FILM DISCUSSION

Elsaesser and Hagener (E+H),”Chapter 4: Cinema as Eye- Look and Gaze”

This chapter takes on what is perhaps an obvious feature of cinema (and something that has been implicit, and even explicit, in the previous chapters). That is, the importance of and role of vision in cinema (p.94) in this chapter they explore ‘the role of the eye in cinema as an organ of world disclosure (because films make us discover the world primarily through sight)

In the last few chapters, E+H have tried to argue: cinema positions us, with both proximity and distance, to the screen and to the worlds that cinema creates for us. This positioning is done primarily through the experience of vision And cinema addresses us at several levels: at the level of story (it engages us and invites us in) and addresses us at the level of apparatus (at the level of the screen, projection, the shot, framing and editing). In the 1970s and 1980s, E+H note that film theory became very interested in the apparatus of cinema. Or how the technology of cinema “is a mental machine that appeals to our psychic structures and ways of knowing and feeling”

At this time, film theory becomes interested in how cinema (at the level of both form and content) is participant with systems of control (and how it might be also used to interrupt or disrupt these same systems) In the 1970s and 80s, film theory developed a somewhat dark vision of the cinema, using concepts from Lacan and Foucault, theorists began to theorize how cinema was an ideological force, drenched with issues of power and surveillance At this time, film theory devises two key terms to address issues of power and control as it is related to vision in the cinema: The look The gaze

Before they investigate 70s and 80s film theory, E+H look to film history to see how the eye – the bearer of the look – has appeared in early film (p. 96) The cinematic lens, from its beginnings, has often functioned as a prosthetic eye, serving as a mechanical extension of human perception… into this world (without cars or airplanes, but with trains) the cinema burst as an infinitely pliable, unfettered mobile eye: what a sense of elation it must have been finally to possess an organ which was no longer tied to the body and which, thanks to mechanical invention, could roam and travel freely, could practically become invisible, was barred form almost no place (be it private, social or physical) and not only seemed to be ever present, but also made time travel possible— back into history and forward into the future…

Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929) depicted a jubilant eye, a sense organ that discovers the world, liberating the eye from the limits of human mobility or perception

But a darker vision and version of the camera eye began to emerge – both within early cinema and then in theories about how cinema was producing experiences for the viewer E+H trace the emergence of what would become classical Hollywood film—the emergence of a film language that emphasized story and narration and the production of realist and continuous space through continuity editing They also trace the emergence of other film languages in the European avant garde--- languages that begin to centralize questions of power and agency. And how cinema becomes a particular kind of experience –uniform and industrialized

Which led to the emergence of apparatus theory in the 70s (p. 100) 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) screens and (hidden) projector, al of which entertain a specific spatial relationship to one another….Baudry's film theory—which should really be called a theory of cinema, given its emphasis on the specific situation of an audience in the theatre- readily supported both a Marxist critique of ideology and false consciousness and a psychoanalytic critique of ego psychology and bourgeois individualism. This theory matched Marxist critique (with its emphasis on ideology), to psychoanalysis (with its emphasis the development subjectivity), to produce a theory of film that was ‘tragic’. Or seemed to suggest that the cinematic apparatus mimics and enshrines power dynamics and molds its audience. In this theory, cinema is like a hypodermic needle of ideology and the spectator is injected and passive. Yikes!

1970s film theory tried to figure out how cinema cast its spell on the spectator. A theory of ‘suture’ emerged: (p. 102) Without entering into its psychoanalytic ramifications, we can briefly summarize the meaning of suture for film theory as follows: given that is based on the conflation of two looks, that of the camera and that of the spectator, different in time (that of recording and that of viewing) asymmetrical in agency (the active look of the camera, passive look of the spectator) primary identification amounts to an ideological effect According to this theory, the viewer is stitched into the film, caught in the web of exchanged looks and this immersion into the world of the film is seamless and seems to happen unconsciously and makes us feel like we are experiencing the film first hand (when in fact we are subject to its manipulation)

E+H tell us about suture theory and they also let us know that this theory has its critics, namely people who were dubious about its reliance on psychoanalysis and its very conceptual ideas about early childhood experiences (described below as tenuous and tautological) (p. 105) In other words, while for its advocates, suture theory explains some of the most powerful features of classical as well as post classical cinema, namely the ability to weave the spectator not only into the external action but also into the inner world of the protagonist through a sophisticated manipulation of look, gaze, framing, and off screen space, its opponents tended to see it as merely as a meta physical theory—proven neither experimentally nor empirically—because it is based on tenuous or tautological assertions about the relations of perception to bodily integrity in the human infant

E+H then tell us about Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (see module 5a.) (pp. 106-107) E+H summarize Mulvey's main argument. Her essay is a polemic, a forcefully argued treatise against the sexism she sees in Hollywood cinema: 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 calls ‘scopophilia), a pleasure which treats ‘other people as objects, subjecting them to a curious and controlling gaze.” This is apparent in the archetonic setup of the cinema (the darkness of the cinema and the brightness of the screen) as well as the voyeuristic style of classical cinema….The other source of pleasure in cinema is located in a regression to an earlier stage of development, namely the mirror stage

She argues that cinema is ideologically sexist, contending that in Hollywood cinema the normatively functioning hierarchy of looks is coded in terms of gender, the man looks and the woman is looked at (p. 109) E+H then discuss how responses to Mulvey and apparatus theory more generally opened up a mode of critique that tried to historicize the look and the spectator, to push against the tendency in psychoanalysis to posit a universal subject that is does not really take into consideration differences among spectators (gender, sexuality, race, class, nationality)

And they discuss the film Silence of the Lambs to investigate how people’s responses to films were affected by all sorts of things that existed beyond the single experience of watching a film—meaning doesn’t only come from the film itself (p. 111) That the Silence of the Lambs caused an intense public debate, demonstrates how, in the concrete context of cinema, the social force filed can influence the reception of a film and there the ‘subject position of the spectator.’ Not everyone viewed the film the same way. And critics pointed out that the eye is not separated form the body and that different bodies (gay, straight, Black, brown, female, queer, non western) would have different experiences of the eye (p. 113) Is it possible to treat the cinematic apparatus as an institution not only whose technologies but also whose psychic dimensions can vary depending upon the social context to which historical spectators are exposed?

The rest of the chapter is dedicated to highly conceptual discussion of “The Real” and a philosophical excavation of the “Imaginary and the Symbolic” which E+H illustrate through a discussion of Zizek. This material is very dense exceeds the limits of what you are expected to read or understand and so please skim from pp. 114 on (if you haven’t already)