FILM DISCUSSION

Chapter 4

Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze

Two men face each other sitting at a table on which are arranged devices that register eye movement as well as record and measure pupil dilation. The pur­ pose of this set-up is to establish whether the test subject is human or a so-called 'replicant,' an artificial being with the external appearance of a biological organ­ ism. The interview proceeds in orderly fashion until the interviewee feels pro­ voked by a question about his mother, upon which he pulls out a gun and shoots the interviewer with the words, "I'll tell you about my mother." This 'Voight­ Kampff-test' can, by measuring empathy, supposedly distinguish between impas­ sive replicants and empathetic people. Already the opening sequence of BLADE RUNNER (US 1982, Ridley Scott) foregrounds the eye as its central motif. Initially, the eye functions as the organ of truth (and the soul) in a Cartesian sense, given that the boundary between a real human being and an artificial one is regulated by an eye test. Conversely, it is not the active - searching, penetrating, or investigating - eye that serves as a source of knowledge or defines this bound­ ary. Rather, it is through the passive, receptive, or reactive eye turned into an object of investigation that the distinction emerges in this science-fiction film. Wh4t complicates matters further is the fact that Deckard (Harrison Ford), the protagonist who in contrast to the artificial beings seems to have neither a first nam� (normally a strong marker of individuality) nor strong feelings, in the end turns out to be a replicant, 1 while the emotionally more sensitive beings are the artif)cial ones, whose possession of memories makes the division of human and nonhuman even more fragile and porous, if not altogether untenable. Already the very first shot of the film reflects a series of distant gas explosions in a giant pupil, thus firmly establishing the central role of the eye while also alluding, through the motif of reflection, to the precarious status of the eye between sub­ ject 1md object, between being an agent or instrument of control and subject to overwhelming and disempowering sense impressions.

In the present chapter we want to follow some of these leads: while we examine the role of the eye in cinema as an organ of world-disclosure

Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze 95

Figure 4.1 BLADE RUNNER: Voight-Kampff machines police the blurry line between humans and nonhumans.

(because films make us discover the world primarily through sight), we also discuss the unsettling and provisional nature of such disclosure as evidenced in those cases where the look seems to emanate from an apersonal or subjectless source. The look into the mirror, on which the previous chapter focused, pre­ supposed a certain spatial arrangement within which the effects of doubling and splitting functioned as signs of reflection and reflexivity. The mirror also marked the point at which a character's action and its exteriority in relation to the body and the self gave way to an inescapable interiorisation and subjectifi­ cation. Unlike our first two 'ontologies' of cinema, the window and the door, the mirror directly implicated the self in what it sees. The present chapter, with its focus on the eye and the look, sets out to revisit these positions, to expand their inherent interaction and reciprocity, and thereby to complicate them.

In the 1970s and 1980s, film theory saw the emergence of several positions which were strongly influenced by Jacques Lacan's poststructuralist rework­ ing of Freudian psychoanalysis, yet also built on Michel Foucault's theory of the 'panopticon,' a surveillance and self-surveillance prison architecture developed by Jeremy Bentham, as a model for both social control and sub­ jectivity. In this perspective, the eye is the privileged point of convergence for various structures of visibility and looks that in film find their articulation in shot, framing, and montage. Feminist film theory in particular has iden­ tified specific patterns of control and captivation (within the intra-diegetic space, between camera and characters, or between spectators and film) inher­ ent in the look. Similar to the approaches discussed under mirror and face, such thinking presupposes that a certain distance, proper to 'seeing' as a pure act of ocular perception, is maintained throughout. Unlike the frame or

96 Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze

the window, however, this distance does not facilitate or regulate access to the diegetic world, but highhghts the power potential of this arrangement and its promise or threat of mastery or possession.

If we regard the eye as an interface between spectator and film we can dis­ tinguish among several configurations that shape the look and the activity of seeing in different ways. Even before they were adopted and further developed by the cinema, some of these configurations have long been culturally prede­ termined and deeply rooted in the popular imagination. For instance, the eye is central to several myths of agency that range from the creative ( or inner) eye of the Romantic imagination to the evil eye of the ethnic and cultural Other. The benevolent eye of an all-seeing Christian God (as depicted on the US dollar bill) translates into the democratic ideal of an eye that stands for transparency and visibility: the look of enlightenment and reason, characterised by light (le siecle des lumieres) equates eye and sun as sources of knowledge. But the eye and the look can also be the occasion for an unrelenting demand for self-examination to the point of self-incrimination, as demonstrated by the witch-hunts of the Inquisition, by the Stalinist show trials, or any other type of extorted confes­ sion. In each case the guilt that one assigns to oneself is activated by the (imag­ ined) gaze of the Other, which need not be transmitted through looking at all. Opaque and obscure, it can be invisible, while drawing its power in direct proportion to its capacity to remain outside the field of vision. The subsequent organisation of the chapter will follow these two fundamental instances of the look and the gaze - at once, transparent and inoffensive, connoting knowledge and enlightenment, but also dark and malicious, associated with power and subjugation. Many of these configurations can be also found in the cinema, where they translate into the somewhat different dynamics of active and pas­ sive looks on the one hand (with a clear division of subject and object, of power and subjugation), and the all-pervasive, surveillant, and punitive eye on the other hand.

Before turning to these configurations in detail, a brief survey of the his­ tory of the eye in early cinema and classical avant-garde film is in order. The cinematic lens, from its beginnings, has often functioned as a prosthetic eye, serving as a mechanical extension of human perception. The world of a century ago, largely without aviation and private motorcars, knew only the railway as a readily available mechanised means of transportation. 2 Into this world, the cin­ ema burst as an infinitely pliable, unfettered mobile eye: what a sense of elation it must have been to finally possess an organ which was no longer tied to the body and which, thanks to a mechanical invention, could roam and travel freely, could practically become invisible, was barred from almost no place (be it pri­ vate, social, or physical)3 and not only seemed ever-present, but also made time travel possible -- back into history and forward into the future, as for• instance

Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze 97

in Georges Melies' A TRIP TO THE MOON (FR 1902, LE VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE). No wonder, therefore, that films shot from the front or rear of railway trains (so-called 'phantom rides')4 were immensely popular during the early days of the cinema, or that the arriving train has become such a powerful symbol for a force that overcomes all obstacles and reaches even the remotest locations. 5 The disembodied eye was celebrated as a strong illusion of power and omnipotence. One tends to forget that the voyeurism which was to become such an abiding preoccupation for film theory depends on forms of disembodiment, especially the idea of not having to take responsibility for one's bodily presence in a given space or at a given time.

Dziga Vertov's famous avant-garde film MAN WITH A Movm CAMERA (SU 1929, CELOVEK s KINOAPPARATOM) can be understood - in addition to influen­ tial recent readings by Lev Manovich,YuriTsivian, or Jonathan Beller6 - as giving expression to this jubilant eye, a sense organ that discovers the world as if for the first time. When window shutters open in the beginning of the film as eyes onto a new day, and when the daredevil cameraman confronts an oncoming train in another scene to capture it on film without incurring bodily harm, Vertov's 'cin­ ema eye' appears disembodied and all-seeing. Indeed, he and his group of collab­ orators called themselves kino-glaz (cinema eye), evoking the mechanised seeing that challenges "the visual perception of the world by the human eye and offers its own 'I see!'"7 In his writings and films Vertov celebrated the technological dissociation of filmic seeing from the insufficiencies of human perception, that is, the absolute, triumphal (optical) victory of film over the limitations of the human senses and the world they perceive. Walter Benjamin also enthusiastically welcomed the penetration of the human environment by the camera; for him, film facilitated access to the 'optical unconscious,' or all those phenomena that for the first time become observable through enlargement, slow motion, freeze frame, eccentric angles and camera positioning, and time-lapse photography. In this respect, Benjamin sees film not as a realistic medium of representation, but something endowed with the possibility of breaking open the urban space as well as regimented time:

Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hope­ lessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dyna­ mite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. 8

This passionate and poetic enthusiasm for the capabilities of the camera to over­ come the limitations of human perception is typical for the avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s.9

98 Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze

Figure 4.2 MAN WITH A Movie CAMERA:The 'kino-eye' conquering time and space.

In early cinema the metaphorical role of seeing and of the eye is emphasised by the many prostheses with which they are related. In the previous chapter we discussed GRANDMA'S READING GLASS (UK 1900, G.A. Smith), in which a magnifying glass is used to explore not only the limited and enlarged world of the room and of the sewing table but also Grandma's piercing eye, making the spectator uncertain whether it is his/her own look that discovers Grandma's eye, or whether, on the contrary, her angry look is directed at the spectator. Films like As SEEN THROUGH A TELESCOPE (UK 1900, G.A. Smith), THE GAY SHOE CLERK (US 1903), and the French peephole films leave no doubt about the phallic nature of the probing, inquisitive eye: It is through the male gaze, aided by prosthetic devices, that the female body is being explored. These fiims seem to be giving away a secret that classical cinema would be more careful to camouflage -the (male) gaze of power on the (female) body is directly displayed in its voyeuristic nature instead of being narratively integrated. 10

Similarly, the films of German Expressionism are often very explicit in their depiction of the pleasures and terrors of the eye: the heroes of films such as THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (GE 1919, Robert Wiene, DAS CABINET DES DR. CALIGARI), THE STREET (GE 1923, Karl Grune, DIE STRASSE), and NOSFERATU (GE 1922, F. W: Murnau) are all 'Peeping Toms,' whereas Fritz Lang preferred to

Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze 99

stage punitive looks: In the catacombs of METROPOLIS (GE 1926) Rotwang vir­ tually pierces Maria with the pointed beam of his flashlight before letting it glide over her, sadistically exposing and 'undressing' her. The hero of DR. MABUSE (GE 1922, DR . MABUSE , DER SPIELER) has a hypnotising look to which people (must) subject themselves , while Lang's early sound films M (GE 1931) and THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE (GE 1933, DAsTESTAMENT DES DR. MABUSE) turn the complicated relation of seeing and hearing into a major resource of the films' disturbing power (see Chapter 6). However, Lang's visual sadism (or that of his protagonists) is much surpassed by the opening scene of another film from the same period , Luis Bufiuel's and Salvador Dali's UN CHIEN ANDALOU (FR 1928), in which the spectator is confronted in an almost unbearably direct manner with the simultaneous desire and vulnerability of the eye. In a parallel montage we see a (pointed) cloud (optically) pierce the moon while a man slices a woman's eye with a razor. Not only do we encounter here the 'passive' eye familiar from the previous chapter as a window onto the soul (as in LA PASSION DE JEANNE o' ARc, FR 1928 , Carl Theodor Dreyer) or as a blending of the 'Self' with the 'Other' (as in PERSONA , SE 1965, Ingmar Bergman), but we also experience in a brutally literal way the 'gaze' of power. In UN CHIEN ANDALOU this gaze is rep­ resented by the man with the razor (played by Bufiuel himself), whereas in REAR

Figure 4.3 UN CHIEN ANDALou: the desire and vulnerability of the eye.

I 00 Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze

WINDOW it coincides at least briefly with the gaze of Mr. Thorwald (Raymond Burr) when he 'returns' Jeffrey's voyeuristic look of surveillance by storming violently and with murderous intent into the latter's apartment. In much of clas­ sical cinema, by contrast, such punishing gazes appear disembodied, displaced into an imaginary sphere, where neither origin nor direction and addressee are clearly determined. We will focus on this issue in the second part of this chap­ ter; first, however, let us turn our attention to what we have called - using an extremely condensed formulation for a very complex issue - the 'active' eye, and the corresponding look of power and desire.

To understand this mode of seeing in the cinema (as spectator) and this mode of being of the cinema ( as film) it is worth recalling Jean-Louis Baudry's 'appara­ tus theory' (see Chapter 3). The paradigms discussed in the present chapter fol­ low on from Baudry and Jean-Louis Comolli, in that these paradigms emerged in opposition to but also by building on apparatus theory. This theory, it will be remembered, is based first of all on an analysis of the fixed and unchangeable arrangement of ( disembodied, captive, and impressionable) spectators, (fixed) screen, and (hidden) projector, all of which entertain a specific spatial relation­ ship to one another. This arrangement creates an architecture of looks, linking camera, audience, and protagonist(s) that turns the silver screen into an imag­ inary mirror of spectatorial desire. But several steps complicate this notion: Baudry initially premised his theory on an understanding of cinema as dream, but grounded this rather banal and, as we saw, misleading physiological analogy in key issues ofWestern epistemology and ontology; hence his return to Plato, particularly the latter's parable of the cave. Baudry's film theory- which should really be called a theory of cinema, given its emphasis on the specific situation of the audience in the cinema theatre - readily supported both a Marxist cri­ tique of ideology and false consciousness (J.L. Comolli), 11 and a psychoanalytic critique of ego psychology and of bourgeois individualism.

It is the latter critique that Baudry's turn to Jacques Lacan brings to the fore. Involving as it does, thanks to the emphasis on Lacan's so-called 'mir­ ror phase' of subject formation, a quasi-anthropological explanation for the predominance of the sense of sight and of vision in (modern) identity forma­ tion, Baudry's (visual) theory complements Louis Althusser's Marxist version of subject formation via (aural) 'interpellation,' that is, the "hey-you" effect of sensing oneself addressed when hearing the personal pronoun 'you.' W hen born, human beings are not ready for the world, so to speak, and they depend on a nurturing 'outside' to become autonomous. Lacan developed this evo­ lutionary fact into a comprehensive account of why we are caught up in our self-images. Harking back to Freud's theory of the self (id/ego/superego), Lacan also insisted on the distinction between the ideal ego and the ego ideal. W hen identifying with our ideal ego we are being subjected to the gaze of the

Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze IO I

Other, not by having internalised an Other (as our superego), but by imagin­ ing the Other looking, at the same time as we look at ourselves. We habitually adopt this critical look from outside when we check ourselves in the mirror for posture, hair, and attire - the steady restaging of the mirror phase in any reflecting surface, which demonstrates the everyday ordinariness of this drama of self-monitoring as self-consumption. The ego ideal, by contrast, is our idea of the person we aspire to emulate, our role model, our object of idealisation, reverence, and love. A conflict arises because the (imagined) look of the Other is never congruent with our own (narcissistic) look. If one takes these two sides of the ego together, it becomes clear why we can never 'be' ourselves, always oscillating between ideal ego and ego ideal. It is this negative, forever divided view of human subjectivity and identity that Baudry imported into film theory. It suggests that the cinematic apparatus not only mimics Platonic ide­ alism about the unknowability of the world other than through its reflection, but also reenacts the inherently premature or incomplete nature of the human animal at birth, its lack of motor coordination, as well as its inability to provide for its own survival. The cinema thus offers the prosthetic experience of human ontogenesis, staging the drama of'becoming subject' in the form of compulsive repetition. Baudry's film theory is imbued with such deep pessimism that it qualifies as a genuinely 'tragic view of cinema.' It was a provocation to lovers of cinema, who did not relish to see their 'good object' tarnished, but also was not welcome to all of those who especially in the 1970s wanted to believe in the liberating and progressive potential of film.

Given the radical implications of Baudry's theory, it is not surprising that certain aspects of it, if not its entire construction, were soon regarded as prob­ lematic. Here we want to focus on three areas of critique that proved to be par­ ticularly influential for subsequent developments: the function of narrative and narration, the role of gender and sexual difference, and the issue of the historical/ empirical as well as the embodied/ disembodied spectator. As to the role of the eye and the look in the filmic system of narration, we remember that Christian Metz distinguished between primary and secondary identification (Chapter 3), whereby primary identification - the identification with the look of the cam­ era, and thus with the act of filmic narration (or enunciation) - was so deter­ mining that it rendered secondary identification - the identification with (the look of) individual characters - almost irrelevant from a theoretical point of view. The question that the emphasis on primary identification raises is there­ fore how to accommodate cuts and the shifts in camera perspective, in other words, why the discontinuities and ruptures introduced through editing do not seem to break this 'primary' bond with the spectator. Jean-Pierre Oudart, Daniel Dayan, and Stephen Heath - still staying within Baudry's theoretical framework - devised an ingenious 'solution' to this problem, which came to

I 02 Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze

be known as 'suture theory.' The term suture, borrowed from surgery, initially designated the stitching up of a wound after an operation, came into film the­ ory via Lacan and in particular, through an essay by his follower Jacques-Alain Miller, when explaining the processes of binding or enfolding that pertain to subject formation. 12

Without entering into its psychoanalytic ramifications, we can briefly sum­ marise the meaning of suture for film theory as follows: given that it is based on tjie conflation of two looks, that of the camera and that of the spectator, different in �e (that of recording and that of viewing) as well as asymmetrical in agency (the active look of the camera, the passive look of the spectator), pri­ mary identification amounts to an ideological effect. It disguises how this fusion and reversal are brought about, and at what cost, making it inherently unstable. Or �s Stephen Heath puts it ironically: "(T]he eye in cinema is the peifect eye, the steady and ubiquitous control of the scene passed from director to spectator by virtue of the cinematic apparatus."13 The moment of rupture introduced by editing potentially brings the otherwise hidden machinery of vision (the 'appa­ ratus') to the viewer's attention, and thus produces a moment of anxiety and loss, which the subsequent shot has to retrieve, bind up, or stitch together, in short - has to suture. The shot does so - at least in so-called 'continuity editing' (see below) - by a match cut, or aligning the framing, angle, and point of view of both shots, according to a set of rules that ensure that the second shot (cor) responds to the first shot, either at the ocular level (for instance, by establish­ ing a logic of'seeing-seen' between them, also known as 'shot-reverse shot') or by answering an (implicit) question, like: 'where?' - 'here.' What may seem to be a fragile bridge actually turns out to be an especially tight bond: the anxiety on the part of the spectators of losing coherence and the threat of being either abandoned or exposed, become the very glue that makes her /him stick the more fervently to the filmic flow, which is to say, 'identify' with its dominant look. Hence the appositeness of the term suture to mark the force or strength of continuity editing as the technique that not only ensures continuity and the sequential logic of actions, but also as the effect that 'stitches' the viewing sub­ ject into the film thanks to rupture, rather than in spite of rupture. 14 As will be evident, a certain familiarity with the continuity system (which is often equated with classical cinema) is necessary to understand suture theory, so that a brief review of the key rules of continuity editing is in order.

Traditionally, 'continuity editing' names the technique or the set of rules that allow for an inconspicuous compression of space and time at the same time as it creates and maintains a spatial and temporal coherence. How is this achieved? Cuts, or the interruptions of the spatio-temporal structure of a con­ tinuous shot, are usually 'motivated' by the movement, action, and interaction of characters, which also make the spectator overlook the cuts or not perceive

Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze I 03

them as disturbing. Decisive in this respect is the primacy of character-oriented narration, to which all other filmic techniques of composition �. including montage - are subordinated. Film is therefore understood primarily as a nar­ rative medium, not as a medium of pure visuality of pictorial representation (as in the case of the avant-garde), 15 or as a medium of movement and time on an immanent level (as in Gilles Deleuze's film philosophy). 16 Historically, the system of continuity editing has been the dominant style of commercial cinema since the 1920s, so that even where a film does not conform to this system (for instance, Russian montage style, or many Japanese films from the 1940s and '50s), it implicitly refers to this system by breaking or transgressing its norms, firmly established as they are in the minds of the world's spectators since the late 1910s. Films as different as BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (SU 1925, Sergei Eisenstein, BRONENOSEz'PoTEMKIN' ) which we discussed regarding montage in Chapter 1, UN CHIEN ANDALOU (discussed previously), and THE IDIOTS (DK 1998, Lars von Trier, IDIOTERNE) play with (and imply) continuity rules by strategically under­ mining them.

Thus, opponents of suture theory will argue that the logic of narration ( or 'narrative comprehension') provides a much simpler account for the efficacy and persistence of continuity editing (as well as its deviations), without the 'bal­ last' of psychoanalysis.17 On the other hand, it is significant that the continuity system bases itself primarily (if not exclusively) on looks - partly the looks of the characters within the diegetic world, partly imaginary ones - and that the spatial configuration of a film is defined by its lines of sight. One central ele­ ment of spatial coherence is the 180-degree rule: within one scene the camera remains constantly on one side of the action. This side is formed by an imagi­ nary line between major characters, and any crossing of the line is perceived as disruptive or at least as highly problematic. Thus, consistent screen direction is maintained: a movement across a cut continues the (rough, i.e. left or right) direction of the movement, because otherwise the axial line would be crossed. That is why soldiers rushing forward in a war film or characters in a comic slapstick chase always move in the same direction from one cut to the next. At the same time, however, the camera position across a cut must not be too close to the previous one: a shot should deviate from the preceding one by at least 30 to 35 degrees, because otherwise the transition could be perceived as a disturb­ ing 'jump cut' (and, of course, the overall variation within one and the same sequence may not exceed 180 degrees without crossing the axial line).

Additional techniques ensure that spatial continuity is maintained and that cuts are motivated by action. A case in point is the so-called 'eye-line match' or 'point-of-view shot' ('POV'), when we as spectators assume that the shot following the shot of a person looking (intensely) at something presents the object that the character looks at. Spectators interpret this sequence normally

I 04 Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze

Figure 4.4 CASABLANCA: over-the-shoulder shot ensures continuity.

as being from the character's perspective. 18 Generally speaking, any change in the relationships among characters and objects in a film is usually answered by a corresponding change in the type of shot, the passage motivated by movement. A cut in the middle of a movement is less obtrusive and disturbing because the spectator may instinctively follow the continuity of the action across the cut. The continuity of movement and action, therefore, has a stronger impact than the interruption caused by the cut. And finally, parallel montage, the alternat­ ing presentation of two different plot strands - a discovery with which D. W Griffith is usually credited - gives spectators the impression of two simultane• ous events. In Griffith's films, for instance THE BIRTH OF A NATION (US 1915), various action strands converge and find their resolution in a common climax.

The question that arises from these discoveries and their effects is whether these elaborate and quite specific rules of continuity are binding because of some 'hard-wired' aspect of the psychology of human perception, or whether they are indeed ideologically or psychoanalytically determined, corresponding to some 'geometry' of subject formation or subjectification which the 'rules' have merely codified and 'naturalised.' While scholars such as David Bordwell and Edward Branigan have offered detailed rebuttals of suture theory along the lines of cognitive psychology and the spatial logic of ordinary human percep· tion, Slavoj Zizek has mounted a spirited defence of suture as more relevant than

Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze I 05

ever, when trying to understand a number of'postclassical' or art cinema films, notably those of David Lynch and KrzysztofKieslowski.19 In other words, while for its advocates, suture theory explains some of the most powerful features of classical as well as postclassical cinema, namely the ability to weave the spectator not only into the external action but also into the inner world of the protago­ nists through a sophisticated manipulation of look, gaze, framing, and off-screen space, its opponents tend to see merely a metaphysical theory - proven neither experimentally nor empirically - because it is based on tenuous or tautologi­ cal assertions about the relation of perception to bodily integrity in the human infant.

The second main engagement with apparatus theory came from the ranks of emerging feminism and focused on the inscription and role of gender in Baudry's geometrical scheme. As much a refinement as a critique, this modification of apparatus theory also focused on the eye and the look: it posed the question of spectatorship not descriptively but in explicitly polemical terms. The cen­ trepiece of what came to be known as feminist film theory, 'the look' dominated countless debates at least from the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s. If not its first then by far its most succinct and successful articulation can be found in Laura Mulvey's short but pithy essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema."20 Historically, and for the discipline of film studies, Mulvey's theses represent a decisive moment. A manifesto of second-wave feminism, its influence was not only foundational in film theory, but extended well beyond into art history, cul­ tural studies, and even literary theory. Most provocative - and finally, perhaps also most problematic - was its 'anti-aesthetics,' its radical iconoclasm, and its stance against beauty and pleasure: "It is said that analy sing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article" (748). Mulvey, who builds both on Lacan's theory of the mirror stage and on suture theory, implicitly addresses various problems in Baudry's approach, while in a sense she shares his 'tragic' view of cinema. Her main point of departure, however, is the idea that (narra­ tive) cinema is structured primarily by a mobile, dynamic, and wholly asym­ metrical configuration of looks. Following Christian Metz, Mulvey distinguishes among three types of looks that become important in conjunction with any cinematic experience: the look of the camera at the action, the spectator's look at the screen, and, finally, the characters' intra-diegetic looks at one another.

These looks, which do not correlate with the looks of early film and avant­ garde cinema but, instead, represent their 'domesticated' and narratively and spatially embedded form, are organised hierarchically in the Hollywood system and follow a logic according to which the first two (i.e. the look of the camera and the look of the spectator) are subordinated to, if not negated and replaced by, the third one (i.e. the looks of the characters). A classical film acknowledges neither the presence of the camera during the shooting, nor the presence of

I 06 Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze

the audience in the auditorium; instead, both are overridden by the rules of continuity. If the spectators are no longer folded and stitched into the diegetic fiction through looks, for instance when a character looks directly into the cam­ era or when a shot of a character looking is not followed with a shot of his/ her optical point of view, the seamless synchronisation of spatial coherence and temporal succession starts to crack at the seams, as does spectator identification and narrative understanding. The result is a 'cinema of displeasure' in which the usual subject-effects of plenitude or the ideological effects of illusionism deriv­ ing from smooth transitions and involvement in the filmic plot are foreclosed or denied. 21

It is not only the classical decoupa9e that fosters both the voyeuristic process whereby women especially are objectified and the narcissistic process of iden­ tification with an 'ideal ego' that one sees up on the screen, but various other characteristics of the situation in the cinema add to these phenomena:

Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the suppressed desire on to the performer.

(749)

Thus Mulvey formulates a psychoanalytically inflected theory of spectatorship: she locates film's power and fascination in two independent drives. The first is the pleasure of looking (what Freud called 'scopophilia'), a pleasure which treats "other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze" (748). This is apparent in the architectonic set-up of the cinema (the darkness of the auditorium and the brightness of the screen), as well as in the voyeuristic style of classical cinema according to which the presence of the camera and of the cin­ ematic apparatus, as well as the constructedness of the filmic discourse, cannot be acknowledged openly (see earlier discussion). The other source of pleasure in cinema is located in a regression to an earlier stage of development, namely the mirror stage. As we saw in the previous chapter, in the mirror stage an infant of six to eighteen months identifies with its mirror image, which appears to pos­ sess more developed motor abilities. This originary moment of self-recognition is always already a moment of self--miscognition, an idealised self-projection, and this is a decisive characteristic of subsequent processes of identification.

This shift of emphasis onto intra-diegetic looks and the disavowal of the spec­ tatorial position gives, in patriarchal society, rise to yet another effect, which is central to Mulvey's text: "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female" (750). Mulvey's

Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze I 07

Figure 4.5 THE BLUE ANGEL: Dietrich as scopophilic object.

main argument contends that in Holij,wood cinema the normativeij, functioning hierar­ chy ef looks is coded in terms ef gender:'the man looks, the woman is being looked at. The decisive innovation of her approach is her turn from content to form, as she no longer criticises the representation but the mode of representation. While pre­ ceding feminist texts had concerned themselves primarily with women's roles in films, focusing therefore on representation understood as mimetic reahsm, result­ ing for example in an influential study on the depiction of women ranging from repression to rape, 22 Mulvey radicahsed this critique by accusing all films of classi­ cal cinema -be they exponents of positive role models for women or not- of sup­ porting the dominant phallocentric patriarchy and of perpetuating its structures.

Classical Hollywood cinema typically focuses not only on a male protagonist in the filmic narration but also assumes a male spectator ( or a spectator coded as male):

As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence.

(751)

I 08 Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze

Only a few genres such as the melodrama tend to have a female protagonist, and it is not by accident that these genres were often disparagingly referred to as 'women's films' or 'weepies.' An additional problem in these films is that they seem to offer only a masochistic position of identification with the female protagonist and her suffering (see below). Furthermore, according to Mulvey, the presence of the woman in film always denotes a lack, because on a symbolic level a woman brings into play the threat of castration. In such a constellation the film has only two options to avert this 'danger' of castration: fetishism or sadism. The woman is either elevated to the position of fetish ( or part-object), and thus into the realm of the imaginary, as demonstrated according to Mulvey by Josef von Sternberg's films with Marlene Dietrich, or she is punished within the plot for her desire to see, and banished from the symbolic order, by 'regress­ ing' into dependency, as in Alfred Hitchcock's films, notably MARNIE (1964), THE BIRDS (1963), and VERTIGO (1958).

Mulvey's theses have been repeated countless times and in the process have been reduced to a checklist of psychoanalytic concepts such as fetishism, voy­ eurism, castration anxiety, phallus, and disavowal. Generations of student essays have translated her complex if compressed argument into simple assertions such as "the look is male" or "woman as image, man as bearer of the look" (750), "[s] adism demands a story" (753), or "desire is lack." On the other hand, at least two generations of film theorists (whom we can only discuss in passing) have since the 1980s produced sophisticated commentaries on the narratological, gender­ related, and ideological implications of Mulvey's arguments about the cinema and the status of'sexual difference.'

Figure 4.6 VERTIGO: woman banished from the symbolic or der.

Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze I 09

Among the most influential contributions to this on-going dialogue were to cite only the book-length studies - Mary Ann Doane's transposition of Mul­ vey's model to the 'woman's film' ; Teresa de Lauretis' complication of the identification model according to which the woman is always split between an identification with the passive (female) object and the active (male) subject; Kaja Silverman's inclusion of the acoustic dimension of cinema; Tania Modleski's study of women in Hitchcock; Sandy Flitterman-Lewis' analyses of the works of three French female directors (Germaine Dulac, Marie Epstein, Agnes Varda); and Barbara Klinger's historical contextualisation of Douglas Sirk's melodra­ mas. 23The last two studies already suggest how film theory in general opened up towards historical investigations after the highly politicised but somewhat ahis­ torical studies published in the 1970s and early 1980s. What all of these investi­ gations share is the centrality of (male versus female) spectatorship, marked by the paradoxical loss of self (the voyeuristic and scopophilic pleasure of looking at other people, seemingly in secret) and the simultaneous empowerment of self (identification as a double movement of recognition, miscogmtion, and the repression/ disavowal of this miscognition).

Indeed, the historicity of the look, its cultural and temporal diversity, has become a broadening field in film and media theory. Martin Jay and Peter Wol­ len have outlined how' gaze theory' has developed in twentieth-century French thinking from Alexandre Kojeve's Hegel seminars in the 1930s to Lacan, Sartre, and Mulvey,24 thereby contributing to the history of film theory, another more recent field of interest. 21 And in an argument touching on anthropology and the gaze of the ( ethnically) Other, Paula Amad has theorised how the return of the look in documentary material shot in the 1920s in Africa articulates a complex set of (reversible) power relations. 26 The question of the gaze of the culturally and ethnically Other will be discussed further in Chapter 5, which deals with the cinema as a means and instrument of contact and exchange.

Mulvey's essay was also a major contribution to a virulent discussion in the 1970s and 1980s on the topic of women's representation in classical Hollywood cinema. The model that prevailed in the early 1970s can be called the role model thesis and had to do primarily with negative or positive stereotypes. These socio­ logically oriented content analyses were not particularly interested in the filmic mode of representation derived largely from formal parameters; instead, they aimed at a transformation of society through positive role models. 27 More radi­ cal voices from Great Britain - such as Pam Cook or Claire Johnston - accused these analyses of political and social na'ivety:

If women's cinema is going to emerge, it should not only concern itself with substituting positive female protagonists, focusing on women's problems, etc.; it has to go much further than this if it is to impinge on consciousness.

I IO Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze

It requires a revolutionary strategy which can only be based on an analysis of how film operates as a medium within a specific cultural system. 28

Related approaches that also drew their energy from the emerging theory of filmic narration, were the 'repression thesis,' according to which women con­ stitute an inconsistency and fragility in the textual system that film wants to hide and conceal under the surface. 29 The 'disruption thesis' puts forward that the woman means 'trouble' or 'friction' for the system, which generates in turn the core dynamic of a narrative progression concentrated on men. The woman, therefore, is necessary as a trigger (or catalyst), but she does not contribute at all to the resolution of the conflict or problem. The related' containment thesis' relies on the trope of woman-as-turbulence in order to set a narration in motion in the first place. Eventually, however, the woman must once again be 'con­ tained' so that the film may reach an ideologically acceptable ending. 30

In the course of these debates, Mulvey's project was not only advanced but also criticised on a number of accounts, such as for constructing a heterosex­ ist argument by implicitly or inadvertently setting heterosexual identifica­ tion as the norm. 31 Her model leaves no room, so the argument went, for lesbian (or homosexual) identification, to which Mulvey replied in an essay that stressed 'perverse' identification with the male look as a possible sub­ ject position for women. 32 Gaylyn Studlar has suggested that Mulvey overes­ timates sadism as a central source of pleasure, reminding us of masochism as the 'originary' subject position in cinema. 33 Finally, Mulvey was criticised for portraying the ideological construction of a gender-specific identity as a suc­ cessful hegemonic activity, although the patriarchal process of identity con­ struction through cinema might be only partially successful, if not completely failing. From this perspective, Mulvey has been accused of not participating in the deconstruction of precisely the patriarchal structures that she criticises and, instead, of supporting the ideology in its efforts to construct gender­ specific identities through popular culture. By ascribing such great power to the patriarchal system, Mulvey indirectly risked consolidating this power by showing it as overly hegemonic.

It was precisely through analyses of individual films, cycles, or genres that Mulvey's model of absolute dominance was softened and differentiated: in melodrama critics working with different theoretical parameters, such as Linda Williams and Joan Copjec, have identified alternative socio-sexual and psycho­ dynamic structures, whereas fylary Ann Doane has given the debate a Foucauld­ ian twist in expanding melodrama to include the subgenre of'medical' women's films. 34 In horror films the gender-specific architecture of looks (to see/to be seen, intra- and extra-diegetic) shifts once again: Carol Clover has shown how the so-called 'final girl,' or the girl who eventually hunts the monster down,

Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze 11 I

extends an invitation to identify even to rµale teenage spectators, so that in cinema an alternative gender position can be tried out and exchanged in a play­ ful manner, with no direct risks involved. 35 Even in relation to film noir and the

femme fatale some dissenting voices made themselves heard. 36 A good case in point for the deconstruction of the male look as implicit norm

and reference point is THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (US 1990, Jonathan Demme), in which the female protagonist Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) knows that she is being watched (by FBI agents, by Hannibal Lecter, and by her superior), but she uses these looks as the source of a performative empowerment. This explains why the opinions of feminist critics about this film were split: on one side were those who saw the woman's role in this film similar to that in Hitchcock - exposed to the sadistic pleasure of men. On the other side were critics who took Clarice to symbolise the new, postfeminist strong woman. This latter interpreta­ tion puts forward not only a positive (female) role model designed to demort• strate courage and determination but also a woman who must prove herself as a 'professional' in a world of men. In the final showdown Clarice knows that she is being watched without herself being able to see (the scene is set in the dark cel­ lar of Buffalo Bill, who wears a device for night vision), but she retains contrf l and keeps her finger on the trigger.

That THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS caused an intense public debate, demon­ strates how, in the concrete context of cinema, the social force field can influence the reception of a film and therefore the 'subject position' of the spectator(s). 37 The controversy played itself out among feminist theorists, as well as between feminist and gay activists. It was sparked by the film's 'sexual po4ti<:s,' that is, by the significance of Clarice's (and Jodie Foster's) sexuality and gender posi­ tion. Gay activists, on the other hand, perceived Demme's film as homophobic, because it pathologised homosexuality through the figure of James Gumb (or 'Buffalo Bill' ), the serial killer, transvestite, and transsexual psychopath. From the perspective of empirical reception research (audience studies), the power structures in the public space of debate seemed much more important than the power structure inside the closed filmic (or textual) space between camera position (point of view) and subject position (suture). 38

It is remarkable that the film could elicit such contradictory reception posi­ tions without becoming incoherent or losing its popular-cultural and mytho­ logical resonances. On the one hand, this demonstrates once again Hollywood's proficiency: how calculated and market-driven but also consciously ambivalent and ambiguous (post)classical narration must be in order to offer and circulate such diverging reception positions in the first place. But, on the other hand, it also shows how problematic the relationship between the cinematic apparatus as a technology of seeing and making visible - which is cited and allegorised in a self-referential and knowing way in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS -- and the resulting

I 12 Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze

subject theory can be, especially when these two are mutually dependent on each other, as postulated by Baudry and feminist film theory.

Critics of the psychoanalytic and psycho-semiotic approaches in film studies have thus argued that 'apparatus theory' bases itself on a similarly problematic assumption as Descartes: by separating the eye as a part of the brain from the eye as a part of the body, one gives precedence to the eye over all other organs of embodied sense perception, de-corporealising it in the process. In short, such critics lament the focus in classical as well as Lacanian film theory on specu­ lar and visual perception, because it systematically ignores the significance of the spectator's body as a continuous perceptive surface and as an organising principle for spatial and temporal orientation even in the cinema. Apparatus theory, but also feminist film theory, thus strengthens, however inadvertently, the (bourgeois) ideology of looking at films in a disembodied, decontextualised, and dematerialised way, even while accusing mainstream cinema of producing alienated forms of human experience. Furthermore, in their efforts to theorise the cinematic experience, psychoanalytic film theories tend to treat the rela­ tionship between the spectator and the screen as if it were based on a percep­ tual 'illusion' (i.e. as if spectators believed that the objects seen on the screen were really present), when it is equally plausible to argue that what one sees are representations, symbolic constructions or culturally determined images. This has been the line of reasoning among many theorists inspired by cognitive theories of perception and comprehension, when discussing 'identification' and spectatorship. 39

In the following two chapters ( on skin and ear) we will come back to the question of embodied perception. For the moment, however, we want to address the question of the historicity of modes of seeing and forms of per­ ception. As already mentioned several times, throughout the 1980s and 1990s film historiography had contributed to a transformation of the theoretical field. It may have been precisely because the (global) historical changes expected as inevitable in the late 1960s turned out to be illusionary in their anticipated form from the mid-1970s onwards that a new interest in history - partly archival, partly educational, and sometimes even deconstructive - grew out of this dis­ appointment and resignation. In film studies attention turned to, among other things, the 'origins' of cinema,+0 and produced with the 'new film history' a theoretically founded version of the previously unreflected positivist historiog­ raphy. 41 In this process early cinema emerged as an independent field of study where new questions could be asked in a different form and backed up with empirical data. Feminist theory discovered early cinema as a public sphere in which women, unlike in classical cinema, were not marginalised or stereotyped but were allowed both as producers and consumers a modicum of freedom and

Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze I 13

active participation.42 Last but not least, in the larger context of the humanities and social sciences, poststructuralist investigations of historicity and the con­ structedness of history gave rise to a regenerative impulse towards historically­ oriented studies also about film and the media's relation to private and public memory.41

It is in this larger context that the third major critique of Baudry's theory can be located. It focused on the historicity of theory itself, and in particular on the historical imaginary underpinning Baudry's own, seemingly ahistorical because universalising, theory. If one follows apparatus theory to the letter, then any engagement with individual films becomes mere illustration or decoration, since the immutability of the system would seem to crush any variation at the level of the individual work. However, it is quite striking that Baudry developed his influential theory at a time when the spatial arrangement, audience set-up, and projection technology, with which his cinematic apparatus and its 'meta­ physics' are so intrinsically bound up, had already lost much of its supremacy and certainly its claim to 'normativity.' In the 1970s and 1980s it even appeared lik�ly that the cinema in which this apparatus had first been used would not only hand over to television and its 'channels,' but that cinema as a public place was inevitably condemned to extinction. One can therefore assume that the insistence on the insurmountability and omnipotence of the apparatus in his theory was embedded in an ideologically symptomatic, contradictory relation to the dwindling influence that same apparatus began to have in practice. In other words, apparatus theory reacted to the crisis of cinema - which had been caused historically by the development of different audio-visual technologies and by changes in audience behaviour - with a certain kind of mourning work vis-a-vis the cinema in which the loving, nostalgic look of the cinephiles gave way to a special kind of love-hate relationship in the face of cinema's looming demise.44

Given the focus of the present chapter, the look and gaze, too, cannot be exempted from this historisation of its own material, that is, its technologi­ cal, ideological, and political conditions. This is why in the 1980s attempts were made to modify and refine Baudry's theses with the aim of understanding the subjectivities and subject positions shaped by the cinema as historically, socially, and politically variable. Is it possible to treat the cinematic apparatus as an institution not only whose technologies but also whose psychic dimen­ sion can vary depending on the social context to which historical spectators are exposed? In their search for an answer to this question, film scholars have for instance turned to psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich, who in his books about National Socialism and the 'fatherless society' had diagnosed a type of look characteristic of modern societies. According to him, National Socialism

I 14 Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze

is, among other things, a response to a 'narcissistic offence' that modernity afflicted upon men by exposing them to a world of images and looks that do not reciprocate their own. Building on Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer who understood the conservative reaction to Weimar modernity in terms of an' aestheticisation,' Mitscherlich interpreted the public propaganda of images and media orchestrated by the National Socialists as a cultural revolution which tried to organise collectively the eye that returns the gaze, the eye of the benev­ olent father, and the look of the significant other. 45 These reflections proved useful insofar as they tried to uncover the historically-determined conditions of a 'political' history of the look and its ambivalences. The hypothesis of a form of exhibitionism that responds to an invisible look refers implicitly to various strategies of eluding the power of an authority (or of an apparatus of state sur­ veillance) by perversely but productively exposing oneself to it. Popular cul­ ture - from the ostentatious carrying of garbage bags in the 'punk' and 'trash' scene through Madonna's hypersexualisedfemmefatale image all the way to rap and hip-hop appropriating terms of abuse and abject subject positions - has often resorted to this strategy of performing (negative) stereotypes in order to make them empowering, whether known as 'pastiche,' 'parody,' 'signifying,' or 'hiding in plain sight.'

Within film theory rather than cultural studies, the more influential models once again came from France: on the one hand, Jacques Lacan's conceptualisa­ tion of "the big Other" to analyse the potential for power that we have previ­ ously called the opaque or dark look, and on the other hand, Michel Foucault's theorisation of the 'dispositif' of surveillance, which he laid out most clearly in his commentary on the 'panopticon,' Jeremy Bentham's idea of a more 'humane' prison. With this we have moved to the final part of this chapter, namely the 'look as gaze' - the steady stare of power that appears to have no clear origin and is all the more powerful because of it, as demonstrated by the all-pervasive eye of the totalitarian state, certain types of centralised prison architecture, but also by the more common, less visible, but nonetheless ubiquitous state security measures, control mechanisms, and surveillance apparatus, monitoring our movements in real and virtual space.

The origin of the 'gaze,' or the look as a fixed stare or as a scopic regime of control and domination, cannot be located in any specific place or associ­ ated with any specific person. The term 'gaze' encompasses both the historical (Foucault) and the structural (Lacan) dimensions of visual (power) relations. The gaze comprises, envelopes, and dominates all individual looks due to its im- and trans-personal character. The gaze controls the visual field from 'another scene' and enters the domain of the visible at best as a phantasm, because, in a psycho­ analytic sense, it belongs to the realm of the Real, which is to say, it functions as a force that is consistently outside any form of embodiment or representation.

Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze I 15

For (the later) Lacan and his followers (among whom Slavoj Zizek is perhaps the best known in the field of film), the Real is a domain paradoxically characterised by the fact that it cannot be defined other than in relation to what it is not: the Imaginary and the Symbolic, for which the Real marks both the boundary and the unbounded excess.

With specific reference to the gaze, the Real in Lacan's understanding signi­ fies the uncanny fact that under certain circumstances the object of our look looks back at us. For him, the gaze belongs to the object, while the look is of the order of the subject. Even though we may think that we can control our look and thereby an object as well, any feeling of voyeuristic and scopo­ philic power is always undercut by the fact that the materiality of existence, or the Real, always transcends and breaks the meaning and significance that emerge in the symbolic order. One of Lacan's favourite examples, Hans Hol­ bein's painting The Ambassadors, can help us to clarify the relationship between the look and the gaze. At first we recognise in the sixteenth-century painting two affluent gentlemen displaying emblems of wisdom, belief, and wealth. As spectators, we get a feeling of mastering and controlling the scene visually until we discover a strange shape on the lower rim of the painting, a stain that on closer inspection reveals itself to be an anamorphic image: viewed from an acute angle the stain becomes a skull, which gazes at the onlooker. The fact that

Figure 4. 7 Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors ( 1533): the Real as a stain on the symbolic order.

I 16 Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze

the object of the look (in this case the painting) returns our look, serves as a powerful reminder that the symbolic order is separated from the materiality of the Real only by a thin layer of varnish. Normally, the Real lies at the outer lim­ its of our perceptual horizon, still somehow within our field of vision but not immediately recognisable, constantly present yet not consciously so. It is only by putting oneself in a special position at an oblique angle that we can focus on the primordial force of the Real outside the pleasurable recognition afforded by the Imaginary and the social control of the Symbolic. The gaze therefore is external to the human subject, a force not controllable and assimilable that can only be approached in the strangely twisted figure of watching oneself being watched.46

Slavoj Zizek, the most productive and original of Lacan's followers, but also a thinker who often deliberately polarises, provokes, and seems to leave no one indifferent, 47 has acted as an important intermediary in bringing Lacanian ideas to bear on contemporary as well as classical cinema. Practicing a kind of Socratic Hegelianism, his strength lies in the unexpected aptness of his examples, invari­ ably drawn from popular culture, politics, news broadcasts, personal anecdotes, and risque jokes, as well as from opera, classical music, literature, or philosophy. In the case of film theory, instead of using Lacan's highly complex conceptual edifice to explain contemporary cinema, Zizek chooses the opposite path: he explains Lacan with the aid of examples borrowed from sometimes well-known, sometimes obscure films, though Hitchcock and Lynch are clearly among his preferred directors. 48 Given Zizek's productivity- he has over fifty books to his name - it is impossible to do justice to his work in only a few pages. 49 What we shall do instead is to focus on a few motifs that are particularly relevant for our discussion of the gaze and the scopic regime.

VERTIGO, one of Hitchcock's best-known films and also a Zizek favourite, can serve as an example. A key sequence in the film takes place in Ernie's restaurant. Scottie Games Stewart), a former policeman who is suffering from vertigo but now works as a private detective, is sitting at the bar and sees Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) for the first time, a woman he is supposed to tail, while she is having dinner with her husband in the back of the restaurant. Scottie is clearly enthralled by Madeleine's beauty, and he just cannot take his eyes off her. Yet twice in this scene we see shots of Madeleine that cannot be taken from Scottie's subjective position, although this is precisely what seems most logical and is also what Hitchcock interpreters tend to assume. Each of these shots is followed by actual shots from Scottie's point of view. As Zizek writes:

We thus get, twice, the same movement from the excess of 'subjectivity without subject-agent' to the standard procedure known as 'suture' ... The excess is thus 'domesticated,' captivated in being caught within the

Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze I 17

subject-object mirror relationship ... What we encounter in this excess is the look as object, free from the strings that attach it to a particular subject. so

Zizek's rereading of suture, as already indicated, is here not interpreted as a method designed to draw the spectator into the filmic fiction, but on the con­ trary, is given another turn of the screw - by Hitchcock reading Lacan, as it were, and keeping the shots un-sutured. Transgressing the norms of the classi­ cal style, Hitchcock makes visible, for just a second, the always-gaping chasm between camera perspectives coded as 'subjective' and the look of the camera when not attached to a human point of view. While in terms of the story, the un-sutured shots convey some of the hallucinatory power that 'Madeleine' (as image) now has over Scottie, even though she is the 'object' of his look, in terms of our theory, Hitchcock has given us an example of the gaze (the' object' look­ ing at us) as it enfolds and overpowers the look (of Scottie). The gaze, in this sense, is the look "of an impossible subjectivity that cannot be located within the diegetic space."51

Similar and yet opposed to Lacan in several respects is Michel Foucault's famous theorisation of the 'panopticon' as a model of society and subjectivity: according to Foucault, we have internalised the gaze of the Other and integrated it into our own subjectivity to such a degree that there is no longer a need for any (surveilling) person to uphold this system. The fact that we might be observed any time holds us captive in this system even if no one is fulfilling the function of overseer or inspector. The panoptical look emphasises the fact of'being seen' and is little concerned with the active look that we discussed earlier. The flow of power is mainly one-way, and when applied to the cinema, such an all-seeing eye tends to be associated with discipline or self-monitoring rather than with voyeurism or the inscription of sexual difference. Foucault once remarked, in a famous quote as if in response to the distinction made by feminist film theory between narration and spectacle:

Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance .... We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves, since we are part of its mechanism. 52

Paranoia thrillers, such as were popular in the 1970s (THREE DAYS OF THE CON­ DOR, US 1975, Sydney Pollack; THE PARALLAX Vrnw, US 1971, Alan J. Pakula; KLUTE, US 1971, Alan J. Pakula) and have had a comeback with the TV series 24 (US 2001-2010, Fox) and Homeland (US 2011-, Showtime), and films such as FuGHTPLAN (US 2005, Robert Schwentke), THE INTERPRETER (US 2005,

I 18 Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze

Sydney Pollack), THE CONSTANT GARDENER (UK 2005, Fernando Meirelles), SYRIAN/\ (US 2005, Stephen Gaghan), or E/\GLE EYE (US 2008, D.J. Caruso) in the <1-tmosphere of post-9/ 11 concerns with the state security apparatus and its reaches into all spheres of life, readily lend themselves to a mise-en-scene of the panoptic gaze, now no longer centralised but dispersed over a myriad of sur­ veillance devices, of which, once again, not all have to be optical or concerned with vision, MINORITY REPORT (US 2002, Steven Spielberg) is a state-of-the-art showcase for all kinds of surveillance and monitoring devices, even including an actual panopticon, as if to provide its own 'archive' of obsolete technologies.

If one were to use Foucault's notions of discipline and control in order to deconstruct the acts of seeing and looking in a film, one would have to search not only for gender-specific imbalances and asymmetries but also for the way that vision and knowledge are asymmetric in relation to each other: to see is no lon­ ger to know, and ocular verification is no guarantee of truth. Likewise, the struc­ tures of political or economic power are rarely visible, and often too complex or volatile, for human beings to claim 'knowledge' in the sense of mastery. Gilles Deleuze once described Foucault's concept of the gaze as his 'folds of vision,' in order to distinguish it from the ocular pyramid one associates with perspectival vision: "an ontological visibility, forever twisting itself into a self-seeing entity, on to a different dimension from that of the gaze and its objects."53 The panopti­ cal gaze of surveillance, despite the clear geometrical hierarchies that enable its functioning, is thus less tied to an eye than it signals a continuum from inner eye to external monitoring, implicating the gaze of someone who is looking but also the gaze emanating from an empty space, modelled both on power enforced by vision and power relayed by human conscience into 'self-surveillance.'

Finally, Foucault and Lacan are not the only thinkers according to whom the (imagined) gaze of the Other upon the Self is constitutive of the development of subjectivity. In systems theory, Niklas Luhmann has also elaborated on the role of observation of first and second degree in the construction of identity:

Individuals are self-observers. They distinguish themselves through the fact that they observe their own act of observation. In today's society they are no longer defined by their (more or less good) birth, nor by origin or traits that set them apart from all other individuals. Whether baptised or not, they are no longer 'souls' � in the sense of indivisible substances -- that guarantee them eternal life. It is often said of Simmel, Mead, or Sartre that they gain an identity only through the looks of the others; but this happens only if they watch themselves being watched. 54

If w� see in Luhmann's concept of modern self-observation a new societal model, then it coincides with what Deleuze has termed the control society,

Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze I 19

which he predicted was in the process of replacing the disciplinary society, analysed by Foucault in his books on the history of prisons, of clinics, and of human sexuality: not only does power become modular and flexible, developing ever-new forms of binding libidinal energies to work and the body, but vision and visuality are no longer the guiding principles regulating subjectivity; the cinematic apparatus, regardless of how we define it, is less in need of a theory capable of deconstructing it than it is threatened by obsolescence - overtaken by mechanisms of power and pleasure directly engaged with the body. 55

But this already takes us into a realm that has more to do with the body and embodied perception than with the paradigm of the eye that we have explored across two interrelated aspects: on the one hand the active and passive eye of seeing and being seen in feminist film theory, and on the other hand the imper­ sonal gaze that, subject-less from an unspecified position, exerts all the more control. The shift of focus in the following two chapters to the body and its perceptive surfaces, through the concepts of skin and ear, parallels the devel­ opments just sketched and marks a movement toward a stronger anchoring of filmic experience in the spectator as an embodied being.

Notes

At least this is what the so-called 'director's cut' suggests, i.e. the supposedly authentic ver­ sion edited by director Ridley Scott and released theatrically in 1992 (a second 'more authen­ tic' version has recently been released on the home market). More about the genesis, analysis, and interpretation of BL�DE RUNNER can be found in Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner, BFI Mod­ ern Classics (London: British Film Institute, 2000), and Will Brooker (ed.), The BLADE RUNNER Experience: The Le9acy of a Science Fiction Classic (London: Wallflower, 2005).

2 For the interrelation of cinema and modernity sec Stephen Kern, The Culture oj'Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds.), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), and Francesco Casetti, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

3 Cinema gave women access to public entertainment, which had previously been reserved for men alone - an important factor in the appeal of early cinema to female spectators. More on this topic can be found in Heide Schliipmann, The Uncanny Gaze: The Dmma of Early German Cinema, trans. Inga Pollmann (Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010), and Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991 ).

4 For more on 'phantom rides,' see Tom Gunning, "An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film," in John A. Fell (ed.), Film Before Griffith (Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1983), 355-366.

5 See Catherine Grant's video essay "The Arrival of the Train Revisited" at http:/ /vimeo. com/41351769 (11 June 2014).

6 See Lev Manovich, The Lan9ua9e of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); YuriTsiv­ ian, "MAN WITH A MovrE CAMERA, Reel One: a Selective Glossary," Film Siµdies:An International Review, Issue 2 (Spring 2000): 51-76, as well asTsivian's audio commentary to the DVD ver­ sion published by the British Film Institute; and Jonathan Beller, "Dziga Vertov and the Film of Money," Boundary 26 no. 23 (Fall 1999): 151-199.

120 Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze

7 Dziga Vertov, "Kinoks: A Revolution" (orig. Russian 1923), in Annette Michelson (ed.), Kino­ Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, trans. Kevin O' Brien (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 11-21, here 21.

8 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Benjamin, llluminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken 1969), 217-252, here 236.

9 An attempt to identify a distinct body of fllm theory around the mobile eye is made in Mal­ colm Turvey, Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

10 See note 20 and the discussion of Laura Mulvey's influential theory below. 11 Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, "Cinema/Idcologie/Critique," Cahiers du cinema, no.

216 (October 1969): 11-15 . 12 A seminal essay in this context was Jacques-Alain Miller's "La suture," Cahiers pour/' analpe,

no. 1, 1966, which was published in English, not accidentally, in a film-theoretical context: "Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signitler," Screen 18, no. 4 (1977): 24-34.

13 Stephen Heath, "Narrative Space" (orig. 1976), Qgestions of Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1981), 19-75, here 32, italics in original.

14 A central text on the subject is Jean-Pierre Oudart, "Notes on Suture," Screen 18, no. 4 (Win­ ter 1977-78): 35--47; orig. French, "La suture," Cahiers du cinema, no. 211 (1969): 36-39, and no. 212 (1969): 50-55. Intluential in the 1970s was Daniel Dayan, "The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema," Film Qgarterly (Fall 1974): 22-31. This latter text preceded the publication in English of Ou dart's text but narrowed the discussion unnecessarily to the shot-countershot technique. Another seminal text of this debate is Stephen Heath, "Notes on Suture;' Screen 18, no. 4 (Winter 1977-78): 48-79 (available onlinc at http:/ /www.lacan.com/symptom8_ articles/heath8.html, 1 Sept 2014). Retrospective overviews and further elaborations can be found in Kaja Silverman, "Suture," The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 194-236, as well as in the paradigm of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, "Back to the Suture," The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kiellowski Between Theory and Post-Theory (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 35-54.

15 See Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1995).

16 See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Hab­ berjam (London: Athlone Press, 1986; orig. French 1983), and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989; orig. French 1985).

17 For an early critique of the idea of suture, see William Rothman," Against 'The System of the Suture,"' Film Qgarterly 29, no. 1 (1975): 45-50. A major polemic against suture theory spe­ cifically can be found in Noel Carroll, Mysc!fying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 183-199.

18 This is in principle no different than the so-called 'Kuleshov effect.' In a famous editing (or montage) experiment in the 1910s, the Russian film director Lev Kuleshov inserted between two identical shots of the actor Ivan Mozjukin a bowl of soup, a woman's face, and a child's coffin. In each case, spectators (mis)took Moszjukin's second (reaction) shot as expressing hunger, love, and sorrow, even though it was in fact the same image.

19 David Bordwell, Narration and the Fiction Film (London: Routledge, 1987); Edward Bra­ nigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (New York: Routledge, 1992); Zizek, The Fright of Real Tears.

20 Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6-18. The text has been reprinted in numerous anthologies. We will be quoting from Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 4th ed. (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 746-757. All further citations in the text will be from this version.

Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze 121

21 Mulvey believes that this can be changed only on the level of film practice through a film form that denies any scopophilic pleasure (the pleasure of looking) and any spectator satisfac­ tion that might be derived from a narcissistic ego-identification (in the case of men) or from fetishism and castration anxiety (in the case of women). In that period, Mulvey put this into practice, most notably in her tllm RIDDLES OF THE SPHINX (UK 1977, with Peter Wollen). The relationship between theory and practice was generally an important aspect of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s - sec for instance the two influential magazines Women and Film (1972- 1975) in the United States and Frauen und Film in Germany (since 1974).

22 Probably the most important study on this topic published shortly before Mulvey's polemic was Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment efWomen in the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1974).

23 Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloom­ ington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984); Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988) - see also Chapter 6 on the ear; Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (London, New York: Methuen, 1988); Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema (Urbana, Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Bar­ bara Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Blooming­ ton, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994).

24 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), and Peter Wollen, "On Gaze Theory," New Left Review++ (March-April 2007): 91-106.

25 See the transnational project "The Permanent Seminar on Histories of Film Theories," which occupies itself with conferences and translations, at www.filmtheories.org

26 Paula Amad, "Visual Riposte: Looking Back at the Return of the Gaze as Postcolonial Theory's Gift to Film Studies," Cinema journal 52, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 49-74.

27 The classical studies in this Held are Marjorie Rosen, Popcorn Venus:Women, Movies and the Ameri­ can Dream (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973); Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape;Joan Mellen, Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film (New York: Horizon, 1974).

28 Claire Johnston, "Women's Cinema as Counter Cinema," in Claire Johnston (ed.), Notes on Women's Cinema (London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1972), 25.

29 Pam Cook and Claire Johnston, "The Place of Woman in the Cinema of Raoul Walsh," in Patricia Erens (ed.), Issues in Feminist Film Criticism (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 19-27.

30 On this topic, see the exemplary analyses by Raymond Bellour, available in The Analysis of Film, (ed.) Constance Penley (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), or the collection of essays by Stephen Heath, Qyestions of Cinema (London, Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1981).

31 For more on this, 'see the special issue "The Spcctratrix," (eds.) Mary Ann Doane and Janet Bergstrom, of Camera Obscura, no. 20/21 (1990).

32 Laura Mulvey, "Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure;' Framework 15-17 (1981): 12-15. 33 See Gaylyn Studlar, In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 34 See Linda Williams, "Melodrama Revised," in Nick Browne (ed.), Refi.guring American Film

Genres: Histo1y and Theory (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 42-88; Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: LacanAgainst the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Mary Ann Doane, "The Clinical Eye: Medical Discourses in the 'Woman's Film' of the 1940s," in Susan Rubin Suleiman (ed.), The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cam­ bridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 152-174.

35 See Carol Clover, Men,Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (London: British Film Institute, 1992).

36 See E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir, new edition (London: British Film Institute, 2005).

122 Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze

37 Janet Staiger, "Taboos and Totems: Cultural Meanings of THE S1u,NCE OF THE LAMBS," in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins (ed.), Film Theory Goes to the Movies, AF! Film Readers (New York, London: Routledge, 199 3), 142-154. An extensive analysis of'THE SILENCE m THE LAMBS can be found in Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland, Studyin9 Con­ temporary· American Film (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), 249-283.

38 For more on reception studies and film see Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators:The Practices cf Film Reception (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

39 Several of these position can be found cogently argued in Richard Allen, Projectin9 Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression cf Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Murray Smith, En9a9in9 Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

40 See for example Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art ef Li9ht and Shadow:Archaeoloar cf the Cinema, trans. Richard Crangle (Ext,ter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), and Stephen Herbert, A History ef Pte-Cinema, 3 vols. (London, New York: Routledge, 2000).

41 By way of a short introduction, see Thomas Elsaesser, "The New Film History," Si9ht and Sound 55, no. 4 (Autumn 1986): 246-251. A monographic application/implementation is offered by Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice (New York: Knopf, 1985).

42 For a recent overview, see Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (eds.), A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2002). See also the work by Miriam Hansen and Heide Schliipmann cited in note 3.

43 What comes to mind in this context are the works of Hayden White or the New Historicism advocated by Stephen Greenblatt and others. For applications to cinema, see Vivian Sobchack (ed.), The Persistence ef History: Cinema, Television and the Modern E"ent, AF! Film Readers (Lon­ don, New York: Routledge, 1996).

44 For further elaborations of this position as well as for alternatives see Marijke de Valek and Malte Hagener (eds.), Cinephilia: MoFies, Love, and Memo1y (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univer­ sity Press, 2005).

45 Alexander Mitscherlich, Society Without a Father (New York: Schocken Books, 1970). With specific reference to cinema: "Might not the perverse pleasure of fascism, its fascination have been less the sadism and brutality of SS officers, but that of being seen, of placing oneself in view of the all-seeing eye of the State? . . . Fascism in its social imaginary encouraged a moral exhibitionism, as it encouraged denunciation and mutual surveillance. Hitler appealed to the Volk, but he always pictured the German nation as standing there, observed by 'the eyes of the world.'Thc massive specularisation of public life, famously diagnosed by Walter Benjamin as the 'aestheticisation of politics,' might be said to have helped institutionalise that structure of'to be is to be perceived' which Fassbinder 's cinema never ceases to interrogate."Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder's Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 93.

46 The painting is situated in the National Gallery in London. For more about the painting see Susan Foister, Ashok Roy, and Martin Wyld, Holbein's Ambassadors (London: Yale University Press, 1998).

4 7 See for instance the debate between the mutually antagonising forces of Zizek and David Bordwell. Zizck has taken Bordwell to task for what he understands as Bordwell's advocacy of 'post-theory' in The Fri9ht ef RealTears: KI7ysztef Kieslowski Between Theory" and Post-Theory (Lon­ don: British Film Institute, 2001). Bordwell replies on his blog, "Slavoj Zizek: Say Anything;' (posted April 2005): http:/ /www.davidbordwell.com/ essays/zizek.php (1 Sept 2014).

48 Slavoj Zizek, Everythin9 You Alwap Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock (London: Verso, 1992).

49 For an overview, see Rex Butler, Slavoj .Zizek: Live Theory (New York: Continuum, 2005). 50 Slavoj Zizek, Or9ans without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (London, New York: Rout­

ledge, 2004), 151-162, here 154. 51 Slavoj Zizek, The Fri9ht efRealTears, 34.

Cinema as Eye - Look and Gaze 123

52 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 217.

53 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 111. 54 Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer­

sity Press, 2000; orig. German 1995), 93. 55 See here Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on Control Societies," Negotiations, /972-1990, trans.

MartinJoughin (NcwYork: Columbia University Press, 1995), 177-182.