with, everything else throughout time and space. One consequence of this
condition is that matter is mobile. As Bergson puts it in Matter and Memory,
„Matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in
uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and traveling in every
direction like shivers through an immense body.‰4 Meanwhile, human sight
cannot perceive the mobility of reality because, for reasons I explore in a mo-
ment, for Bergson „to perceive means to immobilize.‰5 According to Epstein,
the cinema can reveal this mobility: „Such also is the clairvoyance of cin-
ematography which represents [the] world in its overall, continuous mobility.
Faithful to the etymology of its name, it discovers movement where our eye
sees nothing but stasis.‰6 The close-up is one of the techniques that enables
the cinema to do so due to its magniÔcatory power. When the face is Ôlmed in
close-up, for example:

Muscular preambles ripple beneath the skin. Shadows shift, tremble, hesitate.
Something is being decided. A breeze of emotion underlines the mouth with
clouds. The orography of the face vacillates. Seismic shocks begin. Capillary
wrinkles try to split the fault. A wave carries them away. Crescendo. A muscle
bridles. The lip is laced with tics like a theater curtain. Everything is movement,
imbalance, crisis.7

Epstein also argues that the cinema is more reliable than human vision
because it is a machine.

My eye presents me with an idea of a form; the Ôlm stock also contains an idea
of a form, an idea established independently of my awareness, an idea without
awareness, a latent, secret but marvelous idea. . . . Because this unexpected dis-
covery of a subject that is an object without conscience·without hesitation or
scruples, that is, devoid of venality, indulgence, or possible error, an entirely hon-
est artist, exclusively an artist, the model artist·must be put to use.8

Epstein claims that the revelation of mobility by the cinema shows that
human sight is deeply Òawed. In demonstrating that reality is mobile, „an
amazing animism is restored to the world [by the cinema]. We know now,
once weÊve seen it, that we are surrounded by inhuman living things.‰9 This
animistic, mobile reality, Epstein asserts, is fundamentally at odds with
the static one that people see and take for granted. „These [cinematic] ex-
periments contradict and throw into confusion the sense of order which
we have established at great cost in our conception of the universe. . . .
Not without some anxiety, man Ônds himself before that chaos which he has
covered up, denied, forgotten, or thought was tamed. Cinematography ap-
prises him of a monster.‰10 In fact, so different is the animistic, mobile reality
revealed by the cinema from the one people normally see and assume to exist
The Revelationist Tradition: Exegesis 23

that Epstein often employs primitivist similes and metaphors to describe its
inhuman strangeness:

Those lives [the cinema] creates . . . have little in common with human life. These
lives are like the life in charms and amulets, the ominous, tabooed objects of cer-
tain primitive religions. If we wish to understand how an animal, a plant, or a stone
can inspire respect, fear, or horror, those three most sacred sentiments, I think we
must watch them on the screen, living their mysterious, silent lives, alien to the
human sensibility.11

Given the wide gap in EpsteinÊs theory between reality as it really is and the
way it appears to human vision, it is not surprising that he argues that the cin-
emaÊs revelatory capacity escapes the eyeÊs limitations rather than extending
its power, as we saw in his claim that the cinema is „something other than the
eye.‰12
One of the sources of EpsteinÊs belief that the naked human eye is unable
to see the true nature of reality is his knowledge of modern science. Scientists
and philosophers since Galileo have argued that, while the world appears to hu-
mans to be multicolored, noisy, many-scented, and hot or cold, in reality there
is only the rapid movement of colorless, noiseless, scentless particles, of waves
of air or electro-magnetic radiation. This gap between appearance and reality
has typically been explained by the doctrine of „secondary qualities,‰ which
argues that qualities such as color, taste, sound, and smell are not properties
of objects, as they seem to be to humans. Rather, they are produced in us by
the action of objects on our sense organs and are, at least in part, subjective in
origin. For many modern philosophers and scientists, human perceptual organs
therefore fail to perceive reality as it really is. As Alfred Whitehead famously
put it in Science and the Modern World:

Bodies are perceived as with qualities which in reality do not belong to them, quali-
ties which in fact are purely the offspring of the mind. Thus nature gets credit which
should in truth be reserved for ourselves; the rose for its scent; the nightingale for his
song; and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should ad-
dress their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation
on the excellency of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless,
colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.13

Epstein is clearly aware of the doctrine of secondary qualities, which he ap-

peals to in this passage from 1921: „The senses, of course, present us only
with symbols of reality: uniform, proportionate, elective metaphors. And sym-
bols not of matter, which therefore does not exist, but of energy; that is, of
something which in itself seems not to be, except in its effects as they affect
us. We say Âred,Ê Âsoprano,Ê Âsweet,Ê Âcypress,Ê when there are only velocities,
movements, vibrations.‰14 In contrast, the cinema, he argues, is able to reveal
the reality hidden by secondary qualities: the „waves invisible to us, and the
24 doubting vision

screenÊs creative passion [which] contains what no other has ever had before;
its proper share of ultraviolet.‰15
Another source of EpsteinÊs visual skepticism is BergsonÊs philosophy.
This might at Ôrst appear to be an erroneous claim, given that Bergson was
famously critical of the modern scientiÔc argument that reality is very differ-
ent from the way it appears to human vision. In Matter and Memory, Bergson
sought a philosophical justiÔcation for the common sense belief that „matter
exists just as it is perceived. ‰16 Nevertheless, even for Bergson human sight
does not perceive reality as it really is, although in his view it gets closer to
doing so than it does for modern science. Bergson gives a number of reasons
this is so. For one, we rarely if ever have a pure, unmediated perception of real-
ity because memory interferes.17 But even if we were able to give „every form
of memory‰ and obtain „a vision of matter both immediate and instantaneous,‰
this would not mean that we would be able to see the true nature of reality. For
while human perception according to Bergson does not add anything to what
it perceives, as it does according to the doctrine of secondary qualities, it does
subtract something·namely, everything that the object being perceived, what
Bergson in Matter and Memory calls an image, is connected to throughout time
and space.18 Hence, Bergson tends to talk about perception as an act of isolat-
ing what is perceived from its surroundings, by which he means what precedes
and follows it temporally, and everything it spatially interacts with throughout
the universe:

I should convert [objective reality] into representation if I could isolate it, espe-
cially if I could isolate its shell. . . . It [is] necessary, not to throw more light on
the object, but, on the contrary, to obscure some of its aspects, to diminish it by
the greater part of itself, so that the remainder, instead of being encased in its sur-
roundings as a thing, should detach itself from them as a picture. . . . [Objects]
become „perceptions‰ by their very isolation.19

In Creative Evolution, Bergson describes the objects we perceive as being „cut

out of the stuff of nature by our perception,‰ as if perception were a pair of
scissors.20
Why does human perception isolate or cut out the objects it perceives? It
does so because „to perceive all the inÒuences from all the points of all bod-
ies would be to descend to the condition of a material object.‰21 In Matter and
Memory, Bergson proposes an antirepresentationalist theory of perception, ar-
guing that perception consists not of an internal representation of the external
world but the stimulation of the brain and nervous system of a living creature
by the external world. This stimulation is no different from the interactions tak-
ing place between all objects all of the time throughout the universe, and in this
sense, all objects „perceive‰ all other objects, which is why Bergson calls them
„images.‰22 Humans, however, are different from other objects because they
have free will. „Conscious perception signiÔes choice,‰23 and we choose what
to perceive based on practical necessity, suppressing „all those parts of objects
in which their functions Ônd no interest.‰24
The Revelationist Tradition: Exegesis 25

It is for this reason that Bergson believes that „to perceive is to immobi-
lize‰ and he uses his famous analogy between perception and photography.
Perception cuts out objects from their temporal becoming and the spatial
whole of which they are a part, much like a still camera does. It is also for
this reason that Bergson claims in Creative Evolution that the cinema cannot
represent the mobile nature of reality and he characterizes human seeing and
knowing as „cinematographic.‰ Just as the cinema creates the impression of
movement artiÔcially through a succession of still photographs arranged uni-
formly on a strip of celluloid, so human „perception, intellection, language . . .
take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality,‰ which we „string‰ together
„on a becoming, abstract, uniform, and invisible.‰ Both the cinema and human
perception therefore merely imitate mobile reality through joining a series of
immobile representations of reality, „instead of attaching ourselves to the inner
becoming of things.‰25 For Bergson, this failure, although understandable from
a practical point of view, has pernicious consequences, for it means that we are
cut off from the „depths of life‰ of the universe around us, „the vital process‰ of
unpredictable mobility that pulsates, unseen by us, throughout reality, connect-
ing everything to everything else, and we therefore tend, especially in moder-
nity, to fall prey to lifeless, mechanistic forms of knowledge and behavior.26
We have already seen evidence of BergsonÊs inÒuence on Epstein in his
claim that human vision cannot see the essential mobility of reality, although,
in arguing that the cinema can reveal mobility, Epstein departs, as Gilles De-
leuze does, from BergsonÊs theory. We will encounter BergsonÊs inÒuence at
work again in EpsteinÊs arguments about the cinema and time in chapter 2.
Epstein also, like Bergson, believed that even though the naked human eye fails
to see the true nature of reality people are not forever unable to access reality.
Both drew on the Romantic tradition to argue that artists, in particular, pos-
sess a special mental power that enables them to overcome the limitations of
the senses. Bergson tended to refer to this power as „intuition,‰ while Epstein,
drawing on the language of associationist psychology that was popular in his
day, called it the „subconscious.‰ Nevertheless, the powers Epstein attributes
to this mental capacity betray his debt to Romanticism.
As Stuart Liebman has shown, in his writings on experimental poetry Ep-
stein argues that the mental faculty of the subconscious is capable of a knowl-
edge of reality superior to that of the conscious intellect. For Epstein, Liebman
says, the subconscious can „grasp . . . the essential structure of the objective
world.‰27 The subconscious, unlike the conscious intellect, is able to transcend
the spatial and temporal limitations of sensory perception and external physi-
cal appearances and penetrate the internal essence or „being‰ of objects. It is
this power that is often attributed to artists and other seers in Romanticism. For
example, William R. Paulson has shown how the Ôgure of the visionary pos-
sesses this power in BalzacÊs novels: „What is here [in Facino Cane (1836)]
named intuition is described as a doubling or raising to a second power; it is a
vision that goes beyond sensation and description, not only seizing the objects
accessible to the senses, but also appropriating to a visual order the soul, the
symbolic charge, the hidden essence.‰28
26 doubting vision

In his Ôlm theory, Epstein attributes this power to the movie camera, call-
ing it „photogénie,‰ the revelation of the inner „personality‰ of objects.29 He
also often uses terms such as „cinematic telepathy‰ to describe the relation
between the viewer and what is depicted in the cinematic image.30 Such terms
perfectly encapsulate the Romantic ideal of a mental power capable of a di-
rect, super-sensory knowledge of reality. „The Ôlm,‰ he writes elsewhere, „is
nothing but a relay between the source of nervous energy [in the Ôlm] and the
auditorium which breathes its radiance.‰31
Epstein attempts to put this theory into practice in some of his Ôlms, espe-
cially in his late silent masterpiece The Fall of the House of Usher (1928). This
Ôlm is usually classiÔed as an example of cinematic Impressionism, the 1920s
French avant-garde Ôlm movement to which Epstein contributed so much and
certainly it is to some extent.32 Richard Abel, however, has suggested that the
Ôlm signals a new direction in EpsteinÊs Ôlmmaking, although he is unsure
of what, precisely, this direction consists of.33 It becomes clearer when one
views the Ôlm within the context of the theoretical inÒuences on Epstein that I
have just described, and the skepticism about human vision they licensed. For
whereas Impressionist Ôlms typically employ techniques of cinematography,
editing, and mise-en-scene to represent the subjective mental and perceptual
states of their characters, The Fall of the House of Usher also uses these tech-
niques to escape the limitations of human vision and consciousness and pen-
etrate behind the surface appearance of objects to reveal a Bergsonian, mobile
reality that the characters in the Ôlm are unable to see. Indeed, the Ôlm can be
interpreted as an allegory of BergsonÊs claim that „to perceive is to immobi-
lize‰ as well as immobilizationÊs pernicious consequences.
The Ôlm tells the story of Roderick Usher, who is attempting to „immo-
bilize‰ his wife, to isolate her both by keeping her secluded in his ancestral
mansion (Ôg. 1.1) and by obsessively trying to capture her likeness in a still
portrait he is painting of her. That he is succeeding is explicitly represented in
the Ôlm through the superimposition of the living Madeline onto the painting,
as if she were trapped inside it, cut off from her surroundings (Ôg. 1.2), and the
pronounced tendency toward inertia in the Ôrst part of the Ôlm, which is created
both by the use of slow-motion shots of the characters inside the ancestral home
and by the slow movements of the actors. This tendency toward inertia is coun-
teracted by an opposite tendency toward mobility in the environment around the
characters, as if it were animated by an unseen presence. This is especially true
in the ancestral home, with the constantly billowing drapes adorning its walls
(Ôg. 1.3), the piles of books and papers falling over (Ôg. 1.4), and the seemingly
unmotivated camera movements through its corridors, which punctuate the nar-
rative. Roderick sometimes forgets his obsession with painting MadelineÊs por-
trait and instead plays his mandolin, shots of which are intercut with shots of
the natural environment·trees, Ôelds, water·surrounding the mansion as if to
suggest that, at these moments at least, Roderick is able to escape the isolation of
his home and obsessive painting and feel a kinship with the living world around
him. However, the closer Roderick comes to Ônishing his painting, to immobi-
lizing Madeline, the sicker she becomes, as if her life is being drained from her.
The Revelationist Tradition: Exegesis 27

The physician attending Madeline, as a man of science, and RoderickÊs visiting

friend, who is both short-sighted and hard of hearing, are unable to diagnose
what is truly wrong with her·the fact that Roderick is immobilizing her in an
image, much like sensory perception does according to Bergson.

Figure 1.1. Exterior shot of the

Usher mansion in The Fall of the
House of Usher (Jean Epstein,
1928).

Figure 1.2. Roderick and the

doctor discuss Madeline in front
of her portrait.

Figure 1.3. The billowing

drapes inside the Usher
mansion.
28 doubting vision

Figure 1.4. Books and papers

fall over of their own accord.

When Madeline appears to die, Roderick changes. First, he abandons his

solipsistic obsession with painting her portrait and resists a new form of her
immobilization, the attempt on the part of the physician and friend to nail her
cofÔn shut (Ôg. 1.5). Second, he becomes highly sensitive to the mobile envi-
ronment around him as he awaits any sign that Madeline might still be alive,
so that, as one of the inter-titles puts it, „His nerves at breaking point . . . the
slightest sound exasperated him.‰ Epstein conveys the strange, inhuman qual-
ity of this animistic environment by cutting to close-ups of two mating toads
(Ôg. 1.6) and an owl as MadelineÊs cofÔn is being nailed shut. There follows
a remarkable sequence in which shots of RoderickÊs tense, expectant face and
body (Ôg. 1.7) are intercut with shots of a nearby grandfather clock (Ôg. 1.8).
EpsteinÊs camera penetrates behind the exterior of the clock, revealing, in ex-
treme close-ups, the movements of the clockÊs internal mechanism (Ôg. 1.9),
its gears, pendulum, and bell, which, as it chimes, releases particles of dust
(Ôg. 1.10). Roderick cannot see the mobility of the internal mechanism of the
clock and the dust particles, but he can sense it, as is conveyed by the cuts to
his reactions. Finally, immobility and death are overcome by mobility and life,
as an electrical storm begins, the curtains billow more and more violently, and
the camera moves increasingly rapidly along the hallways strewn with leaves.
As the ancestral home begins to burn down, MadelineÊs portrait along with it
(Ôg. 1.11), Madeline rises from her tomb (Ôg. 1.12), no longer immobilized by
cofÔn, mansion, or portrait, and she, Roderick, and his friend escape back into
living nature.
Thus, the new direction Epstein takes in this Ôlm is to explore stylistic
techniques often used to represent human subjectivity in Impressionist Ôlm
proper (camera movement, extreme close-ups, superimposition) to depict, as
well, a Bergsonian, mobile reality surrounding the characters. Motivating this
new direction, which Epstein pursued further in some of his non-Impressionist,
quasi-documentary sound Ôlms, is his belief that the human eye cannot see
the true nature of reality, its mobility. For the characters in the Ôlm can at best
intuit, rather than perceive, this mobile reality, and we viewers are only able to
see it because the cinema can escape the limitations of human perception and
reveal it to us.
 Figure 1.5. Roderick attempts
to prevent MadelineÊs cofÔn
(visible at the bottom of the shot)
from being nailed shut.

Figure 1.6. Mating toads.

Figure 1.7. Roderick waits,

sensing the mobility around him.

Figure 1.8. The grandfather

clock.

29
 Figure 1.9. The internal
mechanism of the clock.

Figure 1.10. Extreme close up

of dust falling off the bell inside
the clock.

Figure 1.11. MadelineÊs portrait

burning.

Figure 1.12. Madeline

resurrected.

30
The Revelationist Tradition: Exegesis 31

II

Of the four Ôlm theorists whose work I am examining in the Ôrst two chapters
of this book, visual skepticism probably exerted the most inÒuence over Dziga
Vertov. This is abundantly evident in his writings of the 1920s and 1930s, and
it informs many of his major arguments as well as his Ôlmmaking. Indeed, in
VertovÊs work, visual skepticism often takes the from of an outright contempt
for the naked human eye.
Take, for example, VertovÊs hostility to Ôction Ôlm, which is a well-known
feature of his theory and practice. Like other Soviets of his generation, Vertov
believed that the cinema could potentially play a major role in the construction
of a new, socialist society after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. And, again
like others, for him this role consisted of depicting social reality as theorized
by Marxist-Leninism, as well as of generating enthusiasm for the new society
being built upon this theory. But unlike most others, Vertov argued that Ôction
Ôlms, even the avant-garde Ôction Ôlms of someone like Sergei Eisenstein,
could not play this role. Cinema had to be nonÔction, or „nonplayed.‰
Vertov gives a number of reasons for his hostility to Ôction Ôlm. For one
thing, Ôction or „played‰ Ôlms typically employ a written scenario or script in
their production. They therefore violate two major tenets of VertovÊs theory
and practice. Like other classical Ôlm theorists, Vertov argues that the cin-
ema as a medium should be independent of other media, in particular theater
and literature. Only those formal and stylistic techniques unique to the cinema
should be used by the Ôlmmaker: „WE are cleansing kinochestvo of foreign
matter·of music, literature, and theater; we seek our own rhythm, one lifted
from nowhere else, and we Ônd it in the movements of things.‰34 The use of
a written scenario in the production of Ôction Ôlms constitutes for Vertov an
intolerable intrusion by literature, a „foreign‰ medium, into the cinema. He
therefore scathingly dismisses Ôction Ôlms as „mere literary skeleton[s] cov-
ered with a Ôlm-skin.‰35
The written scenario also violates the Constructivist tenet of a „culture of
materials‰ to which Vertov adhered, a tenet which insists upon the role of the
raw material of an art work in shaping its Ônal form. This Constructivist tenet
is summarized by El Lissitzky in a retrospective essay on Russian architecture
written in 1929: „The second way of looking at the world, in terms of material,
required not merely observation but also the tactile apprehension of things.
The speciÔc qualities of the respective materials served as a starting point for
the development of the form.‰36 Vertov, deÔning the raw material of the cinema
as „the phenomena of life,‰ argues that the Ôlmmaker must proceed „from the
material to the Ôlm-object.‰37 The collection of the raw material for Ôlm objects
during the act of Ôlming, and the organization of this material in the editing
room, cannot be predetermined. Instead, the form of a Ôlm has to grow out
of the speciÔc qualities of the raw material. This sequence of production, and
the Constructivist tenet underpinning it, are by deÔnition violated if the Ôlm
object is predetermined by a written scenario before shooting, as it is in Ôction
Ôlmmaking. Vertov also routinely appeals to the argument, later employed by
32 doubting vision

Bertolt Brecht, that works of Ôction diminish or destroy an audienceÊs capacity

to think rationally because of the emotions they arouse: „Kino-drama clouds
the eye and the brain with a sweet fog.‰38
Just as important, but much less noted, an additional reason for VertovÊs
hostility to Ôction Ôlm is his distrust of human sight. According to Vertov, a
fundamental problem with Ôction Ôlms, as with all Ôlm practices except his
own, is that they „copy the work of our eye.‰39

The death sentence passed in 1919 by the kinoks on all Ôlms, with no exceptions,
holds for the present as well. The most scrupulous examination does not reveal a
single Ôlm, a single artistic experiment, properly directed to the emancipation of
the camera, which is reduced to a state of pitiable slavery, of subordination to the
imperfections and the shortsightedness of the human eye.40

In other words, so great is VertovÊs distrust of human vision, and so intense

his desire to depart from it, that it leads him to reject all Ôlm practices that he
views as employing „the human eye as crib sheet.‰41
Like Epstein, Vertov believes that human sight is incapable of seeing re-
ality as it really is. Unlike Epstein, it is the true nature of social reality, and
not so much the physical universe, that the eye fails to see. Human eyes are
too weak: „The weakness of the human eye is manifest.‰42 Only an instru-
ment much more powerful than the eye can reveal social reality, and Vertov
views the cinema as being this instrument. The cinema is „more perfect than
the human eye‰; it „perceives more and better.‰43 It enables „the communist
decoding of the world,‰ the revelation of „the truth‰ about social reality „on
the screen.‰44 Hence, it is only with the invention of the cinema and its libera-
tion from „the crib sheet of the human eye‰ that people can, for the Ôrst time,
actually see social reality as it really is: „The eyes of children and adults, the
educated as well as the uneducated, are opening, as it were, for the Ôrst time.
Millions of workers . . . recovered their sight.‰45
According to Vertov, human vision suffers from two fundamental limita-
tions that prevent it from seeing the true nature of social reality, both of which
the cinema overcomes. The Ôrst prevents people from fully seeing and un-
derstanding visual phenomena in general, not just social reality. For accord-
ing to Vertov, our „perceptions‰ are disorganized and confusing. He gives as
an example stage performances. „The spectator at a ballet follows, in confu-
sion, now the combined group of dancers, now random individual Ôgures, now
someoneÊs legs·a series of scattered perceptions, different for each specta-
tor.‰46 The cinema is able to overcome this limitation, „bring[ing] clarity into
the workerÊs awareness of the phenomena concerning him and surrounding
him,‰47 because of the precision with which editing can be used to organize vi-
sual phenomena recorded on Ôlm into harmonious patterns·based upon geo-
metrical principles·that can be understood by the viewer.

Within the chaos of movements, running past, away, running into and colliding·
the eye, all by itself, enters life.
The Revelationist Tradition: Exegesis 33

A day of visual impressions has passed. How is one to construct the impres-
sions of the day into an effective whole, a visual study? If one Ôlms everything
the eye has seen, the result, of course, will be a jumble. If one skillfully edits
whatÊs been photographed, the result will be clearer. If one scraps bothersome
waste, it will be better still. One obtains an organized memo of the ordinary eyeÊs
impressions.48

Vertov calls the precise link, achieved on the editing table, between one vi-
sual phenomenon and the next „an interval,‰ and he compares the harmonious
pattern of intervals created by the editor to a musical phrase conceived of in
classical terms.

Intervals (the transitions from one movement to another) are the material, the ele-
ments of the art of movement, and by no means the movements themselves. It is
they (the intervals) which draw the movement to a kinetic resolution.
The organization of movement is the organization of its elements, or its inter-
vals, into phrases.
In each phrase there is a rise, a high point, and a falling off (expressed in vary-
ing degrees) of movement.49

Via the precision of editing, the editor can organize what is for the human
eye a confusing array of perceptions into ordered, harmonious, and therefore
intelligible patterns, overcoming the eyeÊs limitation. To return to the ballet
example:

The eye submits to the will of the camera and is directed by it to those successive
points of the action that, most succinctly and vividly, bring the Ôlm phrase to the
height or depth of resolution. . . .
A system of successive movements requires the Ôlming of dancers . . . in the
order of their actions, one after another . . . by forceful transfer of the viewerÊs eye
to the successive details that must be seen.
The camera „carries‰ the Ôlm viewerÊs eyes from arms to legs, from legs to
eyes and so on, in the most advantageous sequence, and organizes the details into
an orderly montage study.50

The second limitation that the human eye suffers from, according to Vertov,
is that it is temporally and spatially immobile. It is conÔned to the present, and
it moves through space slowly. The problem with this immobility is that the
sort of phenomena that constitute social reality require much greater temporal
and spatial mobility in order to be seen, as we shall see in chapter 2. In con-
trast, the cinema is „free of the limits of time and space,‰ and Vertov repeatedly
emphasizes its greater mobility in comparison to the eye: „The position of our
bodies while observing or our perception of a certain number of features of a
visual phenomenon in a given instant are by no means obligatory limitations
for the camera.‰51 In terms of space, the cinema can „put together any given
points in the universe, no matter where [it has] recorded them.‰52 And just as
34 doubting vision

it can traverse large expanses of space quickly (though camera movement) or

instantaneously (through editing), so the cinema can move backward and for-
ward in time. This can be achieved by way of editing: „The cofÔns of national
heroes are lowered into the grave (shot in Astrakhan in 1918); the grave is Ôlled
in (Kronstadt, 1921); cannon salute (Petrograd, 1920); memorial service, hats
are removed (Moscow, 1922).‰53 Or it can be achieved by fast, slow, and reverse
motion: „[The camera] experiments, distending time, dissecting movement, or,
in contrary fashion, absorbing time within itself, swallowing years, thus sche-
matizing processes of long duration inaccessible to the normal eye.‰54 Because
of its capacity to move rapidly though space and time, the cinema, Vertov as-
serts, allows for „the possibility of seeing without limits and distances.‰55
We have seen that EpsteinÊs distrust of human sight was the product of a
number of inÒuences: modern science, BergsonÊs philosophy, and Romanticism.
One source of VertovÊs visual skepticism is what the historian Richard Stites
calls the „cult of the machine,‰ which was particularly inÒuential in the Soviet
Union in the 1920s, and idealized the machine as a model of perfection for both
society and human beings.56 Soviet visionaries and reformers of the 1920s, such
as Platon Kerzhentsev and Alexei Gastev, envisaged the transformation of human
beings into „new people,‰ more perfect because they were more machinelike.
While working, these new people would overcome the imperfections of the natu-
ral rhythms and gestures of the human body by coordinating and controlling their
movements with the precision and efÔciency of a machine, ensuring maximum
productivity and eliminating wastage of time and energy. GastevÊs popular po-
etry from the 1910s is particularly well known for the way in which it imagines
the future as a mechanical utopia in which humans with „nerves of steel‰ and
„muscles like iron rails‰ work with the precision and efÔciency of machines.
While VertovÊs relation to the Soviet cult of the machine is, I have argued
elsewhere, complex, the ideal of the machine as more perfect than the human
body is clearly present in his Ôlm theory and practice.57 In his 1922 manifesto
„We,‰ for example, he argues:

The machine makes us ashamed of manÊs inability to control himself, but what are
we to do if electricityÊs unerring ways are more exciting to us than the disorderly
haste of active men and the corrupting inertia of passive ones?
Saws dancing at a sawmill convey to us a joy more intimate and intelligible
than that on human dance Òoors.
For his inability to control his movements, WE temporarily exclude man as a
subject for Ôlm.
Our path leads through the poetry of machines, from the bungling citizen to the
perfect electric man. . . .
The new man, free of unwieldness and clumsiness, will have the light, precise
movements of machines, and he will be the gratifying subject of our Ôlms.58

The prediction Vertov makes in the Ônal sentence of this quotation comes
true in the Ôlms he goes on to make after writing this manifesto. In Man
with a Movie Camera (1929), for example, there is a frenetic sequence that
The Revelationist Tradition: Exegesis 35

interconnects shots of various types of labor. Close-up shots of Ôlm celluloid

being spliced and edited are interspersed with close-up shots of typing, writ-
ing, a sewing machine, and a newspaper conveyer belt. Typically, only the
workersÊ hands are present in these shots, moving swiftly and with precision,
with occasional cuts to their faces as they stare intently down at their work.
Within this fast-paced, exuberant sequence, there is a short series of shots
of a woman folding cigarette boxes on a wooden block. This series begins
with a close-up of a machine sorting and processing similar boxes (Ôg. 1.13).
There is then a cut to a close-up of the womanÊs hands rapidly folding a box
on the wooden stand (Ôg. 1.14), followed by a cut to her face as she stares
downward at her work (Ôg. 1.15) and throws the completed box over her
shoulder onto a pile. The Ôlm cuts back and forth between identical shots of
the womanÊs hands and face about Ôve or six times. It then returns to a shot of
the box-sorting machine, followed by a Ônal shot of the woman. The womanÊs
movements are identical in each shot, much like the repetitious movements of
a machine. And the cuts between her hands and face follow a regular rhythm,
like a machine. Each shot of her hands pauses for roughly two seconds as she
folds the box, and then the shot of her face as she discards it over her shoul-
der lasts a single, third second. This pattern is repeated Ôve or six times and
its pace accelerated. This worker is endowed with the mechanical rhythm of
the box-sorting machine with which she works by the repeated pattern of the
editing and by cuts back and forth between the woman and the machine. She
is a perfect example of the „new people‰ envisaged by Gastev, someone who
has overcome the imperfections of the human body by imitating the rhythm
and movement of the machines around her.
It is this idealization of the machine as more perfect than the human body
that constitutes one source of VertovÊs hostility to human vision. For just as
Vertov decries the „disorderly‰ movements of the human body in comparison
to the „precise‰ movements of machines, so, as we have seen, he unfavor-
ably compares the confusion of sight to the organized, harmonious, and there-
fore intelligible patterns of visual phenomena enabled by the machines of the

Figure 1.13. Sorting machine

in Man with a Movie Camera
(Dziga Vertov, 1929).
36 doubting vision

Figure 1.14. WorkerÊs hands.

Figure 1.15. WorkerÊs face.

cinema·the editing table and the movie camera. In other words, Vertov ex-
tends into the realm of perception the terms used by the Soviet cult of the
machine to describe the superiority of the machine over the human body in
the context of movement and labor·„precision,‰ „control,‰ the elimination of
waste, and so on.
VertovÊs idealization of the machine and his faith in modernization, tech-
nological progress, and science to some extent sets him apart from Epstein
and his Romantic belief in the subconscious as superior to the conscious intel-
lect, as well as from Balázs and Kracauer who, as we will discover, also owe
a major debt to Romanticism. Yet, even though VertovÊs rationalism makes
him the most anti-Romantic of the Ôlm theorists in the revelationist tradition
proper, he still shares with them the view that human sight is unreliable and the
cinema is capable of revealing the true nature of reality by escaping the eyeÊs
limitations. His theory and practice might also share with EpsteinÊs a theo-
retical source for his conception of these limitations, namely, Bergsonianism,
which, as Hillary Fink has shown, exerted a major inÒuence over Soviet artists
in the 1920s.59 This is perhaps why Gilles Deleuze argues that Vertov „realizes
The Revelationist Tradition: Exegesis 37

the materialist programme of the Ôrst chapter of [BergsonÊs] Matter and Mem-
ory through the cinema.‰60 By this, Deleuze seems to mean that VertovÊs Ôlms
depict social reality very much like physical reality as described by BergsonÊs
metaphysics, a ceaselessly changing reality in which everything is constantly
acting on everything else and is in turn acted on by everything else throughout
time and space. As Deleuze puts it: „Whether there were machines, landscapes,
buildings or men [being Ôlmed] was of little consequence: each·even the
most charming peasant woman or the most touching child·was presented as
a material system in perpetual interaction.‰61 In VertovÊs cinema, argues De-
leuze, „everything is at the service of variation and interaction.‰62 His Ôlms are
able to represent this ceaseless interaction because of the cinemaÊs mobility, its
capacity, through camera movement and editing, to move from „a point where
an action begins to the limit of the reaction, as it Ôlls the interval between the
two, crossing the universe and beating in time to its intervals.‰63 For Deleuze,
following BergsonÊs theory of the limitations of human perception and echo-
ing a central theme of this book, this capacity to reveal actions and reactions
throughout space and time means that the cinema in VertovÊs hands escapes its
limitations and is therefore superhuman. „This is not a human eye·even an
improved one. For, although the human eye can surmount some of its limita-
tions with the help of contraptions and instruments, there is one which it can-
not surmount, since it is its own condition of possibility.‰64 This condition is,
of course, immobility, because as we have seen, for Bergson „to perceive is to
immobilize.‰ VertovÊs cinema, in DeleuzeÊs view, reveals within the domain
of social reality the surroundings that are of necessity subtracted when human
perception cuts what it perceives out of reality: everything it interacts with
throughout the universe spatially and temporally.
Whether or not one agrees with DeleuzeÊs Bergsonian interpretation of
VertovÊs Ôlms (as John MacKay has astutely pointed out, this interpretation
ignores the human contribution to editing that is explicitly represented in Man
with a Movie Camera through the shots of VertovÊs wife, Elizaveta Svilova, at
the editing table editing the very Ôlm we are watching65), in his writings Vertov
clearly conceives of the naked eye as immobile in the sense that it is conÔned
to the present and that it moves through space slowly. Human vision thereby
fails to perceive the connections between things, an argument that strongly
echoes BergsonÊs theory of the limitations of sight. Due to the precision of
editing and its mobility, according to Vertov, the cinema is able to escape these
perceptual limitations and reveal the true nature of social reality.

III

In Theory of the Film (1948), his third and last book of Ôlm theory, Béla Balázs
argued that „The already once accomplished and then again lost achievements
of the silent Ôlm are about to be revalued and restored.‰66 As this claim im-
plies, Balázs was very much a silent-Ôlm theorist. His Ôlm theory was largely
predicated on cinema lacking synchronized sound, especially dialogue. When
38 doubting vision

synchronized sound did arrive in the late 1920s, Balázs felt that much of what
was of value about the cinema as an art had been lost, and he had not changed
his mind by the time he wrote Theory of the Film twenty years later.
BalázsÊs continuing attachment to silent Ôlm was due, at least in part, to
the sort of distrust of human vision that we saw at work in the theories of
Epstein and Vertov. However, BalázsÊs visual skepticism (and, as we will see
later, KracauerÊs) differs in at least one important respect from EpsteinÊs and
VertovÊs. Like them, Balázs argues that the cinema reveals truths about real-
ity invisible to the naked eye: „In the silent Ôlm facial expression, isolated
from its surroundings [by the close-up], seemed to penetrate to a strange new
dimension of the soul. It revealed to us a new world·the world of microphysi-
ognomy which could not otherwise be seen with the naked eye or in everyday
life‰ (TTF 65). And, again like Epstein and Vertov, Balázs compares the cin-
ema to other visual technologies, in particular the microscope.

The technique of the close-up . . . was able to make us feel nerve-rackingly the
sultry tension underneath the superÔcial calm; the Ôerce storms raging under the
surface were made tangible by mere microscopic movements, by the displace-
ment of a hair. . . . The micro-tragedies in the peace and quiet of ordinary families
were shown as deadly battles, just as the microscope shows the Ôerce struggles of
micro-organisms in a drop of water. (TTF 84–85)

But unlike Epstein and Vertov, Balázs argues that it is, in part, a historical
limitation that sight suffers from, a limitation from which it can potentially
recover. For Epstein and Vertov, the eyeÊs inability to see the true nature of
reality is due to innate handicaps that cannot be overcome (except perhaps by
evolution), such as its immobility (Epstein), and its disorganized and therefore
confusing perceptions (Vertov). But for Balázs, people have forgotten how to
see due to historically speciÔc forces at work in modernity.
According to Balázs, because of the invention of the printing press, the
printed word has become the dominant medium through which people express
their inner, mental lives in modernity, giving rise to what he calls a „word
culture‰: „The printing press has grown to be the main bridge over which the
more remote interhuman spiritual exchanges take place and the soul has been
concentrated and crystallized chieÒy in the word‰ (TTF 41). One consequence
is that people have almost totally lost the capacity to use their faces and bod-
ies to express the inner: „The animals that do not chew lose their teeth. In the
epoch of word culture we made little use of the expressive powers of our body
and have therefore partly lost that power‰ (TTF 42). The loss of this capacity
means that the dimension of „nonrational emotions‰ that used to be expressed
by the face and body can no longer be expressed, for language can only com-
municate rational concepts: „We had, however, when we neglected the body as
a means of expression, lost more than mere corporal power of expression. That
which was to have been expressed was also narrowed down by this neglect. For
it is not the same spirit, not the same soul that is expressed once in words and
The Revelationist Tradition: Exegesis 39

once in gestures‰ (TTF 42). The result is a spiritual impoverishment in moder-

nity. The nonrational emotional realm that can only be expressed by the face
and body remains unexpressed, leaving just the „rational, conceptual culture‰
of the word (TTF 43).
This in turn has an impact on vision, and it is in describing this impact
that BalázsÊs claims about the limitations of human sight emerge. People have
forgotten how to see the face and body as expressive of the inner in the word
culture of modernity, according to Balázs, because they are no longer used
to express the inner. Meanwhile, it is because the cinema lacks synchronized
sound in the silent era, and actors are therefore forced to relearn how to express
the inner through facial expression and bodily behavior, that Balázs in his early
Ôlm theory believes that the cinema is bringing about the evolution of new
perceptual abilities in humans. People are once again learning how to read the
language of the face and body by watching actors in silent Ôlms.

Now we are beginning to remember and re-learn this tongue. It is still clumsy and
primitive and very far removed as yet from the reÔnements of word art. But already
it is beginning to be able sometimes to express things which escape the artists of
the word. How much of human thought would remain unexpressed if we had no
music! The now developing art of facial expression and gesture will bring just as
many submerged contents to the surface. Although these human experiences are not
rational, conceptual contents, they are nevertheless neither vague nor blurred, but
as clear and unequivocal as is music. Thus the inner man, too, will become visible.
(TTF 42)

Human vision therefore suffers from a historical limitation, according to

Balázs, one that is speciÔc to the word culture of modernity. Because it is only
historical, as opposed to innate, the eye can potentially recover from it, and
this is precisely what Balázs believed was starting to happen in the silent era.
The cinema, he thought, was reeducating people about how to use and under-
stand the language of facial expression and bodily behavior. The nonrational
emotional realm of the inner was becoming visible again for the Ôrst time since
the invention of the printing press. With the arrival of synchronized sound,
however, all of this changed. Actors reverted to spoken language to express the
inner, thereby reinforcing the word culture of modernity, and the new educa-
tion being offered by cinema in the silent era was cut short·hence, BalázsÊs
lifelong attachment to silent Ôlm.
BalázsÊs claims about the limitations of human vision constitute an id-
iosyncratic version of what can be called the modern subjectivity theory,
which has its roots in Romanticism. This theory argues that various forces in
modernity·principally science, technology, and the penetration of „instrumen-
tal reason‰ into all spheres of human existence·have had a profound effect
on humans. These forces have altered the way that the average personÊs mind
works, giving rise to a distinctively modern form of consciousness that is overly
rationalistic and divorced from the senses, the body, and nature in general.
40 doubting vision

Rudolf Arnheim summarizes key elements of this theory at the beginning of

Art and Visual Perception:

We are neglecting the gift of comprehending things by what our senses tell us
about them. Concept is split from percept, and thought moves among abstractions.
Our eyes are being reduced to instruments by which to measure and identify·hence a
dearth of ideas that can be expressed in images and an incapacity to discover meaning
in what we see. Naturally we feel lost in the presence of objects that make sense only
to undiluted vision, and we look for help to the more familiar medium of words.67

We can distinguish between several claims in this familiar generaliza-

tion about modern subjectivity. First is the argument that modern subjectiv-
ity is divided into two realms, the mental and the physical („concept is split
from percept‰). Second is the suggestion that the mental realm dominates the
physical senses, including the eyes, and is overly rationalistic („our eyes are
being reduced to instruments by which to measure and identify‰). As a result,
humans, on average, no longer attend to what the senses have to teach them
independently of the mental realm („we are neglecting the gift of comprehend-
ing things by what our senses tell us about them‰). Finally, there is the claim
that people now typically „look for help‰ in the more familiar mental realm of
language, rather than the physical realm of the senses, because we no longer
know how to learn from „undiluted vision‰·in other words, vision function-
ing independently of the overly rational mind.
Clearly, this theory evinces a deep skepticism about vision, arguing that
humans cannot see reality directly because they subsume what they see under
abstract concepts provided by language. Balázs modiÔes this theory by placing
an intermediary stage·the use of language in place of the face and body to
express the inner·in between the tendency to „look for help in the more fa-
miliar medium of words‰ and the failure to attend to what the senses have to
teach independently of language. It is the use of language in place of the face
and body, due to the dominance of language in the word culture of modernity,
that results in humans forgetting how to see the face and body of another as
expressive of mind, according to Balázs.
As we shall see in a moment, this did not mean that for Balázs the non-
rational emotional realm expressed by the face and body once again became
submerged and unexpressed when synchronized sound arrived, as it had been
before the invention of cinema. For vision also suffers from another limitation.
Humans, Balázs argues again and again, are very bad at noticing details. They
look at reality „as a concert-goer ignorant of music listens to an orchestra play-
ing a symphony. All he hears is the leading melody, all the rest is blurred into
a general murmur. Only those can really understand and enjoy the music who
can hear the contrapuntal architecture of each part in the score. This is how we
see life: only its leading melody meets the eye‰ (TTF 55).
It is not clear from the above passage, or BalázsÊs Ôlm theory in general,
whether Balázs believes the inability to notice details is an innate physiological
The Revelationist Tradition: Exegesis 41

limitation of normal human vision or just a bad visual habit that can be cor-
rected. But either way, he thinks it is a limitation of the naked eye, and one that,
he argues, the cinema overcomes, primarily through the close-up: „But a good
Ôlm with its close-ups reveals the most hidden parts in our polyphonous life,
and teaches us to see the intricate visual details of life as one reads an orches-
tral score‰ (TTF 55). Because it isolates and magniÔes whatever it Ôlms, the
close-up reveals details that are invisible to sight: „An ant-heap is lifeless if seen
from a distance, but at close quarters it is teeming with busy life. The grey, dull
texture of everyday life shows in its microdramatics many profoundly moving
happenings, if we look at it carefully enough in close-up‰ (TTF 86).
Due to the fact that the naked eye cannot see details, it is unable to see the
inner expressed in the details of the faces and bodies of others. In contrast, be-
cause the close-up isolates and magniÔes these details, the inner manifested in
the details of a face or body Ôlmed in close-up is revealed to the viewer: „But in
the isolated close-up of the Ôlm we can see to the bottom of a soul by means of
such tiny movements of facial muscles which even the most observant partner
would never perceive‰ (TTF 63). Thus, the realm of the inner expressed by the
face and body did not once again become submerged and unexpressed when
synchronized sound arrived. Although this happened to some extent, the use of
the close-up in sound Ôlm ensured that this realm of the inner remained par-
tially visible, even though actors were no longer forced to use their faces and
bodies to express themselves because of synchronized dialogue. The close-up,
by isolating and magnifying the details of the faces and bodies it Ôlms, can re-
veal the inner expressed unintentionally in those details·details that the naked
eye cannot see unaided.

IV

KracauerÊs claims about the limitations of human vision also constitute a ver-
sion of the modern subjectivity theory, although a more straightforward one
than BalázsÊs. Like our other Ôlm theorists, Kracauer claims that the cinema
reveals truths about reality invisible to sight, such as „objects too small to be
readily noticed or even perceived by the naked eye.‰68 And, again like other rev-
elationists, he makes the familiar comparison between the cinema and visual
technologies such as the microscope: „In its preoccupation with the small the
cinema is comparable to science. Like science, it breaks down material phe-
nomena into tiny particles, thereby sensitizing us to the tremendous energies
accumulated in the microscopic conÔgurations of matter‰ (TF 50). But like
Balázs, and unlike Epstein and Vertov, for Kracauer it is a historical limitation
speciÔc to modernity that vision suffers from, and, unlike Balázs, Kracauer
does not argue that people have forgotten how to see.
According to Kracauer, one of the fundamental features of modernity is
„abstractness‰ (TF 291), and he explains what he means by this term by refer-
ring to the sciences: „Most sciences do not deal with the objects of ordinary
42 doubting vision

experience but abstract from them certain elements which they then process in
various ways. Thus the objects are stripped of the qualities which give them
Âall their poignancy and preciousnessÊ (Dewey)‰ (TF 292).
This lack of concern with qualities is what constitutes the abstractness of
the sciences, and Kracauer argues that, due to the enormous inÒuence of the
sciences in modernity, „our way of thinking and our whole attitude toward re-
ality are conditioned by the principles from which science proceeds,‰ including
the principle of abstractness: „the abstractness inherent in [the sciences] cannot
but inÒuence our habits of thought‰ (TF 292). Thus, for Kracauer, the average
human in modernity, like a scientist, does not attend to the qualities of objects:
„scientiÔc and technological abstractions condition the minds most effectively;
and they all refer us to physical phenomena, while at the same time luring us
away from their qualities‰ (TF 298).
Kracauer points to what he believes to be several pernicious consequences
of abstractness. One is that it „impedes practically all direct efforts to revamp re-
ligion and establish a consensus of beliefs‰ (TF 294). As any reader of Kracauer
will know, one of the features of modernity that preoccupied him throughout
his life and that he repeatedly bemoaned in his writings is the lack of ideologi-
cal unity in modern life, the absence of the sort of „binding norms‰ (TF 287)
that were supposedly provided by religion in premodern times. As he puts it in
his Ôrst published article in 1915 when describing the state of Germany over
the previous ten years, „Above all else, the most important need of the soul,
the religious, lay broken; there were no living, universally binding beliefs that
expressed our essence.‰69 And forty-Ôve years later, in Theory of Film, Kracauer
wrote under the subtitle „Ruins of ancient beliefs‰ (taken from Durkheim):

From the nineteenth century on practically all thinkers of consequence, no mat-

ter how much they differed in approach and outlook, have agreed that beliefs once
widely held·beliefs that were embraced by the whole of the person and covered life
in its wholeness·have been inexorably waning. They not only acknowledge this
fact but speak of it with an assurance which is palpably founded on inner experience.
It is as if they felt in their very bones the breakdown of binding norms. (TF 287)

„Man in our society is ideologically shelterless‰ (TF 288), Kracauer laments,

and he often uses metaphors of fragmentation to describe the supposed loss
of shared beliefs in modernity, in contradistinction to the supposed wholeness
provided by shared beliefs such as religion in premodern times.
According to Kracauer, it is, in part, the abstractness of modernity that
prevents the restoration of the ideological wholeness characteristic of pre-
modern life. When humans „try to get in touch with mental entities,‰ such as
ideological beliefs, „we reduce them to abstractions as colorless as the noise
to which radio music is commonly being reduced‰ (TF 293). We do this by
„passing [mental entities] off as derivatives of psychological dispositions,‰
and Kracauer cites Freudian psychoanalysis and „depth psychology‰ in gen-
eral as examples (TF 293). We also do this through „relativistic reduction,‰ the
„realiz[ation] that everything can be viewed from more than one angle‰ (TF 293).
The Revelationist Tradition: Exegesis 43

Because we compare the various ideologies that are on offer in modernity, we

„run the risk of missing the very essences of the diverse value systems to which
we are exposed. Our interest in their comparable elements interferes with our
readiness to absorb any such system for its own sake‰ (TF 294).
But it is not just our relation to mental phenomena, such as ideological be-
liefs, that is affected by the abstractness of modernity, according to Kracauer. It
is also our relation to physical phenomena, and it is in characterizing this relation
that KracauerÊs claims about the limitations of human vision emerge. Because
we do not attend to the qualities of objects, he argues, we do not see them. „Phys-
ical reality,‰ including the phenomena people typically encounter in everyday
life in modern societies·„streets, faces, railway stations‰ (TF 299)·has „re-
mained largely invisible‰ in modernity, he claims, and this is due to abstractness.
„The truly decisive reason for the elusiveness of physical reality is the habit of
abstract thinking we have acquired under the reign of science and technology,‰
which leads us to „eliminate the qualities of things‰ (TF 299–300). Hence, we
live with only „a shadowy awareness of things in their fullness‰ (TF 291). We
touch „reality only with the Ôngertips‰ (TF 294).
Thus, as it does for Balázs, human vision suffers from a historical limita-
tion for Kracauer, one that is speciÔc to modernity. Unlike Balázs, though,
Kracauer does not argue that the eye used to be free in premodern times of the
limitation it suffers in modernity. It is not that humans have forgotten how to
see the qualities of objects for Kracauer, as they have forgotten how to see the
face and body as expressive of mind for Balázs. According to Kracauer, in pre-
modern times, sight suffered from the same limitation as it does in modernity,
but for a different reason. Whereas in modernity it is abstractness that prevents
people from seeing the qualities of things, in premodern times it was ideolo-
gies, such as religion. „It should be remembered that physical nature has been
persistently veiled by ideologies relating its manifestations to some total as-
pect of the universe‰ (TF 299). For Kracauer, therefore, „physical reality‰ has
always been „largely invisible‰ to humans, Ôrst due to ideology in premodern
times and now due to abstractness in modernity.
As in BalázsÊs Ôlm theory, because abstractness is only a historical, as
opposed to an innate, limitation, the human eye can potentially recover from
it, and it is precisely such a recovery that Kracauer believes the cinema ef-
fects. Because the cameraÊs mechanical nature allows it to record and repro-
duce what is in front of it·including all of the qualities of objects that are
supposedly invisible to people in modernity due to abstractness·regardless
of what the Ôlmmaker thinks or believes is in front of it, it reveals a physical
reality that has never before been seen by humans due to abstraction in mo-
dernity and ideology in premodern times. „Film renders visible what we did
not, or perhaps even could not, see before its advent. It effectively assists us in
discovering the material world with its psychophysical correspondences. We
literally redeem this world from its dormant state, its state of virtual nonexis-
tence, by endeavouring to experience it through the camera‰ (TF 300). Hence,
KracauerÊs Theory of Film is subtitled The Redemption of Physical Reality:
cinema redeems physical reality from its invisible state.
44 doubting vision

Cinema only does this, though, if used in a certain way, and Theory of Film
is to some extent a manifesto advocating a speciÔc way of using the cinema.
Kracauer follows many traditional Ôlm historians in arguing that there have
been two major traditions of Ôlmmaking in the history of cinema. The Ôrst,
which he calls the realistic tendency and which is exempliÔed by the Ôlms
of the Lumière Brothers, uses the cinemaÊs recording properties to reproduce
reality. The second, which he refers to as the formative tendency and which
is exempliÔed by MélièsÊs Ôlms, uses properties of cinema such as editing to
transform reality according to the ÔlmmakerÊs vision. Kracauer acknowledges
that the second tradition conforms to the standard deÔnition of art in the twen-
tieth century as necessarily involving the transformation of reality by the art-
ist. It was, of course, this deÔnition of art that informed the Ôrst wave of Ôlm
theory and history from the 1910s through the 1930s, which was in large mea-
sure aimed at rebutting the claim that cinema, like photography, is not an art
because it can only record and reproduce reality.70 Kracauer, however, departs
from this Ôrst wave of Ôlm theory and history by arguing that when this stan-
dard deÔnition of art is applied to the cinema, it „thwarts the cinemaÊs intrinsic
possibilities. If for reasons of aesthetic purity Ôlms inÒuenced by the tradi-
tional arts prefer to disregard actual physical reality, they miss an opportunity
reserved for the cinematic medium‰ (TF 301). As this statement suggests, Kra-
cauer was a medium-speciÔc theorist, meaning that he believed that „each me-
dium has a speciÔc nature which invites certain kinds of communications while
obstructing others‰ (TF 3). According to him, the recording and reproducing of
reality is one of the cinemaÊs essential properties, part of its „speciÔc nature.‰
Thus, only Ôlms that record and reproduce reality „may claim aesthetic valid-
ity‰ (TF 37). This, in turn, means that the traditional deÔnition of art as neces-
sarily involving the transformation of reality by the artist does not apply to the
cinema (and photography). If cinema is an art, it is an „art with a difference.
Indeed, along with photography, Ôlm is the only art which exhibits its raw
material‰ (TF 302).71
Kracauer, however, does not completely reject the standard deÔnition of art
and the formative tendency in Ôlmmaking that is believed to exemplify it. In-
stead, like André Bazin before him and Victor Perkins after him, Kracauer tries
to Ônd a rapprochement between this deÔnition and the requirement that Ôlms
record and reproduce reality by arguing that „the formative tendency . . . does
not have to conÒict with the realistic tendency. Quite the contrary, it may help
substantiate and fulÔll it‰ (TF 16). Just as Bazin had argued that Ôlmmakers
such as Jean Renoir had creatively found ways to better record and reproduce
reality, discovering and developing techniques such as the long take and the shot
in depth, so Kracauer argues that the formal and stylistic properties of the pho-
tographic and cinematic mediums, as well as the photographer and ÔlmmakerÊs
creativity, can be employed in the service of better recording and reproducing
reality: „Provided his choices are governed by his determination to record and
reveal nature, he is entirely justiÔed in selecting motif, frame, lens, Ôlter, emul-
sion and grain according to his sensibilities‰ (TF 15). Hence, the ÔlmmakerÊs for-
mative tendency plays a role in the type of Ôlmmaking Kracauer is advocating.
The Revelationist Tradition: Exegesis 45

But this formative tendency must be subordinated to recording and reproducing

reality: „What counts is the ÂrightÊ mixture of his realist loyalties and formative
endeavours·a mixture, that is, in which the latter, however strongly developed,
surrender their independence to the former‰ (TF 16).
Thus, in Theory of Film, Kracauer advocates a certain way of using the
cinema, one in which the formative is subordinated to the realistic. He does
so, in part, because he is a medium-speciÔc theorist. He believes that record-
ing and reproducing is one of the cinemaÊs essential properties. However, he
also does so because of his distrust of human vision, his claim that, due to
the abstractness of modernity, humans do not see the qualities of objects and
therefore have only a „shadowy awareness‰ of physical reality. If cinema is to
redeem physical reality for people, if it is to render „visible what we did not, or
perhaps even could not, see before its advent,‰ it must reproduce reality rather
than transform it according to the ÔlmmakerÊs vision: „in order to make us ex-
perience physical reality, Ôlms must show what they picture‰ (TF 300).
Using the cinema to record and reproduce reality not only changes our
relation to physical reality by revealing the qualities of objects, according to
Kracauer. It also changes our relation to mental phenomena, including ideol-
ogy. As we have seen, for Kracauer the abstractness of modernity prevents the
restoration of the ideological wholeness characteristic of premodern times.
Thus, he concludes that a step toward this restoration would be taken if the
abstractness of modernity were to be eliminated: „if we want to assimilate val-
ues that delimit our horizon we must Ôrst rid ourselves of that abstractness as
best we can‰ (TF 296). One way of eliminating abstractness is by revealing the
qualities of objects to sight: „We can limit our all but compulsive indulgence
in abstractions only if we restore to objects the qualities which, as Dewey says,
give them Âtheir poignancy and preciousness.Ê The remedy for the kind of ab-
stractness which befalls minds under the impact of science is experience·the
experience of things in their concreteness‰ (TF 296). In as much as cinema
enables us to „experience things in their concreteness,‰ it weakens if not de-
stroys the power of abstractness over our minds and bodies, thereby not only
„assist[ing] us in discovering the material world,‰ but helping us to take a step
toward regaining ideological wholeness, toward escaping the „spiritual naked-
ness‰ of modernity.
As should be evident, KracauerÊs arguments about the limitations of human
vision are a straightforward version of the modern subjectivity theory. His basic
claims·about the abstract nature of the modern mind, about the failure of hu-
mans in modernity to attend to „what our senses tell us about‰ the world inde-
pendently of abstract categories·are familiar themes from this theory. And it
is perhaps because of the inÒuence of this theory, or rather a powerful version
of it that he encounters in the United States, that KracauerÊs conception of the
cinema as a revelatory technology changes during his lifetime. In his early Ôlm
theory of the 1920s and early 1930s, Kracauer argued that it is truths about
social reality, rather than physical reality, that are revealed by the cinema to
the viewer. And it is not so much what the cinema represents, but rather how it
represents it, that is revelatory. As we have seen, throughout his life, Kracauer
46 doubting vision

lamented the supposed loss of ideological wholeness in modernity. In his early

Ôlm theory, he claimed that the cinema reveals to us our modern condition
of ideological fragmentation through the fragmentary, distracting, superÔcial
nature of the sensory experience it offers to viewers. As he puts it: „Here, in
pure externality, the audience encounters itself; its own reality is revealed in
the fragmented sequence of splendid sense impressions. Were this reality to
remain hidden from the viewers, they could neither attack nor change it; its
disclosure in distraction is therefore of moral signiÔcance.‰72 For Kracauer, the
revelation to the masses of ideological fragmentation through the sensory frag-
mentation, distraction, and superÔciality experienced while watching a Ôlm
is a crucial precondition for the revolution that, as someone inÒuenced at this
moment in his life by Jewish Messianism and Marxism, he hopes will bring
about a return to the ideological wholeness of premodern times.73
Some of KracauerÊs interpreters have argued that the shift from the con-
ception of cinema as a technology that reveals truths about social reality in his
early Ôlm theory to the conception of cinema as revealing truths about physical
reality in Theory of Film betrays a loss of interest on KracauerÊs part or even
a repression of the topic of cinemaÊs relation to its historical context. Miriam
Hansen, for example, suggests that:

One might say that history disappears from Theory of Film in a double repression:
on the level of theory, inasmuch as the speciÔcally modern(ist) moment of Ôlm
and cinema is transmuted into a medium-speciÔc afÔnity with physical, external,
or visible reality; and, in the same move, on the level of intellectual biography, in
that Kracauer seems to have cut himself off completely from his Weimar persona
and the radical „love of cinema‰ that inspired him at the time.74

To explore this issue in depth would take me well beyond the scope of this
book. But it is worth pointing out that, as we have seen, Kracauer is still con-
cerned with the relation between cinema and its historical context in Theory
of Film. It is just that his conception of this relation has changed. Whereas in
his early Ôlm theory Kracauer believed that the cinema would help transform
its historical context by revealing the absence of ideological wholeness in mo-
dernity through embodying that absence (the lack of ideological wholeness
in modernity is embodied in the fragmentary, distracting, superÔcial sensory
experience of cinema), in his later work, he argued that the cinema would help
change its historical context by counteracting the cause of the absence of ideo-
logical wholeness in modernity (namely, abstractness) and that it would do so
by revealing the qualities of objects.
One reason, perhaps, that Kracauer changed his mind about the relation-
ship between the cinema and its historical context as well as his conception of
the cinema as a revelatory technology is that, in moving to the United States
in the early 1940s, he came into contact with a particularly inÒuential version
of the modern subjectivity theory, that of Alfred North Whitehead, whose writ-
ings Kracauer refers to and extracts in Theory of Film. In works such as Pro-
cess and Reality (1929), Whitehead, the British mathematician and philosopher
The Revelationist Tradition: Exegesis 47

who taught at Harvard in the 1930s, proposed a new metaphysical theory in

response to developments in twentieth-century physics, primarily relativity and
quantum theory, which, he believed, had broken up the once stable foundations
of science. „The old foundations of scientiÔc thought are becoming unintel-
ligible,‰ Whitehead argued. „Time, space, matter, material, ether, electricity,
mechanism, organism, conÔguration, structure, pattern, function, all require
reinterpretation.‰75 In place of the metaphysical doctrine of scientiÔc material-
ism (which, according to Whitehead, dominated the natural sciences from the
seventeenth through the end of the nineteenth centuries, and which conceived
of reality as consisting of independently existing particles interacting in mea-
surable, predictable ways), Whitehead proposed a new cosmology, which sees a
particle „as a vibratory ebb and Òow of an underlying energy.‰76 Any particular
particle consists, according to this theory, of a number of overlapping streams
of energy Òowing through space and time.
In the 1940s and 1950s, WhiteheadÊs process philosophy, as it was often
called, inÒuenced the American avant-garde not unlike how Henri BergsonÊs
philosophy had inÒuenced the European avant-garde several decades earlier.
For example, as Daniel Belgrad has argued, painters and poets such as Bar-
nett Newman, Robert Motherwell, and Charles Olson took the concept of the
„energy Ôeld‰ from Whitehead in order to justify their art.77 In Theory of Film,
the inÒuence of WhiteheadÊs metaphysics can be discerned in KracauerÊs talk
of „the tremendous energies accumulated in the microscopic conÔgurations of
matter,‰ and of reality as an endless continuum. But it is the impact of White-
headÊs version of the modern subjectivity theory on Kracauer that particularly
concerns us here. One of the social implications of his metaphysics which
Whitehead often pointed to is that an organism and its environment are fun-
damentally continuous because they consist of overlapping streams of energy.
And one of the deleterious effects on society of traditional scientiÔc material-
ism, with its atomistic conception of reality as consisting of separate, individual
particles, is that it gives rise to a conception of an organism as separate from
its environment, thereby „ignor[ing] . . . the true relation of each organism to
its environment [as well as] the intrinsic worth of the environment.‰78 Further-
more, the „professionalizing of knowledge‰ that modern science exempliÔes
means, Whitehead argued, that in modernity, „there is a development of par-
ticular abstractions, and a contraction of concrete appreciation.‰79
The cure for the separation between organism and environment caused
by scientiÔc materialism and the highly specialized, abstract education en-
couraged by modern science lies, Whitehead believed, in aesthetic education
broadly conceived. For in the „aesthetic apprehension‰ of its environment, an
organism directly sees and comes into contact with the concrete qualities of
the objects around it, rather than separating itself from its environment behind
abstractions.

What is wanted is an appreciation of the inÔnite variety of vivid values achieved

by an organism in its proper environment. When you understand all about the sun
and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, you may still
48 doubting vision

miss the radiance of the sunset. There is no substitute for the direct perception of
the concrete achievement of a thing in its actuality. We want concrete fact with a
high light thrown on what is relevant to its preciousness.
What I mean is art and aesthetic education.80

Clearly, WhiteheadÊs arguments constitute yet another version of the mod-

ern subjectivity theory, at the center of which is the divorce between reality and
subjectivity due to mental abstractions and language and the desire to see „what
the senses have to teach us,‰ to see the world independently of concepts and
words. And, as we have seen, Kracauer makes very similar arguments about
the pernicious abstractness of modernity and the way in which Ôlm can coun-
teract this abstractness by revealing the concrete qualities of objects. Whether
or not Kracauer changed his mind about the relationship between cinema and
its historical context, as well as his conception of the cinema as a revelatory
technology, due to WhiteheadÊs inÒuence, it is clear that KracauerÊs claims
about the limitations of human vision, like BalázsÊs, are very much indebted
to the modern subjectivity theory, and that in this respect their visual skepti-
cism differs from that of Epstein and Vertov, who view the Òaws of the eye as
innate.
 2

The Revelationist Tradition

Critique

We have seen how the belief that human vision fails to see the true nature of
reality informs the work of Epstein, Vertov, Balázs, and Kracauer, and we have
located the immediate sources of this belief. In this chapter I examine more
closely the various truths about reality that are revealed by the cinema, accord-
ing to these theorists, and ask whether the naked eye is really too weak to see
them, as they argue.
Due to the inÒuence of BergsonÊs metaphysics, the most important of these
truths for Epstein is mobility, and we have already examined the spatial impli-
cations of this concept for his Ôlm theory, his claim that the cinema reveals the
inner mobile essence or being of objects normally invisible to human sight.
The concept of mobility also has temporal implications for EpsteinÊs claims
about the cinemaÊs revelatory power. For Bergson, one consequence of the fact
that reality is an indivisible, continuous whole is that time is duration, „the
continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells
as it advances.‰1 Time does not consist of the replacement of one static, discrete
state by another, but rather of one continuous state changing perpetually and
unpredictably. Hence, the past is not supplanted by the present and the future,
but instead endures into the present and the future, like a „Òux of Òeeting shades
[of color] merging into each other‰2 or the Òow of a river. Meanwhile, due
to practical necessity, we humans conÔne ourselves to the present, artiÔcially
separating it from the past and the future.

In reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably,

it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our
50 doubting vision

earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing
against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. The cerebral
mechanism is arranged just so as to drive back into the unconscious almost the
whole of this past, and to admit beyond the threshold only that which can cast light
on the present situation or further the action now being prepared·at short only
that which can give useful work.3

Although Bergson here blames „the cerebral mechanism‰ for conÔning

human beings to the present, he also, as we have seen, attributes a similar
Òaw to perception, arguing that it „cuts out‰ objects from their temporal be-
coming much like a still photograph does. This means that we experience
time as a series of static, discrete states, which we then combine together
mentally·this is another reason that Bergson claims the human mind is
cinematographic.
Epstein is clearly inÒuenced by BergsonÊs conception of time as duration,
and he too claims that humans are conÔned to the present and are unable to
experience time as the Òow it really is. However, he tends to blame the weak-
ness of our perceptual and cognitive faculties for this, rather than practical
necessity.

Man . . . seems constitutionally unsuited to capture a continuous event in four di-

mensions all by himself. ManÊs physiological inability to master the notion of
space-time and to escape this atemporal section of the world, which we call the
present and of which we are almost exclusively conscious, is the cause of most
„accidents of matter and knowing,‰ most of which would be avoided if we could
directly seize the world as the Òow that it is.4

In contrast, the cinema is able to „capture a continuous event in four

dimensions.‰

But the speciÔc quality of this new projected world [of cinema] is to make an-
other perspective of matter evident, that of time. The fourth dimension, which once
seemed mysterious, becomes a notion as banal as that of the other three coordinates
through the techniques of slow motion and fast motion. Time is the fourth dimen-
sion of a universe of space-time. Cinematography currently is the only instrument
that records an event according to a system of four reference points.5

Cinema therefore renders the true nature of time as Òow or duration visible
to the viewer. In the following passage, Epstein is describing close-ups of the
human face:

Even more beautiful than a laugh is the face preparing for it. I must interrupt.
I love the mouth which is about to speak and holds back, the gesture which hesi-
tates between right and left, the recoil before the leap, and the moment before land-
ing, the becoming, the hesitation, the taught spring, the prelude, and even more
than all these, the piano being tuned before the overture.6
The Revelationist Tradition: Critique 51

The Òow of time is revealed in moments of temporal presence·„recoil,‰

„hesitation,‰ „becoming‰·in which past and future become visible in the
present.
Due to his Bergsonian conception of time, Epstein argues that narrative
is antithetical to the cinema because it supposedly divides time into separate
states.

So why tell stories, narratives which always assume a chronology, sequential

events, a gradation in facts and feelings? . . . There are no stories. There have never
been stories. There are only situations, having neither head nor tail; without begin-
ning, middle, or end, no right side or wrong side; they can be looked at from all di-
rections; right becomes left; without limits in past or future, they are the present.7

Narrative, Epstein claims, should therefore be rejected in favor of a „new dra-

maturgy,‰ which he names an „art of incidences‰ or „situations.‰ An incident
or a situation is a narrative event in which past and future become visible in the
present: „Fragments from several pasts take root in a single present. The future
erupts through the memories.‰8
In an article about his Ôlm The Three-Sided Mirror (1927), Epstein indi-
cates that he is attempting to put his theory of the situation into practice. The
Ôlm tells the story of Him, an unnamed, wealthy businessman who is romanti-
cally involved with three women simultaneously. Having abandoned them one
day for a ride in the country in his sports car, he crashes after being struck on
the forehead by a bird in Òight while speeding along a country lane (Ôg. 2.1).
For Epstein, the encounter between Him and the bird is a paradigmatic situ-
ation or incidence, because the viewer can see more than the narrative event
itself, namely, his past and future and the entire context of the drama in which
he has been involved, which crystallizes at the moment the bird strikes him.

A carefree motorist seems an insigniÔcant character; a swallow in Òight even more

so; their encounter; the incidence. That little mark which the birdÊs beak left on the
manÊs forehead had against it the desires of three hearts, the miraculous vigilance
of love, all the reÒexes of living, all the probabilities in three-dimensional space,
every temporal chance. But it took . . . place. In an instant, super saturation pro-
duces crystallization. . . . Before and after it, characters and actions suddenly fall
obediently into place. In the future, a wrong road unexpectedly intersected in its
turn by the ultimate. In the past, viewed enumerated, interlinked, comprehensible,
comprehended.9

Epstein connects events in the past, present, and future in this Ôlm using a
radically innovative temporal structure. The Ôlm is divided into four numbered
sections. In the Ôrst three, the three women, one per section, tell somebody
nearby about their frustrating, painful love affairs with Him, which the Ôlm
narrates using elliptical Òashbacks. Intercut with these reminiscences are shots
of Him retrieving his sports car from a garage and driving through towns from
where he sends messages, one at a time, to each of the three women, informing
52 doubting vision

Figure 2.1. The aftermath of the

crash in The Three-Sided Mirror
(Jean Epstein, 1927).

them that he will not be joining them. While the temporal relationship bet-
ween these shots and the scenes of the women remembering is indeterminate
in sections two and three, the Ôrst section strongly implies that they are Òash-
forwards. We see Him being driven away from a restaurant where he has just
quarreled with one woman after she has run out of the restaurant and begun
talking about her love affair with Him to a passing stranger. The shots we then
see of Him retrieving his car from the garage, in which he has changed his
clothes, must therefore occur sometime after her reminiscences, which only
take a few minutes. But even if they are occurring roughly simultaneously with
the three women recalling their involvement with Him, they themselves contain
Òash-forwards of the road He will drive down to his death, as well as of the tele-
graph wires on which the bird will perch that will strike Him on the forehead
(Ôgs. 2.2–2.4). Epstein could have strictly adhered to the four-part structure of
the Ôlm, conÔning the scenes of Him in his sports car racing toward his death
to this last section alone, thereby giving each major character in the Ôlm their
own section. Instead, he deliberately intercuts these scenes (the future) with
the scenes of the three women reminiscing (the present) about their love affairs
with Him (the past) in an effort to create a strong sense of continuity between
the three temporal dimensions.
That events in the past, present, and future are connected and that the Ôlm
medium can represent these connections through Òashbacks and Òash-forwards
are hardly controversial ideas. But does this mean that humans are conÔned
to the present due to the weakness of our perceptual and mental faculties? Is
time really something that we could see or experience more of if our eyes were
only stronger, as Epstein claims? This claim suggests that time is like a spatial
whole that we can see more or less of. Just as when we back away from a tall
building we can see more of it, so as we move away from the present we can
see more of the past and future. As Wittgenstein argued in his remarks about
St. AugustineÊs famous question·What, then, is time?·the surface grammati-
cal analogies in our language between temporal and spatial expressions should
not be taken too far because they mask profound logical differences. For ex-
ample, there is a surface grammatical analogy between the injunctions „donÊt
live in the past‰ and „donÊt live in Manhattan.‰ But whereas we can ask where
The Revelationist Tradition: Critique 53

Figure 2.2. A shot of the

businessman parking his car
outside a telegraph ofÔce.

Figure 2.3. Shot in Ôgure 2.2

is followed by a shot of birds
perched on telegraph wires.

Figure 2.4. Shot in Ôgure 2.3 is

followed by a shot of the busi-
nessman leaving the telegraph
ofÔce with telegram in hand.

Manhattan is and request instructions for getting there, we cannot ask the same
of the past.10
Augustine takes these surface analogies too far as is evident, according
to Wittgenstein, in his discussion of measuring time, his claim that „the past
canÊt be measured, as it is gone by; and the future canÊt be measured because it
has not yet come; and the present canÊt be measured for it has no extension.‰11
Augustine conceives of measuring time as akin to measuring the length of an
object, when we are able to see the beginning and end of what we measure.
54 doubting vision

Because we cannot see the past and the future, we therefore cannot measure
time, Augustine concludes. But although there are similarities between measur-
ing time and space, there are also signiÔcant logical differences, including the
fact that the parts of a temporal whole, unlike the parts of a spatial whole, do not
coexist. Hence, it is wrong to demand, as Augustine does, that when measur-
ing time we be able to see the beginning and end of what we measure, for this
is to impose the logical grammar of space onto time. Epstein does something
similar, conceiving of time as if it were like a spatial whole whose parts (past,
present, and future) coexist, but which we are only able to see or experience
part of (the present) due to the limitations of our perceptual faculty, as if, were
our eyes only stronger, we would be able to see its other parts, too. But whereas
we can point to the location of the part of a spatial whole that is out of sight,
such as the roof of a tall building, and potentially adjust our position so that we
can see it, no matter how strong our eyes are, we cannot point to where events in
the past or future are or adjust our position to see them as we should be able to
if the past and future did coexist with the present. The present, therefore, is not
something we are perceptually conÔned to due to the limitations of the human
eye, in the way that we can be conÔned to one part of a spatial whole, unable to
see its other parts, for conÔnement implies the possibility of escape, of seeing
its other parts as well. And while it is a truism that the cinema is a temporal art
that can record events unfolding in time, this does not mean that it enables the
viewer to escape the present into the past and future through Òashbacks and
Òash-forwards, thereby making the fourth dimension of time visible, as Epstein
suggests. When one sees a Òashback in a Ôlm, one is not escaping the present
and seeing the past. Rather, one is seeing a recording in the present of a past
event. To truly escape the present, the cinema would have to enable the viewer
to see the Òashback when it was shown at the previous nightÊs screening of the
Ôlm, or when it will be shown at the following nightÊs screening.
Wittgenstein suggested that it is the Augustinian picture of language, the
notion that the meaning of a word is the thing named by it, that leads to this
confusion about time and many other concepts. Because we use time as a
noun, we are easily misled into thinking that it refers to an entity of some kind,
which, because we cannot see it, or can only see part of it (the present), must
therefore be wholly or in part hidden from us, „something we can see from
the outside but which we canÊt look into.‰12 But the dimension of time is not
something that we can only see part of, because it is not a thing at all, unlike,
say, the spatial dimensions of an object, such as its length or width. This is
why we cannot point to its parts or adjust our position to see parts of it better.
It is therefore nonsensical to accuse the human eye of failing to see the fourth
dimension of time, as Epstein does, and equally nonsensical to argue that the
cinema is capable of revealing it.
What about the spatial consequences of the mobile nature of reality? IsnÊt it
true that, whereas from a human perceptual point of view a table, for example,
appears still and solid, physical theories have shown that in reality it is mostly
empty space in which „sparsely scattered . . . are numerous electric charges
rushing about with great speed‰?13 DonÊt our perceptual faculties create the false
The Revelationist Tradition: Critique 55

impression that reality is static and substantial, as Epstein argues? This is a

venerable illusion which Gilbert Ryle attempted to dispel, arguing that there
is no genuine rivalry or incompatibility between philosophical and scientiÔc
descriptions of the microstructure of objects and our ordinary, everyday per-
ceptual experiences and descriptions of them.14 This illusion is created, Ryle
suggested, by the use of concepts such as „to describe‰ to cover the disparate
goals and activities of the physical theorist and the ordinary person, which
„smother‰ the fundamental differences between them. In fact, argued Ryle,
the theorist and the ordinary person are not describing or misdescribing the
same things at all, although the formerÊs descriptions presuppose that what the
latter is describing exists. First of all, if the theorist describes anything at all,
it is the physics of the matter and energy of all objects, whereas the ordinary
person is typically describing a speciÔc object. Hence, the things about an
object described by and of interest to an ordinary person·whether it is a table
as opposed to a chair, for example·play no role in the theoristÊs description,
and vice versa. „A bit of the theory of ultimate particles has no place in it for a
description or misdescription of chairs and tables, and a description of chairs
and tables has no place in it for a description or misdescription of ultimate
particles. A statement that is true or false of the one is neither true nor false of
the other. It cannot therefore be a rival of the other.‰15
Second, the theorist investigates the microstructure of objects to explain
their properties, such as why some things are solids as opposed to gases and
liquids. Far from showing that there is no such thing as a solid object, therefore,
the theorist is attempting to explain why some things are solids as opposed to
gases and liquids, thereby presupposing that there are such things as solids.
As P. M. S. Hacker puts it, picking up on RyleÊs argument: „If [the theorist]
contends that, because my table is a congeries of particles relatively widely
separated from each other, therefore it is not (from his point of view) solid, he
is in grave conceptual confusion. For it immediately follows that nothing on
earth is solid. So what was he trying to explain?‰16
If Ryle and Hacker are right, the fact that the microstructure of objects
consists of widely separated particles in rapid motion does not show that there
are no such things as static, solid objects, as Epstein, like many other moderns,
assumes. Indeed, it presupposes the very opposite.
Vertov also assumes that there is a conÒict between the world of science
and the everyday world, although the science that gives rise to this conÒict in
his theory is Marxist-Leninism, not physics. In specifying what the cinema
reveals about social reality that humans cannot see unaided, Vertov invokes
the familiar comparison between the cinema and other visual technologies by
asking a rhetorical question about the cinemaÊs difference from microscopes
and telescopes, about its unique area of competence: „The eye of the micro-
scope penetrates where the eye of my movie camera cannot. The eye of the
telescope reaches distant worlds, inaccessible to my naked eye. What about
the camera then? WhatÊs its role in my assault on the visible world?‰17 His
answer to this question is that the cinema „opens the eyes of the masses to the
connection . . . between the social and visual phenomena interpreted by the
56 doubting vision

camera.‰18 In other words, the cinema reveals various social relations the eye is
too weak to see between the phenomena it can see.
A major example of the revelation of such relations occurs, Annette
Michelson has argued, in VertovÊs 1924 Ôlm Kinoglaz.

We Ôrst see a peasant woman on her way to the market to buy meat. We next see
her, walking backwards, propelled by the reversal of that sequence, whence she
came. The processing and distribution of meats is then recapitulated in reverse,
as well. . . . And later in the Ôlm, from a PioneerÊs diary, [intertitle number] 64:
„If time went backwards the bread would return to the bakery.‰ And the Ôlm then
continues with a recapitulation of bread distribution and manufacture.19

According to Michelson, in this Ôlm Vertov uses reverse motion to go

back in time and reveal, in VertovÊs own words, „the origins of objects‰ such
as bread and meat, origins that the human eye is too weak to see because of
its temporal immobility, its conÔnement to the present.20 Such a revelation,
argues Vertov, has a potentially transformative impact on workers in his audi-
ence because it undoes what Marxists call „commodity fetishism,‰ making „it
possible for every worker to acquire, through evidence, the conviction that he,
the worker, creates all these [objects] himself, and that consequently they be-
long to him.‰21 Thus, the social relation that this sequence supposedly reveals
is one between the worker purchasing the meat in the present and the various
workers producing it in the past.
In general, as Michelson has shown, what Vertov attempts to reveal in his
Ôlms are the various social relations·putatively invisible to the naked human
eye·that, as a Marxist, he believes connect citizens of the new Soviet repub-
lics: relations of economic interdependency between town and city, between
different types of labor and sectors of the economy, between different ethnici-
ties, regions, and nationalities within the Soviet Union, and so on. Man with a
Movie Camera, for example,

joins the human life cycle with the cycles of work and leisure of a city from dawn
to dusk within the spectrum of industrial production. That production includes
Ôlmmaking (itself presented as a range of productive labor processes), mining,
steel production, communications, postal service, construction, hydro-electric
power installation, and the textile industry in a seamless, organic continuum.22

Vertov reveals these social relations to demonstrate to Soviet citizens that

they are part of a new, general community in which they are all equally interde-
pendent and all equally owners of the means of production, thereby furthering
the Marxist project of overcoming the alienation of private property in capital-
ism.23 And he does this by exploiting the two ways he believes the cinema is su-
perior to human vision: its mobility, its capacity to move rapidly through space
and time between citizens engaged in different activities in different places
at different times throughout the Soviet Union; and the precision of editing,
which allows him to link these disparate subjects into intelligible patterns.24
The Revelationist Tradition: Critique 57

As with connections between events in the past, present, and future, it

is hardly controversial to say that people are connected in the sense of being
linked by various social relations and that the cinema can represent these rela-
tions. But does this license VertovÊs claim that such social relations are invis-
ible to the naked eye, as if, were our eyes more powerful, we would be able to
see them? Once again Ryle comes to the rescue with some perspicuous analo-
gies. In some card games, for example, cards in a certain suit are designated
trumps by the rules of the game. But this does not mean that being a trump is
some „occult or latent [property] behind the glossy faces of the cards.‰25 Simi-
larly, the price of a commodity is not „an invisible quality of the thing, whose
detection requires some mysterious super-perceptive faculties.‰26 In both
cases, the fact that we say that being a trump or having a price is a property
or attribute of the card or commodity in question can mislead us into thinking
that they are like intrinsic physical properties we can see and describe, such
as that a card has a rectangular shape. Because the property of being a trump,
unlike having a rectangular shape, is not visible, we therefore assume it must
be invisible in the sense that our eyes are not powerful enough to see it, much
like its particulate structure is. But, of course, that a particular card is a trump
is not an intrinsic physical property of the card like its particulate structure,
but rather a property it possesses by virtue of its interaction with other cards as
deÔned by the rules of the game being played. Similarly, the price of a com-
modity is determined by its interaction with other commodities and the market
conditions in which it is made and consumed. It is not an intrinsic physical
property of the commodity like its mass. Hence, it is to these interactions, and
the contexts in which they occur, that we turn if we want to Ônd out whether a
card is a trump or if we want to know the price of a commodity. No matter how
powerful our eyes might be, we would not be able to see that a card is a trump
or know the price of the commodity just by looking at them in isolation from
these interactions and contexts. Furthermore, we are able to perceive these
interactions without the help of a visual technology. Unless we are suffering
from a perceptual or cognitive impairment, we are capable of discovering the
rules of a card game by watching the game being played and determining that
a particular card is a trump, unaided, just as we can Ônd out about market
conditions, view a commodity being produced and consumed, and Ôgure out
its price without assistance.
The same is true of social relations, such as marriage or the relation of
consumer to producer. Being married is not like an intrinsic physical property
we are incapable of seeing unaided, nor is being a consumer. Instead, the rela-
tion of marriage is created through a speciÔc type of interaction, namely, the
act of marrying, and one becomes a consumer through another type of interac-
tion, the act of consumption. If we want to discover these relations, we must
consult records of these interactions, such as marriage certiÔcates and receipts
of purchase, or witnesses to them, which we are quite able to do without a
visual technology. Ditto the social relations that Vertov endeavors to inform
his viewers of in his Ôlms. That a commodity is produced in the country and
58 doubting vision

consumed in the city and that the city is, therefore, dependent on the country
for this commodity is determined by the various interactions that constitute the
market conditions in which the commodity is made and purchased·that the
raw materials used to make the commodity originate in the country, that it is
cheaper to buy it from the country, and so on·which we must investigate if
we want to Ônd out where it comes from and why. This is precisely, of course,
what Vertov does in his Ôlms, despite what he claims in his theory. When
showing us the origins of meat in Kinoglaz, he is not revealing something our
eyes are not powerful enough to see in the same way that a microscope could
reveal the meatÊs particulate structure. Instead, he is informing us of certain
facts about the market conditions in which the meat is sold by depicting the
interactions that constitute these market conditions, such as the slaughter of
the cow in the slaughterhouse. Vertov in effect hypostatizes social relations in
his Ôlm theory, conceiving of them as if they were physical, intrinsic proper-
ties of things that the eye is incapable of seeing unaided, when in fact they are
properties things possess by virtue of their interactions with the world, interac-
tions we are in many instances perfectly capable of perceiving or Ônding out
about without assistance. It is therefore as nonsensical to accuse the eye of
failing to see these social relations as it is to accuse it of failing to see the past
and the future.
What about VertovÊs claim that our perceptions are disorganized and
confusing? Does this make sense? No, because although psychologists talk
of „having perceptions,‰ this does not mean that seeing consists of separate
perceptions joined together in the way that a Ôlm consists of separate shots that
are edited together. We cannot count our perceptions, whereas we can count the
number of shots in a Ôlm. Nor can we ask whether we had a perception today
or yesterday, whereas we can ask whether a shot was Ôlmed today or yesterday.
Hence, our perceptions cannot be badly organized, in the way that a Ôlm can be
badly edited, for there are no separate things to organize. Instead, what we see
is confusing or badly organized (which also means that it can be clear and well
organized, like a formal garden), or it is seen today or yesterday. This is why
we do not say that we see something confusedly, or that our seeing of it is con-
fused. Rather, we say that we are confused by what we see, or we say that what
we see is confusing, because it is what we see that can confuse us, not our act
of seeing it. Nor does VertovÊs talk of the cinema being more mobile than the
human eye, of being „free of the limits of time and space,‰ make sense. If a Ôlm
camera is not present to record an event as it happens, it cannot go backward
or forward in time to record it. Nor can it move instantaneously between one
place and another to record events, for it has to be taken between places to do
so, usually by human beings, which takes time. It is the change from one shot
to another in a Ôlm that can be instantaneous (or not). But this does not mean
that the viewer is suddenly transported from one place and time to another
when the shot changes, for the viewer remains in the same place (the movie
theater) and time (the present) throughout. Rather, it means that there is an
instantaneous transition between shots recorded at different places and times.
Vertov systematically conÒates the instantaneous transition between shots re-
corded at different times and places with the act of recording them to make it
The Revelationist Tradition: Critique 59

seem as if the camera itself can move instantaneously between different times
and places and is therefore more mobile than the human eye.
Time and social relations are good examples of the Ôrst type of truth about
reality found in the revelationist tradition. These relations are things that the
eye cannot intelligibly be accused of failing to see because they are not the sort
of things than can be seen. Emotion and family resemblance, which are found
in EpsteinÊs Ôlm theory, are examples of the second: things that it is logically
and empirically possible for human beings to see unaided.
For Epstein, the cinema reveals the inner mental life of human beings,
in particular their feelings. „The close-up is drama in high gear. A man says,
ÂI love the faraway princess.Ê Here the verbal gearing down is suppressed.
I can see love. It half lowers its eyelids, raises the arc of the eyebrows laterally,
inscribes itself on the taut forehead, swells the masseters, hardens the tuft of
the chin, Òickers on the mouth and at the edge of the nostrils.‰27 When a face
is Ôlmed in close-up, Epstein is claiming, the viewer can see more than the
external material surface or properties of the face in question, namely, inner
feelings („I can see love‰), as if, like the particulate structure of an object, the
naked eye is normally not strong enough to see such feelings. Indeed, Epstein
looks forward to a time when the movie camera will be used as a device for
revealing to prospective lovers their partnersÊ emotions: „Possibilities are al-
ready appearing for the drama of the microscope, a hystophysiology [sic] of
the passions, a classiÔcation of the amorous sentiments. . . . Young girls will
consult them instead of the fortune teller.‰28
The argument that the cinema reveals the inner mental life of human be-
ings is also made by other Ôlm theorists during this period, including Balázs,
and I will examine BalázsÊs version of it later in this chapter. Somewhat unique
to EpsteinÊs version is that he extends this argument beyond the human face and
body to include material objects. For Epstein, not only does the cinema uncover
the interior life of human beings, it also reveals the interior life of objects.

A close-up of a revolver is no longer a revolver, it is the revolver-character, in other

words the impulse towards or remorse for crime, failure, suicide. It is as dark as
the temptations of the night, bright as the gleam of gold lusted after, taciturn as
passion, squat, brutal, heavy, cold, wary, menacing. It has a temperament, habits,
memories, a will, a soul.29

Epstein refers to the interior life of an object as its „personality,‰ which he

deÔnes partly in Bergsonian terms: „Personality is the spirit visible in things
and people, their heredity made evident, their past become unforgettable, their
future already present.‰30 When the personality of an object is revealed by the
movie camera, the viewer can see more than an inert, material object. The ob-
ject seems to come alive, as if it were a living being of some kind.

Through the cinema, a revolver in a drawer, a broken bottle on the ground, an eye
isolated by an iris, are elevated to the status of characters in the drama. Being dra-
matic, they seem alive, as though involved in the evolution of an emotion. . . . To
things and beings in their most frigid semblance, the cinema thus grants the great-
est gift unto death: life. And it confers this life in its highest guise: personality.31
60 doubting vision

So great is the power of the cinema to reveal personality that it can make an
entire environment of objects appear alive:

True tragedy remains in abeyance. It threatens all the faces. It is in the curtain at
the window and the handle of the door. Each drop of ink can make it bloom on
the tip of the fountain pen. In the glass of water it dissolves. The whole room is
saturated with every kind of drama. The cigar smoke is poised menacingly over the
ashtrayÊs throat. The dust is treacherous. The carpet emits venomous arabesques
and the arms of the chair tremble.32

At Ôrst sight, the argument that the cinema reveals the personality of an
object may appear very mysterious. However, Epstein demystiÔes it somewhat
by invoking the experience of possessing a personal object:

Each of us, I assume, must possess some object which he holds onto for personal
reasons: for some itÊs a book; for some, perhaps, a very banal and somewhat
ugly trinket; for someone else, perhaps, a piece of furniture with no value. We
do not look at them as they really are. To tell the truth, we are incapable of see-
ing them as objects. What we see in them, through them, are the memories and
emotions, the plans or regrets that we have attached to these things for a more or
less lengthy period of time, sometimes forever. Now, this is the cinematographic
mystery: an object such as this, with its personal character, that is to say, an
object situated in a dramatic action that is equally photographic in character, re-
veals anew its moral character, its human and living expression when reproduced
cinematographically.33

Just as a personal object can sometimes seem to come alive with the vari-
ous „memories and emotions‰ with which it is associated to the owner who is
looking at it, so an object Ôlmed in close-up can seem to come alive with the
various narrative elements with which it is associated to the viewer looking at
it. Epstein provides a simple cinematic example to illustrate this point:

I imagine a banker receiving bad news at home from the stock exchange. He is
about to telephone. The call is delayed. Close-up of the telephone. If the shot of
the telephone is shown clearly, if it is well-written, you no longer see a mere tele-
phone. You read: ruin, failure, misery, prison, suicide. And in other circumstances,
this same telephone will say: sickness, doctor, help, death, solitude, grief. And at
yet another time this same telephone will cry gaily: joy, love, liberty. All this may
seem extremely simple; they may be regarded as childish symbols. I confess that it
seems very mysterious to me that one can in this way charge the simple reÒection
of inert objects with an intensiÔed sense of life, that one can animate it with its
own vital import.34

Epstein is arguing that the cinema reveals the interior life or personality of an
object in the sense that the close-up can animate an object with the context of
the narrative within which it is embedded.
The Revelationist Tradition: Critique 61

Another phenomenon that Epstein argues is revealed by the cinema is

family resemblance. In the following passage, he talks about his experience of
watching a home movie depicting two generations of a single family.

From oldest ancestor to youngest child, all the resemblances and differences de-
lineated a single character. The family seemed to me like an individual whose
dissimilar members never disrupted the sense of unity and, on the contrary, proved
necessary to its equilibrium. . . . Not a single person in the assembled group
seemed to me free, neither in what they had been, nor in what they were, nor in
what they would be. And what issued from the mouth of one or another was the
family, which answered me with its singular voice, according to its singular char-
acter, with its set way of thinking and which carried on across many past, present,
and future bodies.35

Here, Epstein describes family resemblance as if it were an invisible, immate-

rial, almost platonic entity existing independently of each family member. It
is only the cinema, according to Epstein, that has the power to capture this
strange entity, to render it visible to the Ôlm viewer through the accumulation
of images of the family across time. „Once cinematography will have reached
the century mark of its existence . . . it will have been able to capture the star-
tling and instructive appearances of this familial monster. Many other concepts
await their personiÔcation through cinematography; among the closest are he-
redity, the affectations of the mind, diseases.‰36
Once again, as with emotion, the revelation of family resemblance by the
movie camera involves the viewer seeing more than the external material sur-
face of the feature of reality being depicted in the cinematic image·namely,
the „familial monster‰ that lurks in each family member, waiting to be revealed
or personiÔed by the cinema.
What is important about emotion and family resemblance is that, unlike
time and „the relations of workers with each other,‰ they are phenomena that it
makes perfect sense to say that we see, as Wittgenstein pointed out in his investi-
gation into an unusual visual experience he called „aspect-dawning‰ in section xi
of part 2 of Philosophical Investigations. Although the duck-rabbit provides
the most famous example of this experience, Wittgenstein gives many others:
„I suddenly see the solution of a picture-puzzle. Before, there were branches
there; now there is a human shape. My visual impression has changed and now
I recognize that it has not only shape and color but also a quite particular Âorga-
nization.Ê ‰37 What makes aspect-dawning an unusual visual experience is that,
like some of the truths revealed by the cinema according to Epstein, it appears
to involve the beholder „seeing‰ more than the material properties of the object
he is looking at. This is because the object of sight remains materially un-
changed during aspect-dawning. Nothing is physically added to or taken away
from it to change its appearance. Yet, once the aspect has dawned, the beholder
seems to see something different about the object·what Wittgenstein calls an
aspect·even though he knows there is nothing new to see about it, materially
speaking. Thus, as Wittgenstein points out, an „exact copy‰ of the object of
62 doubting vision

sight before the dawning of an aspect will be identical to an exact copy of it

once the aspect has dawned because, materially, the object remains the same.
Hence, the beholderÊs claim that he sees something new about an object during
aspect-dawning can seem paradoxical and confusing. Wittgenstein sums up
this sense of paradox in the following way: „The change of aspect. ÂBut surely
you would say that the picture is altogether different now!Ê But what is differ-
ent: my impression? my point of view?·Can I say? I describe the alteration
like a perception; quite as if the object had altered before my eyes‰ (PI 195;
emphasis in original).
Wittgenstein includes family resemblance and emotion·phenomena that
Epstein argues are revealed by the cinema·under the concept of an aspect
because they occasion familiar examples of aspect-dawning. They can sud-
denly be „seen‰ in a face without the material properties of the face in question
changing. Indeed, WittgensteinÊs Ôrst example of aspect-dawning in section xi
is the resemblance between two faces: „I contemplate a face, and then sud-
denly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it
differently‰ (PI 193; emphasis in original). Likeness cannot, therefore, be rep-
resented using an exact copy or an accurate drawing of the faces in question,
although it can be seen in a drawing of the faces: „The one man might make an
accurate drawing of the two faces, and the other notice in the drawing the like-
ness which the former did not see‰ (PI 193). Similarly, an emotion expressed
in a face, such as friendliness, is something that a beholder may suddenly see,
even though the material properties of the face remain unchanged (PI 199).
Wittgenstein also gives as an example of aspect-dawning, or at least something
very similar to aspect-dawning, the curious experience that Epstein refers to
as the revelation of the personality of an object in which an object seems to
come alive to the beholder. This experience is very similar to aspect-dawning,
because during it the beholder behaves as if the object looked different to him,
as if it had changed in some way, even though the beholder knows that it has
not. For example, the beholder describes the object differently. „I might say:
a picture does not always live for me while I am seeing it. ÂHer picture smiles
down on me from the wall.Ê It need not always do so, whenever my glance
lights on it‰ (PI 205; emphasis in original).
In the Ôrst part of section xi of the Investigations, Wittgenstein tries to dis-
solve the air of paradox and confusion that can surround aspect-dawning. He
does so by investigating the meaning of the concept of seeing, when and how
it is employed correctly, to clarify precisely what the beholder means when he
says that he sees something new about an object during aspect-dawning. „But
this isnÊt seeing!‰ insists one of WittgensteinÊs imaginary interlocutors. „But
this is seeing!‰ demands another. Wittgenstein replies: „It must be possible to
give both remarks a conceptual justiÔcation. But this is seeing! In what sense
is it seeing?‰ (PI 203; emphasis in original). WittgensteinÊs detailed answer to
this question, which requires some careful unpacking, demonstrates that the
widespread assumption that we can only see the material properties of things
is false. In EpsteinÊs theory, this erroneous assumption in combination with
the Romantic theory of intuition gives rise to the claim that the cinema reveals
The Revelationist Tradition: Critique 63

emotion and family resemblance, which the naked eye cannot see because it is
conÔned to the external material properties of objects.
To answer the question of what sense seeing an aspect is seeing, Wittgen-
stein attempts to unearth the relevant criteria that govern correct uses of the
concept of seeing. As usual, to avoid the charge that he is inventing these crite-
ria or that they are not veriÔable, he examines situations in which they are most
visible: standard, third-person uses of the concept. According to Wittgenstein,
the criteria governing the correct use of any concept cannot be private, hidden,
or unknown, awaiting discovery by the philosopher. If they were, the concept
would be unusable and unteachable. Hence, the criteria governing correct uses
of the concept of seeing must lie in public, observable, verbal and nonverbal
behavior in context. P. M. S. Hacker summarizes this element of WittgensteinÊs
argument in the following way:

That a creature can perceive is established by observing its behavior, its discrimi-
natory, conative and affective responses to visibilia, audibilia, etc., its use of its
perceptual organs in discerning objects, sounds, smells or warmth in its environ-
ment. It is not the eye, brain, mind or soul that perceives, but . . . the living crea-
ture; and we determine that it perceives by observing its behavior in appropriate
circumstances.38

What are the criteria for saying that somebody sees something? To an-
swer this question, Wittgenstein imagines examples in which a hypothetical
beholder is asked to report on what he sees when shown a variety of standard
images and objects instead of ones that occasion unusual visual experiences
such as aspect-dawning. One obvious criterion for saying that the beholder
sees what he is shown is that he will, when asked, identify the kind of object he
is shown correctly. However, Wittgenstein points out that this is not a sufÔcient
criterion for saying that the beholder actually sees what he is shown. „I see that
an animal in a picture is transÔxed by an arrow. It has struck it in the throat
and sticks out at the back of the neck. Let the picture be a silhouette.·Do
you see the arrow·or do you merely know that these two bits are supposed to
represent part of an arrow? (Compare KöhlerÊs Ôgure of the interpenetrating
hexagons.)‰ (PI 203; emphasis in original.)
Somebody who cannot see the animal transÔxed by the arrow in this
schematic Ôgure (a silhouette) may well be able to infer what the Ôgure de-
picts from the spatial arrangement of the lines („two bits‰) and other clues,
and therefore identify the kind of object the Ôgure depicts correctly. What,
therefore, are the criteria for saying that somebody actually sees the animal
transÔxed by the arrow in this Ôgure, as opposed to merely knowing or infer-
ring what the Ôgure depicts? According to Wittgenstein, these criteria lie in
the way the beholder makes his report about what the Ôgure depicts, and the
precise form of words he uses.
First, somebody who sees the animal transÔxed by the arrow will be able
to offer his report about the kind of object depicted in the Ôgure immediately
on being shown it (given conditions in which his sense of sight is not impaired
64 doubting vision

for some reason·for example, by insufÔcient light). He will spontaneously

and unhesitatingly respond to a question about what he sees with a correct
report about the kind of object the Ôgure depicts, even if he is shown the Ôgure
only for a few seconds (PI 203–204). Meanwhile, somebody who does not
see the animal transÔxed by an arrow will not, on being shown the Ôgure, be
able to respond immediately. Rather, such a person will need a period of time
to infer what kind of object the spatial arrangement of the lines in the Ôgure
is supposed to represent, and he may well make an incorrect inference. In his
verbal report, he will probably make reference to these lines, saying something
like, „These lines represent . . .‰
Second, if a beholder is not able to see the animal transÔxed by the arrow,
he has to infer what the Ôgure is supposed to depict, and inference-making by
deÔnition involves considering a number of interpretations to Ônd the most
plausible one. Hence, in his verbal report, he may well say something like,
„These lines could represent an arrow, or they could represent a spear, or they
could represent something else long and pointed.‰ Meanwhile, somebody who
sees the arrow will not consider a variety of interpretations, because, if he is
describing what he sees truthfully and accurately, his report that he sees the
arrow is the only one he can give. A beholder will not consider a variety of
interpretations of the lines if he sees an arrow in them, because no interpreta-
tion is needed. As Wittgenstein puts it, „But I cannot try to see a conventional
picture of a lion as a lion, any more than an F as that letter‰ (PI 206; emphasis
in original).
What does an example such as this one teach us about the concept of see-
ing? First, it shows that it is the way that a beholder behaves, his particular
attitude, that constitutes one of the criteria for saying that he sees the kind of
object something is. „ÂTo me it is an animal pierced by an arrow.Ê That is what
I treat it as; this is my attitude to the Ôgure. This is one meaning in calling it
a case of Âseeingʉ (PI 205; emphasis in original). A beholder who sees the
animal transÔxed by the arrow in the schematic Ôgure will not only identify
what he is shown correctly, but will identify it in a particular manner: he will
spontaneously and unhesitatingly report what kind of object is depicted in the
Ôgure, and he will not treat his identiÔcation as one among several possible
interpretations of the Ôgure. His reaction will be as automatic and unthinking
as chewing when eating: „One doesnÊt ÂtakeÊ what one knows as the cutlery at
a meal for cutlery; any more than one ordinarily tries to move oneÊs mouth as
one eats, or aims at moving it‰ (PI 195; emphasis in original).
Second, this example demonstrates that we apply the concept of seeing
to two different „objects of sight‰ (PI 193). „If I saw the duck-rabbit as a rab-
bit, then I saw: these shapes and colors (I give them in detail)·and I saw be-
sides something like this: and here I point to a number of different pictures of
rabbits.·This shews the difference between the concepts‰ (PI 196–197). The
Ôrst object of sight is material properties such as shape and color. These can be
pointed to, described, and represented using an exact copy. The second object
of sight is the kind of object something is, in this case a rabbit depicted in a
picture. The difference between the two types of object of sight is evident in the
The Revelationist Tradition: Critique 65

way they are represented by the beholder. Unlike material properties, the „rab-
bitness‰ of the rabbit in the picture, its identity as a rabbit, what Wittgenstein
calls its aspect, cannot be pointed to, described, or represented using an exact
copy. Instead, it can only be represented by pointing to other pictures that also
depict rabbits. In the case of the schematic Ôgure of the animal transÔxed by an
arrow, both beholders see the Ôrst type of object of sight·namely, the material
properties of the Ôgure. They can, for example, describe the spatial arrangement
of its lines. But only one of the beholders can see the second type of object of
sight·the kind of object depicted in the Ôgure.
A simple thought experiment might help clarify the difference between
these two objects of sight. Let us imagine that a tribe of English-speaking peo-
ple, who do not use cutlery or have any concept of cutlery, and who have never
seen or heard of cutlery, is discovered in a remote corner of Wisconsin. One of
them is shown a fork and asked what it is that he sees. He describes the material
features of the fork perfectly: its color, shape, texture, and so on. But would
we say that he sees a fork? In one sense we would, for he describes its mate-
rial properties very well. But in another sense we wouldnÊt. He does not see a
fork, but just an object with a certain color, shape, and texture. It is this other
sense of the concept of seeing·seeing the kind of object something is, not
just its material properties·that Wittgenstein is trying to clarify in section xi
of Investigations.
Third, this example shows that we speak of seeing both objects of sight
in the domain of images. The fact that humans identify the kind of objects de-
picted in images spontaneously and unhesitatingly, and the fact that they do not
treat their identiÔcations as one among several possible interpretations, consti-
tute grounds for saying that they see the kind of objects depicted in images.
They do not just see the material properties of images·their surface shapes
and colors·and then infer what kind of objects these images are supposed to
represent. Wittgenstein calls seeing the kind of object depicted in an image
„continuous seeing of an aspect,‰ or „regarding-as‰ (PI 205).
Section xi of Investigations does not contain a complete investigation of
the concept of seeing, and it leaves many questions unanswered. Its purpose,
instead, is to clarify the concept of seeing sufÔciently enough to dissolve the
paradox and confusion that surround aspect-dawning. The fact that seeing has
at least two distinct objects of sight explains why the unusual visual experience
of aspect-dawning can seem paradoxical and confusing. Aspect-dawning is an
unusual visual experience because it foregrounds this distinction. Normally,
when we see an object with which we are familiar, whether in reality or de-
picted in an image, we can see what kind of object it is at the same time that we
see its material properties. As Wittgenstein puts it in relation to images, „The
aspects in a change of aspects are those ones which the Ôgure might some-
times have permanently in a picture‰ (PI 201; emphasis in original). However,
in aspect-dawning seeing the kind of object that something is is delayed. In the
case of images that occasion aspect-dawning, for example, either we see one
kind of object the material properties of the image depict, and then notice that
these same material properties can be seen as another, very different, kind of
66 doubting vision

object, as in the duck-rabbit, or we see the material properties of the image

Ôrst, such as the lines in the picture puzzle, and then see what kind of object
those material properties depict, such as the human shape.
If one understands the object of sight in the Ôrst sense mentioned above
(seeing material properties), then the beholderÊs claim that he can see something
new about the object once the aspect has dawned seems paradoxical and confus-
ing. In this Ôrst sense, as the imaginary interlocutor insists, aspect-dawning is
not seeing. But if one understands the object of sight in the second sense, as see-
ing the kind of object something is, then there is nothing paradoxical or confus-
ing about the beholderÊs claim. Aspect-dawning does involve seeing something
new in the second sense, because what one sees when an aspect dawns is the
kind of object something is.
We can now Ônally return to the question of why it makes sense to say that
we see family resemblance and emotion, phenomena that Epstein argues can-
not be seen with the naked human eye but can only be revealed by the cinema.
„ÂWe see emotionÊ·As opposed to what?·We do not see facial contortions
and make the inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom. We describe the
face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any
other description of the features.·Grief, one would like to say, is personiÔed
in the face. This is essential to what we call Âemotion.ʉ39
We say that human beings see emotion in a face, as opposed to merely see-
ing the material features of a face and inferring what emotion its owner is feel-
ing, because of their verbal and nonverbal behavior. Humans can spontaneously
and unhesitatingly identify a face as sad, happy, and so on, without treating
their identiÔcation as one among several possible interpretations. Similarly, we
say that people see family resemblance because, again, they can immediately
identify that a face is like another face without saying, for example, „The shape
of his nose suggests that he could belong to the Smith family, but the color of
his hair and eyes suggests that he could be a member of the Jones clan.‰
The curious experience that Epstein refers to as the revelation of the per-
sonality of an object, in which an object seems to come alive to the beholder, is
a somewhat more complex phenomenon. To do justice to it fully would require
a much more in-depth examination of WittgensteinÊs remarks about aspect-
dawning than I have given. Since such an examination is beyond the scope of
this book, and since others have attempted it, I will only suggest in what sense
we „see‰ the emotional life of an object.40
According to Wittgenstein, there are other behavioral grounds for
„regarding-as‰·for saying that humans see the kind of objects depicted in im-
ages, their aspects, and not just their material properties·beyond the criteria
examined above. These include the larger role that images play in human life:
„You need to think of the role which pictures such as paintings (as opposed
to working drawings) have in our lives‰ (PI 205). For as Wittgenstein points
out, in certain ways, we treat an image as we do the object it depicts. „In some
respects I stand towards [a picture-face] as I do towards a human face. I can
study its expression, can react to it as to the expression of the human face.
A child can talk to picture-men or picture-animals, can treat them as it treats
The Revelationist Tradition: Critique 67

dolls‰ (PI 194). For example, at certain moments we treat an image as if it had
become the object it depicts, as if it were the living embodiment of that object.
People often revere images of loved ones, for instance, hanging them on a wall
or keeping them in a special place. And sometimes, such an image is treated
as if it were the loved one. It is taken down from the wall, kissed, stroked, and
talked to. Wittgenstein refers to such moments as examples of „seeing-as,‰ not
regarding-as.

The question is whether yet another concept, related to [regarding-as], is also of

importance to us: that, namely, of a seeing-as which only takes place while I am
actually concerning myself with the picture as the object depicted.
I might say: a picture does not always live for me while I am seeing it. „Her
picture smiles down on me from the wall.‰ It need not always do so, whenever my
glance lights on it.
The duck-rabbit. One asks oneself: how can the eye·this dot·be looking in
a direction?·„See, it is looking!‰ (And one „looks‰ oneself as one says this.) But
one does not say and do this the whole time one is looking at the picture. (PI 205;
emphasis in original.)

For Wittgenstein, the experience of „seeing-as,‰ in which an image seems

alive for a short period of time because it appears to become the object it de-
picts, is to be distinguished from regarding-as because, during „seeing-as,‰ the
beholder is intensely preoccupied or concerned with the kind of object an image
depicts, with its aspect, whereas during regarding-as he isnÊt. A beholder may
always regard an image as the object it depicts, but only sometimes, if at all,
become preoccupied with its aspect to the extent that he experiences seeing-as.
However, seeing-as constitutes an important behavioral criterion for regarding-
as, for saying that human beings see the kind of object an image depicts. For if
we could only see the material properties of images and had to infer what im-
ages are supposed to depict, we would not be able to experience seeing-as. We
would not, in other words, be able to experience moments in which an image
seems to become the object it depicts because we would not be able to see the
object in the image. We would not, therefore, treat images of, say, loved ones
in the way that we do, nor would we treat images as the objects they depict in
other ways. We would not, to use WittgensteinÊs example of the picture face,
„study its expression‰ or „react to it as to the expression of the human face.‰
The role that images play in our lives would be very different.
The most important thing about what Wittgenstein calls seeing-as here is
that it can be experienced in relation to nonmimetic representations, as shown
by the way human beings treat such representations. For example, not only do
we revere images of loved ones. We also revere letters written by them, or ob-
jects that belong to them. And sometimes, we behave toward these nonmimetic
representations as if they had become the living embodiment of what they rep-
resent. As Epstein points out, for example, what is for someone else a „banal
and somewhat ugly trinket‰ may, at certain moments, seem to us to incarnate
the „memories and emotions, the plans or regrets that we have attached to these
68 doubting vision

things.‰ Hence, just as with an image of the loved one, we may kiss, stroke, and
even talk to the trinket. Nor is such an experience conÔned to personal nonmi-
metic representations. In religious practices, for example, certain objects·one
thinks of relics and the sacrament in the Christian religion·are treated as if
they were the living embodiment of the divine. And in aesthetic experiences,
as Wittgenstein pointed out, we often behave toward art works as if they had
become what they represent:

But the expression in oneÊs voice and gestures is the same as if the object had
altered and had ended by becoming this or that.
I have a theme played to me several times and each time in a slower tempo.
In the end I say „Now itÊs right,‰ or „Now at last itÊs a march,‰ „Now at last itÊs
a dance.‰·The same tone of voice expresses the dawning of an aspect. (PI 206;
emphasis in original.)

In what sense does the experience of „seeing as‰ in which an object seems
to come alive·what Epstein refers to as the revelation of the personality of an
object·involve seeing? Clearly, the use of the concept of seeing in the context
of this experience involves an extension of the concept. Unlike the experience
of aspect-dawning, in which the beholder suddenly notices the kind of object
an image depicts (the face in the lines of the picture puzzle, for example), there
is nothing new to see about an image or a nonmimetic representation when it
seems to become the living embodiment of what it represents. Nevertheless,
as Wittgenstein points out in the above quotation, during „seeing-as,‰ the be-
holder behaves in a manner strongly analogous to the way he behaves during
aspect-dawning. For example, he behaves „as if the object had altered and had
ended by becoming this or that‰ (PI 206; emphasis in original), just as, during
aspect-dawning, he describes „the alteration like a perception; quite as if the
object had altered before [his] eyes‰ (PI 195). The beholder, in other words,
reacts toward and describes the object as if something had changed about it, as
if it looked different to him, even though he knows that nothing has changed
about it materially, just as he does during aspect-dawning. To use EpsteinÊs ex-
ample of the personal trinket again, the owner of the trinket behaves toward it
as if he sees something different about it than the beholder for whom the trinket
has no personal value, as if it looked different to him. It is for this reason, I sug-
gest, that we are inclined to use the concept of seeing to describe this curious
experience (and indeed why Wittgenstein calls it „seeing-as‰), even if we use it
in an extended sense. A beholder for whom an object appears alive with emo-
tion behaves as if he can see something different about the object, as if it looks
different to him, just as he does during aspect-dawning. Hence, we are inclined
to say that he „sees‰ something about it that others do not.
If Wittgenstein is right, therefore, two of the three phenomena at the
core of EpsteinÊs theory of the cinemaÊs revelatory power·emotion and family
resemblance·can be seen, logically speaking, by us. What Wittgenstein, of
course, makes no mention of is the need for visual technologies to see these phe-
nomena. This is because, contrary to EpsteinÊs theory, human beings standardly
The Revelationist Tradition: Critique 69

can and do see, unaided, the resemblance between two faces, see emotions
manifested in other peoplesÊ faces, and undergo the curious experience in
which objects, such as objects belonging to loved ones, come alive for them.
The naked human eye, unless it is suffering from a visual impairment, is
not too weak to see these things, as Epstein claims. It is not conÔned to the
external material properties of things and people. Like his arguments about
the invisibility of the fourth dimension of time and VertovÊs arguments about
the invisibility of social relations, Epstein is only able to make this claim
about the limitations of human vision and the revelatory power of the cinema
through a misuse of perceptual concepts.

II

We have seen that Epstein and Vertov confuse things that it is logically impos-
sible for human beings to see with things the eye is not strong enough to see.
In addition, Epstein denies vision the capacity to see things that it can see per-
fectly well unaided. The truths about reality revealed by the cinema in Balázs
and KracauerÊs theories are, on the whole, of the latter kind. Indeed, in BalázsÊs
theory, we Ônd two of the same truths that we encountered in EpsteinÊs. Be-
cause it isolates and magniÔes details, Balázs, like Epstein, argues that the
close-up reveals the inner life of objects, which he often refers to as the „face
of objects.‰ And, again like Epstein, Balázs claims that the interior life that
objects seem to possess when Ôlmed in close-up is derived from the various
narrative elements with which they are associated, principally the emotions of
characters.

When the Ôlm close-up strips the veil of our imperceptiveness and insensitivity
from the hidden little things and shows us the face of objects, it still shows us man,
for what makes objects expressive are the human expressions projected onto them.
The objects only reÒect our own selves. . . . When we see the face of things, we
do what the ancients did in creating gods in manÊs image and breathing a human
soul into them. The close-ups of the Ôlm are the creative instruments of this highly
visual anthropomorphism.41

For Balázs, however, the most important thing revealed by the close-up is the
inner mental life of human beings, and Balázs calls the capacity of the close-up
to reveal this inner mental life „microphysiognomics.‰
Balázs provides numerous examples of microphysiognomics in action. For
instance, as we saw in the example of the duplicitous priest in the Introduction,
the close-up can uncover the truth in a liarÊs face: „However disciplined and
practisedly hypocritical a face may be, in the enlarging close-up we see even
that it is concealing something, that it is looking a lie‰ (TTF 63). It can do this
by revealing whether facial movements are natural: „The microscopic close-up
is an inexorable censor of ÂnaturalnessÊ of expression; it immediately shows up
the difference between spontaneous reaction and deliberate, unnatural, forced
70 doubting vision

gesture‰ (TTF 77). The majority of BalázsÊs examples of microphysiognomics,

however, concern the revelation of emotions expressed in the details of faces
and bodies that the naked eye could not, he argues, see unaided: „Close-ups
are often dramatic revelations of what is really happening under the surface of
appearances. You may see a medium shot of someone sitting and conducting a
conversation with icy calm. The close-up will show trembling Ôngers nervously
fumbling a small object·sign of an internal storm‰ (TTF 56).
As we saw in chapter 1, Balázs argues that the cinema is needed to re-
veal inner emotions in the details of behavior in part because human beings
have forgotten how to express their emotions using their bodies, and hence
have forgotten how to see the body as expressive of mind. But does this make
sense? Can emotions exist permanently „unexpressed‰ or „submerged,‰ to use
BalázsÊs words? This argument conceives of outer behavior as independent of
inner mental life, something that can be dispensed with or „forgotten,‰ as if it is
superÒuous to the inner mind, as if the mind were intrinsically private and could
exist independently of the outer. But according to Wittgenstein in his criticisms
of similar arguments found in the Cartesian tradition, what we call inner men-
tal life is logically dependent on outer behavior. In the absence of the outer, our
concepts of the inner would become unusable and meaningless. Wittgenstein
attempts to show this in his so-called private language arguments.
If inner phenomena such as sensations occurred in an internal, private
world, then learning the correct concept to refer to a sensation·say the con-
cept „pain‰ to refer to the sensation of pain·would consist of associating the
concept with a sensation that only the language learner can feel and know to be
present or not. But this would render the concept unintelligible, according to
Wittgenstein, and he shows this in at least two ways. First, others would never
be able to know whether or not the concept for the sensation was being used
correctly by the language learner. Such a sensation would be like something
hidden in a box·say, a beetle·that only its owner can look into (PI §293).
Because the object in each personÊs box can be seen and known only to him,
each person could be using the word „beetle‰ to refer to a different object,
or indeed nothing at all. Similarly, if sensations were intrinsically private, no
word (or indeed any other type of sign) could be used intelligibly to refer to a
sensation because there would be no visible, public criterion of correctness for
the use of the word.
Second, if learning the correct concept to refer to a sensation consisted of
associating the concept with a sensation that only the language learner could
feel and know to be present, then the concept could not even be used intel-
ligibly by the language learner herself. The language learner who learns the
concept „pain‰ to refer to the sensation of pain needs a criterion of correctness,
something by which to judge whether she is using the concept to refer to the
sensation of pain, instead of some other sensation. But what could function as
a criterion of correctness if sensations were intrinsically private? The language
learner might respond that, whenever she feels what she thinks is the sensation of
pain, she appeals to her memory to see if it is indeed the sensation of pain, and
if it is, she uses the concept „pain‰ to refer to it. However, this is unintelligible.
The Revelationist Tradition: Critique 71

To verify whether she is correct in calling a certain sensation „pain,‰ the lan-
guage learner is appealing to her memory of pain. But it is precisely her memory
of pain that she is attempting to verify (PI §265). Such a process of veriÔcation
is as illogical as buying several copies of the morning paper to assure oneself
that what is said there is true (PI §265). At the very most, such a language
learner would be able to make „sounds which no one else understands‰ while
pretending to understand them (PI §269).
The concepts that we use to refer to inner mental life, just like any con-
cepts, require public, visible criteria of correctness in order to be used intel-
ligibly. In other words, a language user must be able to appeal to criteria of
correctness when using concepts of the inner, or when judging if they are being
used correctly by others. If he could not appeal to them because they were pri-
vate and invisible, the language learner would not know how to use concepts
of the inner correctly, or be able to challenge their incorrect use on the part
of another, as we have just seen in the examples provided by Wittgenstein.
Anthony Kenny clariÔes what Wittgenstein means by a criterion for a mental
state by contrasting it with a symptom, another type of evidence. A symptom of
a state of affairs is discovered through empirical inquiry. For example, certain
electrical brain patterns may be discovered to be associated with the capacity to
speak the English language by experiments showing that the brains of English
speakers exhibit such patterns while the brains of non-English speakers donÊt.
A criterion, in contrast, is not discovered by empirical inquiry but is something
that must be known in advance by anyone who possesses the concept in ques-
tion. A personÊs capacity to speak English, for example, is not just a symptom
of, but a criterion for, his possession of English. In other words, mastery of the
concept „possession of English‰ involves learning that the capacity to speak
English indicates its possession. This is not discovered through empirical in-
quiry but is learned when the concept of possessing English is learned.42
What, therefore, do function as the public, visible criteria of correctness
for the use of concepts of the inner? Wittgenstein answers by examining how
human beings actually learn words for sensations and other inner phenomena·
what infants are taught regarding the actual criteria for concepts of the inner. In-
fants, he argues, are taught to replace pain-behavior by the word „pain,‰ thereby
learning that, for us, pain behavior constitutes the criterion for the presence of
pain in human beings and other creatures like them (PI §244). Pain behavior
is not something superÒuous to what we call pain, as if pain was intrinsically
private and could exist independently of pain behavior. Rather pain and pain be-
havior are logically connected. The latter constitutes the public, visible criterion
for the presence of the former.
The conclusion drawn by most of WittgensteinÊs interpreters from these
private language arguments is that the notion of an intrinsically private mental
object, state, event, or process·one that has no necessary or logical connec-
tion to outer behavior·is nonsensical.43 Instead, these arguments show that
it is outer behavior·typical bodily and linguistic manifestations and expres-
sions, patterns of antecedent and consequent behavior·within an enormous
variety of Ônely differentiated contexts that constitute the criteria for the
72 doubting vision

application of concepts of the inner. These outer behavioral criteria are logi-
cally connected to our concepts of the inner and hence cannot discarded. At-
tempts to deÔne and use concepts of the inner independently of such outer
behavioral criteria fail.
Hence, BalázsÊs claim that mental life·or at least a certain dimension of
mental life·cannot be expressed in modernity is nonsensical. According to
Wittgenstein, the inner is logically dependent on outer behavior. We say that
we see that another human being is in pain (e.g., a man screaming in agony
after being knocked down by a car) because behavior such as screaming in the
context of being knocked down by a car constitutes one of the criteria for being
in pain. This manÊs pain behavior is not a superÒuous, dispensable addition to
our seeing that he is in pain. Rather, screaming in agony in the context of being
knocked down by a car is what we call being in pain. To see him behaving in
this way in this context is to see that he is in pain. If human beings suddenly
stopped expressing their emotions and other mental phenomena, as Balázs ar-
gues has occurred in modernity, these emotions would not exist „unexpressed,‰
as he claims. Rather, our concepts of the inner would become unusable and
meaningless, and we would no longer be able to conceive of emotions, unex-
pressed or not. Like the beetle in the box, they would drop „out of consider-
ation as irrelevant‰ (PI §293). Moreover, as anyone who has witnessed a car
accident knows, people continue to scream in agony, cry out of sadness, and in
various other ways manifest their emotions physically in modernity. The body
has not forgotten how to express them, and nor has the eye forgotten how to see
them. Thus, we do not need the cinema to reveal them in the way that we need
a telescope to reveal a distant planet. Unless our sense of sight is impaired, we
can see them perfectly well unaided.
KracauerÊs theory focuses on quotidian phenomena typically encountered
in everyday life by humans in modern societies. According to Kracauer, even
though people regularly encounter quotidian phenomena, these phenomena are
invisible to them until the cinema reveals them. As he puts it:

In recording and exploring physical reality, Ôlm exposes to view a world never
seen before, a world as elusive as PoeÊs purloined letter, which cannot be found
because it is within everybodyÊs reach. What is meant here is of course not any of
those extensions of the everyday world which are being annexed by science but
our ordinary physical environment itself. Strange as it may seem, although streets,
faces, railway stations, etc., lie before our eyes, they have remained largely invis-
ible so far.44

KracauerÊs theory of what the cinema reveals, however, turns out to be

another example of what Ryle calls a category mistake. Kracauer confuses
one type of phenomenon·things that we sometimes do not pay attention to,
or notice, or see fully, or that we cannot see at certain moments in time due to
viewing circumstances, or because they are hidden from us·with another·
phenomena that are invisible in the sense that we cannot see them unaided and
that need to be revealed by a visual technology in order to be seen.
The Revelationist Tradition: Critique 73

According to Kracauer, as we saw in chapter 1, our ordinary physical envi-

ronment is largely invisible to us because we cannot see the qualities of things
as a result of the abstractness of modernity. „Quality‰ is a vague concept, and
Kracauer does not explicitly clarify the sense in which he is using the word in
his theory. Indeed, for somebody who criticizes abstractions, KracauerÊs theory
is remarkably abstract·he gives very few concrete examples of qualities that
he believes sight is incapable of seeing unaided. One example he does give is
Alfred WhiteheadÊs example of the radiance of a sunset, which Kracauer quotes
verbatim: „When you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere
and all about the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the
sunset‰ (TF 296). And what this example, and his argument (which we have
already surveyed) about abstractness in modernity seem to suggest is that, for
Kracauer, a quality is a unique, physical characteristic of an object or event,
something speciÔc or particular to it, that cannot be captured by abstract cat-
egories. When we look at a sunset in modernity, according to this argument,
what we see is a generic sunset because we subsume it under abstract catego-
ries applicable to sunsets in general·in all sunsets, the sun appears to move
downward behind the horizon, the light fades, and so on. What we do not see
are this particular sunsetÊs unique physical characteristics, such as the speciÔc
color and intensity of its radiance.
This argument will doubtless be familiar to anybody who is acquainted with
neo-Kantian aesthetic theories, and it is therefore susceptible to all of the stan-
dard criticisms leveled at such theories. For example, critics often point out that,
far from preventing us from seeing the unique physical characteristics of an ob-
ject or event, so-called abstract categories enable us to see them. For it is only if
we are aware of the degree of radiance of a particular sunset relative to sunsets
in general that we can see its particular radiance. The particular only stands out
against the general. But the point that is relevant to my argument in this book is
that, in claiming that we do not attend to qualities in modernity and that they are
therefore invisible to us and need to be revealed by a visual technology in order
to be seen, Kracauer makes the category mistake described above. For we do not
say that something is invisible if we do not pay attention to it. Indeed, in order
to be able to attend, or fail to attend, to something, it must be visible. Right now,
sitting at my desk in my ofÔce writing these sentences on my computer, I am not
paying attention to what is outside of the window behind me. But this does not
mean that what is outside of the window is invisible and needs to be revealed by a
visual technology in order to be seen·it simply means that I am not attending to
it. And in order for me to be able to attend to it by walking over to the window and
looking out, what is outside of the window must be visible. With phenomena that
we do speak of as being invisible in the sense that we cannot see them unaided,
such as microbes and ultraviolet light, we cannot see them simply by attending to
them because something about their very nature (size in the case of microbes and
frequency in the case of ultraviolet light) makes it impossible for us to see them
unaided. Nor is it because of some way in which modernity has altered my mind
that I cannot see them unaided. Even if I lived in premodern times, I would not be
able to see microbes or ultraviolet light without a visual technology.
74 doubting vision

Furthermore, we do not speak of something that makes us attend to some-

thing we are not paying attention to as revealing it. If somebody comes in to
my ofÔce and tells me to look out of the window behind me, we do not say
that this person is revealing what is outside of the window to me. Rather, we
say that he or she is directing my attention to something that I was not paying
attention to before. Meanwhile, a microscope reveals a microbe to me not by
making me pay attention to it, but by magnifying it so that I can see it. Kra-
cauer confuses the category of phenomena we do not pay attention to with the
category of phenomena that we cannot see unaided because something about
their nature makes them invisible to the human eye, a confusion that is often
evident in his writing: „Film renders visible what we did not, or perhaps even
could not, see before its advent‰ (TF 300; my emphasis). If Kracauer is correct
and it is only when watching Ôlms that we see the qualities of objects, this is
not because these qualities are invisible and are revealed to us by the cinema.
Rather, it is because we attend to qualities only when watching Ôlms.
Kracauer makes the same category mistake with many of the other phe-
nomena that he argues are revealed by the cinema. He begins his list of „things
normally unseen‰ by sight with „objects too small to be readily noticed or
even perceived by the naked eye,‰ and gives as an example a close-up of „Mae
MarshÊs clasped hands in the trial episode of Intolerance‰ (TF 46–47). Ac-
cording to Kracauer, this close-up „reveals how her hands behave under the
impact of utter despair‰ (TF 47). But we would not say that this close-up is re-
vealing something that can only be seen with a visual technology. Rather, we
would say that it is revealing something that, due to viewing circumstances,
we had not noticed or been able to see prior to the close-up. At this moment, I
cannot see the title on the spine of a book that is in a bookcase in my ofÔce be-
cause of a viewing circumstance·the desk I am sitting at is too far away from
it. But while we might say that the title is invisible to me at this moment be-
cause it is too far away, we would not say that it is invisible to me in the sense
that I need a visual technology to reveal it. For if I moved close enough to it, I
would be able to see it unaided. Similarly, the viewer cannot see Mae MarshÊs
hands and the emotions they express due to viewing circumstances, the way
the scene has been Ôlmed prior to the close-up (the camera is too far away
from her, her hands are concealed by the mise-en-scene, etc.). The shot that
does reveal her hands changes the viewing circumstances because it is Ôlmed
close enough to her hands that the viewer can see them. Phenomena that we
describe as invisible in the sense of being impossible to see unaided cannot be
seen by the naked human eye no matter what the viewing circumstances and
hence must be revealed by a visual technology in order to be seen. I cannot
see ultraviolet light just by moving closer to it or by Ôlming it in close-up.
There is another sense in which Mae MarshÊs hands can be said to be
invisible until they are revealed by GrifÔthÊs close-up: they are hidden from
the viewer. We often speak of something being invisible if it is hidden. But to
be invisible in the sense of being hidden is not to be invisible in the sense of
being impossible to see unaided. I have a bad photograph of myself hidden in
The Revelationist Tradition: Critique 75

my desk in my ofÔce, so that colleagues and students cannot see it. It therefore
can be said to be invisible to them. However, I have hidden it precisely because
it would be visible to them if I had not. But whether I hid a microbe or not, it
would still be invisible to me because it is too small for me to see it unaided.
In the case of „the small,‰ Kracauer is confusing phenomena that, due to view-
ing circumstances or being hidden, we cannot see at certain moments in time,
with phenomena such as microbes that are impossible for us to see unaided no
matter the viewing circumstances or whether they are hidden and that therefore
need to be revealed by a visual technology in order to be seen.
Following „the small,‰ Kracauer suggests that „objects so big‰ that they
„elude observation‰ are also an example of one of the cinemaÊs „revealing func-
tions‰ (TF 46), and he claims that „among the large objects, such as vast plains
or panoramas of any kind, one deserves special attention: the masses‰ (TF 50).
Only photography and Ôlm, he argues, can „portray crowds as the accidental
conglomerations they are,‰ and he says that „the traditional arts‰ are „unable
to encompass and render‰ crowds·only Ôlm can do this while also „captur-
ing them in motion‰ (TF 50). But as these quotations suggest in their use of
verbs such as „portraying,‰ „capturing,‰ and „rendering‰ instead of „revealing,‰
we do not speak of crowds and other large phenomena as being invisible and
therefore in need of being revealed by a visual technology in order to be seen
just because we are unable to see them in their entirety. If I stand in the middle
of a desert, I am unable to see the entire desert. But this does not mean that the
desert is invisible to me, for desert surrounds me as far as the eye can see. Nor
would we say that a visual technology that shows the desert in its entirety·an
aerial photograph, for example·reveals the desert. Rather, we would say that
it reveals the desert in its entirety. Here, it is phenomena that are too big to be
seen in their entirety that Kracauer has conÒated with phenomena that are in-
visible and need to be revealed by a visual technology in order to be seen.
After „the big,‰ Kracauer argues that another „group of things normally
unseen comprises the transient,‰ and he gives as examples phenomena that
are „imperceptible‰ to the naked human eye because they happen too slowly,
such as the growth of plants, as well as things „too fast to be registered‰ by the
eye such as the „racing legs‰ of galloping horses. While one might question
whether such phenomena are best described as „transient,‰ it makes sense to
call them invisible and in need of revelation by a visual technology in order to
be seen. For these are phenomena that, due to something about their nature (the
speed at which they occur, in this case) cannot be seen by the naked human eye,
rather than things that are visible but that we sometimes do not pay attention
to, or notice, or see fully, or that we cannot see at certain moments in time due
to viewing circumstances, or because they are hidden from us. And, because
of the techniques of fast and slow motion, the cinema is indeed able to reveal
them. Kracauer is here appealing to the perfectly acceptable use of the cinema
to reveal phenomena, such as the leg positions of galloping horses or the wing
movements of birds, that I mentioned in the introduction. But he also cites
under the category of the transient phenomena the mane of a galloping horse,
76 doubting vision

as well as „the shadow of a cloud passing across the plain,‰ without provid-
ing any explanation as to why they are invisible to human vision and need to
be revealed by a visual technology in order to be seen. These phenomena are
neither too fast nor too slow to be perceived by the naked eye; we can, and
regularly do, see them perfectly well unaided. Here, Kracauer seems to be
conÒating phenomena that move („the transient‰) with phenomena that move
too quickly or too slowly to be seen by the naked human eye.
The Ônal category of phenomena that Kracauer argues is revealed by the
cinema is what he calls „blind spots of the mind,‰ and he includes under it
„refuse‰ such as „garbage,‰ as well as things that are familiar to us, such as
„streets we walk day by day‰ (TF 54–55). But again, just because we do not
usually pay attention to garbage, or the streets we often walk down, does not
mean that they are invisible to us and in need of being revealed by a visual
technology in order to be seen, for reasons I surveyed when I examined quali-
ties. These things must be visible to the naked human eye in order for us to fail
to attend to them. Meanwhile, it is not because I fail to attend to ultraviolet
light that I cannot see it, for no amount of attending to it will enable me to see
it without a visual technology.
Another example Kracauer gives of blind spots of the mind is what he
refers to as „unconventional complexes,‰ which he deÔnes as „previously in-
visible interrelationships between parts‰ of objects (TF 54). By this, he seems
to mean abstract patterns formed by concrete objects or their parts. As he puts
it, „in rendering physical existence, Ôlm tends to reveal conÔgurations of semi-
abstract phenomena,‰ and he gives as an example a scene from Triumph of
the Will in which „moving banners fuse into a very beautiful pattern at the
moment when they begin to Ôll the screen‰ (TF 54). Here, Kracauer is charac-
terizing something that we do not always notice as something that we cannot
see because it is invisible. As I look at the peeling paint of my ofÔce wall,
I notice an abstract pattern among the paint chips akin to a magniÔed snowÒake.
I have never noticed it before, even though I have contemplated the peeling
paint many times. We would not say, however, that this pattern was invisible to
me before I noticed it, because, as with paying attention, something has to be
visible in order to fail to notice it. There is nothing about the nature of abstract
patterns that makes them impossible to see unaided. While it may be true that
the cinema can draw our attention to abstract patterns in reality through edit-
ing, framing, and other techniques, this does not mean it is revealing something
that was previously invisible. Furthermore, it is usually the case that Ôlms cre-
ate abstract patterns that do not exist in reality, rather than revealing ones that
do exist. For example, in October, Eisenstein creates graphic discontinuity be-
tween shots of Òags by juxtaposing a shot of a Òag that Òows diagonally from
the top left to the bottom right of the screen with a shot of a Òag that Òows
from the top right to the bottom left. This is an abstract pattern created out of
camera position, framing, editing, and the plastic properties of Òags. It is not a
preexisting abstract pattern that Eisenstein is revealing.
The Ônal two categories of phenomena that Kracauer lists under the
cinemaÊs revealing functions are what he calls „phenomena overwhelming
The Revelationist Tradition: Critique 77

consciousness‰ and „special modes of reality.‰ The former he deÔnes in the

following way:

Elemental catastrophes, the atrocities of war, acts of violence and terror, sexual
debauchery, and death are events which tend to overwhelm consciousness. In any
case, they call forth excitements and agonies bound to thwart detached observa-
tion. No one witnessing such an event, let alone playing an active part in it, should
therefore be expected accurately to account for what he has seen. . . . Only the
camera is able to represent them without distortion. (TF 57)

What Kracauer seems to be arguing here is that, due to their extreme na-
ture, certain acts and events are so emotionally and intellectually overwhelm-
ing that viewers cannot remember and represent them accurately. Meanwhile,
because it is a machine, the cinema records them „without distortion.‰ As for
special modes of reality, Kracauer gives as an example the scene from October
in which some Cossacks defect to the Bolshevik side and celebrate by dancing.
EisensteinÊs use of fast, discontinuous editing and close-ups to Ôlm the dance
represent, according to Kracauer, the way it appears to the soldiers in their state
of happiness. „In their great joy, dancers and onlookers who constantly mingle
cannot help perceiving incoherent pieces of their immediate environment in
motion. It is a whirling agglomerate of fragments that surrounds them. And
Eisenstein captures this jumble to perfection‰ (TF 59). For Kracauer, this is an
example of how the cinema can „expose physical reality as it appears to indi-
viduals in extreme states of mind‰ (TF 58). Kracauer here seems to be referring
to what today we would call subjective narration, the representation of aspects
of subjective experience, such as the appearance something has for a person in
a certain state of mind, with stylistic techniques such as point-of-view shots,
editing, anamorphic lenses, camera movement, and the like. A standard ex-
ample is the use of free-wheeling camera movement to represent the way the
world appears to rock from side to side to a drunken person, as when the major
protagonist is drunk in The Last Laugh (1924).
Kracauer does not, however, argue that phenomena overwhelming con-
sciousness and special modes of reality are invisible and need to be revealed
by a visual technology in order to be seen, instead separating them from what
he calls „things normally unseen‰ (TF 46). In these instances, he does not
transgress the bounds of sense, although he does come perilously close on
occasion, claiming, for example, that the cinema „insists on rendering visible
what is commonly drowned in inner agitation‰ (TF 58), as if to suggest that
phenomena overwhelming consciousness are invisible. But in order to fail to
remember and represent such phenomena accurately, as Kracauer himself ac-
knowledges elsewhere, observers have Ôrst to see („witness‰) them (TF 57).
Such acts and events are not invisible and in need of being revealed by a visual
technology. Rather, once seen, they are difÔcult to remember accurately and in
need of being recorded.
In the case of special modes of reality, while we might say that, in a scene
such as the one from October, the cinema is revealing the way something appears
78 doubting vision

to someone, we would not say that it is revealing it in the sense of bringing to

view something otherwise invisible. When a visual technology reveals some-
thing invisible, it does so by showing it in such a way that a viewer can see it
or its previously invisible properties. When the cinema reveals the precise wing
movement of a bird, it does so by recording the bird in Òight and then showing
it in slow motion so that the viewer can see its previously invisible wing move-
ment. But in the scene from October, the cinema is not recording the dance and
then showing it in such a way that the viewer can see something about the dance
that was previously invisible. For the appearance of something to somebody is
not a property of that thing, in the way that wing movement is a property of a
bird. The world does not really rock from side to side when a person is drunk.
A dance is not really a „whirling agglomerate of fragments.‰ Rather, in these
cases, certain stylistic techniques are being used to create a rough approxima-
tion for the viewer of the appearance of the world when drunk and of the dance
to the soldiers when happy. These techniques are not bringing to view a property
of the world or the dance that would otherwise be invisible. In this way, these
techniques are like the discontinuous shifts in scale and point-of-view used by
painters such as Fernand Léger to represent the appearance of the modern envi-
ronment in their paintings. A city is not really a „rush of images assaulting the
eye simultaneously,‰ which is how Standish Lawder describes the appearance
of the city in LégerÊs painting La Ville (1919).45 This is not an otherwise invis-
ible property of the city that Leger is revealing in his painting. Rather, Léger is
using discontinuous shifts in scale and point-of-view to create for the viewer a
rough approximation of the way the city appears to an observer.
Why do we say that the cinema is revealing the way the dance appears
to the happy soldiers in the scene from October if it is not bringing to view
an otherwise invisible property of the dance? We do so, of course, because to
reveal means not only to bring to view but to make known. We use the word to
reveal not only in the context of vision but in the context of knowledge. Seeing
need not be involved in revealing. A friend can, for example, reveal a secret
verbally over the phone. In the case of the scene from October, we say that
EisensteinÊs techniques are revealing the way the dance appears to the happy
soldiers because we would not have known it otherwise, not because we would
not have seen it otherwise.
While Kracauer does, for the most part, use the concepts of invisibility
and revelation correctly when discussing phenomena overwhelming conscious-
ness and special modes of reality, as we have seen, elsewhere he systematically
conÒates things that are visible but that we sometimes do not pay attention to,
or notice, or see fully, or that we cannot see at certain moments in time due to
viewing circumstances, or because they are hidden from us, with things that are
invisible in the sense that the eye is too weak to see them and that therefore need
to be revealed by a visual technology in order to be seen. Like Balázs and Ep-
stein (in certain instances), he denies sight the capacity to see phenomena·the
particular radiance of a particular sunset, hands, deserts, the mane of a galloping
horse, refuse, and so on·that can be seen perfectly well unaided, and he does so
through a systematic misuse of perceptual concepts such as invisibility.
 3

Revelationism and
Contemporary Film Theory

Not long after the publication of KracauerÊs Theory of Film in 1960, a new
type of Ôlm theory emerged that was dominated by two theoretical paradigms:
semiotics and psychoanalysis. Due to the inÒuence of the New Left as well as
various political and social upheavals during the 1960s, the new semiotic-
psychoanalytical Ôlm theory was preoccupied with a question about the cinema
that, while asked to some extent by earlier Ôlm theorists, was less important to
them than questions about the cinemaÊs nature and artistic value: how does the
cinema propagate ideology? Before the 1960s, Ôlm theorists for the most part
viewed the cinema as morally and politically benign, at least when it was being
used to create art.1 Some, as I have already described, went further and argued
that the cinema could be used to transform society for the better. Semiotic-
psychoanalytical Ôlm theorists, in contrast, saw the cinema as politically and
morally pernicious. And this was because, unlike earlier Ôlm theorists who, if
they did examine ideology, focused for the most part on speciÔc Ôlms,2 the new
theorists argued that ideology is reproduced by the basic properties or features
of the cinema·the technologies used to produce and exhibit Ôlms (the camera,
its lens, the projector) as well as its predominant forms (narrative, documen-
tary) and stylistic norms (continuity editing).3
At Ôrst glance, therefore, it may seem that the revelationist tradition
fell into obsolescence in the 1960s. Semiotic-psychoanalytical Ôlm theorists
viewed the cinema as a tool of deception rather than enlightenment. They
saw cinema as something that, far from revealing truths about reality, propa-
gates false beliefs about it. And in place of the revelationist traditionÊs enchant-
ment concerning the cinemaÊs revelatory power, we Ônd in the new theory
80 doubting vision

disenchantment due to the belief that the cinema deceives people and thereby
transforms society for the worse. But in fact, despite appearances to the con-
trary, semiotic-psychoanalytical Ôlm theory was greatly indebted to the rev-
elationist tradition. Whether knowingly or not, it borrowed and renewed this
traditionÊs fundamental tenets.4
First, the new theory evinced a pervasive distrust of human vision. For the
new theorists, just as much as for their predecessors, sight was fundamentally
Òawed. However, they renewed this visual skepticism by turning to powerful new
theories to justify it, those of Marx and Freud as Ôltered through the writings of
Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan as well as Bertolt BrechtÊs writings on the the-
ater. And they mobilized a concept that, while present to some extent in previous
Ôlm theorizing, became central to Ôlm theory after 1968: the concept of illusion.
According to Althusser and Lacan, humans have a mistaken view of them-
selves. In capitalist societies, Althusser argued, people believe that they are
autonomous agents with free will (subjects), when in fact they are controlled
by (subject to) the capitalist social formation. According to Althusser, this false
belief is perpetuated by „ideological state apparatuses,‰ various institutions,
such as the government, the church, and the media, that address humans as if
they were subjects (interpellation).5 And the reason people mistake being ad-
dressed as subjects for being subjects is because they misrecognize themselves,
Lacan argued. For Lacan, humans are born into a condition of „no-thing-ness,‰
of psychic fragmentation and dispersal in which there is no distinction between
self and other.6 As a child develops, he forms an image of himself (the ego) as
an autonomous, uniÔed entity separate from the world around him. However,
this image is an illusion because the real condition of the subject, Lacan be-
lieved, remains no-thing-ness („the Real‰).7 Althusser used a version of this ar-
gument to explain why people falsely believe that they are what the ideological
state apparatuses tell them that they are: autonomous, free agents or subjects. It
is because people falsely believe that they are subjects and have freely chosen
the social roles that capitalism has imposed on them, he claimed, that the capi-
talist social formation can reproduce itself even though it is exploitative.8
Semiotic-psychoanalytical Ôlm theorists, following Althusser and Lacan,
conceived of humans as laboring under an epistemic illusion, the false belief
that they are subjects. But Lacan also provided Ôlm theorists with the concep-
tual tool to renew skepticism about vision by arguing that this epistemic illu-
sion is reproduced, in part, in the realm of sight. Between the ages of six and
eighteen months, Lacan argued, infants begin to look at and recognize them-
selves in mirrors. However, they mistake the image of themselves that they see
in the mirror, in which they appear autonomous and uniÔed, for truth. They
identify (primary identiÔcation) with this image in the sense of taking it as an
accurate representation of themselves (the ego), even though they remain in the
condition of no-thing-ness. Lacan used the mirror stage as an allegory for the
formation of human subjectivity and believed that, as they learn language and
enter society („the Symbolic‰), people constantly search out representations of
themselves which, like the mirror image of the mirror stage, they mistake for
truth and with which they identify („the Imaginary‰).9
Revelationism and Contemporary Film Theory 81

Although Lacan was not only referring to sight in his arguments about the
Imaginary, the fact that he claimed that humans do, at least in the mirror stage,
literally mistake images of themselves for truth gave semiotic-psychoanalytical
Ôlm theorists the theoretical ammunition to renew skepticism about human vi-
sion. For them, sight was to be distrusted, at least in part, because it helps repro-
duce the epistemic illusion that humans are subjects by mistaking false images
of the self as uniÔed and autonomous for reality. However, it was the conÒuence
of this argument about vision with Bertolt BrechtÊs (also in vogue in the 1960s
and employed by Althusser as well as inÒuential Ôlmmakers such as Jean-Luc
Godard) that truly enabled the new generation of Ôlm theorists to renew skepti-
cism about sight. BrechtÊs writings contain a variety of sometimes inconsistent
claims. Nevertheless, like Althusser and Lacan, at least sometimes he argued
that humans mistake representations for truth, and, like Althusser, that this mis-
take serves the economic interests of the ruling class. And he claimed (again
sometimes) that this mistake occurs in the realm of Ôction, speciÔcally theatrical
Ôction, in the form of an epistemic and visual illusion of the following kind:
Above all, the Chinese artist never acts as if there were a fourth wall besides the
three surrounding him. He expresses his awareness of being watched. This imme-
diately removes one of the European stageÊs characteristic illusions. The audience
can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is
really taking place.10

In conjunction with the Lacanian claim that the epistemic illusion of being
a uniÔed, autonomous subject is reproduced in the realm of sight, this argu-
ment about the propensity of spectators to experience the epistemic and visual
illusion of being an „unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place,‰
when extended to the cinema, proved to be a potent enough form of skepti-
cism about vision to dominate Anglo-American Ôlm theorizing until well into
the 1980s. For semiotic-psychoanalytical Ôlm theorists, the eye could not be
trusted because it mistakes representations·cinematic representations, and
representations of the self·for reality.
Unlike theorists in the revelationist tradition, the new theorists did not view
the cinemaÊs properties as enabling an escape from the limitations of sight, from
the epistemic and visual illusions it is prone to. As we have seen, Epstein, Vertov,
Balázs, and Kracauer argued that the cinemaÊs features·editing (Vertov), the
close-up (Epstein and Balázs), and recording (Kracauer), among others·could
be exploited to escape the Òaws of human vision. The new theory, however, turned
this argument on its head by claiming that the cinemaÊs properties reinforce these
Òaws, visionÊs propensity to experience epistemic and visual illusions.
For example, in The Imaginary SigniÔer, one of the most inÒuential and
famous works of semiotic-psychoanalytical Ôlm theory, Christian Metz ar-
gued that „Ôlm is like the mirror‰ of the mirror stage because, like a mirror,
what it represents is absent (from the representation), while the representation
itself is present.11 Because the play of presence and absence in the cinematic
image is like the play of presence and absence in the mirror, it facilitates the
same process of „primary identiÔcation (the formation of the ego)‰ that takes
82 doubting vision

place in the mirror stage. However, due to the fact that the cinematic image is
not literally a mirror·the viewer cannot literally see a reÒection of himself in
it·the viewer does not identify with his own image, as does the child in the
mirror stage. Instead, he identiÔes with the perceptual experience he has while
in the cinema („the spectator identiÔes with himself, with himself as a pure
act of perception‰) and therefore with what creates this experience („as he
identiÔes with himself as look, the spectator can do no other than identify with
the camera, too‰).12 He takes what the camera has recorded as his own per-
cepts, thereby experiencing the epistemic and visual illusion that he is seeing
reality rather than a Ôlmic representation. For the camera is „all perceiving‰:
All-perceiving as one says all-powerful (this is the famous gift of „ubiquity‰ the
Ôlm makes its spectator); all-perceiving, too, because I am entirely on the side
of the perceiving instance: absent from the screen, but certainly present in the
auditorium, a great eye and ear without which the perceived would have no one to
perceive it, the instance, in other words, which constitutes the cinema signiÔer (it
is I who make the Ôlm).13

Just as the infant identiÔes with its mirror image in the mirror stage, mistak-
ing the image of herself as autonomous and uniÔed for truth, so the viewer
identiÔes with the perceptual experience created for her by the cinema, mistak-
ing the experience of autonomy and unity it affords her („all-perceiving‰) for
her own („it is I who make the Ôlm‰). Although semiotic-psychoanalytical Ôlm
theorists disagreed about precisely how the cinema does this, they all tended to
argue, like Metz, that it gives rise to two types of epistemic and visual illusion:
the illusion that one is a uniÔed, autonomous subject, and the illusion that one
is in the presence of reality rather than a representation.
The second way in which semiotic-psychoanalytical Ôlm theory was in-
debted to the revelationist tradition is perhaps less obvious. It may appear, from
what I have said so far, that the new theorists no longer viewed the cinema as
an artistic medium that reveals truths about reality. For as we have just seen,
they conceived of the cinemaÊs basic features as propagating false beliefs about
reality in the form of epistemic and visual illusions. Yet, in fact, the new theory
advocated a type of Ôlm art that compensates for the propensity of sight to
experience illusions by revealing the truths about reality that these illusions
mask. And in advocating this type of Ôlm art, the new theory, once again, re-
newed its revelationist predecessor, this time in much the same way that Sym-
bolism renewed Romanticism a century earlier. Charles Taylor has described
this renewal in the following way:
An inÒuential strand of thought from the Symbolists on has conceived of the work
not as an epiphany of being, either of nature or of a spiritual reality beyond nature
[as the Romantics did]. They have tried to detach it from all relation to what is
beyond it and yet, paradoxically, to retain the epiphanic quality. The work remains
the locus of revelation, and of something of ultimate signiÔcance, but it is also ut-
terly self-contained and self-sufÔcient.14

It is this type of art, the „autotelic,‰ in which the locus of revelation shifts to
within the work of art itself, that semiotic-psychoanalytical Ôlm theory champi-
Revelationism and Contemporary Film Theory 83

oned. Whereas the revelationist tradition conceived of the cinema as revealing

truths about reality by making visible something external to the cinema·
emotion (Epstein), class relations (Vertov), the inner (Balázs), and qualities
(Kracauer), among others·the new theorists conceived of the cinema as reveal-
ing truths about reality by making visible its own internal properties and con-
ventions, a process that came to be known as „reÒexivity.‰
Semiotic-psychoanalytical Ôlm theorists advocated a variety of different
types of reÒexive Ôlm art, even Ônding reÒexivity in Hollywood Ôlms such
as the 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk. However, perhaps the most pure,
extreme example was the structural-materialist avant-garde Ôlm lauded by
the British journal Screen in the 1970s.15 Structural-materialist Ôlmmakers
did not rest content with simply revealing the cinemaÊs properties and the
various conventions that govern its most common forms (narrative, docu-
mentary); they also argued that a reÒexive Ôlm art should reveal to the viewer
the process through which these properties and conventions form the Ônished
Ôlm and the viewerÊs experience of it. As Stephen Heath put it,

Materialist stresses process, a Ôlm in its process of production of images, sounds,

times, meanings, the transformations effected on the basis of the speciÔc proper-
ties of Ôlm in the relation of a viewing and listening situation. It is that situation
which is, Ônally, the point of „structural/materialist Ôlm,‰ its fundamental opera-
tion, the experience of Ôlm and the experience of Ôlm.16

Hence, in many structuralist-materialist Ôlms, rather than a representa-

tion of something we get a coming-into-being of a representation of some-
thing, a representation in the process of being formed, such as in Peter GidalÊs
Room Film (1973), in which hand-held panning shots of a room constantly
go in and out of focus. In its emphasis on process, structural-materialist Ôlm
probably came closer than any other type of reÒexive cinema to what Taylor,
as noted above, described as a work that remains the locus of revelation but
that is also self-contained and self-sufÔcient. Although not many new theo-
rists went as far as advocating such an extreme, iconoclastic (and iconopho-
bic) avant-garde artistic practice, they all tended to promote an autotelic or
reÒexive cinema.
But what truths about reality does reÒexivity reveal, according to semiotic-
psychoanalytical Ôlm theorists? How does reÒexivity compensate for the sus-
ceptibility of human vision to visual and epistemic illusions? First, and most
obviously, it does so by breaking the illusion postulated by ciné-Brechtians,
the illusion that the viewer is in the presence of reality when watching a Ôlm.
In doing so, it reveals the truth masked by this illusion·namely, the Ôlm
itself. By drawing the viewerÊs attention to the properties, conventions, and
processes of the cinema, reÒexivity forces the viewer to see what he is really
in the presence of: a Ôlm, not reality. Second, according to the new theorists,
reÒexivity shatters the illusion theorized by Althusser and Lacan: the viewerÊs
mistaken belief that he is a subject, an autonomous, free, uniÔed agent. The
truth masked by this illusion is thereby revealed to the viewer: his no-thing-
ness. Heath made this argument in relation to structural-materialist Ôlm by
84 doubting vision

claiming that, because the various cinematic properties and processes revealed
by structuralist-materialist Ôlms are heterogeneous in nature, the viewer who
watches a structuralist-materialist Ôlm is plunged into a state of psychic
heterogeneity.

The contrary practice of „structural-materialist Ôlm‰ is to break given terms of

unity, to explore the heterogeneity of Ôlm in process. . . . The disunity, the disjunc-
tion, of „structural-materialist Ôlm‰ is, exactly, the spectator. What is intended,
what the practice addresses, is not a spectator as uniÔed subject . . . but a spectator,
a spectating activity, at the limit of any Ôxed subjectivity, materially inconstant, dis-
persed in process, beyond the accommodation of reality and pleasure principles.17

While HeathÊs arguments here are speciÔc to structuralist-materialist Ôlm,

semiotic-psychoanalytical Ôlm theorists all tended to argue that reÒexivity
breaks the viewerÊs illusion that he is an autonomous, uniÔed subject.
Given its renewal of skepticism about human vision, it should come as no
surprise that the new theory was continuous with its revelationist predecessor
in yet another way. We saw in chapter 2 how theorists in the revelationist tradi-
tion arrived at their distrust of sight primarily by confusing things that it is logi-
cally impossible for human beings to see with empirical phenomena the naked
eye is too weak to see and by denying sight the capacity to see things that it can
see perfectly well unaided. Semiotic-psychoanalytical Ôlm theorists were no
different in their misuse (indeed abuse) of the concept of illusion.
A visual illusion is something that, by way of its appearance, deceives the
person experiencing it into believing or perceiving something that is not true.
As we have seen, the new theorists argued that when watching a Ôlm, viewers
experience the epistemic and visual illusion that they are in the presence of
reality rather than a representation. However, as Noël Carroll and others have
argued, this claim is demonstrably false. First of all, viewers of Ôlms do not
normally behave as they would if this claim were true. For example, they do not
typically Òee movie theaters seeking to protect themselves as, presumably, they
would if they believed that they were in the presence of reality when watching
horror Ôlms, disaster Ôlms, science-Ôction films, and action Ôlms. Second, and
relatedly, mistaking a Ôction for reality would in many cases prevent viewers
from appreciating the Ôction, thereby undermining the whole point of Ôction.
As Carroll puts it in relation to horror Ôctions:

If when reading or viewing Ôctions we come to be convinced, albeit by deception,

that werewolves really existed in our vicinity, it would be difÔcult to continue to
savor the story. One would want to take some practical measures to secure oneÊs
life and loved ones. A very condition of there being an institution of Ôction from
which we derive entertainment and pleasure is that we know that the persons and
events are not actual.18

Third, unlike trompe-oeils and other visual illusions, Ôlms are not standardly
designed to deceive their viewers that they are in the presence of reality rather
Revelationism and Contemporary Film Theory 85

than a representation. They lack three-dimensionality; frequently move through

space and time via editing and camera movement; are often accompanied by
extra-diegetic music and subtitles; regularly employ patently unrealistic staging,
lighting, setting, costume, make-up, and color; and use out-of-focus, high, low,
and tilted camera angles, and so on. Although it might be possible to design and
exhibit a Ôlm in such a way that it deceives its viewers into believing that they are
in the presence of reality, Ôlms are not typically designed this way.
These are just some of the arguments that have been leveled against
semiotic-psychoanalytical Ôlm theoryÊs claim that the cinema deceives view-
ers epistemically and visually into mistaking a representation for reality.19
The point of mentioning them here is to show that, like their predecessors in
the revelationist tradition, the new theorists arrived at their distrust of vision
through a misuse of perceptual concepts, in this case the concept of a visual il-
lusion. They denied sight the capacity to see something that it can see perfectly
well unaided: that a Ôlm is a representation, not reality.
Richard Allen has attempted to rehabilitate the concept of illusion for Ôlm
theory by distinguishing between illusions that give rise to false beliefs and
illusions that deceive the senses but do not result in false beliefs. A trompe-
lÊoeil is a canonical example of the former because it can deceive the viewer
into believing that what it depicts is real. The famous Müller-Lyer illusion is
an example of the latter, because lines of equal length are perceived as unequal
even when the viewer knows that they are equal and has no false belief about
their length. Allen suggests that when we view Ôlm and other visual repre-
sentations, we can have an illusion of the latter type, one in which no false
belief is involved. We can experience the representation as „a fully realized
world of experience and not a representation,‰ even though we know it is a
representation.20 He calls this projective illusion, and argues that it happens
as a result of imagining that we see what the representation depicts. However,
we do not have to experience a visual representation this way, he claims. This
is because, unlike the case of the Müller-Lyer illusion, „our knowledge about
what we are seeing can break the hold of the illusion.‰21 Allen argues that when
viewing a visual representation we can Òip-Òop between being aware of it as a
representation and the experience of projective illusion, just as when looking
at JastrowÊs duck-rabbit Ôgure we can Òip-Òop between seeing the Ôgure as a
duck and seeing it as a rabbit.

When you see a zombie in George RomeroÊs Night of the Living Dead (1968), you
may see the image as a medium-aware spectator. That is, you may look through the
image at the Ôctional portrayal of a zombie not only with the knowledge that what
you see is only a Ôlm, but also by perceiving the way in which the Ôctional scene
is staged for the camera. . . . However, there is [another] option: You may imagine
that you perceive a world inhabited by zombies. In this . . . case, you do not mistake
a staged event for actuality; . . . rather, you lose awareness of the fact that you are
seeing a Ôlm, that is, watching a recorded event that is staged before the camera. . . .
You perceive a fully realized though Ôctional world that has all the perceptual im-
mediacy of our own; you experience the Ôlm as a projective illusion.22
86 doubting vision

This is an intriguing argument, but once again it only gets off the ground
because of a misuse of the concept of illusion. An illusion is not something that
we can choose to experience. Rather, an illusion is something that happens to
the senses, which is why we speak of illusions as deceiving us. I can perhaps
choose to experience an illusion in the sense of creating a situation in which I am
likely to experience one, for example by arranging objects in my environment
in such a way that they appear to be closer or bigger than they really are. But
I cannot do so in the sense of simply willing it to happen or imagining that it
does. When looking at the Müller-Lyer illusion, for example, I cannot Òip-Òop
back and forth at will between experiencing it as an illusion in which I see the
lines as unequal in length and experiencing it as a representation in which I see
the true length of the lines. Rather, I both experience it as a representation and
as an illusion the entire time. Allen acknowledges that projective illusion is un-
like the Müller-Lyer illusion in this respect. Instead, he claims, it is more like a
mirror illusion in which we initially mistake a mirror image of something for the
thing itself. When we Ônd out that we are seeing a mirror image, this knowledge
breaks the hold of the illusion, he argues. But this analogy does not help AllenÊs
argument, because once again we cannot choose to see a mirror image as an
illusion. If the illusion is effective, it appears as if we are seeing the thing the
mirror reÒects rather than a mirror image of it, regardless of whether we know it
is an illusion. We cannot, in other words, Òip-Òop back and forth at will between
seeing the mirror image as an illusion and seeing it as a mirror image as we
can, according to Allen, in the case of projective illusion. This is why Allen ul-
timately compares Òip-Òopping back and forth between being aware of the Ôlm
as a representation and experiencing it as a projective illusion to the duck-rabbit
Ôgure, in which we can choose to see the Ôgure as one thing then another. But
this analogy is not convincing either, because in the case of the duck-rabbit we
are Òip-Òopping between two different aspects, between seeing the Ôgure as a
duck and seeing it as a rabbit. There is no illusion involved at all, and we see that
it is a representation the entire time. Ultimately, Allen is unable to point to any
visual experience in which we choose to see something as an illusion or not, and
this is because an illusion is not something we can choose to experience.23
AllenÊs misuse of the concept of illusion is also evident in his argument
that „our awareness of [a] painting as a painting may be eclipsed entirely, and
we may imagine or visualize that the object of the painting is before us, un-
mediated by representation.‰24 But to visualize or imagine seeing something
is not to experience a perceptual illusion in which we see what it is that we
are imagining. For unless we are hallucinating, which we also cannot choose
to do, imagining seeing something will not create a visual illusion any more
than willing it to occur will (although we can of course imagine that we are
experiencing a visual illusion). AllenÊs argument fails because he erroneously
conceives of an illusion as something we can choose to experience.
Like theorists in the revelationist tradition, Allen misuses perceptual and
related concepts. Unlike them, he does not distrust sight, or subscribe to the
revelationist conception of the cinema. As I have shown, despite appearances to
the contrary, it was the semiotic-psychoanalytical Ôlm theorists who renewed
Revelationism and Contemporary Film Theory 87

these fundamental tenets of the revelationist tradition by couching them within

the theories of the day and by turning toward an autotelic conception of art.
For them, just as much as their predecessors, the human eye was unreliable,
and they arrived at this skeptical argument in much the same way as their pre-
decessors did: by denying human vision the capacity to see something (that a
Ôlm is a representation, not reality) that it can see perfectly well unaided.

II

Semiotic-psychoanalytical Ôlm theory was the dominant Ôlm theory in Anglo-

American Ôlm studies until the mid-1980s. There are, however, other Ôlm
theories that have emerged since the 1960s, and like semiotic-psychoanalytical
Ôlm theory, they too have renewed skepticism about vision and the revelation-
ist conception of the cinema, although at the price, once again, of misusing
perceptual and related concepts.
Stanley Cavell has proposed a theory that conceives of Ôlm in terms of
modern philosophical skepticism, the doubt that reality and other minds exist.
For the philosophical skeptic, it is not just that our eyes fail to give us knowl-
edge of the true nature of reality, as is the case with theorists in the revelationist
tradition. Rather, the eyes, along with our other sense organs and minds, fail to
guarantee that there is a reality to know in the Ôrst place. Cavell argues that, for
a variety of reasons, humans are naturally inclined to be skeptics, especially in
the modern world where, he claims, we feel isolated and trapped in our minds.
We believe that our consciousness has become „unhinged‰ from reality, that
our subjectivity is now interposed between ourselves and the world so that it,
rather than reality, has „become what is present to us.‰25 We therefore wish to
make reality present to us again, to escape our solipsistic entrapment in sub-
jectivity. Cavell argues that this wish for the presence of reality, for its „pres-
entness,‰ as he sometimes calls it, is satisÔed by different artistic mediums in
different ways. Film satisÔes it in part by way of what he calls the „automa-
tism‰ of photography. Drawing on some of André BazinÊs arguments, Cavell
claims that, because its images are manufactured rather than handmade, pho-
tography removes „the human agent from the task of reproduction,‰ thereby
escaping human subjectivity. Hence, „photography maintains the presentness
of the world by accepting our absence‰ from the production of its images.26 But
we are also absent from Ôlms in another way. Films are projected onto a screen,
and the screen is, according to Cavell, a barrier. „It screens me from the world
it holds·that is, makes me invisible. And it screens that world from me·that
is, screens its existence from me. That the projected world does not exist (now)
is its only difference from reality.‰27 Cavell clariÔes this idea by comparing the
audience of a Ôlm to the audience in of a play.

The audience in a theater can be deÔned as those to whom the actors are present
while they are not present to the actors. But movies allow the audience to be me-
chanically absent. The fact that I am invisible and inaudible to the actors, and Ôxed
88 doubting vision

in position, no longer needs accounting for; it is not part of a convention I have

to comply with. . . . In viewing a movie my helplessness is mechanically assured:
I am present not at something happening, which I must conÔrm, but at something
that has happened, which I absorb (like a memory).28

Films make reality present to us at the price of our automatic absence from it,
our invisibility.
Cavell therefore argues that the cinema reveals reality in the sense that, for
those modern human beings in the grip of skepticism, it satisÔes the desire to
escape human subjectivity and „see the world itself‰ by making reality present
to them in a manner that is free of human subjectivity. But Cavell also sug-
gests that it reveals reality in another, more reÒexive sense. As William Rothman
and Marian Keane put it, „Movies awaken us to the worldÊs reality and thereby
awaken us to the reality of our unnatural condition, a condition in which we
have become displaced, have come to displace ourselves, from our natural habi-
tation within the world.‰29 Cavell describes this unnatural condition as follows:
due to the hold of skepticism, „our natural mode of perception is to view, feeling
unseen. We do not so much look at the world as look out at it, from behind the
self. . . . Viewing a movie makes this condition automatic, takes the responsibil-
ity for it out of our hands,‰ because Ôlm makes reality present to us by automati-
cally making us invisible to it.30 By mechanically instantiating this unnatural,
skeptical way of relating to the world, Ôlms reveal it to us, making us aware of it
and potentially awakening us from it. Hence, Ôlm is a „moving image of skepti-
cism.‰ It gives us an image of our skeptical relation to the world.
„The reality in a photograph is present to me,‰ Cavell asserts, „while I am
not present to it; and a world I know, and see, but to which I am nevertheless
not present (through no fault of my subjectivity), is a world past.‰31 But how
can something that is past be present to me? This is a logical question about
the meaning of the concept of being present to someone, not an empirical one.
For the very deÔnition of something being present to someone is that it is in
the same spatial location as that person at the same time. Someone is present to
me at my wedding because she is at the wedding while it is taking place. She is
not present to me if she arrived too late to witness it, or left before it occurred.
Cavell could argue that it is, precisely, photography that enables something
past to be present to someone. However, this would be circular: Cavell would
be appealing to the concept of being present to someone to explain photog-
raphy, and then appealing to photography to explain his aberrant use of the
concept of being present to someone. Moreover, however much as we might
want it to, having a photograph of a deceased relative at the relativeÊs funeral
does not make him present to those of us at his funeral except perhaps in the
metaphorical sense that it makes us think of him. Of course it does make sense
to talk about a person being present in a photograph. But this is not meant in
CavellÊs sense of being present to those of us viewing the photograph. Rather,
it is meant in the sense of being present when the photograph was taken.
A similar confusion obtains in CavellÊs use of the concepts of being un-
seen and invisible. It only makes sense to say that something is unseen or
Revelationism and Contemporary Film Theory 89

invisible if it could be seen or visible. One slips into a house unseen because
one could have been seen but wasnÊt. Something is invisible because our eyes
are not powerful enough to see it, but if they were more powerful, or if we
had a technology that augmented their power, it could be seen. But when we
watch a Ôlm, we are not invisible or unseen to the people in the Ôlm as if, were
their eyes only stronger, or they had a telescope, or the „barrier‰ of the screen
was removed, they could see us. As Cavell acknowledges, what a Ôlm depicts
has already happened. By deÔnition, therefore, we can neither be seen or not
be seen by those in a Ôlm. When looking at a home movie of our parents as
children, we, their children, are not unseen or invisible to them for the obvious
reason that we werenÊt alive when the home movie was made. No matter how
powerful their eyes were, they could not have seen us. For what direction would
they have looked in? Similarly, we do not see future viewers of photographs
and Ôlms of ourselves because, no matter how powerful our eyes were, we
would not be able to see them. For who will these viewers be, and where will
they be located when they see these photographs and Ôlms of us? The only licit
sense in which one can be unseen when watching a Ôlm is if one manages to
slip in to see it unnoticed by other members of the audience.
Cavell arrives at these arguments by claiming that photographs are „mys-
terious‰ because, unlike a recording of a sound which reproduces the sound,
„we cannot say that a photograph reproduces a sight (or a look, or an appear-
ance).‰32 Hence, he concludes, photographs are not recordings of reality, at
least in the sense that a recording is a reproduction. Instead, they present reality
to us in the sense of making it present to the viewer. But while it is true that
it makes no sense to speak of a photograph as reproducing the „sight‰ of an
object because objects donÊt make sights or have sights, it certainly does make
sense to say that a photograph reproduces the look or appearance of an object.
This is why we often examine photographs to see how things used to look
or appear. By examining photographs of President Kennedy arriving in Dal-
las on November 22, 1963, for example, we can see what he looked like just
before his assassination. Furthermore, it makes sense to say that photographs
and Ôlms record things. One can, for example, record a performance of a play
or dance by Ôlming it, as early Ôlmmakers routinely did. One can also record
a historical event, as Abraham Zapruder did when he (unintentionally at Ôrst)
Ôlmed KennedyÊs assassination. There is therefore no reason to think that pho-
tographs and Ôlms are not reproductions or recordings of things just because
they cannot be said to reproduce „sights.‰ Much like semiotic-psychoanalytical
Ôlm theorists in their misuse of the concept of illusion, Cavell is only able to
renew skepticism about human vision and the revelationist conception of the
cinema by taking considerable liberties with the meanings of the concept of
seeing and related concepts such as being invisible, being present, and sights.
Visual skepticism and the revelationist conception also inform another
new Ôlm theory, which David Bordwell and Charlie Keil have dubbed the mo-
dernity thesis.33 This theory draws on the early writings of Kracauer as well as
Walter Benjamin to argue that human vision goes through changes over time,
and these changes are reÒected in, if not caused by, visual art and culture.
90 doubting vision

In modernity, which Benjamin saw as beginning around 1850, a new type or

mode of perception different from the modes of previous epochs has arisen due
to the forces of change at work in modern societies: capitalism, urbanization,
industrialization, technological progress, and so on. This mode is characterized
above all by distraction: the frequent shifts in attention demanded of people by
the overload of visual and aural stimuli typical of modern environments such
as cities. Ben Singer, a modernity thesis proponent, puts it this way:

The gist of the history-of-perception argument is that modernity caused some kind of
fundamental change in the human perceptual apparatus, or „sensorium,‰ as Benjamin
and others called it. Immersion in the complex, rapid-Ôre environment of the metrop-
olis and industrial capitalism created a distinctly modern perceptual mode. The cityÊs
bombardment of heterogeneous and ephemeral stimuli fostered an edgy, hyperactive,
fragmented perceptual encounter with the world.34

In contrast, the prevailing mode of perception in the premodern era was

one of contemplation. People were able to look at an object without being
distracted by competing perceptual stimuli. But this is not possible, or at least
is much less probable, in modernity. Jonathan Crary, another modernity thesis
advocate, writes: „Perception for Benjamin was acutely temporal and kinetic;
he makes clear how modernity subverts even the possibility of a contemplative
beholder. There is never a pure access to a single object; vision is always mul-
tiple, adjacent to and overlapping with other objects, desires, and vectors.‰35
According to the modernity thesis, the modern, distracted mode of percep-
tion both shapes and is shaped by the visual art and culture characteristic of
modernity. In particular, the cinema is said to reÒect and intensify perceptual
distraction through stylistic techniques such as editing and the close-up, which,
much like a modern city, overload the viewer with perceptual stimuli, requiring
her to shift attention often and thereby shocking her.
As we saw in chapter 1, in his Ôlm theory of the 1920s and early 1930s
Kracauer argued that the cinema reveals to human beings their otherwise
hidden condition of ideological fragmentation in modernity through the dis-
tracting perceptual experience it creates for viewers. By forcing viewers to
switch attention frequently from one unconnected stimulus to another, their
perceptual experience is fragmented, and this reveals to them their condition
of ideological fragmentation. „Here, in pure externality, the audience encoun-
ters itself; its own reality is revealed in the fragmented sequence of splen-
did sense impressions. Were this reality to remain hidden from the viewers,
they could neither attack nor change it; its disclosure in distraction is there-
fore of moral signiÔcance.‰36 Tom Gunning has applied this argument to early
cinema, which he refers to as „the cinema of attractions‰: „The sudden, in-
tense, and external satisfaction supplied by the succession of attractions [in
early cinema] was recognized by Kracauer as revealing the fragmentation of
modern experience. The taste for thrills and spectacle, the particularly mod-
ern form of curiositas that deÔnes the aesthetic of attractions, is molded by
a modern loss of fulÔlling experience.‰37 And Miriam Hansen has used this
Revelationism and Contemporary Film Theory 91

theory of distraction to explain one of the appeals of classical narrative cinema

in general·namely, that it was „the single most inclusive cultural horizon in
which the traumatic effects of modernity were reÒected, rejected or disavowed,
transmuted or negotiated.‰38 Much like revelationist theorists, therefore, these
scholars claim that people are unable to see and know an important truth about
reality·namely, their condition of ideological fragmentation·and that the
cinema reveals it to them through the distracting perceptual experience it cre-
ates for its viewers.
Does it make sense, though, to describe the perceptual experience of Ôlm
as distracting? Is this a correct use of the concept? For although a Ôlm could
be said to contain different perceptual stimuli much like a modern environ-
ment does, these stimuli·its images and sounds·are typically presented se-
quentially. Hence, Ôlm viewing usually consists of watching one thing·the
Ôlm·change over time. In contrast, the modern environment contains mul-
tiple things that simultaneously compete for our attention, which is why it can
distract us. Distraction by deÔnition consists of having oneÊs attention drawn
away from one thing by another, and in order for this to happen the two things
must be present at the same time. The various images and sounds of a Ôlm,
however, are not standardly co-present because they are presented sequentially,
and they therefore cannot compete with each other for the viewerÊs attention
and thereby distract her. Certainly, the images and sounds of a Ôlm can be
presented simultaneously. Chantal Akerman, for example, converted her fine
film DÊest (1993) at the Jewish Museum in New York City into a video instal-
lation, Bordering on Fiction (1995), in which different parts of the film were
exhibited simultaneously on multiple monitors. However, this is not how DÊest
is normally exhibited, and the same is true of Ôlms in general. This is why,
when watching a Ôlm, viewers are typically looking at and paying attention to a
single perceptual stimulus: what is being exhibited on the screen or monitor in
front of them. They are not distracted away from this single perceptual stimulus
in the way that competing perceptual stimuli in a modern environment distract
its inhabitants away from a single perceptual stimulus. Films, in other words,
do not usually cause their viewers to look around, switching attention from one
perceptual stimulus in one part of the exhibition space to another.
Given that Ôlms do not normally consist of different perceptual stimuli
presented simultaneously, if Ôlmmakers truly wanted to replicate the percep-
tual distraction of the modern environment, they would, surely, have to distract
viewers away from the Ôlm they are watching with perceptual stimuli located
on the sides and back of the exhibition space that are unrelated to the Ôlm, a
fact recognized by Kracauer. In his essay „The Cult of Distraction,‰ Kracauer
argues that „the large picture houses in Berlin are places of distraction‰ because
of their architecture and interior design. „The interior design of movie theaters
serves one sole purpose: to rivet the viewerÊs attention to the peripheral. . . . The
stimulations of the senses succeed one another with such rapidity that there is
no room left between them for even the slightest contemplation.‰39 In other
words, according to Kracauer, the interior design of movie theaters distracts the
viewer, making him switch attention frequently and abruptly from one feature
92 doubting vision

of the design to the next. Later in the same essay, however, Kracauer acknowl-
edges that such distraction does not actually occur because of „the programs
of the large movie theaters. For even as they summon to distraction, they im-
mediately rob distraction of its meaning by amalgamating the wide range of
effects·which by their nature demand to be isolated from each other·into
an ÂartisticÊ unity. These shows strive to coerce the motley sequence of exter-
nalities into an organic whole.‰40 Although Kracauer does not explain how this
„organic unity‰ is achieved, one might hypothesize that he is referring to the
fact that theater managers do things such as turn down the lights in order to
minimize the distraction of interior décor, enabling their patrons to concentrate
on the Ôlm. But however it is achieved, Kracauer is acknowledging that Ôlms
and the exhibition spaces in which they are shown are typically designed to
minimize distraction, not maximize it. Indeed, he ends his essay by complain-
ing that distraction is a potential but unrealized possibility of Ôlm exhibition:
Ôlm theaters „should rid their offerings of all trappings that deprive Ôlm of its
rights,‰ he demands, „and must aim radically toward a kind of distraction that
exposes disintegration instead of masking it.‰41
Benjamin in effect concedes that Ôlms are not distracting in this way by
arguing that it is the change from one sequentially presented shot to another
that causes distraction. „The distracting element [of Ôlm] is . . . primarily tac-
tile,‰ he says, „being based on changes of place and focus which periodically
assail the spectator. . . . No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is al-
ready changed.‰42 But this is a major concession. For why should the change
from one shot to another be thought of as a form of distraction? Distraction
by deÔnition consists of having oneÊs attention drawn away from one thing by
another, not of watching one thing change. To think that the two are alike is to
confuse two types of change: the subjective change in our visual Ôeld as we
switch our attention from one thing to another, and the objective change that
occurs in one thing while we are watching it.
But let us assume, for the sake of argument, that distraction can occur
as a result of watching one thing change. This still does not mean that Ôlm is
distracting. Benjamin seems to think that it is because, unlike paintings, Ôlms
do not allow us to contemplate their shots for an indeÔnite length of time. „The
painting invites the spectator to contemplation,‰ he suggests. „Before it the spec-
tator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot
do so.‰43 But this argument fails to compare like with like. The cinema is a
temporal art form, one that controls the duration of the viewerÊs experience of
it. Paintings, however, are still images, and they typically cannot control how
long a viewer looks at them. Change·both in the depicted content and the
way that content is depicted·is therefore always a possibility in Ôlms, which
it isnÊt in paintings, and Ôlms by deÔnition control the rate at which this change
occurs. In this respect, the cinema is not like painting, but rather temporal art
forms such as ballet, theater, performance art, opera, and music, which also
typically consist of material that changes and which control the rate at which it
changes. Yet these temporal art forms are not considered distracting. A musical
composition, for instance, usually consists of sounds presented sequentially,
Revelationism and Contemporary Film Theory 93

with one sound changing into or being replaced by another, but it does not
follow from this that music is distracting. Just because we cannot contemplate
a sound in a piece of music for as long as we want to does not mean that we
are distracted away from it by the sounds that follow it. There is no reason to
think, therefore, that Ôlm is distracting because we cannot contemplate a shot
for as long as we want to. For if this is true of Ôlm, then it must be true of all the
temporal arts, most of which existed long before modernity. Thus, once again,
skepticism about human vision and the revelationist conception of the cinema
are being renewed through the misuse of a perceptual concept, in this case the
concept of perceptual distraction.
But even if Ôlms could distract us, this would not mean that they could
thereby reveal to us our hidden condition of ideological fragmentation (if in-
deed such a condition obtains in modernity). In his early work, Kracauer and his
followers seem to think that this revelation occurs because our perceptual ex-
perience is like our experience of ideology in that both are fragmented. But it is
important to remember that the word „fragmentation‰ is a metaphor in both the
perceptual and the ideological contexts. When we describe our perceptual expe-
rience as „fragmented‰ (if indeed we ever do), we do not mean that it really is
separated into fragments in the way that a Ôlm is separated into shots, as we saw
in the case of Vertov and his claim that our perceptions are disorganized. For we
cannot count our perceptions in the way that we can count the number of shots
in a Ôlm. Rather, we mean that what we see consists of unconnected perceptual
stimuli. And when Kracauer describes ideology as fragmented in modernity, he
means, as we have seen, that human beings lack „binding norms.‰ They do not
share the common beliefs and values once provided by religion. Thus, percep-
tual and ideological fragmentation are not really alike. To not share a belief or
value with someone else is not in any way like shifting attention frequently and
abruptly from one perceptual stimulus to another unrelated one. There is no rea-
son, therefore, to think that the experience of the latter, even if it did routinely
occur in the cinema, would lead to the revelation of the former.
One Ônal Ôlm theory that has emerged recently and is strongly inÒuenced
by skepticism about sight and the revelationist conception is that of Gilles
Deleuze, which is based, like his philosophy in general, on BergsonÊs meta-
physics. As we saw in chapter 1 when examining EpsteinÊs work, according
to Bergson reality is an indivisible, continuous whole in which everything is
constantly interacting with everything else throughout time and space, a pro-
cess he refers to as mobility. Due to practical necessity, human perception is
immobile, subtracting what is seen from its spatial and temporal connections to
everything else. Deleuze, like Epstein, bases his Ôlm theory on this claim about
the gap between reality and the way it appears to human sight. However, again
like Epstein, he departs from BergsonÊs philosophy by arguing that, rather than
replicating the immobility of human vision, the cinema overcomes it, thereby
revealing the mobility of reality to the viewer. Although he never explains how,
the cinema, he insists, does not artiÔcially construct an imitation of movement,
as does human perception. Rather, movement is an „immediate given‰ of the
cinematic image, and he therefore calls it a „movement-image.‰44 Furthermore,
94 doubting vision

while framing does subtract what it frames from its spatial and temporal con-
nections to the rest of reality, much like human sight, this is counteracted by
camera movement and editing which, by revealing what is excluded by the
frame, restore these spatial and temporal connections. „If the cinema does not
have natural subjective perception as its model, it is because the mobility of its
centres and the variability of its framings always lead it to restore vast acentered
and deframed zones. It then tends to return to the Ôrst regime of the movement-
image: universal variation, total, objective, and diffuse perception.‰45 Hence, the
cinema oscillates between revealing and hiding the mobility of reality, between
an objective, „acentered‰ perception, in which what is framed at any one mo-
ment is connected to the rest of reality by camera movement and editing, and a
subjective, „unicentered‰ perception, in which what is framed is separated from
its spatial and temporal connections to the rest of reality.46
The real focus of DeleuzeÊs theory, however, is time. Deleuze does not
argue that revealing the mobility of reality automatically entails revealing time
as duration, as Epstein tends to. Rather, he claims that this only comes about due
to a change that occurs in the cinema after World War II. In the pre-war classical
cinema of the movement-image, reality is conceived of as ordered, intelligible,
and predictable. The connections established by camera movement and editing
between what is depicted in one frame and the next are therefore rational and
continuous. One consequence of this is that the cinema can only offer an „indi-
rect image of time,‰ meaning time in the transcendental, Bergsonian sense of a
ceaselessly changing whole in which past, present, and future interpenetrate. In
the classical cinema, this whole is subordinated to space because it is depicted
spatially, through the addition of more and more frames, shots, and scenes.
Hence, time as duration has to be deduced from these spatial additions.47 The
trauma of WWII, however, „greatly increased the situations which we no longer
know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe,‰ and
a modern cinema emerges in which irrational, discontinuous relations between
frames, shots, and scenes predominate, thereby creating ambiguity, paradox,
and even incommensurability.48 The clear distinctions typical of classical cin-
ema between different times and spaces, subjectivity and objectivity, and real
and imaginary, break down. The result is a „direct image of time‰: the non-
chronological temporal relations that govern modern cinema are those of time
as duration in which the past, present, and future coexist and intermingle. Past
becomes present, present becomes past, and both become future in an image of
time that Deleuze calls „crystalline‰ because it is multifaceted.

What we see in the crystal is no longer the empirical progression of time as suc-
cession of presents, nor its indirect representation as interval or as whole; it is its
direct presentation, its constitutive dividing in two into a present which is passing
and a past which is preserved, the strict contemporaneity of the present with the
past that it will be, of the past with the present that it has been. . . . The direct time-
image or the transcendental form of time is what we see in the crystal.49

Deleuze turns to the Ôlms of Alain Resnais to illustrate this argument.

Revelationism and Contemporary Film Theory 95

Narration will consist of the distribution of different presents to different charac-

ters, so that each forms a combination that is plausible and possible in itself, but
where all of them together are „incompossible,‰ and where the inexplicable is
thereby maintained and created. In Last Year [at Marienbad], it is X who knew
A (so A does not remember or is lying), and it is A who does not know X (so X
is mistaken or playing a trick on her). Ultimately, the three characters correspond
to the three different presents . . . : what X lives in a present of past, A lives in a
present of future, so that the difference exudes or assumes a present of present (the
third, the husband), all implicated in each other.50

Hence, for Deleuze, like Epstein before him, the cinema is able to grasp and
reveal time as duration, which human perception cannot see because of its im-
mobility, but only when Ôlms employing nonchronological temporal relations
emerge after WWII.51
As we saw in chapter 1, Bergson has a very broad deÔnition of perception,
arguing that something perceives something else merely by interacting with
it. Deleuze accepts this deÔnition unquestioningly, claiming at one point that
atoms perceive, and indeed that they can perceive more than we humans can!52
But perceiving does not simply consist of the interaction between one thing
and another. We do not say that a mirror, for example, perceives its environ-
ment simply because light rays from the objects around it are reÒected on its
surface. Rather, we say that something perceives on the basis of its behavior in
appropriate circumstances, whether it can, for example, discriminate between
or react to perceptual stimuli such as light and dark. As Wittgenstein pointed
out, „Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living
human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is
conscious or unconscious.‰53 It is nonsensical to claim that atoms and mirrors
perceive, because they do not behave like sighted creatures such as ourselves,
let alone have perceptual organs with which to see.
As a result of this broad deÔnition of perception, Deleuze often writes
about the cinema as if it can perceive, as in the quotation above, or as if it is
conscious, as in the following passage: „Given that it is a consciousness which
carries out these divisions and reunions, we can say of the shot that it acts like a
consciousness. But the sole cinematographic consciousness is not us, the spec-
tator, nor the hero; it is the camera·sometimes human, sometimes inhuman
or superhuman.‰54 But even though a shot might be like human perception (as
deÔned by Bergson) in that it separates what it frames from the rest of reality,
this does not mean that it is a perception, or that the movie camera perceives
and is conscious. For a camera cannot behave like a sighted or conscious crea-
ture. It cannot recognize or fail to recognize an object, identify it or misidentify
it, discover it or overlook it, pay attention to it or ignore it, watch it, observe it,
scrutinize it, study it, or inspect it. Nor can it go blind or lose consciousness.
The camera can certainly help us do some of these things by recording and
thereby enabling us to see what we would not be able to see otherwise. But
this does not mean that the camera performs these actions. In effect, by literal-
izing the analogy between cinema and perception in BergsonÊs work, Deleuze
96 doubting vision

trafÔcs in the category confusion between ability and agent that I pointed to in
the introduction. Seeing is an ability, something that is identiÔed by its exercise
in appropriate circumstances. The cinema can be thought of as a vehicle of
sight, something that enables us to see things we would not be able to see oth-
erwise via recordings of them. But this does not mean that it is the cinema that
does the seeing for us, as Deleuze suggests. Nor is a shot a perception, if by a
perception is meant the subjective content of an act of perception. For although
a shot, like a perception, contains information, what makes a perception a per-
ception is that the information it contains is perceived. To contain information
is to be in a certain state, while to perceive something is an ability.55 A photo-
graph, for example, contains information, but it does not perceive this informa-
tion. Nor, therefore, does a shot, which, after all, is only a series of photographs
(whether captured analogically or digitally) exhibited on a screen.
For Deleuze, the post-WWII modern cinema directly reveals time as dura-
tion, which the naked eye is incapable of seeing. But as I noted when examining
EpsteinÊs work in chapter 1, the dimension of time is not something that, logically
speaking, can be seen, and thus the eye cannot intelligibly be accused of failing to
see it. The fact that we use time as a noun, Wittgenstein pointed out, misleads us
into thinking that it refers to an entity of some kind, like a river Òowing by. The
phrase „an image of time‰ therefore seems to make sense, just as „an image of
Jupiter‰ does. But whereas we can point to Jupiter in an image that depicts it, as
well as see what shape and color it is, we cannot do the same with time. Hence,
there cannot be an image of time, at least in the sense of an image that depicts
time. An image can, of course, depict events happening in time. But this no more
means that it depicts events happening inside some thing that can be revealed,
pointed to, and described than an image depicting somebody in love does.
It is not surprising, therefore, that when Deleuze gives examples of what
he means by an image of time, it is not something in the cinematic image that
he points to, because there is nothing he could point to. Instead, he refers to the
temporal relations between things in Ôlms. As he puts it, „What is speciÔc to
the [cinematic] image . . . is to make perceptible, to make visible relationships
of time which cannot be seen in the represented object.‰56 But as we saw in
the case of Vertov, a relation between object A and object B is not an invisible
property of object A (or B) that our eyes are too weak to see and that needs to
be revealed by a visual technology in order to be seen, as Deleuze suggests in
the above quotation. For no matter how powerful our eyes were, we would not
be able to see how object A relates to object B simply by looking at object
A alone. Instead, by deÔnition, seeing a relation between one object and an-
other consists of seeing both of them and how they stand in relation to each
other. The spatial relation of town A being north of town B is not an invisible
property of town A which, if our eyes were only more powerful, we would be
able to see by looking at town A. Rather, one can only see that town A is north
of town B by seeing both towns and their positions relative to each other.
The same is true of temporal relations. As Gregory Currie has pointed out,
the cinema is a temporal art in the strong sense that the temporal properties of
cinematic representations, such as the order and duration of shots, can represent
Revelationism and Contemporary Film Theory 97

the temporal properties of what they depict, unlike, say, paintings, which have to
use spatial properties such as blurring and positioning to represent the temporal
properties of what they depict, as in DuchampÊs Nude Descending a Staircase
(1912).57 The temporal relation of event B taking place after event A in a nar-
rative Ôlm is typically represented by presenting the shots depicting event B to
the viewer after the shots depicting event A. In the narrative of Cléo from 5 to
7 (1961), Cléo meets the young solider on leave from Ôghting in Algeria in the
park at around 6:10 PM after she has broken her mirror at about 6:04 PM, and
this temporal relation is represented by shots of her meeting the soldier after the
shots of the mirror breaking. No matter how powerful our eyes are, or how pow-
erful the visual technology we have at our disposal, we would not be able to see
this temporal relation simply by looking at the shots of her breaking her mirror.
As with other kinds of relations, it can only be seen by seeing both events and
how they stand in relation to each other temporally. The cinema does not, there-
fore, represent the temporal relations between two or more things by revealing
an otherwise invisible property of those things, as Deleuze argues. Instead, it ma-
nipulates its temporal properties, such as the order and length of shots, as well as
employs nontemporal techniques, such as titles, to represent temporal relations.
Of course, a Ôlm can hide temporal relations. Michael Gondry and Charlie
Kaufman, for example, hide the fact that the opening, precredit shots of The Eter-
nal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2005), in which Joel and Clementine appear
to meet for the Ôrst time in Montauk, depict an event that actually takes place
after the events depicted in the postcredits shots, in which they break up and have
their memories of each other erased. But this is not accomplished by making the
temporal relation between these events invisible. Instead, it is achieved by pre-
senting the shots that depict these events nonchronologically without informing
the viewer that this is being done. The cinema does not, therefore, reveal time
which the human eye cannot see. Not only is it senseless to conceive of time as
something that can or cannot be seen, but the temporal relations between things
that can be seen in Ôlms are not invisible properties of those things that need to be
revealed by a visual technology. Deleuze, like Vertov, in effect hypostatizes a rela-
tional property, conceiving of time as if it were like an intrinsic physical property
of a thing that the eye is incapable of perceiving unaided rather than something
possessed by virtue of its interaction with other things. In arguing that the cinema
is more mobile than human sight, he also follows Vertov in conÒating the instanta-
neous transition that is possible when exhibiting shots recorded at different times
and places with the act of recording them to make it seem as if the camera can
move instantaneously between different times and places. But as I noted in chap-
ter 2, the camera is no more mobile than the human eye, for it cannot move back-
ward and forward in time. Nor can it move instantaneously between one place and
another. Indeed, it cannot move at all·it has to be moved. Nor does some kind of
instantaneous movement through time and space occur when a viewer is watching
a Ôlm. For what the viewer sees are shots exhibited in the exhibition space in the
present. The fact that these shots were recorded in different times and places does
not mean that the shots are moving between these different times and places as the
viewer watches them, as Deleuze seems to think.
98 doubting vision

As I noted in the introduction, one way of defending Deleuze and the other
Ôlm theorists I have examined in this book against my criticisms is to argue
that I am interpreting them too literally, that in fact talk of cameras seeing, or
Ôlm as being distracting, or the cinematic image making its referent present or
being an illusion, is metaphorical. Of course theorists donÊt believe that these
things are literally true of the cinema, someone might protest. However, as
I have already pointed out, if this were the case with theorists in the revela-
tionist tradition proper, then they would not arrive at the conclusions that they
do about the cinema, and the same is true of the contemporary Ôlm theorists
I have examined in this chapter. If semiotic-psychoanalytic Ôlm theorists, for
example, were not claiming that the cinematic image is really illusory but only
like an illusion, they would not also argue that it dupes the Ôlm viewer into
believing that she is in the presence of reality and is an autonomous subject,
for if the cinematic image is not literally an illusion then, by deÔnition, it does
not deceive the viewer. Nor, therefore, would they impute to it the pernicious
political consequences that they tend to. And if Cavell did not believe that the
cinematic image really makes its referent present, he would not in addition
claim that it satisÔes the desire to „see the world itself‰ and thereby escape
human subjectivity, for the Ôlm viewer would not be seeing the world, only a
recording of it. In the case of the modernity thesis, if it was being suggested
that the perceptual experience of Ôlm is not really distracting, but only like a
distracting perceptual experience, then it would not further be maintained that
the cinema contributes to the creation of a new, modern mode of perception in
the way that the perceptually distracting modern environment supposedly does,
for the simple reason that Ôlm would not be literally distracting in the way that
modern environments are. And if Deleuze were not arguing that the cinema
offers an „image of time,‰ but only something like an image of time (whatever
that might be), he would not also claim that the cinema reveals the mobility of
reality·in which everything is connected to everything else throughout time
and space·because the past and the future would not be literally made pres-
ent to the viewer in a Ôlm.58 The retreat to suggesting that the claims of Ôlm
theorists are mere metaphors is always a possibility. But with it must come the
recognition that if the claims of Ôlm theorists are not literal ones, then neither
are the conclusions built on them. Furthermore, it must be explained why Ôlm
theorists would arrive at those conclusions in the Ôrst place if their arguments
about the cinema are not meant literally, and what the purpose of such meta-
phors is if not to make literal claims about the cinemaÊs nature and functions.
That Deleuze draws the conclusions he does from his assertions about the
failings of human sight and the cinemaÊs revelatory capacity is ample evidence
that he means them literally and that they are therefore open to the sort of criti-
cisms I have leveled against them. Of course, he is far from being alone among
Ôlm theorists in the way he misuses perceptual concepts to make these argu-
ments. As this book has shown, such misuse has been a persistent tendency in
Ôlm theorizing since the 1920s. It is time, now, to ask why.
 4

The Lure of Visual Skepticism

A distrust of human vision has played a foundational role in Ôlm theory. It

helped give rise to the revelationist tradition within classical Ôlm theory and
has continued to inform Ôlm theorizing since the 1960s. Where does this
visual skepticism come from, and what explains its enduring appeal to Ôlm
theorists?
The answer can be found in artistic modernism where, as much recent
scholarship in art history and other disciplines has demonstrated, there is a
marked distrust of sight. Rosalind Krauss, for example, has argued that there
is a reaction among certain avant-garde artists from the 1920s onward against
an idealization of vision that, she believes, is a feature of much modernist art,
especially abstract painting and sculpture.1 By an idealization of vision, Krauss
means that much modernist abstract art is designed to give the viewer the ex-
perience of „a higher, more formal order of vision‰ than everyday sight, an
experience of vision „in its reÒexive form: the terms not just of seeing but of
consciousness accounting for the fact of its seeing. It is the axis of a redoubled
vision: of a seeing and a knowing that one sees, a kind of cogito of vision.‰2
The avant-garde counter-tradition of the „optical unconscious‰ consists of ar-
tistic practices that in some way challenge this idealization of vision by in-
serting non- or anti-ideal features into art works and the viewerÊs perceptual
experience of them, such as time, opacity, and the body. For example, accord-
ing to Krauss, Max ErnstÊs collages and readymades challenge the idealization
of vision in modernist abstract art by way of a „blind spot,‰ „a break in the Ôeld
of vision,‰ „a point in the optical system where what is thought to be visible
will never appear.‰3
100 doubting vision

Martin Jay agrees with Krauss that, in France at least, this avant-garde
counter-tradition was in full swing in the 1920s. However, he argues that it
was part of a much larger but generally ignored „antivisual‰ or „antiocular-
centric‰ discourse, „a profound suspicion of vision and its hegemonic role in
the modern era.‰ This discourse encompassed a variety of intellectual, artistic,
and social practices in France and elsewhere from the late nineteenth century
onward and was aimed at a widespread valorization of vision in modernity he
calls „ocularcentrism‰ or „Cartesian perspectivalism.‰4 Antiocularcentrism is
therefore a more pervasive phenomenon than the avant-garde reaction against
the idealization of vision in modernist abstract art that Krauss is concerned
with. Indeed, according to Jay, certain abstract and semiabstract modernist art-
ists, especially Impressionists and post-Impressionists such as Cézanne, are
part of antiocularcentrism, if only ambivalently.5
Jonathan Crary also argues that there was a shift in the latter half of the
nineteenth century away from the valorization of vision that Jay claims is a
major feature of modernity. However, Crary conceives of this shift as being
even more widespread and fundamental than JayÊs antiocularcentrism. Rather
than an early modern valorization of vision that is then increasingly contested,
Crary argues that there was a large-scale change in the middle of the nine-
teenth century in the very concepts used in discourses about visual perception,
at least in European countries. Visual perception was no longer conceptualized
as a transparent, „decorporealized,‰ and therefore reliable source of informa-
tion about reality, as it supposedly was prior to the nineteenth cenutry.6 Rather,
„there is an irreversible clouding over of the transparency of the subject-as-
observer. Vision, rather than a privileged form of knowing, becomes itself an
object of knowledge.‰7 For Crary, the shift from a valorization of sightÊs ca-
pacity to attain knowledge of reality to a more skeptical, antirealist concep-
tion of visual perception is a big, even epochal change that occurred on the
conceptual level, one which effected a wide variety of phenomena, including
modernist art.
I suspect that modernity is such a vast and complex phenomenon that gen-
eralizations about it of the sort that Jay and Crary advance are implausible.
It seems unlikely that any historical epoch can be characterized as having a
prevailing view or conception of vision. For example, if one examines the
philosophical theories of vision that have been advanced since the nineteenth
century, one Ônds an enormous range of views from realism to antirealism that
defy simple generalizations such as „ocularcentric‰ and „antiocularcentric.‰8
Nevertheless, the work of these scholars has helped draw attention to the ex-
istence of a distrust of human vision within artistic modernism.9 And while it
might be possible to deÔne the nature and scope of this distrust in other ways,
the evidence suggests that it can be minimally construed as follows.
There is a speciÔc kind of skepticism about human vision that can be
found in artistic modernism in general. It is not conÔned to KraussÊs avant-
garde counter-tradition and its reaction against modernist abstraction, nor to
JayÊs antiocularcentric artistic movements such as Impressionism. Rather, it is
a common feature of artistic modernism in toto, including those ocularcentric
The Lure of Visual Skepticism 101

traditions of modernist abstraction that supposedly idealize vision. It is a gen-

eral, systematic doubt about normal human vision, a distrust of everyday sight.
It is a belief that the standard exercise of the visual faculty is not to be trusted
in some signiÔcant respect because it possesses one or more Òaws. By words
such as „normal‰ and „standard,‰ I mean the exercise of the visual faculty out-
side of artistic contexts in everyday life. Often, this skepticism about normal
vision takes the form of the explicitly epistemic claim that humans are unable
to see, under standard conditions with their bodily eyes, various truths about
reality that it is important to know about, according to modernists. However,
even in the absence of such an explicitly epistemic claim, modernists have
doubts about everyday sight for a variety of other reasons. Of course, they
differ considerably over why normal vision is to be doubted, as well as what
the consequences of its inadequacies are. Nevertheless, they overwhelmingly
agree that standard, everyday, normal, physical vision is Òawed in some crucial
respect and therefore cannot be trusted.
P. Adams Sitney has also recently argued that questioning vision is a very
common if not essential feature of artistic modernism. He suggests that mod-
ernism can be deÔned as a group of contradictory beliefs or „antinomies‰ that
modernist artists share. A well-known example is the belief that „innovation
is the sole legitimate means of guaranteeing [an artistÊs] link to tradition,‰ a
belief which gives rise to the seemingly contradictory practice of „min[ing] the
greatest works of [a] tradition‰ for norms and conventions that can be used to
create radically new and innovative art works.10 A less well-known but equally
pervasive contradictory belief is the „antimony of vision,‰ which Sitney de-
scribes as follows: „Modernist literary and cinematic works stress vision as
a privileged mode of perception, even of revelation, while at the same time
cultivating opacity and questioning the primacy of the visual world.‰11 Mod-
ernist art works, for Sitney, can be interpreted as allegories of an oscillation
between visual opacity and revelation, in which „dramatic moments of vision
occur . . . in which nothing, or nothing dramatic, is seen.‰12
Although Sitney does not deÔne the „questioning of the primacy of the
visual world‰ in modernism in the way I have done·as a skepticism about
the normal exercise of the visual faculty·he does argue that a questioning
of some kind is a very general feature of modernism. And I think that if we
remind ourselves of the basic modernist conception of art, as well as of some
of the arguments about the inadequacies of normal vision widely appealed to
by modernists to justify this conception, we can see how pervasive skepticism
about everyday sight is in artistic modernism.
The basic modernist conception of art that I am referring to·one which
surfaces in one form or another in almost all modernist theory and practice·
argues that genuine art should not imitate or copy the way that reality standardly
appears to human vision. Rather, it should be free from the normal exercise of
the visual faculty. The artist should transform or abandon the way that reality
usually appears to everyday sight; he or she should not slavishly copy it.
As scholars of modernism routinely point out, almost all modernist the-
ories and practices owe some kind of debt to this antirealist or antimimetic
102 doubting vision

conception of art. Rarely noted, however, is the animus against everyday sight
motivating this conception, which takes the form of the argument that genuine
art should escape from the way that reality standardly appears to it. Modernists
differ considerably, however, over why art should do this, appealing to many
different, relatively informal arguments about the inadequacies of normal vi-
sion to justify their practices.
A common example of such an argument is what can be called the „auto-
mation of perception‰ theory. Roman Jakobson provides a classic formulation
of it in his early celebration of Futurist painting. Arguing that twentieth-century
painting has broken with the „naïve realism‰ of the nineteenth century, which he
deÔnes as the obligation „to convey perception,‰ he claims:

Perceptions, in multiplying, become mechanized; objects, not being perceived, are

taken on faith. Painting battles against the automization of perception; it signals the
object. But, having become antiquated, artistic forms are also perceived on faith. Cub-
ism and Futurism widely use the device of impeded perception, which corresponds in
poetry to the step-ladder construction discovered by contemporary theoreticians.13

The argument that art should „battle against the automization of perception,‰
that it should break with the way that reality standardly appears to everyday sight
through the „device of impeded perception,‰ is repeated in a variety of different
ways and forms throughout modernist theory and practice and in relation to all
the arts. Well-known examples are Victor ShklovskyÊs theory of ostranenie in lit-
erature and Bertolt BrechtÊs theory of Verfremdung in theater. So is the argument
that Jakobson only hints at here·namely, that the depiction of reality found in
genuine art is more truthful and accurate than the way it appears to everyday
sight („painting . . . signals the object‰). In other words, through the device of
impeded perception, genuine art gets closer than normal vision to true reality.
What is important here about the automation of perception theory is that
it perfectly exempliÔes modernist distrust of normal vision. In this theory, this
distrust takes the form of the argument that the everyday exercise of the vi-
sual faculty is characterized by routinization and habituation to the extent that
human beings are not actively conscious of much of what they see. As some
inÒuential commentators on Shklovsky have put it:

Normally our perceptions are „automatic,‰ which is another way of saying that
they are minimal. From this standpoint, learning is largely a matter of learning
to ignore. We have not really learned to drive an automobile, for example, until
we are able to react to the relevant stoplights, pedestrians, other motorists, road
conditions, and so on, with a minimum of conscious effort. Eventually, we may
even react properly without actually noticing what we are reacting to·we miss
the pedestrian but fail to see what he looks like. . . . Since perception is usually too
automatic, art develops a variety of techniques to impede perception or, at least, to
call attention to themselves.14

Art, in other words, compensates for a supposed inherent limitation of every-

day sight·its tendency to habituate·by impeding this tendency and making
The Lure of Visual Skepticism 103

people attend to things that they usually overlook. Needless to say, for modern-
ists who subscribe to this theory, it is very important that at least some of the
time people be made conscious of what they normally miss due to habituation,
even though modernists differ over why this is important. The crucial point here
is the distrust of everyday sight that this widely used justiÔcation for modernist
art is premised on. Normal vision misses a lot; art helps us see more and better.
Another common modernist argument in favor of abandoning the way re-
ality standardly appears to normal human vision in art is what I call the „mod-
ern environment‰ theory, which we have already encountered in the guise of
the modernity thesis in chapter 3, and which tends to be conÔned to the visual
arts. According to this theory, the problem with normal human vision is that it
is out of sync with the modern environment. Vision is historically outmoded
because it is no longer suited to the modern world. Various forces from the
mid-nineteenth century onward, principally technology and capitalism, have
combined to produce a perceptually challenging environment, particularly in
urban centers, one which gives rise to a new visual experience characterized
by qualities such as distraction and shock. This visual experience will increas-
ingly become the norm in the modern world, according to the modern environ-
ment theory, one which people will have to get used to in order to continue to
navigate their environment successfully. What was before thought of as normal
human vision, namely contemplation, the ability to look at and think about an
object without being shocked and distracted by competing perceptual stimuli,
is no longer the norm, but an outdated, old-fashioned, premodern way of see-
ing. Artists should therefore abandon vision-as-contemplation and instead in
some manner address the new visual experience increasingly more typical of
modernity.
This theory can be used in various ways. The version of it most familiar
today is Walter BenjaminÊs.15 Benjamin is usually interpreted as arguing that
human beings are undergoing a perceptual change in modernity, one in which
their visual faculty is adapting to („internalizing‰) the perceptually challeng-
ing modern environment. Certain types of art, including Ôlm, are playing a
role in this historical process by employing formal features that instantiate the
shock and distraction that are increasingly becoming norms of visual experi-
ence for more and more people. However, BenjaminÊs is not the only version
of the modern environment theory. Another prominent one among modernists,
usually overlooked today because of BenjaminÊs inÒuence, adopts the oppo-
site position. According to this version, because the perceptually challenging
modern environment gives rise to a visual experience quite different from that
of the premodern period, and because human beings have not had time to adapt
to it, art should step in and compensate for the fact that normal human vision
is ill-equipped for modernity. Rather than arguing, like Benjamin, that human
vision is changing due to the modern environment and that art is playing a role
in this process, this version of the theory suggests that art should compensate
for the inability of human vision to change.
An excellent example of this latter argument can be found in Fernand LégerÊs
writings from around 1924, during the period of his embrace of the classicism
104 doubting vision

prevalent among the avant-garde in post–World War I Paris.16 Whereas before

this time LégerÊs argument had been closer to BenjaminÊs, by 1924, the shock
and distraction associated by many modernists with the modern environment
are emerging in his writings as unnatural and damaging features of modernity,
ones which normal human vision is ill-equipped to deal with. In a text from
1924 titled „The Spectacle: Light, Color, Moving Image, Object-Spectacle,‰
we Ônd him repeatedly criticizing these features. For example, he claims: „The
visual world of a large modern city, that vast spectacle that I spoke of in the
beginning, is badly orchestrated; in fact, not orchestrated at all. The intensity
of the street shatters our nerves and drives us crazy.‰17
Rather than arguing, like Benjamin, that this „overdynamic exterior envi-
ronment‰ is being imitated or instantiated by art, Léger now sees it as some-
thing that art needs to protect people against. And by 1924 he has come to view
a classical ideal of beauty, with its emphasis on harmony and order, as a perfect
way of accomplishing this: „If the spectacle offers intensity, a street, a city, a
factory ought to offer an obvious plastic serenity. LetÊs organize exterior life
in its domain: form, color, light. . . . A society without frenzy, calm, ordered,
knowing how to live naturally within the Beautiful without exclamation or ro-
manticism.‰18 Art, in other words, can organize the visual chaos of the modern
environment into the geometrical order of „the Beautiful,‰ one which is much
more hospitable to everyday sight. Art thereby alleviates the most deleterious
effects of the modern environment on the eyes.
Although a lot more can be said about these arguments, what is important
here about the modern environment theory is, again, the lack of trust it evinces
in normal human vision. For theorists like Benjamin and artists like Léger,
everyday sight (viz., the exercise of the visual faculty typical of the premod-
ern period) is ill-equipped to deal with the modern environment. It cannot be
relied on in modernity. Art therefore needs to address its historical limitations
in some way. For Benjamin, advanced art reÒects the new visual features of
modernity, thereby playing a role in the process of adapting to the modern
environment. For Léger, art should compensate for the eyeÊs inability to adapt
by protecting it from these features. But in both cases, art can no longer simply
represent the way reality standardly appeared to the visual faculty before the
modern era. Art somehow needs to address the fact that normal human vision
is historically out of sync with the modern environment.
Yet another common modernist argument in favor of abandoning the way
reality standardly appears to normal human vision in art is the modern subjectiv-
ity theory discussed in chapter 2. It resembles the automation of perception the-
ory in many ways, but like the modern environment theory, it explicitly ties the
inadequacies of the human eye to the historical phenomenon of modernity. As
we have seen, this theory argues that various forces in modernity·principally
science, technology, and the penetration of „instrumental reason‰ into all
spheres of human existence·have had a profound effect on humans. These
forces have altered the way that the average personÊs mind works, giving rise
to a distinctively modern form of consciousness that is overly rationalistic and
intrinsically divorced from the senses, the body, and nature in general.
The Lure of Visual Skepticism 105

Clearly, this theory evinces a deep skepticism about the normal exercise of
the visual faculty, seeing it as part of a modern consciousness enslaved to ra-
tional, instrumental imperatives. Humans have lost the capacity to gain purely
visual knowledge of reality in modernity. They can no longer see, in the fullest
sense of the word. However, as usual, this theory leaves the door open for art
to step in and compensate for the Òaws of normal vision in a number of differ-
ent ways. Artists can, for example, abandon normal vision entirely and turn to
other resources to attain visual knowledge free from the constraints of ratio-
nalistic consciousness. A standard candidate for such a resource is a visionary
mental faculty supposedly uncontaminated by instrumental reason·namely,
the imagination or the „inward eye.‰ This is a strategy, argues M. H. Abrams,
that many Romantics pursued.

The preoccupation is with a radical opposition in ways of seeing the world, and
the need to turn from one way to the other, which is very difÔcult, but works
wonders. „Single vision,‰ the reliance on the „bodily,‰ „physical,‰ „vegetable,‰
„corporeal,‰ or „outward eye,‰ which results in a slavery of the mind to merely
material objects, a spiritual sleep of death, and a sensual death-in-life·to this way
of seeing [Romantic] poets opposed the liberated, creative, and resurrective mode
of sight „throÊ and not with the eye,‰ the „intellectual eye,‰ the „imaginative eye,‰
or simply, „the imagination.‰ The shift is from physical optics to what Carlyle in
the title of one of his essays called „Spiritual Optics,‰ and what Blake and others
often called „Vision.‰19

Alternatively, artists can pursue the option hinted at by Rudolf Arnheim (chap-
ter 2): they can attempt to recapture „undiluted vision‰ itself·pure, physical
sight liberated from the instrumental dictates of the mental realm.
Both strategies, interestingly enough, have been attributed to the Ôlm
theorist and Ôlmmaker Stan Brakhage, who typically refers to both physical
and mental concepts of vision to describe the type of visual experience liber-
ated from an overly rationalistic consciousness that his art aims to capture.
For example:

Suppose the Vision of the saint and the artist to be an increased ability to see·
vision. Allow so-called hallucination to enter the realm of perception . . . accept
dream visions, day-dreams or night-dreams, as you would so-called real scenes,
even allowing that the abstractions which move so dynamically when closed eye-
lids are pressed are actually perceived. Become aware of the fact that you are not
only inÒuenced by the visual phenomenon which you are focused upon and at-
tempt to sound the depths of all visual inÒuence.20

William C. Wees has argued that Brakhage is best understood as attempt-

ing to capture the undiluted vision of the physical eye freed from the mental.
As he puts it, „Brakhage is a literalist of perception, striving to make equiva-
lents of what he sees, as he actually sees it.‰21 Others, such as Sitney, have
maintained that authentic vision for Brakhage is just as much mental as it is
106 doubting vision

physical.22 Regardless of which interpretation is right, what is important here is

that Brakhage articulates a powerful version of a widespread argument among
modernists, which I have called the modern subjectivity theory. And at the
center of this theory is the same distrust of normal human vision and the same
call to abandon it in art that we have found elsewhere in very different modern-
ist theories of art.
So far, in order to point to the pervasiveness of the distrust of normal
human vision that is a common feature of modernism, I have examined sev-
eral of the most inÒuential but informal arguments about the inadequacies of
everyday sight that modernist artists appealed to. However, modernists also
routinely turned to more formal philosophical and scientiÔc doctrines to justify
their artistic departure from normal vision. Indeed, they were often motivated
by such doctrines to produce art in the Ôrst place. And, once again, although
these doctrines differ considerably in many ways, they all provide plenty of
ammunition for the modernist distrust of everyday sight. We have already en-
countered one of these theories, Bergsonism, but there were others, too.
A good example is the spiritual philosophies of one sort or another that,
according to much research in art history, played a crucial role in the develop-
ment of abstract painting by European painters born from the 1860s onward.
Pioneering abstractionists as different as Wassily Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka,
Jean Arp, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich all moved toward abstrac-
tion due to their desire to represent spiritual ideals. These were culled from a
variety of mystical and occult doctrines popularized in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries by writers and spiritual leaders such as Alfred Percy,
Helena P. Blavatsky, Franz Hartmann, Charles W. Leadbeater, and Rudolf
Steiner. And many other abstract, semiabstract, and nonabstract visual artists of
their generation were also inÒuenced, to varying degrees, by such philosophies.
It is impossible to summarize all of these spiritual philosophies here. What
is important is that, despite their variety, they shared certain basic features
described by Maurice Tuchman as „a concern for the quality of inner life, an
interest in spiritual development and wholeness, and a mistrust of material val-
ues and appearances.‰23 And it is the latter antimaterialism that is of particular
relevance to the claim that skepticism about normal human vision is a very
common feature of modernism. For this general antimaterialism helped give
rise to the collective effort in modernist visual art to „transcend the visible,‰ to
use Sixten RingbomÊs words24·to leave behind the way reality appears to the
bodily eye and represent instead a higher, more authentic state of insight into,
or absorption in, reality through abstract, nonrepresentational styles and forms.
At the heart of this antimaterialism is a basic doubt about normal human vision
and the way reality appears to it, which here takes the form of a widespread
belief, one we encountered in the work of Epstein in chapter 1: that everyday
sight and the senses in general are conÔned to outer material appearances and
are usually incapable of perceiving inner spiritual or metaphysical truths.
While explicitly spiritual doctrines were an important inÒuence on experi-
mentation by visual artists during modernismÊs formative period between 1890
and 1930, ostensibly more materialist philosophies and theories also played a
The Lure of Visual Skepticism 107

crucial role in promoting doubt about the normal exercise of the visual faculty,
theories which either added weight to the ontological gap between appear-
ance and reality at the heart of neoplatonism and other spiritualist doctrines
or legitimized a naturalistic version of this gap. One such group of theories,
which grew out of developments in early nineteenth-century geometry, popu-
larized the fertile concept of a spatial fourth dimension invisible to the naked
human eye. And as Linda Dalrymple Henderson has shown, this concept had
a considerable impact on a wide variety of modernists. Although only a few
visual artists actively investigated the non-Euclidean geometries from which
the concept of a spatial fourth dimension sprang, fastening on to their relativist
implications, the concept itself became „a concern common to artists in nearly
every major modern movement‰ from analytical cubism through to Duchamp,
Dada, and De Stijl because it supported a plethora of interpretations and styles.
These interpretations can be grouped into two basic schools, which in practice
often overlapped: one consisting of artists such as Malevich interested in the
abstract depiction or evocation of spiritual and metaphysical truths, who saw
the fourth dimension as an example of a higher spiritual reality beyond mate-
rial appearances, and the other consisting of artists such as the Dadaist Tristan
Tzara belonging to the nihilist wing of modernism, who employed it in their
battle against logic and reason as proof of the relativity and conventionality
of rationality and human conceptual schemes in general. However, for both
schools, the fourth dimension concept provided yet another reason to be skepti-
cal toward everyday sight, either because of the inability of the bodily eyes to
perceive the fourth dimension, or the supposed relativity of the three dimensions
they do perceive; as well as yet another impetus for making abstract or semiab-
stract art. As Henderson puts it, „belief in a fourth dimension encouraged artists
to depart from visual reality and to reject completely the one-point perspective
system that for centuries had portrayed the world as three-dimensional.‰25
Although the concept of a spatial fourth dimension was eventually re-
placed in the popular imagination in the 1920s by EinsteinÊs much more
scientiÔcally signiÔcant temporal fourth dimension, it should be pointed out
that the skepticism toward everyday sight that this particular concept gener-
ated is a feature of a much broader picture of the natural universe that was put
into place by the success of the modern physical sciences from the seventeenth
century onward, one which lasts to this day and which we encountered brieÒy
in chapter 1·namely, the doctrine of secondary qualities. Sharing many of the
same philosophical sources as neoplatonic and other spiritualist doctrines, this
picture legitimizes a naturalistic version of the neoplatonic gap between the
way reality appears to human perception and the way reality actually is in its
claim that, while the world appears to human beings to be multicolored, noisy,
many-scented, and hot or cold, in reality there is only the rapid movement of
colorless, noiseless, scentless particles, of waves of air or electromagnetic radi-
ation. Even modernists with only the most superÔcial grasp of modern science
could not have failed to be aware of this striking picture of the natural universe
that science had erected. And while the philosophical coherence of the picture
has long been disputed, and the picture itself is vague enough to generate a
108 doubting vision

number of respectable philosophical positions between realism and antirealism

on perception,26 it could only help cement skepticism about everyday sight in
a modernist context already overdetermined by such skepticism and not aware
of, or sophisticated enough to address, the philosophical complexities of this
picture.
Thus far, I have surveyed some of the most inÒuential formal and informal
theories of the inadequacies of normal human vision used by modernists to
justify their artistic departure from everyday sight and the way reality appears
to it. While this survey is by no means intended to be exhaustive, I hope that
by brieÒy examining a fairly wide range of inÒuential modernist arguments,
I have provided enough evidence to support my contention that a skepticism
about the ordinary exercise of the visual faculty is a very common feature of
modernism. For most modernists, everyday sight is not to be trusted in some
signiÔcant respect because of one or more Òaws. Normal vision is inauthentic.
Modernist art, meanwhile, attempts to compensate for this inauthenticity by
partially or wholly departing from the way reality usually appears to everyday
sight and Ônding more authentic „ways of seeing.‰
This skepticism, I am suggesting, is a widespread feature of modernism,
overdetermined by a number of different arguments about the inadequacies of
normal human vision that are used to motivate very different, often conÒicting,
modernist agendas. In other words, it is a prejudice shared by modernists of
very different, even antithetical persuasions, much like the belief pointed to
by Sitney that „innovation is the sole legitimate means of guaranteeing [an
artistÊs] link to tradition.‰27 Indeed, it is broad enough to be shared by ocular-
centric artists such as Mondrian, and antiocularcentric artists who are part of the
tradition of „optical unconscious‰ such as Duchamp, to use Jay and KraussÊs
terminology. For while Mondrian, unlike Duchamp, may well have believed in
the possibility of the artistic representation of some kind of neoplatonic reality,
such a belief is still predicated on the antiocularcentric assumption that every-
day sight is not up to the task of accessing that reality in the Ôrst place because
it is conÔned within the earthly, corporeal limitations of opacity, of repetition,
of time·the very features of the optical unconscious that, according to Krauss,
Duchamp and others foreground in their art. Mondrian and Duchamp, in other
words, share a similar conception of the condition of normal human vision,
even though they differ considerably about how art should escape this condition
and Ônd more authentic ways of seeing. For Mondrian, authenticity consists
of neoplatonic essences hidden behind appearances; for Duchamp, if Krauss
is right, it consists of self-reÒexively foregrounding the condition of everyday
sight itself, namely, the optical unconscious. Yet, both basically agree about the
nature of this condition.
This skepticism about everyday sight is a very general feature of modern-
ism because it functions as a compelling rationale for the purpose of modernist
art. Where normal human vision cannot be trusted, modernist art steps in and
compensates in some way, helping people see more authentically, often by
revealing the truths they normally fail to see. In other words, for modernists
in general, a common justiÔcation for their art is that it compensates for the
The Lure of Visual Skepticism 109

inadequacies of everyday sight by providing a more authentic way of seeing

to its viewers. It allows people to escape from the limitations of normal vision.
Different modernists may believe that there are other ways of helping people
see more authentically. But, they overwhelmingly believe that art is one way
to achieve this goal, and that without the aid of art at least some of the time,
humans are very much in the dark, so to speak.
This rationale is especially powerful in the case of those modernists who
make the epistemic argument that human beings are standardly unable to see
and know important truths about reality. For this claim creates a coveted role
for art: to reveal such truths. This role is highly attractive to artists because it
gives the arts considerable status and moral authority, placing them on a par
with other truth-seeking pursuits such as philosophy, science, and religion. The
philosopher Charles Taylor writes:

There are strong continuities from the Romantic period, through the Symbolists
and many strands of what was loosely called „modernism,‰ right up to the pres-
ent day. What remains central is the notion of the work of art as issuing from or
realizing an „epiphany,‰ to use one of JoyceÊs words in a somewhat wider sense
than his. What I want to capture with this term is just this notion of a work of art
as the locus of a manifestation which brings us into the presence of something
which is otherwise inaccessible, and which is of the highest moral and spiritual
signiÔcance.28

This is why art is so revered in the modern era, argues Taylor, and why art-
ists are seen as „heroes,‰ „visionaries,‰ „seers,‰ and so forth. Because most
people are supposedly limited in their capacity to see and know truths about
reality, artists who reveal such truths are viewed as extraordinary, and art, the
locus of their revelation, is venerated.
This explains, I think, the attraction of Ôlm theorists and Ôlmmakers to
skepticism about human vision and the cinemaÊs revelatory capacity, espe-
cially Ôrst-generation theorists such as Epstein, Vertov, Balázs, and Kracauer,
who formulated their theories when modernism was at its height in the 1920s
and when the cinema had not yet been widely accepted as an art. Not only did
the cinemaÊs revelatory power enable them to differentiate the cinema from
the other arts, thereby satisfying the requirement of the doctrine of medium
speciÔcity to which they subscribed, but by embracing skepticism about sight
and the revelationist conception they could counter detractors by arguing that
the cinema has a morally profound role to perform: to reveal important truths
about reality that human beings cannot see and know, much like scientists
do using visual technologies such as microscopes and telescopes. Film is a
vital art, they could claim, because it enables mass enlightenment. This also
explains the euphoria of these theorists and Ôlmmakers about the cinema and
why, as we saw in the introduction, they combined skepticism about sight,
which they inherited from the modernist tradition, with a realist embrace of
the cinemaÊs capacity to mechanically record reality. As we have seen, like
modernist visual artists in general, they had doubts about sight and wanted
110 doubting vision

to depart from the way reality appears to it in order to reveal otherwise in-
accessible truths about reality. The cinema, they believed, fulÔlled this role
because it can reveal features of reality invisible to the naked eye, just as a
painter can depart from the way reality appears to sight through abstraction
and other styles. However, a painting is still dependent on the intentions of a
human being who, however enlightened, has Òawed vision from the perspec-
tive of modernist skepticism about sight. In contrast, the cinema is indepen-
dent of human intentions, human vision, and human beings, because it is a
machine. Those in the revelationist tradition embraced the capacity of Ôlm to
mechanically record reality because they believed that, in conjunction with the
cinemaÊs revelatory power, it offered a way to escape the limitations of the
human eye and to see reality as it is.

II

I have argued that Ôlm theorists and Ôlmmakers are attracted to skepticism
about human vision because it provides a powerful rationale for the purpose
of cinematic art, for its role or value. Another possible explanation for this at-
traction is that skepticism about sight is valid. Although the speciÔc arguments
Ôlm theorists have made about vision might be wrong, it could still be that
there are good reasons to be skeptical about our perceptual capacities. DonÊt
we often make mistakes in our perceptual judgments concerning how things
are in the world? And doesnÊt this show that our senses are fundamentally
unreliable? Furthermore, the cinema can reveal truths about reality invisible
to the naked eye, such as the precise position of the legs of galloping horses.
DoesnÊt this conÔrm the revelationist claim that the cinema escapes the eyeÊs
limitations?
The „argument from the notorious limitations and fallibilities of our senses
to the impossibility of our getting to know anything by looking, listening and
touching‰ is one that Ryle addressed, and sought to counter, in his classic paper
„Perception.‰29 Wittgenstein did the same in his investigations into the concepts
of doubt and certainty in the unÔnished writings that have been collected in the
volume On Certainty.30 Although much more space is needed to do justice to
this topic, I will brieÒy survey their major claims. For if these philosophers
are right, then there is no good reason to distrust sight, as modernists tend to.
To start with, as Wittgenstein pointed out, we cannot act in our everyday lives
as if our visual faculty is consistently unreliable, unless it is not functioning
correctly. Whatever doubts about vision we might subscribe to in theory, they
are impossible to systematically sustain in practice, in our normal behavior.
They make little difference to everyday life. If, for example, a skeptic were to
doubt the existence of a table despite the fact he could see it, „how would his
doubt come out in practice?‰ asks Wittgenstein. „CouldnÊt we peacefully leave
him to doubt it, since it makes no difference at all?‰ (OC §120) At most, such
doubts might show up some of the time in what a skeptic says and feels, but
they would not fundamentally alter the skepticÊs behavior (OC §339).
The Lure of Visual Skepticism 111

More signiÔcant, the concept of doubt cannot be generalized into a sys-

tematic doubt of the skeptical variety without becoming unintelligible and un-
usable: „A doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt‰ (OC §450).
Wittgenstein points to this in a number of different ways. Children, for ex-
ample, learn words and facts Ôrst, and then learn what it means to doubt them.
It would be impossible for children to learn anything if doubt was part of their
education from the beginning, if, when teaching a child what the word „violet‰
means by showing him or her a picture of the Òower, an adult said, „perhaps
that is a violet‰ (OC §450).
Once the meaning of the concept of doubt and its various applications in
practice is learned, background certainties must be in place in order to doubt in-
telligibly: „The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty‰ (OC §115). For
example, „If the shopkeeper wanted to investigate each of his apples without
any reason, for the sake of being certain about everything, why doesnÊt he have
to investigate the investigation?‰ (OC §459). The shopkeeper, in other words,
has to rely on his investigation in order to investigate his fruit; otherwise he
will be forced into the senseless procedure of investigating his investigation of
his investigation, and so on. Similarly, in the empirical sciences, „If I make an
experiment I do not doubt the existence of the apparatus before my eyes. I have
plenty of doubts, but not that‰ (OC §337; emphasis in original). Or in math-
ematics, „If I do a calculation I believe, without any doubts, that the Ôgures on
the paper arenÊt switching of their own accord‰ (OC §337). Practices that in-
volve doubt·investigations, experiments, calculations·require background
certainties that are taken for granted, such as the existence of the apparatus
used to conduct an experiment. If doubt is generalized and these background
certainties are questioned, then practices such as experiments that involve
doubt are rendered unintelligible and pointless. Indeed, even the most radical
skeptic takes something for granted·namely, the meanings of the words he
uses to express his skepticism. For if the meanings of these words are doubted,
then the skeptic cannot rely on getting them right and therefore cannot express
his skepticism: „If you are not certain of any fact, you cannot be certain of the
meaning of your words either‰ (OC §114).
Finally, it is only because of the logical possibility of certainty that, when
we have grounds for doing so, it makes sense to doubt something in the Ôrst
place. In other words, the concept of doubt can only be used meaningfully
when certainty is a logical possibility. Take, for example, the question of
whether another person is really in pain. A skeptic typically generalizes doubt
by arguing that it is impossible to ever know with certainty whether another
person is in pain because we may Ônd out that the person in question is not
really in pain but is only pretending to be. But, as Wittgenstein labored to show,
if it is impossible to know with certainty whether another person is in pain in the
present, then it is equally impossible in the future·meaning that it can never be
discovered whether the person in question is in pain or only pretending. But this
renders the concept of doubt unintelligible. It makes no sense to argue that we
can never know with certainty whether another person is in pain because we may
discover in the future that he is pretending, if such a discovery is impossible.
112 doubting vision

I cannot discover in the future that a person is pretending to be in pain if it is

impossible for me to ever know with certainty whether someone is in pain or
only pretending to be.31
As this example shows, doubting whether something is true is logically
dependent on the possibility of being certain about whether it is true or not,
even if being certain is not always an empirical possibility. The outcome of
the skepticÊs generalization of doubt, as Wittgenstein pointed out, is not that
we cannot know with certainty whether another person is in pain because he
may be pretending to be in pain, but that the concept of doubt and related con-
cepts such as pretense become unusable. „But what does it mean to say that
all behavior might always be pretence? Has experience taught us this? How
else can we be instructed about pretence? No, it is a remark about the concept
Âpretence.Ê But then this concept would be unusable, for pretending would have
no criteria in behavior.‰32 The logical possibility of being certain is part of the
meaningful use of the concept of doubt. It is part of the language game of
doubting. Without this possibility, doubting becomes unintelligible.
All of this is also true of vision. General, systematic doubt within the
context of sight is equally as unintelligible as in other contexts. Doubting and
testing what we see is only intelligible against a background of certainties that
are taken for granted, such as the existence of our eyes. And it is only because
of the logical possibility of being certain of what we see that, when we have
grounds for doing so, it makes sense to doubt it. We doubt what we see because
we can then, for example, go back and look at it again, or move to see it in a
better light or from a better vantage point, or in some other way Ônd out the
truth about it: „If e.g. someone says ÂI donÊt know if thereÊs a hand hereÊ he
might be told ÂLook closer.Ê·The possibility of satisfying oneself is part of
the language-game. Is one of its essential features‰ (OC §3). It is only because
we can potentially satisfy ourselves perceptually that something is the case that
we can intelligibly doubt it in the Ôrst place. Without this logical possibility,
doubting what we see would lose its point. Ryle uses the following example to
make this claim:

You and I sometimes make mistakes in counting, adding and multiplying, and we
may remind ourselves of this general liability in the very same breath with making
one of these mistakes. So, at Ôrst sight, it looks as though we ought to surrender
and say that we can never Ônd out by counting the number of chairs in a room
and never Ônd out by adding or multiplying the right answers to our arithmetical
problems. . . . Very good·but how is the mistake exposed? By someone counting
correctly or by someone adding correctly. . . . So far from our thinking that per-
haps nothing can ever be found out by counting or adding, we realize not only that
things can be so found out but also that among the things that can be thus found
out are mistakes in counting and adding.33

If philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Ryle are right, sight is not fun-
damentally unreliable, as modernists and revelationist Ôlm theorists and Ôlm-
makers tend to argue. Skepticism about human vision is therefore not a solid
The Lure of Visual Skepticism 113

foundation on which to build theories of Ôlm and should be abandoned. Al-

though vision is fallible, the intelligibility of it being so is dependent on the
logical possibility that visual oversights and errors can be corrected and that
they occur against a background of certainties that are not questioned.
This points to the correct way of conceptualizing the relation between
visual technologies and human perception. If it is true that vision is on the
whole reliable, then such technologies, while more powerful than the eye in
certain respects, do not escape the limitations of human perception. Instead,
they extend our already existing capacity to see and know the world around
us. They enable us to see further and know more than we would be able to
otherwise. Discovering the particulate structure of an object using a micro-
scope, for example, presupposes that we can see the microscope correctly. It
also assumes that we can accurately see what the microscope reveals, and that
any mistakes we make in doing so can be corrected by looking through the
microscope again, or using another one, or having someone else conÔrm what
we see. Using such technologies, in other words, relies on the fact that our eyes
are reliable and that we already can see and know the world around us. If we
couldnÊt, they would be of no help to us, for we would no more be able to see
what is the case in our environment with them than without them. Thus, in as
much as it is like other visual technologies and does reveal truths about reality
that are invisible to human perception, the cinema does not do so by escaping
the eyeÊs limitations or developing new perceptual faculties in us, as theorists
in the revelationist tradition argue. Rather, it augments our already existing
capacity to Ônd out about the environment around us using our eyes.34

III

I have argued that human sight, even though fallible, is not limited to the extent
that theorists in the revelationist tradition claim. Not only is visual skepticism
probably incoherent, for the philosophical reasons I have just examined, but
most of the truths about reality that the cinema reveals, according to these
theorists, are either ones that it makes no sense to accuse the naked human
eye of failing to see or ones that it can see just Ône unaided. This does not
mean, however, that revelationist theorists were wrong to assert that Ôlm has
greater revelatory powers than the other arts, at least as these other arts were
standardly practiced when they formulated their theories. First, cinematic tech-
niques such as time-lapse photography do enable us to see features of reality,
such as the precise leg positions of galloping horses, that are invisible in the
sense that we are incapable of seeing them without a visual technology due to
the limitations of our eyes. Second, and more important, because of their desire
to legitimize Ôlm as an art by equating it with the scientiÔc discovery of inac-
cessible features of the natural universe using visual technologies, revelationist
theorists overlooked the fact that there are other senses of revelation pertinent
to the cinema. Indeed, the comparison between Ôlm and other revelatory vi-
sual technologies at the heart of the revelationist tradition obscures the ways
114 doubting vision

in which the cinema is uniquely capable of revealing truths about reality. For
although this comparison helps differentiate Ôlm from the other arts, it does so
by assimilating its revelations to those of science. In other words, the cinemaÊs
difference from the preestablished arts is purchased at the price of aping pre-
existing visual technologies such as microscopes and telescopes. Furthermore,
this comparison places the heavy burden on the Ôlm theorist of having to show
that human vision is incapable of seeing the truths revealed by the cinema, just
as it is incapable of seeing distant planets and microbes, a requirement that, as
I have demonstrated, often results in a category error. Once we clarify the other
senses of revelation of relevance to Ôlm art, we can reconstruct the revelationist
claim that it allows us „to see more and better‰ than the other arts in a nones-
sentialist way that neither sacriÔces cinematic speciÔcity nor involves a misuse
of our perceptual concepts.
Microscopes, telescopes, and other visual technologies are normally used
by scientists to reveal truths about natural phenomena because such phenom-
ena, or parts of them, are invisible in the sense that they are impossible for
human beings to see unaided. On the basis of such revelations, scientists form
hypotheses about the explanatory principles governing the nature and behavior
of such phenomena, which in turn allow them to predict how they will behave
in given situations. These hypotheses are open-ended, in that they can be tested
against further observations and reÔned or rejected. And the predictions they
give rise to can help humans manipulate the phenomena being investigated to
their advantage. For example, by observing asteroids using telescopes, scien-
tists can form hypotheses about how their size, density, and other factors gov-
ern the direction and speed of their movements. Such hypotheses allow them
to predict their movements in given situations, such as when they collide with
other asteroids. When these situations occur and are observed, the underlying
hypotheses can be modiÔed or rejected if the predictions they give rise to are
wrong. And these predictions potentially enable humans to control asteroids
in a way that beneÔts them, for example by devising technologies that pre-
vent them from colliding with Earth.
Is this the sort of truth about reality that the cinema reveals? Obviously,
it can. For example, Ôlm and other moving image technologies, when afÔxed
with the requisite lenses, can record the otherwise inaccessible movements of
asteroids, thereby helping scientists to explain, predict, and potentially control
them. But this is not the only type of revelation that what we call Ôlms (as op-
posed to the technology of Ôlm) usually trafÔc in. We say, for example, that
Peter Parker reveals that he is Spiderman to Mary-Jane Watson in Spiderman
2 (2004) (Ôg. 4.1), that David Harris reveals that he killed police ofÔcer Wood
in The Thin Blue Line (1988), and that Marianne reveals that she thinks her
father-in-law, Isak Borg, is a selÔsh, utterly ruthless man in Wild Strawberries
(1957). But we do not say that these truths are revealed because they were
hitherto invisible in the sense of being impossible to see without assistance.
Rather, we say that they are revealed because they were previously concealed.
As I noted in chapter 2 in the examples of Mae MarshÊs hands and the pho-
tograph hidden in the desk, in addition to being impossible to see without a
The Lure of Visual Skepticism 115

Figure 4.1. Mary Jane Watson

after learning that Peter Parker is
Spiderman in Spiderman 2 (Sam
Raimi, 2004).

visual technology, to be invisible means to be hidden from view, and things that
are deliberately hidden are typically possible to see unaided, otherwise there
would be no reason to hide them. This is in contradistinction to things that are
impossible to see without assistance, such as microbes, which remain invisible
whether they are hidden or not. Hence, the fact that Peter Parker is Spider-
man, that David Harris killed OfÔcer Wood, and that Sara thinks poorly of her
father-in-law does not need to be revealed by a visual technology in order to
be discovered. Rather, these truths are revealed in these Ôlms in the way that
people typically reveal truths about themselves in real life, through words and
behavior, which we are perfectly capable of perceiving without help unless
suffering from an impairment.
Films are full of such revelations of previously concealed truths about
human beings, which typically occur by way of verbal confessions, behav-
ior which gives them away, or when the ÔlmÊs narration or style informs the
viewer of them. Alfred HitchcockÊs Ôlms, for example, trafÔc in these latter
two modes of revelation. As we shall see, his masterpiece Shadow of a Doubt
(1943) employs expressionistic stylistic techniques from its opening scene to
hint that Uncle Charlie is the so-called merry widow murderer, and Hitchcock
often draws the viewerÊs attention to details of his behavior unseen by other
characters that suggest the same. But the fact that he is a murderer is not some-
thing that is invisible to these characters and the viewer in the sense that it is
impossible to see unaided. Rather it is invisible in the sense that Uncle Charlie
conceals it. And it is discovered not by way of visual technologies, but in the
way that people usually discover truths about others·through observing his
actions and witnessing his confessions.
It might be objected that thoughts, feelings, and many other truths about
human beings are internal, mental phenomena and therefore are hidden behind
external behavior, much like the internal mechanism of the clock in The Fall of
the House of Usher is hidden behind its external face. DoesnÊt this mean that
they are invisible to human perception in the same way that microbes and dis-
tant planets are? IsnÊt it the case that our sense of sight is not powerful enough
to see beyond the exterior of the face and body into the interior mind, just as
it is not strong enough to see microbes or planets a great distance away? No,
for as we saw in chapter 2, mental states and events are not intrinsically hidden
or private, as the Cartesian myth would have it, for if they were, we would not
be able to refer to them intelligibly because there would be no public criteria
for the correct use of mental concepts. Instead, we can often see the pain in
another personÊs face or hear it in her voice, or see from her behavior that she
116 doubting vision

is desperately sad or thinking hard. This is because mental phenomena have

characteristic behavioral manifestations that function as criteria (as opposed to
symptoms) for their presence. Behavior is not a mere external accompaniment
to the real mental state or event, which is somewhere internal, invisible to the
naked eye like, say, BrocaÊs area. A woman giving birth to a child is not feeling
pain somewhere inside her and, in addition, screaming and writhing in agony.
Rather, her pain is manifest in her cries and bodily movements. Of course, one
can hide oneÊs thoughts, feelings, and much else by concealing them. But this
consists of in some way dissimulating their characteristic behavioral expres-
sions. One masks oneÊs sadness by holding back oneÊs tears, or one speaks and
acts as if one thinks the opposite of what one really does. The fact that we have
to take steps to conceal our thoughts and feelings shows that they are not nor-
mally hidden, for if they were we would not have to take such steps. It is true
that most of us do not give verbal or physical expression to our mental lives all
of the time, and this means that other people cannot always perceive them. But
this does not necessarily mean that we are hiding our thoughts and feelings, for
we will often tell or show other people what we are thinking or feeling if asked
to do so.35 Hence, it is not a visual technology that is required to perceive the
mental lives of others, as a CAT scan is needed to see their brains, but rather
access to the words and behavior that manifest those lives.
Revealing what is invisible in the sense of making visible what human per-
ception is incapable of perceiving unaided does, of course, occur in Ôlms. And it
can coexist with revelation in the sense of making known previously concealed
truths that are capable of being perceived without assistance. Crime documen-
taries often contain footage of forensic evidence, such as hairs and saliva, being
subjected to microscopic analysis, which reveals who committed a crime by
making visible microscopic particles invisible to human perception, as well as
interviews with the criminal in which he reveals that he committed the crime by
way of confessions and deeds that can be perceived unaided. Typically, however,
when we say that a Ôlm (as opposed to the technology of Ôlm) reveals some-
thing, we mean it in the latter sense much more often than we do in the former,
and this is because Ôlms are for the most part humanistic in character. While the
sciences can and do employ Ôlm and other moving image technologies to make
discoveries about invisible natural phenomena, what we call Ôlms are usually
about the visible world of human (or humanlike) agents and their actions, words,
identities, thoughts, feelings, wishes, struggles, histories, circumstances, and
much else besides, and we are quite capable of perceiving such things unaided.
Furthermore, we watch Ôlms for the most part because we enjoy stories (whether
Ôctional or not) about other agents, we often learn something about human life
from them, and we value the way Ôlmmakers present them to us, the aesthetic
choices they make and the creativity manifest in these choices. We do not, on
the whole, watch them in order to construct hypotheses about the explanatory
principles governing a natural phenomenon that is invisible to us that we want
to explain and potentially control, although Ôlms can present us with the results
of scientiÔc research into such phenomena, as Al GoreÊs An Inconvenient Truth
(2006) does. The comparison between the cinema and other revelatory visual
The Lure of Visual Skepticism 117

technologies is therefore a misleading one because it suggests that Ôlms „reveal

truths about reality‰ in a scientiÔc sense, allowing viewers to make discoveries
about natural phenomena they would otherwise not be able to see in the same
way that a scientist does using microscopes and other visual technologies, when
it is far more common for Ôlms to reveal truths about people that are possible
to see unaided but have for some reason been concealed. The phrase „revealing
truths about reality‰ is also potentially deceptive, because it is a „smothering‰
expression, to use RyleÊs term, masking signiÔcant logical differences between
types of truth, revelation, and invisibility.
It is striking that although theorists in the revelationist tradition compare
cinematic revelation to scientiÔc discoveries using visual technologies of inac-
cessible natural phenomena to differentiate Ôlm from the other arts, many of
the examples they give involve human beings. Epstein and Balázs, for example,
suggest that the cinema can reveal what people are really thinking and feeling
in the same way that microscopes and telescopes can bring to view microbes
and distant planets. As I have argued, the mind is not invisible in the sense that
microbes or distant planets are. It does not require a visual technology in order
to be seen, as Epstein and Balázs claim, because we are often able to see what a
person is thinking or feeling unaided. Nevertheless, there is an insight about the
difference between the cinema and the other visual arts buried in this mislead-
ing comparison. For although other visual arts can also reveal cognitive and
affective states, Ôlms can do so in ways they cannot because, as Noël Carroll
has pointed out, they have at their disposal a property that the other visual arts,
at least in their customary forms, lack: variable framing. Editing and cam-
era movement enable Ôlmmakers to control the viewerÊs attention to a much
greater degree than is possible in the other visual arts. To use CarrollÊs termi-
nology, by moving the camera toward an object, editing and camera movement
can index it, suggesting to the viewer that he pay attention to it, much like the
gesture of pointing. These techniques can also exclude or bracket what sur-
rounds the object, so that the viewer literally cannot pay attention to anything
else on screen. And Ônally, in moving the camera toward an object, its scale is
changed as it Ôlls up more screen space, which further suggests that the object
should be attended to by the viewer or forces the viewer to do so.36 Using these
techniques, Ôlms can direct our attention to details of human behavior that
reveal much that might otherwise remain concealed.
Although indexing, bracketing, and scaling are distinct functions of vari-
able framing, in practice they often occur together and reinforce one another.
In Shadow of a Doubt, just before young Charlie nearly dies of suffocation
from exhaust fumes in the garage where her uncle, also named Charlie, has de-
liberately left the family car running, her family is gathering in the living room
to go out for the night. In a medium shot, Uncle Charlie, who has returned to
the house having set the deadly trap for his niece, makes small talk with his sis-
ter and brother-in-law as they put on their coats (Ôg. 4.2). He is smiling, and his
face has the friendly demeanor he usually employs to mask his true malevolent
self. As his niece descends the stairs, the camera dollies in to a medium close-
up of him alone (Ôg. 4.3), thereby indexing and enlarging the scale of his face
118 doubting vision

Figure 4.2. Uncle Charlie

makes small talk with his sister
and brother-in-law in Shadow
of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock,
1943).

Figure 4.3. The camera dollies

toward Uncle Charlie, bracketing
the other characters.

in the shot, and bracketing the rest of the family. His smile fades, and his brow
furrows as he looks up at her while the rest of the family continues talking
(Ôg. 4.4). By drawing our attention to this small, momentary change in his facial
expression by way of variable framing, Hitchcock is revealing what the family
members around him are oblivious to because he conceals it from them: that he
is thinking about his plot to kill his niece. We cut to a plan Américain of Char-
lie coming down the stairs as she joins the conversation about who should go in
a taxi (there are too many people to Ôt in the family car) (Ôg. 4.5). Uncle Char-
lie, smiling once again, suggests that he and his niece take the car. Hitchcock
cuts to a close-up of the girlÊs wide-eyed face as, for a brief second, it reveals
her alarm at the thought of traveling alone with her uncle, whom she knows is
trying to murder her (Ôg. 4.6), once again making use of indexing, bracketing,
and scaling. But her smile quickly returns, thereby hiding her true feelings
from her family, as the camera dollies back to a two-shot and she turns to her
uncle to insist that he go in the taxi while she takes the car (Ôg. 4.7).
This Ôlm, and HitchcockÊs Ôlms in general, are full of such revelations
of what is really going in the minds of characters, often unbeknownst to those
around them. They perfectly illustrate the way revelation often occurs in Ôlms
in the sense of making visible the otherwise concealed cognitive and affective
states of human beings by way of variable framing that allows the viewer to
closely observe details of their behavior that gives these states away. NonÔction
 Figure 4.4. The shot indexes
Uncle CharlieÊs face and
enlarges its scale. As he looks at
his niece descending the stairs
off-screen, his true thoughts and
feelings are revealed in close-up
as his smile fades.

Figure 4.5. A plan Américain

eyeline match of young Charlie
descending the stairs.

Figure 4.6. Young CharlieÊs

alarm at the thought of traveling
alone with her uncle is momen-
tarily revealed in close-up.

Figure 4.7. CharlieÊs alarm is

quickly concealed behind a smile
as the camera dollies back to a
two-shot of her and her uncle.

119
120 doubting vision

Ôlms also use similar techniques for the same reason, such as the close-up of
Jackie KennedyÊs Ôdgeting hands during a rally in Primary (1960), which re-
veals how nervous she really is beneath her placid exterior (Ôg. 4.8).
Epstein and BalázsÊs true insight was that the cinema allows greater access
to the minds of human beings than the other visual arts. However, they mud-
died this insight by wrongly conceiving of the nature of this access to the mind,
comparing it to the revelation by visual technologies of phenomena the naked
human eye is incapable of seeing unaided, when, in fact, people are perfectly
capable of perceiving what others are thinking and feeling without assistance.
What the cinema does do is extend this ability in ways the other visual arts can-
not through variable framing, which can force the viewer to pay attention to de-
tails of the human face and body that can reveal much about their mental lives.
Although painting, photography, and sculpture can do the same, as atemporal
art forms they cannot do so as part of a succession of different views of the sort
just described in which a truth is concealed at one moment and revealed at the
next (and vice versa). And while the theater is, like the cinema, a temporal art,
it lacks the control over the viewerÊs attention that the cinema possesses by
way of editing and camera movement. In the hands of a great Ôlm artist such
as Hitchcock, this control can be used to create a constantly changing drama of
revelation and concealment.
Of course, Ôlms, and the agents in them, often exploit the limitations of
human perception to hide things, and they often use visual technologies to
overcome these limitations and thereby reveal them. Later in the scene from
Shadow of a Doubt described above, young Charlie goes out to the garage to
fetch the family car which her uncle has left running. He closes the window to
the living room in which the family has gathered, complaining it is getting cold,
and turns up the music playing on the radio so that the sounds of Charlie suf-
focating in the exhaust fumes will be masked. And when he Ôrst travels to Santa
Rosa on a train, he conceals his identity by pretending to be ill and remaining
behind a curtain in the passenger car. In both instances, he is exploiting the
limitations of human perception to hide himself and his crimes. The police,
meanwhile, use photography, a visual technology, to try to identify him. But the
point remains that in these instances, what is being concealed·young Charlie

Figure 4.8. Jackie KennedyÊs

Ôdgeting hands reveal how
nervous she really is in Primary
(Robert Drew, 1960).
The Lure of Visual Skepticism 121

suffocating, Uncle CharlieÊs true identity·is capable of being perceived un-

aided by human beings, which is why it is hidden in the Ôrst place.
Balázs, and especially Epstein, also point to the way in which the cinema
can extend a type of seeing that is more typical of aesthetic practices than real
life in order to reveal truths about human or humanlike agents. This is our abil-
ity to see anthropomorphic properties in nonhuman entities·to see clouds, for
example, as threatening, or a home as welcoming·which in Ôlms usually takes
the form of endowing the environment around agents with expressive qualities
using Ôlm style. The other visual arts also exploit this capacity. But, again, the
cinema can do so in ways other visual arts cannot due to variable framing. In
Shadow of a Doubt, when Charlie goes to the library to Ônd an article that her
uncle has surreptitiously removed from the family newspaper, she sits in the
dark at a reading table, her face in proÔle in a medium close-up shot, the music
quiet and expectant. It pauses for a brief second as she freezes, her gaze alight-
ing on something. There follows a cut to a close-up from her point-of-view of a
newspaper report about the merry widow murderer, accompanied by the merry
widow waltz on the soundtrack, now rendered sinister by dramatic, loud, slow
scoring in a minor key. The music quiets down again as Charlie examines the
ring that her uncle gave her, which bears the initials of one of the murdered
widows she has just read about. Then the camera pulls back and up in a virtuoso
crane shot as Charlie slowly gets up from the table. Her Ôgure, now seen from a
high angle long shot, casts a shadow across the Òoor and onto the wall opposite,
which grows in size and intensity as she walks toward the exit. The music gets
louder again, and the camera climbs farther away from her, dwarÔng her lonely
Ôgure (Ôg. 4.9). These techniques strongly encourage us to see the shadow as
expressive of what Charlie is thinking and feeling: her dawning, horriÔc realiza-
tion, which she hides from her family, that her beloved uncle is the merry widow
murderer (they also perversely hint at her kinship with her uncle, who has been
associated with shadows and the waltz throughout the Ôlm). These techniques
illustrate how Ôlms can endow the environment around characters with expres-
sive qualities that reveal their true cognitive and affective states even when the
characters themselves do not explicitly express them verbally or physically.
Epstein realized that the cinema is an art with considerable expressive
power. Yet, by assimilating the cinematic revelation of visible but hidden or

Figure 4.9. High-angle crane

shot of Charlie as she leaves the
library after discovering the truth
about her uncle in Shadow of a
Doubt.
122 doubting vision

unexpressed truths to the scientiÔc revelation of inaccessible ones, he mis-

construed it, arguing that it consists of making visible the „interior life‰ of
objects, which human beings cannot see because we are conÔned to the ex-
ternal appearances of things. In fact, we are quite capable of seeing a cloud
as threatening or a home as welcoming without assistance. What the cinema
does do is extend this ability by way of the numerous expressive techniques it
has at its disposal, including ones not available to the other visual arts in their
standard forms. For although other visual arts use many of the same expressive
techniques as the cinema, they lack variable framing, which can be used for
expressive purposes. In the above example, it is not just the shadow·a device
the other visual arts could use·that expresses young CharlieÊs thoughts and
feelings, but the fact that it grows in size and intensity as she becomes smaller
in the frame due to the cameraÊs movement away from her. This change in scale
and bracketing brilliantly expresses both her isolation and her sense of being
overwhelmed by her newfound knowledge.
In other Ôlms, Hitchcock uses stylistic techniques such as these for the op-
posite reason·to conceal rather than reveal the truth about human beings. As
Richard Allen has shown in meticulous detail, in The Lodger (1927) Hitchcock
deceives the viewer by Ôlming the lodger using expressionist techniques com-
monly used to depict monsters and other evil characters in expressionist Ôlms
of the 1920s, thereby suggesting that the lodger is the serial killer who is prey-
ing upon young blonde women in London.37 In fact, the lodger turns out to be
the brother of one of the murdered women who seeks to avenge her death. This
shows that Ôlmmakers not only can reveal previously concealed truths, they
can also play a game of hide-and-seek with the truth.38 A good example is the
Ôlmmaker Jacques Tati, whose Ôlms are replete with subtle sight gags that the
viewer not only has to work hard to notice because Tati refuses to direct our at-
tention to them, but that Tati sometimes deliberately directs our attention away
from and thereby conceals. In Mon Oncle (1958), there is a scene in which TatiÊs
character Monsieur Hulot emerges with two friends from a neighborhood bar,
one on either side. As he often does, Tati Ôlms the scene in a long shot and
does not employ editing or other techniques to direct the viewerÊs attention to
important information in the scene (Ôg. 4.10). The three men are grouped to the
right of the shot, and as they converse, the man closest to the center moves to
the left (Ôg. 4.11). At exactly the same moment, Hulot goes to tap his pipe on
the heel of his shoe as he is accustomed to doing, only to discover that his shoe
has accidentally slipped off and he is tapping the pipe on the heel of his foot
(Ôg. 4.12). It is easy to overlook this gag because we are distracted by the much
bigger and more noticeable movement of the man from right to left, which Tati
has deliberately staged to occur at the same time as the pipe-tapping. When we
notice a subtle sight gag such as this one in a Tati Ôlm, it is a revelation, not in
the sense that something we are incapable of seeing unaided is made visible,
but in the sense that we notice something it is easy to overlook.
As this example demonstrates, there is another sense of revelation perti-
nent to cinematic art. Not only can Ôlms reveal what is invisible in the sense of
bringing to view previously concealed truths, they can also draw our attention
The Lure of Visual Skepticism 123

Figure 4.10. Monsieur Hulot

and friends leave a neighborhood
bar in Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati,
1958).

Figure 4.11. As his friend

moves screen left, Monsieur
Hulot goes to tap his pipe on the
heel of his shoe.

Figure 4.12. Monsieur Hulot

discovers that his shoe has
fallen off.

to truths that are in plain sight but that are invisible in the sense that we have not
noticed or paid attention to them. Kracauer points to this type of visual revela-
tion, although like other revelationist theorists he misconstrues it by comparing
it to the revelation of natural phenomena we are incapable of seeing unaided.
According to Kracauer, what we do not notice or pay attention to is the quotidian
environment around us, which, due to the abstractness of modernity, we cannot
see. Hence a visual technology is needed to reveal it. As I argued in chapter 2,
to fail to attend to something is not to be incapable of seeing it without a visual
124 doubting vision

technology. Indeed, in order to fail to attend to something, it must be capable

of being attended to. However, once again there is a genuine insight buried
in KracauerÊs argument: the cinema is an art with an unparalleled capacity to
direct our attention to truths that are in plain sight but that we do not notice or
pay attention to, such as familiar environments. The other visual arts, of course,
also possess this ability. However, variable framing and the control over atten-
tion it allows means that Ôlmmakers can force us to notice things we might
otherwise overlook. Stan Brakhage, for example, uses camera movement and
editing to compel us to attend to details of our quotidian environment, thereby
revealing its visual richness. A classic example in his Ôlms is light and shadow.
He often draws our attention to the wide variety of shadows cast by objects,
which we normally overlook because they are so familiar, by Ôlming these
shadows in close-up rather than the objects casting them (Ôg. 4.13). Watching
a Brakhage Ôlm can be a revelation not in the sense that something we cannot
see unaided is made visible, but in the sense that it makes us notice things·our
environmentÊs colors, textures, shapes, movements, and so on·that we see all
the time but that we do not pay attention to due to their familiarity.
Revealing truths that we do not notice or pay attention to need not only
involve what we see. It can also concern the way we see it. Films can make us
notice the aesthetic conventions they use to shape the way we view them, as well
as facts about perception these aesthetic conventions exploit. We are continu-
ously exposed to these conventions, and the truths about perception they exploit
are ones we take for granted. But we are typically not consciously aware of them
until they are pointed out to us, just as we are usually unaware of the grammati-
cal rules we follow when using language until they are pointed out to us by a
grammarian. For example, Ôlmmakers around the world tend to place the most
important information at the center of a shot. This is a widespread aesthetic
norm in the visual arts that exploits a fact about perception·we tend to look
at the center of what we see, not its edges. Some Ôlmmakers in the history of
cinema, such as Tati, have systematically violated this norm by placing impor-
tant information at the edge of the shot·the couple with a baby at the airport
in the opening scene of Playtime (1967), for example (Ôg. 4.14). And in doing
so, they can reveal to the viewer both this aesthetic convention and the feature

Figure 4.13. The shadow of a

window on pregnant Jane
BrakhageÊs abdomen in
Window Water Baby Moving
(Stan Brakhage, 1959).
The Lure of Visual Skepticism 125

of human perception it exploits in the sense of making the viewer notice or pay
attention to them. Avant-garde Ôlms in particular trafÔc in this type of revela-
tion, and they can offer a visual education in the sense that, by systematically
contravening conventions, they force the viewer to notice the conventions Ôlm-
makers typically use to enable us to easily perceive the contents of an image. It
is in this sense that the claim made by many avant-garde Ôlmmakers that their
Ôlms „reveal truths about perception‰ should be understood. They do not typi-
cally do so in the scientiÔc sense of revealing invisible truths about perception
we are incapable of seeing unaided, such as the fact that, when we see an object,
imperceptible photons are absorbed by the photosensitive cells of the retina.
Rather, they do so in the sense of making us aware of what we take for granted
about perception and aesthetic conventions but do not pay attention to.
Of the four theorists in the revelationist tradition proper, only VertovÊs ex-
amples of cinematic revelation genuinely involve bringing to view something
that human sight is incapable of seeing unaided, although not in the way he
supposed. Vertov, as a Marxist-Leninist, was not so much interested in truths
about individuals as he was in the social relations between them. However, as
we saw in chapter 2, due to his conÒation of cinematic with scientiÔc revela-
tion, he tended to hypostatize such relations, to conceive of them as if they
were intrinsic physical properties of an object we are incapable of seeing un-
aided, such as its particulate structure, rather than as relational properties pos-
sessed by virtue of interactions with the world. Furthermore, social relations
of the sort Vertov was interested in revealing are not beyond the capacity of
the human eye to perceive without assistance. We can, for example, see that
two different people belong to the same class without the help of a visual tech-
nology by observing and comparing their interactions with the environment
around them.
Nevertheless, as with the other theorists discussed, there is a profound
insight about the cinema in VertovÊs Ôlm theory: due to its capacity to record
people in different times and places and to link these recordings together using
editing, Ôlm can participate in what has been called „the expanding circle‰ of
modernity to a much greater extent than the other arts.39 „Expanding circle‰
refers to the way in which modern technologies of representation and travel can
broaden the moral horizons of human beings beyond the traditional environ-
ment of family and village, in which everyone knows everyone else, to include
unknown persons connected by geographical location, class, ethnicity, nation,

Figure 4.14. The couple with

the baby in the bottom left of
a shot in the opening scene of
Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967).
126 doubting vision

race, and ultimately humanity. Such technologies enable people to see, either
directly or by way of recordings, what they have in common with others whom
they have never met, thereby potentially extending their sense of moral respon-
sibility beyond the people they know personally. Vertov, due to his political
beliefs, was particularly concerned to use the cinema to show his working-class
viewers what they have in common with workers whom they could never meet
in person due to geographical distance, thereby fostering a sense of interna-
tional working-class solidarity between them. As he put it, „We want to . . . give
everyone working behind a plow or a machine the opportunity to see his broth-
ers at work with him simultaneously in different parts of the world.‰40
Using the cinema to reveal what workers in different times and places have
in common does not involve bringing to view something that is invisible in the
sense that we are incapable of seeing it unaided, as Vertov tended to claim, for,
as I have suggested, we can see without assistance that two people belong to
the same class as well as seeing many other social relations. But the cinema
can involve making people visible that we are incapable of perceiving unaided
due to the fact that they are far away or lived a long time ago, thereby greatly
enlarging the number of people with whom we can discover commonalities
and thereby participate in the expanding circle of modernity. The cinema, in
other words, vastly extends our capacity to observe what human beings have
in common by recording people we would never be able to see without as-
sistance and juxtaposing these recordings. This does not mean the cinema is
more mobile than human perception and can move through time and space in-
stantaneously, as Vertov and Deleuze claim, for a movie camera cannot travel
into the past or future, and it has to be taken between places, which takes time.
Instead, it is the transition between different shots recorded in different times
and places that can be instantaneous (or not), and it is this, along with the
cinemaÊs recording capacity and the motion of its images, that allow its view-
ers to observe and compare people they would not be able to see otherwise.
The other visual arts either lack editing, motion, recording, or all three. Hence,
while they can connect people and reveal what they have in common, they can-
not join separate, moving images of a wide variety of people recorded in a wide
variety of times and places in the way that the cinema can.
In doing so, Ôlms can, once again, exploit a visual ability that the other
visual arts also make use of, but that the cinema is able to extend in ways
they cannot due to variable framing. As silent theorists and Ôlmmakers such
as Vertov quickly discovered, when Ôlmed in a certain way, viewers can no-
tice graphic properties of the cinematic image and its contents, such as shape,
size, texture, and light. And Ôlms can utilize this ability by creating visual
similarities and differences between the graphic properties of shots·as Vertov
does in the sequence I discussed in chapter 1 comparing human being and
machine·to suggest that the subjects of the shots have other properties in
common, such as relational ones. Shadow of a Doubt provides a canonical ex-
ample in the graphic similarities and differences Hitchcock creates between the
scenes introducing Uncle Charlie and his niece.41 In introducing Uncle Charlie,
the Ôlm cuts to successively closer shots of a boarding house in a run-down
The Lure of Visual Skepticism 127

neighborhood, the closest being a canted shot of one of its windows (Ôg. 4.15).
Inside, we see Uncle Charlie lying on a bed, with the light from the lace cur-
tains on his window reÒected on the wall behind him as the camera dollies
toward him (Ôg. 4.16). In introducing the niece Charlie, we see successively
closer shots of her house from the opposite direction, following establishing
shots of Santa Rosa with its safe, pleasant streets patrolled by friendly police-
men. But the shot of her window is also canted (Ôg. 4.17), and when we cut
inside, Charlie is lying in exactly the same position as her uncle with similar

Figure 4.15. A canted shot of

Uncle CharlieÊs boarding-house
bedroom window in Shadow of
a Doubt.

Figure 4.16. Inside, Uncle

Charlie lies on his bed, the
shadows from the window
curtains visible above him.

Figure 4.17. A canted shot of

young CharlieÊs bedroom
window.
128 doubting vision

shadows behind her, and the camera repeats the same forward dolly (Ôg. 4.18).
By way of these visual similarities and differences, the attentive viewer will
infer that Hitchcock is hinting that Uncle Charlie and his niece might have
more in common than meets the eye. Indeed, through these graphic similari-
ties and differences, Hitchcock is articulating the central question of the Ôlm
(and, arguably, his work in general): does young Charlie have the same moral
character as her uncle or not? Many of these graphic properties, such as the
shadows and the position of the characters within the frame, are ones the
other visual arts could make use of to reveal such relations. However, Hitchcock
employs a cinematic property that they do not have at their disposal, variable
framing, to do so. Each sequence employs the same camera movement, the for-
ward dolly, as well as the same editing structure·successively closer shots·
to hint at possible similarities between Charlie and her uncle. These techniques
do not reveal something that we are incapable of seeing unaided, for we are
quite capable of discovering without assistance whether two people are alike
in character by observing and comparing their words and behavior. However,
these techniques do encourage us to make this comparison, which we might
neglect to do in their absence.
Thus arguing, as I have, that human vision is not limited to the extent
that Ôlm theorists often claim does not mean that the cinema is incapable of
revealing truths about reality that are invisible to the naked eye. Nor does it
mean that it is unable to do so in ways the other arts cannot, at least as they
are customarily practiced. However, its revelatory power is for the most part
wrongly conceived of when it is compared exclusively to the scientiÔc dis-
covery of natural phenomena that human sight is incapable of seeing unaided.
Although the technology of Ôlm can, like microscopes and telescopes, bring
to view features of reality inaccessible to vision, this is not the only sense in
which Ôlms reveal the invisible. Rather, as I have suggested, they also do so
in the sense of revealing truths that we are capable of seeing unaided but that
were previously concealed or that we did not pay attention to. And even when
they do reveal things we cannot see without assistance, such as the workers in
faraway places in VertovÊs Ôlms, often this is in order to enable us to see things
we are capable of perceiving without a visual technology, such as commonali-
ties of class. Meanwhile, the difference between Ôlm and the other visual arts

Figure 4.18. Inside, young

Charlie lies in the same position
as her uncle with similar
shadows above her.
The Lure of Visual Skepticism 129

lies principally in the way that it extends our visual capacities·our ability to
see what other people are thinking and feeling, to see anthropomorphic proper-
ties in nonhuman entities, to see what we have in common with other people
whom we have never met, to notice graphic properties as well as what we have
overlooked·in ways they cannot due to variable framing.
Although theorists in the revelationist tradition correctly realized that the
cinemaÊs revelatory power is unparalleled among the arts in their standard forms,
they misconstrued its nature because they likened it exclusively to scientiÔc
discoveries about invisible natural phenomena using visual technologies; this is
not too surprising, given that our culture is a scientiÔc one. The sciences have
been so successful at explaining and predicting the natural universe over the
last four centuries that they have become the paradigm of explanation in the
modern world, thereby casting a long shadow over other types of knowledge,
such as philosophy, religion, and art. The result has often been scientism, the
illicit extension of the forms, methods, and rhetoric of the natural sciences into
realms where they have no application in an effort to emulate their success. For
this reason, theorists and practitioners of art have often clothed their work in
scientiÔc garb and compared artistic knowledge to scientiÔc discovery.42 In the
case of the cinema, there is a particular temptation to do this, because Ôlm is a
technology as well as an artistic medium and it can be used to make scientiÔc
discoveries about natural phenomena that we are incapable of seeing unaided.
Early theorists also misconstrued cinematic revelation, I suspect, because of
the sheer novelty of seeing human faces, bodies, and environments on Ôlm. As
Carroll has pointed out, variable framing, and the control over the viewerÊs at-
tention it enables, results in a much greater degree of clarity in our experience of
what is represented by a Ôlm than is possible in the theater or in real life. Through
indexing, bracketing, and scaling, camera movement and editing enable the Ôlm-
maker to analyze what is Ôlmed into variable views for the viewer, rendering it
visually perspicuous. Of course, Ôlms donÊt have to use such techniques, and
when they do, these techniques are not necessarily used to render their subjects
perspicuous. But when these techniques are used in this way, the result can be „an
element of cognitive clarity‰ that, as Carroll argues, „may well account . . . for
the widespread intensity of engagement that movies elicit.‰43 After more than a
century of Ôlm, viewers are now accustomed to this clarity, but this was not the
case with theorists in the revelationist tradition, who all grew to maturity while
Ôlmmakers were discovering and experimenting with the analytical techniques
of variable framing. Due to the precision, detail, and proximity with which these
techniques can allow viewers to observe reality, watching a Ôlm that used these
techniques for the Ôrst time must have been like discovering a „world never seen
before,‰ as Kracauer puts it, much like the world of micro-phenomena revealed
for the Ôrst time by microscopes. This is why, I suspect, they reached for the
analogy with other visual technologies. As Òawed as this analogy was, the insight
about the cinemaÊs unique revelatory power motivating it was sound.

In this book, I have attempted to show that skepticism about human vision
has had a profound inÒuence on Ôlm theorists since the 1920s and continues to
130 doubting vision

do so. I have also offered a critique of this inÒuence, arguing both that, in gen-
eral, visual skepticism is probably unfounded, and that Ôlm theorists typically
make skeptical arguments about vision at the price of misusing perceptual and
related concepts. One thing that has struck me again and again when writing
this book is that, even though the cinema is widely considered to be a visual
art and theorizing about its visual properties has been going on for almost a
century, Ôlm theorists are woefully confused about what it is we actually see
when we watch Ôlms. The study of Ôlm badly needs philosophy to clarify pre-
cisely what it makes sense to say that a Ôlm viewer sees, in addition to close
empirical study of the way Ôlms actually engage and artfully manipulate our
sense of sight. Some Ôlm scholars, most notably David Bordwell, are doing the
latter;44 I hope here to have taken a few steps toward the former.
Nevertheless, I am pessimistic about the inÒuence of skepticism about
human vision on Ôlm theory coming to an end any time soon. The lure of visual
skepticism, and the concomitant claim that the cinema can reveal truths about
reality beyond the reach of human seeing and knowing, are too seductive. As
I have suggested, Ôlm theorists are attracted to this conception of the cinema
because it places Ôlm art on a par with science, philosophy, and other truth-
seeking pursuits, thereby investing it with considerable status and moral value.
But behind this conception, doesnÊt there lurk what Murray Smith has called
„the ancient view that the worth of art will always pale in comparison with the
worth of philosophy?‰45 Smith is referring to popular Ôlms such as comedies in
arguing against the currently fashionable claim that Ôlms „philosophize,‰ but
his argument could apply to all Ôlms and all attempts to equate Ôlm art with
nonartistic pursuits such as science and philosophy.

A different path is open to us if we recognize and challenge this assumption. We

can, and should, take popular Ôlms seriously·but as works of art, rather than as
works of philosophy. After all, in the larger scheme of things, comic artistry is
probably as important to human Òourishing as philosophy. What it makes to take
popular Ôlmmaking as an art seriously, of course, is still another matter.46

Taking Ôlm as an art seriously involves clarifying what sort of knowledge

it gives us, what sort of „truths about reality‰ it can reveal, rather than assimi-
lating these truths to those of science or philosophy. I have suggested that it is,
for the most part, truths about human beings and their environments that are
invisible in the sense of being concealed or overlooked that the cinema as an
art, as opposed to Ôlm as a technology, reveals. I suspect that such truths, to
borrow SmithÊs felicitous phrase, are just as important to human Òourishing
as those scientiÔc discoveries about natural phenomena that we are incapable
of seeing unaided.
 NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. In this book, I use the term „classical Ôlm theory‰ solely for the pur-
poses of historical periodization. The term refers to Ôlm theory produced before the
Anglo-American academicization of Ôlm studies and the ascendancy of semiotic-
psychoanalytical Ôlm theory in the late 1960s. Film theory since the late 1960s I refer
to as „contemporary Ôlm theory.‰ See Noël Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classi-
cal Film Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 10.
2. Ibid., 12–15.
3. Walter Benjamin, „The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,‰ in
Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 236.
4. Jean Epstein, „Photogénie and the Imponderable‰ (1935), in French Film The-
ory and Criticism, A History/Anthology, vol. II, 1929–1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 190.
5. Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film (Character and Growth of a New Art) (1948),
trans. Edith Bone (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 55.
6. Gregory Currie, „Visible Traces: Documentary and the Contents of Photo-
graphs,‰ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57, no. 3 (Summer 1999), 286.
7. See, for example, Annette Michelson, „The Wings of Hypothesis: On Montage
and the Theory of the Interval,‰ in Montage and Modern Life 1919–1942, ed. Matthew
Teitelbaum (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 62; Richard Abel, „Photogénie and
Company,‰ in French Film Theory and Criticism, A History/Anthology, vol. I, 1907–
1929, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 107.
8. Alan Williams, Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 58. Williams is referring here to the
Ôlms of Dr. Jean Comandon in France. The cinemaÊs revelatory capacity continues
to have entertainment value today, as the recent documentary Microcosmos (1996)
demonstrates.
132 notes to pages 5– 8

9. Hugo Münsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study. The Silent Photoplay in

1916 (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 11.
10. Jean Epstein, „The Cinema Continues‰ (1930), in French Film Theory, vol. II,
63–64.
11. Jean Epstein, „On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie‰ (1924), in French
Film Theory, vol. I, 318.
12. Dziga Vertov, „Kinoks: A Revolution‰ (1923), in Kino-Eye: The Writings of
Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin OÊBrien (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), 17–18.
13. Dziga Vertov, „Kinoglaz‰ (1924), in Kino-Eye, 39.
14. Balázs, Theory of the Film, 33.
15. Ibid., 34–35.
16. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality
(1960) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 299, 300.
17. Ibid., 300.
18. Ibid., 296.
19. By our sense of sight, I should make clear immediately that I do not mean
vision in any metaphorical or secondary sense, unlike, say, P. Adams Sitney, who has
used vision as a metaphor for the imagination to argue that post-war American avant-
garde Ôlm is „visionary.‰ By this he means that its central theme is „the triumph of the
imagination.‰ In this tradition, according to Sitney, Ôlmmakers employ „radical tech-
niques‰ as „metaphors for perception and consciousness‰ (Visionary Film: The Ameri-
can Avant-Garde 1943–2000 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002], 65, 49). Nor
do I mean that the cinema embodies or objectiÔes perceptual processes such as atten-
tion, which is what Hugo Münsterburg argued. Rather, for the Ôlmmakers and theorists
I analyze in this book, it is literal, physical vision, and the knowledge of reality we gain
through seeing, that is limited.
20. In the pages that follow, I sometimes refer to this distrust of our sense of sight
as skepticism. However, the use of the term skepticism should not be construed to mean
modern, philosophical skepticism (i.e., doubts about the existence of reality and other
minds), unless I indicate otherwise. Rather, I use „skepticism‰ in the more general sense
of a doubting or questioning attitude toward sight. Indeed, the theorists and Ôlmmakers
I discuss have no doubt about the existence of reality and other minds because, accord-
ing to them, the cinema has the power to escape the limitations of human vision and
reveal reality and other minds as they really are.
21. David Bordwell, French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory,
and Film Style (New York: Arno Press, 1980); Stuart Liebman, „Jean EpsteinÊs Early
Film Theory, 1920–1922‰ (Ph.D. dissertation; New York University, 1980); Richard
Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1984); Jacques Aumont, ed., Jean Epstein: Cinéaste, Poete, Philosophe (Paris:
Cinemateque Francaise, 1998); Vincent Guigueno, Jean Epstein, cinéaste des îles:
Ouessant, Sein, Hoëdic, Belle-˝le (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 2003).
22. Joseph Zsuffa, Béla Balázs: The Man and the Artist (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987); Sabine Hake, CinemaÊs Third Machine: Writing on Film in Ger-
many, 1907–1933 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993); Hanno Loewy, „Space,
Time, and ÂRites de PassageÊ: Béla BalázsÊs Paths to Film,‰ October 115 (Winter 2006)
and Loewy, Béla Balázs: Marchen, Ritual, und Film (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2003).
23. Annette Michelson, Introduction, Kino-Eye; Vlada Petric, Constructivism in
Film; The Man with the Movie Camera: A Cinematic Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987); Yuri Tsivian, ed., Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the
Notes to pages 8 –14 133

Twenties (Sacile/Pordenone, Italy: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004); Thomas Tode
and Barbara Wurm, Dziga Vertov: The Vertov Collection at the Austrian Museum (Vi-
enna: Filmmuseum Synema Publikationen, 2006). John McKay summarizes the new
wave of scholarship on Vertov in „The ÂSpinning TopÊ Takes another Turn: Vertov
Today,‰ KinoKultura 8 (April 2005) [online]. Available: http://www.kinokultura.com/
articles/apr05-mackay.html. See also Malcolm Turvey and Annette Michelson, eds.,
„New Vertov Studies,‰ October 121 (Summer 2007).
24. See, for example, Thomas Y. Levin, Introduction to Siegfried Kracauer, The
Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995), 1–30.
25. Carroll, Philosophical Problems, 7.
26. Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 35.
27. André Bazin, „The Ontology of the Photographic Image‰ (1945), in What is
Cinema? vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14
(emphasis in original).
28. Ibid., 13–14.
29. Ibid., 15.
30. Linda Nochlin, Realism (New York: Penguin, 1971), 19.
31. André Bazin, „William Wyler, or the Jansenist of Directing‰ (1948), in Bazin
at Work, ed. Bert Cardullo, trans. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo (New York: Routledge,
1997), 7.
32. Vertov, „Kinoks,‰ 15–16.
33. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1976); Sabine Hake, CinemaÊs Third Machine: Writing on Film in
Germany, 1907–1933 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 213–14; Theodor
W. Adorno, „The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer‰ (1965), New German Cri-
tique 54 (1991), 159–79.
34. The most persistent critic of medium speciÔcity in Ôlm theory is Noël Carroll.
See his essays „Medium SpeciÔcity Arguments and the Self-Consciously Invented Arts:
Film, Video, and Photography‰; „The SpeciÔcity of Media in the Arts‰; „Concern-
ing Uniqueness Claims for Photographic and Cinematographic Representation‰; and
„DeÔning the Moving Image,‰ all in Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–74. Murray Smith has recently defended a version
of medium speciÔcity he calls „medium deÒationism‰ against CarrollÊs criticisms. He
argues that one can legitimately speak of the „cinematic‰ in the sense of features of a Ôlm
that are „in some way characteristic or prototypical of the medium‰ (emphasis in origi-
nal). See Smith, „My Dinner with Noël; or, Can We Forget the Medium?‰ Film Studies:
An International Review 8 (Summer 2006), 146, and CarrollÊs response, „Engaging Crit-
ics,‰ ibid., 161–63. Interestingly, Carroll also makes use of the idea of „characteristic‰
features in his essay „The Power of Movies‰ (also in Theorizing the Moving Image, 84).
However, by this he means features typical of a certain genre·rather than the medium·
of Ôlm, what he calls movies, by which he means mainstream narrative Ôlms.
35. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1,
ed. G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1982), §885.
36. Annette Michelson, Introduction to Kino-Eye, xlvi.
37. Balázs, Theory of the Film, 75.
38. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 52.
39. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1949), 16.
134 notes to pages 15– 21

40. The qualiÔcation „as they are customarily practiced‰ is important. In recon-
structing some of the claims of the revelationist tradition about the cinemaÊs revelatory
capacity and the way it differentiates Ôlm from the other arts, I do not mean to replicate
their medium-speciÔc essentialism. The revelatory techniques that the cinema, I argue
in chapter 4, does legitimately possess are ones the other arts do not have at their dis-
posal in their standard forms. This does not mean they might not be able to develop
equivalents of these techniques. Hence, these techniques should not be construed as
being unique to the medium of Ôlm, but only unique to cinematic art as it is customar-
ily practiced in relation to the other arts as they are customarily practiced. See Carroll,
„The Power of Movies,‰ 86–87.
41. For recent overviews and defenses of this tradition, see Oswald HanÒing, Phi-
losophy and Ordinary Language: The Bent and Genius of Our Tongue (London: Rout-
ledge, 2000) and P. M. S. Hacker, WittgensteinÊs Place in Twentieth Century Analytic
and Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), especially chapters 6 through 8.
42. The following paragraphs are taken from Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey,
„WittgensteinÊs Later Philosophy: A Prophylaxis against Theory,‰ in Wittgenstein, The-
ory and the Arts, ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (London: Routledge, 2001),
1–35.
43. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe
and R. Rhees, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), §109
(emphasis in original). (Hereafter cited in text as PI.)
44. WittgensteinÊs distinction between the conceptual and the empirical has been
challenged most prominently by W. V. Quine and his followers, who argue that all con-
ceptualization is theory-ridden, and that there is no distinction between conceptual and
empirical truths. For recent criticisms of this view and defenses of Wittgenstein, see
H.-J. Glock, Quine and Davidson on Language, Thought and Reality (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Hacker, WittgensteinÊs Place, chapter 7.
45. Anthony Kenny, The Metaphysics of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989),
72–73.
46. Although Wittgenstein always contended that philosophical investigation is
distinct from empirical enquiry and that the task of philosophy is the perspicuous char-
acterization of meaning, he changed his mind about the nature of meaning during his
lifetime with profound consequences. This is why his philosophy is usually divided into
two periods, early and late. See Allen and Turvey, „WittgensteinÊs Later Philosophy,‰
6–10.
47. Contemporary neuroscientists and neuroscientiÔc philosophers of mind use
this objection to defend their reckless application of psychological predicates to the
brain. For criticisms, see M. R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations
of Neuroscience (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).
48. Epstein, „Photogénie and the Imponderable,‰ 189.
49. Ibid.
50. Epstein, „The Cinema Continues,‰ 64.

CHAPTER 1

1. Jean Epstein, „MagniÔcation‰ (1921), in French Film Theory and Criticism,

A History/Anthology, vol. I, 1907–1929, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1988), 240 (emphasis in original).
2. Ibid., 239–40.
Notes to pages 21–31 135

3. Ibid., 240. With the coming of sound in the late 1920s, Epstein abandons his
view that the cinema is, or should be, an exclusively visual art.
4. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New
York: Zone Books, 1988), 208.
5. Ibid.
6. Jean Epstein, „Photogénie and the Imponderable‰ (1935), in French Film
Theory and Criticism, A History/Anthology, vol. II, 1929–1939, ed. Richard Abel
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 189.
7. Epstein, „MagniÔcation,‰ 235.
8. Jean Epstein, „The Senses I (b)‰ (1921), in French Film Theory, vol. I,
244–45.
9. Epstein, „Photogénie and the Imponderable,‰ 190.
10. Ibid.
11. Jean Epstein, „On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie‰ (1924), in French
Film Theory, vol. I, 317.
12. Jean Epstein, „The Cinema Continues‰ (1930), in French Film Theory,
vol. II, 64.
13. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free
Press, 1967), 54.
14. Epstein, „The Senses,‰ 244.
15. Ibid.
16. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 10.
17. Ibid., 33.
18. Ibid., 35–36.
19. Ibid., 36.
20. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola, NY:
Dover Publications, 1998), 12 (emphasis in original).
21. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 49.
22. Ibid., 30–31.
23. Ibid., 49.
24. Ibid., 36.
25. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 306.
26. Ibid., xii.
27. Stuart Liebman, „Jean EpsteinÊs Early Film Theory, 1920–1922‰ (Ph.D. dis-
sertation, New York University, 1980), 149.
28. William R. Paulson, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Blind in France
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 150.
29. Epstein, „On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie,‰ 316–17.
30. Epstein, „For a New Avant-Garde‰ (1925), in Abel, French Film Theory,
vol. I, 352.
31. Epstein, „MagniÔcation,‰ 238.
32. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, for example, include it in their list of
Impressionist Ôlms in their Film History: An Introduction (New York: McGraw Hill,
2003), 89.
33. Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1929 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1984), 471: „Although Usher seems to announce a break in
EpsteinÊs aesthetic commitment, the effect of that break remains unarticulated.‰
34. Dziga Vertov, „We: Variant of a Manifesto‰ (1922), in Kino-Eye: The Writings
of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin OÊBrien (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), 7.
136 notes to pages 31–37

35. Dziga Vertov, „On the SigniÔcance of Nonacted Cinema‰ (1923), in Kino-
Eye, 36.
36. El Lissitzky, „Russia: The Reconstruction of Architecture in the Soviet Union‰
(excerpt), in The Tradition of Constructivism, ed. Stephen Bann (New York: Da Capo
Press, 1990), 142.
37. Dziga Vertov, „On the Film Known as Kinoglaz‰ (1923), in Kino-Eye, 35.
38. Dziga Vertov, „Artistic Drama and Kino-Eye‰ (1924), in Kino-Eye, 48.
39. Dziga Vertov, „Kinoks: A Revolution‰ (1923), in Kino-Eye, 16.
40. Ibid., 14.
41. Ibid., 19.
42. Ibid., 16.
43. Ibid., 15.
44. Dziga Vertov, „The Birth of Kino-Eye‰ (1924), in Kino-Eye, 42.
45. Dziga Vertov, „Kinoglaz‰ (1924), in Kino-Eye, 39.
46. Vertov, „Kinoks,‰ 16.
47. Vertov, „Kino-Eye‰ (1926), in Kino-Eye, 73.
48. Vertov, „Kinoks,‰ 18–19 (emphasis added).
49. Vertov, „We,‰ 8–9 (emphasis in original).
50. Vertov, „Kinoks,‰ 16.
51. Ibid., 15, 18.
52. Ibid., 18.
53. Ibid., 17.
54. Ibid., 19.
55. Vertov, „Birth of Kino-Eye,‰ 41.
56. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life
in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), chapter 7.
57. See Malcolm Turvey, „Can the Camera See? Mimesis in Man with a Movie
Camera,‰ October 89 (Summer 1999), 25–50.
58. Vertov, „We,‰ 7–8 (emphasis in original).
59. Hillary Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism, 1900–1930 (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1999). I explore the possible inÒuence of Bergson on
Vertov in Turvey, „Vertov: Between the Organism and the Machine,‰ October 121,
„New Vertov Studies,‰ ed. Malcolm Turvey and Annette Michelson (Summer 2007).
60. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (1983; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 81.
61. Ibid., 39.
62. Ibid., 80.
63. Ibid., 40.
64. Ibid., 81.
65. John McKay, „A Superhuman Eye,‰ section 1 of „Disorganized Noise: Enthu-
siasm and the Ear of the Collective,‰ 7 [online] January 2005. Available: http://www.
kinokultura.com/articles/enthusiasm-noise.pdf. The fragile, even contradictory balance
between human and machine in VertovÊs theory and practice is discussed in Turvey,
„Can the Camera See?‰
66. Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film (Character and Growth of a New Art) (1948),
trans. Edith Bone (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 39. (Hereafter cited in the text as
TTF.) Theory of the Film was originally published in 1948 in Hungary as Filmkultúra
and translated into English in 1952. According to Joseph Zsuffa, it is a „common mis-
conception‰ that Filmkultúra is the same as Iskusstvo Kino, published in Russia in 1945
(Béla Balázs: The Man and the Artist [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987],
Notes to pages 37–54 137

496, n. 69). „While parts of the two editions correspond, Filmkultúra is a different
book.‰
67. Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), v–vi.
68. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality
(1960) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 46. (Hereafter cited in the
text as TF.)
69. Quoted in David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the
Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 112.
70. See Noël Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), chapter 1; and David Bordwell, On the History
of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), chapter 2.
71. For a critique of KracauerÊs claims about cinemaÊs medium-speciÔc prop-
erties, see Noël Carroll, „KracauerÊs Theory of Film,‰ in DeÔning Cinema, ed. Peter
Lehman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 111–31.
72. Siegfried Kracauer, „Cult of Distraction‰ (1927), in The Mass Ornament:
Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1995), 326 (emphasis in original).
73. Ibid., 327.
74. Miriam Hansen, Introduction to Kracauer, Theory of Film, xiii.
75. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free
Press, 1967), 16.
76. Ibid., 35.
77. Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in
Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 120–41.
78. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 196.
79. Ibid., 197.
80. Ibid., 199.

CHAPTER 2

1. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola, NY:

Dover Publications, 1998), 4.
2. Ibid., 3.
3. Ibid., 5 (emphasis in original).
4. Jean Epstein, „Photogénie and the Imponderable‰ (1935), in French Film
Theory and Criticism, A History/Anthology, vol. II, 1929–1939, ed. Richard Abel
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 189.
5. Ibid.
6. Epstein, „MagniÔcation‰ (1921), in French Film Theory and Criticism,
A History/Anthology, vol. I, 1907–1929, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1988), 236.
7. Jean Epstein, „The Senses I (b)‰ (1921), in French Film Theory, vol. 1, 242.
8. Jean Epstein, „Art of Incidence‰ (1927), in French Film Theory, vol. 1, 413.
9. Ibid., 413–14.
10. See The Philosophy of Time: A Collection of Essays, ed. Richard Gale (Gar-
den City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967), 5–8.
11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Blackwell,
1958), 26.
12. Ibid., 6.
138 notes to pages 54–71

13. Arthur S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (New York: Macmillan,
1929), x.
14. Gilbert Ryle, Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954),
chapter 5.
15. Ibid., 79 (emphasis in original).
16. P. M. S. Hacker, Appearance and Reality: A Philosophical Investigation into
Perception and Perceptual Qualities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 204.
17. Dziga Vertov, „The Birth of Kino-Eye‰ (1924), in Kino-Eye: The Writings of
Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin OÊBrien (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), 41.
18. Dziga Vertov, „On the Film Known as Kinoglaz‰ (1923), in Kino-Eye, 35.
19. Annette Michelson, „From Magician to Epistemologist: VertovÊs The Man
with a Movie Camera,‰ in The Essential Cinema, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New
York University Press, 1975), 104.
20. Vertov, „On the Film Known as Kinoglaz,‰ 34.
21. Ibid.
22. Annette Michelson, Introduction to Kino-Eye, xxxvii.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ryle, Dilemmas, 86.
26. Ibid., 88.
27. Epstein, „MagniÔcation,‰ 238–39.
28. Ibid., 238.
29. Jean Epstein, „On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie‰ (1924), in French
Film Theory, vol. 1, 317.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Epstein, „The Senses I (b),‰ 242.
33. Jean Epstein, „For a New Avant-Garde,‰ in French Film Theory, vol. 1, 352.
34. Ibid.
35. Epstein, „Photogénie and the Imponderable,‰ 191.
36. Ibid.
37. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe
and R. Rhees, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 196.
(Hereafter cited in the text as PI.)
38. Hacker, Appearance and Reality, 19 (emphasis in original).
39. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 2, ed.
G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1980), §570 (emphasis in original).
40. For an in-depth examination of the issues covered in the following paragraphs,
see Stephen Mulhall, On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing As-
pects (London: Routledge, 1990). My discussion of aspect-dawning is greatly indebted
to this book.
41. Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film (Character and Growth of a New Art) (1948),
trans. Edith Bone (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 60 (emphasis in original). (Hereafter
cited in the text as TTF.)
42. Anthony Kenny, The Metaphysics of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 5.
43. For this reason, WittgensteinÊs philosophy of psychology has often been mis-
taken for a form of logical behaviorism. But unlike behaviorists, Wittgenstein does not
argue that mental concepts can be reduced to behavior. See Paul Johnston, Wittgenstein:
Notes to pages 71– 82 139

Rethinking the Inner (London: Routledge, 1993); P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Mean-

ing and Mind, Volume 3 of an Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investi-
gations, Part 1: Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), especially chapter 6; and Kenny,
Metaphysics of Mind, 1–6.
44. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality
(1960) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 299. (Hereafter cited in the
text as TF.)
45. Standish D. Lawder, The Cubist Cinema (New York: New York University
Press, 1975), 72.

CHAPTER 3

1. Of course, there are important exceptions, such as Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer. See their „The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception‰ (1947),
in Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997), 120–167.
2. See, for example, Siegfried KracauerÊs analysis of the antiliberal ideology in
German cinema between the wars in From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological His-
tory of the German Film (1947) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
Again, there are important exceptions, such as Vertov, who, in proselytizing on behalf
of nonÔction Ôlm, tends to argue that Ôction Ôlm in general, rather than speciÔc Ôction
Ôlms, „clouds the eye and the brain with a sweet fog‰ (Dziga Vertov, „Artistic Drama and
Kino-Eye‰ [1924], in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson,
trans. Kevin OÊBrien [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984], 48).
3. For a critique of the attribution of ideology to the cinemaÊs basic properties,
see Noël Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), chapters 3–5.
4. Because this theoretical terrain is well known, and others have surveyed it in
much more detail than I have room to do here, I will only brieÒy summarize it as far
as it pertains to my argument. An excellent, philosophically informed overview can be
found in chapters 1 and 2 of Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and
the Impression of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
5. Louis Althusser, „Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward
an Investigation),‰ in Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben
Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 85–127.
6. Allen, Projecting Illusion, 28.
7. Jacques Lacan, „The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,‰ in
Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Tavistock Publications,
1977), 1–7.
8. Althusser, „Ideology‰; see also Althusser, „Freud and Lacan,‰ in Lenin and
Philosophy, 133–51.
9. Lacan, „The Mirror Stage.‰
10. Bertolt Brecht, „Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting‰ (1936), in Brecht on
Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1964), 91–92.
11. Christian Metz, The Imaginary SigniÔer: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema,
trans. Celia Britton et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 45.
12. Ibid., 49 (emphasis in original).
13. Ibid., 48 (emphasis in original).
14. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 420.
140 notes to pages 83–88

15. P. Adams Sitney has pointed to the autotelic nature of American structural Ôlm:

The structural Ôlm . . . has the same relationship to the earlier forms of the avant-
garde Ôlm that Symbolism had to its source, Romanticism. The rhetoric of inspira-
tion has changed to the language of aesthetics; Promethean heroism collapses into
a consciousness of the self in which its very representation becomes problematic;
the quest for a redeemed innocence becomes a search for the purity of images and
the trapping of time. All this is as true of structural Ôlm as it is of Symbolism.
(Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943–2000 [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002], 355.)

16. Stephen Heath, „Repetition Time: Notes around ÂStructural/materialist FilmÊ ‰

(1978), in Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981),
165 (emphasis in original).
17. Ibid., 167.
18. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New
York: Routledge, 1990), 64.
19. For additional arguments, see Carroll, Mystifying Movies, chapter 3.
20. Allen, Projecting Illusion, 82.
21. Ibid, 100.
22. Ibid., 106–7.
23. There are illusions we can choose to experience indirectly. There are trompe-
lÊoeils, for example, that, when viewed from a certain distance, deceive us into believ-
ing we are in the presence of what they depict. When we move close enough to them,
we can see their surfaces, and the illusion evaporates. We can then return to the position
from which we originally saw them. Because we can no longer see their surfaces they
appear, once again, to be the things they depict rather than representations, even though
they no longer cognitively deceive us into believing they are real because we have seen
their surfaces and know they are illusions. There might even be trompe-lÊoeils that,
when we look at part of them (the center), appear to be what they depict, but when we
look at another part (the edges), are plainly representations. In these cases, we do, indi-
rectly, choose to experience a perceptual illusion in the sense that we choose the opti-
mum position in space, or the optimum part of the illusion to look at, in order to trigger
the illusion. We, in effect, help the illusion to deceive our eyes. Perhaps such an experi-
ence could be made to occur in the cinema by, for example, placing viewers far enough
away from the screen so that they cannot tell whether they are seeing a representation or
something real, or by eschewing conventions such as editing, camera movement, titles,
and music that would alert them to the fact that they are seeing a representation. But this
is not how Ôlms are usually exhibited or designed.
24. Allen, Projecting Illusion, 88.
25. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed, enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1979), 22.
26. Ibid., 23.
27. Ibid., 24.
28. Ibid., 25–26.
29. William Rothman and Marian Keane, Reading CavellÊs The World Viewed:
A Philosophical Perspective on Film (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2000),
180.
30. Cavell, The World Viewed, 102 (emphasis in original).
31. Ibid., 23.
Notes to pages 89 – 98 141

32. Ibid., 19–20.

33. David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1997), 141–46; Charlie Keil, „ ÂTo Here from ModernityÊ: Style, Histori-
ography, and Transitional Cinema,‰ in American CinemaÊs Transitional Era: Audiences,
Institutions, Practices, ed. Charlie Keil and Shelly Stamp (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004), 51–65.
34. Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its
Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 104.
35. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 20.
36. Siegfried Kracauer, „Cult of Distraction‰ (1927), in The Mass Ornament:
Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1995), 326 (emphasis in original).
37. Tom Gunning, „An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the Incredu-
lous Spectator‰ (1989), in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo
Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 6th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 875.
38. Miriam Hansen, „The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as
Vernacular Modernism,‰ in Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda
Williams (London: Arnold, 2000), 341–42.
39. Kracauer, „The Cult of Distraction,‰ 325–26.
40. Ibid., 327.
41. Ibid., 328.
42. Walter Benjamin, „The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction‰
(1935), in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 238 (empha-
sis added).
43. Ibid. I develop my critique of the modernity thesis further in chapter 1 of
Turvey, The Filming of Modern Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, forthcoming).
44. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image (1983), trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 2.
45. Ibid., 64.
46. Ibid., 58, 64.
47. Ibid., 29.
48. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985), trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), xi.
49. Ibid., 274. See also p. 81.
50. Ibid., 101.
51. Ibid., xii.
52. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 63–64.
53. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe
and R. Rhees, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), §281.
(Hereafter cited in the text as PI.)
54. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 20.
55. Anthony Kenny, The Metaphysics of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989),
106.
56. Deleuze, Cinema 2, xii.
57. See CurrieÊs discussion of cinema and time in his Image and Mind: Film,
Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
92–103.
58. Shorn of this extravagant theoretical claim, DeleuzeÊs work on the cinema
is little more than a history of Ôlm, one that, as David Bordwell has pointed out, is in
142 notes to pages 98 –106

almost all respects traditional and derivative of the work of others. Bordwell, Film Style,
116–17.

CHAPTER 4

1. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1993).
2. Ibid., 15, 19 (emphasis in original).
3. Ibid., 82–88.
4. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century
French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 14, 69.
5. Ibid.; see 154ff for JayÊs discussion of Impressionism and post-Impressionism.
6. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 39.
7. Ibid., 70.
8. A good overview of many of these views is given by Howard Robinson, Per-
ception (London: Routledge, 1994).
9. The argument that follows pertains only to artistic modernism, and when I use
the word „modernism,‰ it should be understood as referring only to modernism of the ar-
tistic variety. I am not making any claims about modernity, as do Jay and Crary, nor about
the arts in general. My claim pertains only to the modernist movement within the arts.
10. P. Adams Sitney, Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and
Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 1.
11. Ibid., 2.
12. Ibid., 3.
13. Roman Jakobson, „Futurism‰ (1919), in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna
Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press, 1987), 32.
14. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reiss, Introduction to Victor Shklovsky, „Art
as Technique,‰ in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and
Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 4.
15. Walter Benjamin, „The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,‰
in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).
16. For LégerÊs relation to classicism, see Christopher GreenÊs Léger and the
Avant-Garde (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976).
17. Fernand Léger, „The Spectacle: Light, Color, Moving Image, Object-
Spectacle‰ (1924), in Functions of Painting (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 46.
18. Ibid., 47. I explore these issues further in Turvey, „The Avant-Garde and the
ÂNew SpiritÊ: The Case of Ballet Mécanique,‰ October 102 (Fall 2002).
19. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, Tradition and Revolution in Roman-
tic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1971), 377.
20. Stan Brakhage, „Metaphors on Vision‰ (extract), in The Avant-Garde Film:
A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Anthology Film
Archives, 1978), 120–21.
21. William C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of
Avant-Garde Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 79.
22. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943–2000 (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 168.
23. Maurice Tuchman, „Hidden Meanings in Abstract Art,‰ in The Spiritual in
Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, exhibition catalogue (New York: Abbeville Press,
1986), 19.
Notes to pages 106 –130 143

24. Sixten Ringbom, „Transcending the Visible: The Generation of the Abstract
Pioneers,‰ in The Spiritual in Art, 131–54.
25. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Ge-
ometry in Modern Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 340.
26. For criticisms of this picture, see Gilbert Ryle, Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1954), chapter 5; P. M. S. Hacker, Appearance and Reality: A Philosophi-
cal Investigation into Perception and Perceptual Qualities (London: Blackwell, 1987). See
Robinson, Perception, for a good overview of the variety of possible positions.
27. Sitney, Modernist Montage, 1.
28. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 419.
29. Ryle, Dilemmas, 94.
30. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe
(New York: Harper & Row, 1972). (Hereafter cited in the text as OC.)
31. For further elaboration, see Turvey, „Is Scepticism a Natural Possibility of
Language?: Reasons to be Sceptical of CavellÊs Wittgenstein,‰ in Wittgenstein, The-
ory and the Arts, ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (London: Routledge, 2001),
117–36.
32. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright,
trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), §571 (emphasis in original).
33. Ryle, Dilemmas, 95–96.
34. Patrick Maynard conceives of photography in this way in his Engine of Visual-
ization: Thinking Through Photography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
35. P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind, Volume 3 of an Analytical
Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, Part 1: Essays (Oxford: Blackwell,
1993), 134. My discussion of psychological concepts in this chapter is greatly indebted
to this book.
36. Noël Carroll, „The Power of Movies,‰ in Theorizing the Moving Image
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 84–87.
37. Richard Allen, „The Lodger and the Origins of HitchcockÊs Aesthetic,‰
Hitchcock Annual (2001–2002), 38–78.
38. See Thomas M. Leitch, Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991).
39. The term originates in the work of the nineteenth-century historian W. H. Lecky.
It has been taken up most famously by the moral philosopher Peter Singer. See his The
Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
40. Dziga Vertov, „Kino-Eye‰ (1926), in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov,
ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin OÊBrien (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984), 73–74.
41. James McLaughlin, „All in the Family: Alfred HitchcockÊs Shadow of a
Doubt,‰ in A Hitchcock Reader, ed. Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (Ames:
Iowa State University Press, 1986), 141–52.
42. On this topic, see Paisley Livingston, Literary Knowledge: Humanistic In-
quiry and the Philosophy of Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).
43. Carroll, „The Power of Movies,‰ 84.
44. See, for example, David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic
Staging (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
45. Murray Smith, „Film Art, Argument, and Ambiguity,‰ The Journal of Aesthet-
ics and Art Criticism 64, no. 1 (Winter 2006), 41.
46. Ibid.
This page intentionally left blank
 INDEX

Abel, Richard, 8, 26 and revelation of emotion and mental

Abrams, M. H., 105 states, 12 –13, 38 – 41, 59, 69 –70, 72,
Adorno, Theodor, 11 117, 120 – 21
agent versus ability, 17, 96 and revelationism, 4 – 8, 19
Akerman, Chantal, 91 and semiotic-psychoanalytic film
Allen, Richard, 85 – 86, 122 theory, 81, 83
Althusser, Louis, 80 – 81, 83 and silent film, 37– 39
An Inconvenient Truth (Gore, 2006), 116 and sound film, 40 – 41
analytical philosophy, 15 –18 and Vertov, Dziga, 8, 36, 38, 41, 48, 69
Andrew, Dudley, 11 and visual skepticism, 8, 9, 11, 38 – 41,
antiocularcentrism, 100, 108 49, 109
Arnheim, Rudolf, 9 –11, 40, 105 Balzac, Honoré de, 25
Arp, Jean, 106 The Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein,
Augustine, Saint, 52 – 54 1925), 13 –14
automation of perception theory, 102–104 Bazin, André, 5, 9 –10, 44, 87
autotelic art, 83, 87 Belgrad, Daniel, 47
Benjamin, Walter, 4, 89 – 90, 92, 103 – 4
Balázs, Béla Bergson, Henri
and Epstein, Jean, 8, 36, 38, 41, 48, Creative Evolution, 24, 25
59, 69, 78 influence on Deleuze, Gilles, 93 – 96
influence of Romanticism/modern influence on Epstein, Jean, 18, 21– 22,
subjectivity theory on, 36, 24– 25, 26 – 28, 34, 49 – 51, 59
39– 40, 48 influence on Vertov, Dziga, 36 – 37
and Kracauer, Siegfried, 8, 36, 38, 41, Matter and Memory, 22, 24, 37
48, 49, 69, 78 on mobility, 21– 22
and microphsyiognomics, 69 –70 and modernism, 106
and misuse of perceptual concepts, on perception, 24 – 25, 93, 95
12–13, 70 –72, 78 on time, 49 – 50, 94
146 index

Bergson, Henri (continued) and The Fall of the House of Usher

and Whitehead, Alfred North, 47 (1928), 26 – 30, 115
Blavatsky, Helena P., 106 influence of Bergson, Henri, on,
Bordwell, David, 8, 89, 130 18, 21– 22, 24 – 25, 26 – 28, 34,
Brakhage, Stan, 105 – 6, 124 49– 51, 59
Brecht, Bertolt, 32, 80 – 81, 102 influence of Romanticism on, 25 – 26,
34, 62
Carroll, Noël influence of scientific materialism on,
and classical film theory, 3 23– 24, 34
and medium specificity, 3, 133 n. 34, and Kracauer, Siegfried, 8, 36, 38, 41,
134 n. 40 48, 69, 78
and modernist film theory, 9 and misuse of perceptual concepts, 12,
and semiotic-psychoanalytical film 52– 55, 62 – 69, 78
theory, 84 – 85 and narrative, 51– 52
and variable framing, 117, 129 and revelation of emotion and mental
category mistake, 14, 17, 72 –74, 96 – 97, states, 59, 62 – 63, 66 – 69, 83, 117,
114 120– 21
Cavell, Stanley, 14, 87– 89, 98 and revelation of family resemblance,
Cézanne, Paul, 100 59, 61– 63, 66, 68 – 69
classical film theory, 3–4, 15, 109, 131 n. 1 and revelation of mobility, 21– 22,
Cléo from 5 to 7 (Varda, 1961), 97 26– 28, 49 – 51
Crary, Jonathan, 90, 100 and revelation of time, 4, 12, 18,
Currie, Gregory, 5, 96 49– 53, 69, 96
and revelationism, 4 – 8, 19
Degas, Edgar, 10 and semiotic–psychoanalytic film
Deleuze, Gilles theory, 81, 83
and Bergson, Henri, 93 – 96 and The Three-Sided Mirror (1927),
and Epstein, Jean, 15, 25, 93 – 95, 96 51– 53
and misuse of perceptual concepts, 15, and Vertov, Dziga, 8, 32, 34, 36, 38,
17, 95 – 97, 126 41, 48, 69
and revelationism, 14 –15, 93 – 98 and visual skepticism, 8, 9, 11, 21– 25,
and Vertov, Dziga, 15, 36 – 37, 96 – 97, 49– 50, 106, 109
126 Ernst, Max, 99
Descartes, René, 14 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
DÊest (Akerman, 1993), 91 (Gondry, 2005), 97
distraction, 46, 89 – 93, 98, 103 – 4 expanding circle of modernity, 125 – 26
Duchamp, Marcel, 97, 107– 8
Dulac, Germaine, 9 The Fall of the House of Usher (Epstein,
Durkheim, Émile, 42 1928), 26 – 30, 115
Fink, Hillary, 36
Einstein, Albert, 107 Freud, Sigmund, 80
Eisenstein, Sergei 9, 13 –14, 31
Epstein, Jean Galileo, Galilei, 23
and Balázs, Béla, 8, 36, 38, 41, 48, 59, Gastev, Alexi, 25, 34
69, 78 Gidal, Peter, 83
and concept of photogénie, 26, 59 – 60, Godard, Jean-Luc, 81
66– 68 Gondry, Michael, 97
and Deleuze, Gilles, 15, 25, 93 – 95, 96 Gore, Al, 116
and doctrine of secondary qualities, Griffith, D.W., 74
23– 24 Gunning, Tom, 90
Index 147

Hacker, P. M. S., 55, 63 and Vertov, Dziga, 8, 36, 38, 41, 48,
Hake, Sabine, 8, 11 69, 93
Hansen, Miriam, 46, 90 – 91 and visual skepticism, 8, 9, 11, 41– 43,
Hartmann, Franz, 106 45, 49, 109
Heath, Stephen, 83 – 84 Krauss, Rosalind, 99 –100, 108
Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, 107 Kuleshov, Lev, 9
Hitchcock, Alfred, 115 – 22, 126 – 28 Kupka, Frantisek, 106
Lacan, Jacques, 80 – 84
illusion, 79 – 87, 98, 140 n. 23
Intolerance (Griffith, 1916), 74, 114 The Last Laugh (Murnau, 1924), 77
intrinsic versus relational properties, Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais, 1961),
57– 58, 97 95
Lawder, Standish, 78
Jacobson, Roman, 102 Leadbeater, Charles W., 106
Janssen, Jules, 5 Léger, Fernand, 78, 103 – 4
Jay, Martin, 100, 108 Liebman, Stuart, 8, 25
Lissitsky, El, 31
Kandinsky, Wassily, 106 The Lodger (Hitchcock, 1927), 122
Kaufman, Charlie, 97 Loewy, Hanno, 8
Keane, Marian, 88 Lumière Brothers, 44
Keil, Charlie, 89
Kennedy, Jackie, 120 MacKay, John, 8, 37
Kennedy, John F., 89 Malevich, Kazimir, 106
Kenny, Anthony, 17, 71 Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov,
Kerzhentsey, Platon, 34 1929), 34 – 37, 56
Kinoglaz (Vertov, 1924), 56, 58 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 5
Kracauer, Siegfried, Marx, Karl, 80
and Balázs, Béla, 8, 36, 38, 41, 43, 48, medium-specificity, 3, 12, 44 – 45, 109,
69, 78 114, 133 n. 34, 134 n. 40
and concept of abstractness, 41– 43, Méliès, Georges, 44
45, 73 Metz, Christian, 81– 82
and concept of quality, 42 – 43, 45, 73, Michelson, Annette, 8, 12, 56
83 misuse of perceptual concepts
and early film theory, 45 – 46, 89 – 93 by Allen, Richard, 85 – 86
and Epstein, Jean, 8, 36, 38, 41, 48, by Balázs, Béla, 12 –13, 70 –72, 78
69, 78 by Cavell, Stanley, 15, 87– 89
influence of Romanticism/modern definition of, 12
subjectivity theory on, 36, 41, by Deleuze, Gilles, 15, 17, 95 – 97,
45– 48 126
influence of Whitehead, Alfred North, by Epstein, Jean, 12, 52 – 55, 62 – 69, 78
on, 46 – 48, 73 by Kracauer, Siegfried, 12, 13 –14,
and misuse of perceptual concepts, 12, 72–78
13–14, 72 –78 in modernity thesis, 15, 91– 93, 98
and modernity thesis, 89 – 93 in revelationism, 12 –15
and realism, 44 – 45 in semiotic-psychoanalytical film
and revelation of reality, 43, 72, theory, 15, 84 – 85
123– 24, 129 by Vertov, Dziga, 12, 57– 59, 69, 126
and revelationism, 4 – 8, 19 modern environment theory, 103 – 4
and semiotic-psychoanalytic film modern subjectivity theory, 39 – 40, 41,
theory, 79, 81, 83 45– 48, 104 – 6
148 index

modernism of emotion and mental states, 12 –13,

and antiocularcentrism, 100, 108 38– 41, 59, 62 – 63, 66, 69 –70, 72,
and automation of perception theory, 83, 117– 21
102– 3 of family resemblance, 59, 61– 63, 66,
and Bergson, Henri, 106 68– 69
conception of art, 101– 2, 108 – 9 of mobility, 21– 22, 26 – 28, 49 – 51,
and film theory, 9 –11 93– 94
and fourth dimension, 107 of natural phenomena, 5 – 6, 8
influence on revelationism, 109 –10 of previously concealed truths, 114 – 22
and modern environment theory, 103–4 of reality, 43
and modern subjectivity theory, 104 – 6 of relations, 55 – 59, 125 – 28
and optical unconscious, 99 –100, 108 scientific versus humanistic, 116 –17,
and realism, 9 –11, 109 –10 128– 30
and scientific materialism, 107– 8 of time, 4, 12, 18, 49 – 53, 69, 94 – 97
and Sitney, P. Adams, 101, 108 of unnoticed truths, 122 – 25
and spiritual philosophies, 106 using expressive techniques, 121– 22
and Taylor, Charles, 109 using graphic similarities and
and visual skepticism, 99 –109 contrasts, 126 – 28
modernist conception of art, 101– 2, using variable framing, 117– 22,
108– 9 126– 28, 129
modernist film theory, 9 –11 revelationism
modernity thesis, 14 –15, 89 – 93, 98 and Balázs, Béla, 4 – 8, 19
Mon Oncle (Tati, 1958), 122 – 23 and Cavell, Stanley, 14 –15, 87– 89, 98
Mondrian, Piet, 106, 108 definition of 3 – 5, 9 –11
Motherwell, Robert, 47 and Deleuze, Gilles, 14 –15, 93 – 98
Müller-Lyer illusion, 85 – 86 and Epstein, Jean, 4 – 8, 19
Münsterberg, Hugo, 5, 9 and film style, 11
Muybridge, Eadweard, 5 and Kracauer, Siegfried, 4 – 8, 19
and metaphor, 18 –19, 98
Newman, Barnett, 47 and misuse of perceptual concepts,
Nochlin, Linda, 10 12–15
and modernism, 10 –11, 99 –110
October (Eisenstein, 1928), 76 –78 and modernity thesis, 14–15, 89–93, 98
Olson, Charles, 47 and photographic trace, 4 – 5, 109 –10
optical unconscious, 99 –100, 108 and realism, 10 –11, 109 –10
and scientism, 129
Paulson, William R., 25 and semiotic-psychoanalytical film
Percy, Alfred, 106 theory, 14 –15, 79 – 87, 98
Perkins, Victor, 44 and Vertov, Dziga, 4 – 8, 19
Petric, Vlada, 8 and visual skepticism, 8, 9, 10 –11, 99
Playtime (Tati, 1967), 124 – 25 Ringbom, Sixten, 106
Primary (Drew, 1960), 120 Romanticism
influence on Balázs, Béla, 39 – 40
realism, 9 –11, 44 – 45, 102, 109 –10 influence on Epstein, Jean, 25–26, 34, 62
reflexivity, 83 – 84 and modern subjectivity theory,
Renoir, Jean, 10, 44 39– 40, 105
Resnais, Alain, 94 – 95 and Symbolism, 82
revelation, cinematic and Vertov, Dziga, 36
and aura, 4 and visual skepticism, 105
definitions of, 3 – 5, 15, 113 – 29 Room Film (Gidal, 1973), 83
Index 149

Rothman, William, 88 and Man with a Movie Camera (1929),

Ryle, Gilbert, 14, 15, 55, 57, 72, 110, 34– 37, 56
112, 117 and misuse of perceptual concepts, 12,
57– 59, 69, 126
scientism, 114, 129 and revelation of social relations, 12,
Screen (journal), 83 55– 59, 83, 125 – 26, 128
semiotic-psychoanalytical film theory, and revelationism, 4 – 8, 19
14–15, 79 – 87, 89, 98 and Romanticism, 36
Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock, 1943), and semiotic-psychoanalytic film
115, 117– 22, 126 – 28 theory, 81, 83
Shklovsky, Victor, 102 and visual skepticism, 8, 9, 11, 31– 34,
Singer, Ben, 90 48– 49, 109
Sirk, Douglas, 83 visual skepticism
Sitney, P. Adams, 101, 105, 108, 132 n. 19 and Balázs, Béla, 8, 9, 11, 38 – 41, 49,
Smith, Murray, 130 109
Spiderman 2 (Raimi, 2004), 114 –15 and Epstein, Jean, 8, 9, 11, 21– 25,
Steiner, Rudolf, 106 49– 50, 106, 109
Stites, Richard, 34 and Kracauer, Siegfried, 8, 9, 11,
structural-materialist film, 83 – 84 41– 43, 45, 49, 109
Svilova, Elizaveta, 37 and misuse of perceptual concepts,
Symbolism, 82 12–15
and modernism, 99 –109
Tati, Jacques, 122, 124 critique of, 110 –13
Taylor, Charles, 82 – 83, 109 and revelationism, 8, 9, 10 –11, 99
The Thin Blue Line (Morris, 1988), 114–15 and Vertov, Dziga, 8, 9, 11, 31– 34,
The Three-Sided Mirror (Epstein, 1927), 48– 49, 109
51– 53
time, 4, 18, 49 – 54, 94 – 97 Walton, Kendall, 5
Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl, 1935), 76 Wees, William C., 105
Tsivian, Yuri, 8 Whitehead, Alfred North, 23,
Tuchman, Maurice, 106 46– 48, 73
Tzara, Tristan, 107 Wild Strawberries (Bergman, 1957),
114–15
variable framing, 117– 22, 126 – 28, 129 Window Water Baby Moving (Brakhage,
Vertov, Dziga 1962), 124
and Balázs, Béla, 8, 36, 38, 41, 48, 69 Wittgenstein, Ludwig
and Deleuze, Gilles, 15, 36 – 37, and Augustinian picture of language,
96– 97, 126 52– 54, 96
and editing, 32 – 34 conception of philosophy, 15 –18
and Epstein, Jean, 8, 32, 34, 36, 38, criteria versus symptoms, 71, 115 –16
41, 48, 69 and perception, 12, 95
and expanding circle of modernity, and private language arguments,
125– 26 70–72, 115 –16
influence of Bergson, Henri, on, and seeing aspects, 61– 68
36– 37 and skepticism, 110 –13
influence of cult of machine on, 34 – 36 and time, 52 – 54, 96
influence of Romanticism on, 36 Wyler, William, 10
and Kinoglaz (1924), 56, 58
and Kracauer, Siegfried, 8, 36, 38, 41, Zapruder, Abraham, 89
48, 69, 93 Zsuffa, Joseph, 8