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f i l m - p h i l o s o p h y
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Jan-Christopher Horak
The Archeology of Vision
_The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography_
Edited by Dudley Andrew
Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1997
ISBN 0-292-70476-3
331 pages
In his introduction to _The Image in Dispute_, Dudley Andrew notes that his
volume is about 'the politics of Representation' and 'its evolution from
classical to modern conceptions of the image'. The published proceedings of
a 1992 Obermann Faculty Research Seminar at the University of Iowa, The
Image in Dispute: Visual Cultures in Modernity, Andrew's volume
nevertheless seems to be less about constructed images than about vision:
Vision as a form of knowledge, as a means of ordering the chaos of the
world. In this sense, the volume tries to reframe many of the film
theoretical debates of the last century, while at the same time
contextualizing the evolution of cinema as one more paradigm in a
continuously evolving discourse on vision and modernity. As is often the
case with such anthologies, the volume displays a high degree of
heterogeneity, yet it is to the credit of its authors that individual
essays are consistently rewarding.
The most thought provoking chapter in the volume is undoubtedly Jacques
Aumont's essay, 'The Variable Eye, or the Mobilization of the Gaze', which
is translated here for the first time. Explicitly critiquing much of the
structuralist and postmodern film theory that has dominated film studies
for the last twenty years, Aumont locates the genesis of cinema in late
seventeenth century painting, in particular, in the development of the
etudes (as opposed to the ebauche). Contradicting materialist 'apparatus
theories', as put forward by Jean-Louis Baudry, Stephen Heath and others,
Aumont downgrades the importance of the development of Renaissance
perspective as a key factor in cinematic vision, focusing instead on the
art historical moment that he defines as the genesis of a modernist vision.
While the ebauche utilized optical devises to construct an exact replica of
a given scene, the etudes was a rapidly executed sketch that documented the
artist's first impression. At stake here is not so much an aesthetic
technique, as a wholly different mode of perception. Monocular vision,
geometric perspective, and an omnipotent point of view, give way to a
modern vision, encompassing multiple perspectives, subjectivity, and the
overt acknowledgment of a spectator's gaze. In the words of Aumont: 'What
matters in this effort to seize a fleeting moment and, at the same time,
understand it as fugitive and aleatory . . . is the emergence of a new
vision, of a new confidence in seeing as an instrument of knowledge, even
of science'.
Aumont then goes on to discuss such 19th century phenomena as the railroad,
photography, panoramas, and mountain climbing as part and parcel to a new
vision, which will culminate in the cinema as a cultural practice. What all
these practices have in common is their inscription of the spectator and
his/her mobile gaze, whereas the camera obscura's earlier form of exacting
vision presupposed the immobile gaze on an object without a subject. Even
more surprising, Aumont returns to the texts of such classical film
theoreticians as Hugo Munsterberg, Bela Balazs, and Andre Bazin, arguing
that the cinema can 'thus be described as a symbolic machine for describing
points of view', while the 'film spectator implies a 'variable eye',
subject to relentless processes of historical change', in the words of
translator Charles O'Brien. Aumont's argument draws on modernist aesthetic
concepts of 'a new vision' (multiplicity of perspectives) to define the
cinema as the modernist medium par excellence.
Concepts of vision also inform numerous other essays in the volume,
beginning with John Durham Peters's eclectic meditation on Walter Benjamin,
'The Ambivalent Iconoclasm of Kierkegaard and Benjamin'. Peters analyzes
the iconoclast's prohibition of image-making as a moral choice to resist
the temptation of vision, of treating subjects as objects and objects as
subjects. According to Peters, 'the image evokes anxieties about hubris,
fetishism, prostitution, necrophilia, adultery, and lust'. Dudley Andrew's
analysis of Francois Truffaut's _Jules et Jim_, while focusing more heavily
on an analysis of a particular film, does reference Benjamin's notion of
cinema as a casual form of narrative, potentially capable of expressing a
multiplicity of points of view.
Citing Benjamin's essay on 'The Return of the Flaneur', Anke Gleber and
Lauren Rabonowitz, on the other hand, discuss the appearance of a female
spectator, a female flaneur in public places, such as the streets of Weimar
Germany and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, respectively. Both make the
point that while unescorted, respectable women had begun cautiously to
enter previously forbidden public spaces, e.g. the street -- the literature
from Benjamin to Kracauer still ignored or denied the existence of a
flaneuse, because these authors couldn't conceptualize anything like a
female subjectivity. Both contributors then go on to identify female
flaneurs: Gleber finds a window shopper in _Berlin, die Sinfonie einer
Grossstadt_ (1926), whom male critics have previously identified as a
prostitute (what else would a woman in a forbidden zone be doing?), while
Rabnowitz discovers in popular late 19th century cartoons from the Chicago
World's Fair the triangular gaze of men looking at women and women looking
at the scene.
Aumont's 'mobilization of the gaze' is also a key concept in James Lastra's
discussion of photography and early cinema as not only new media in the
19th century, but, more importantly, ontologically different ways of
organizing visual impressions. While classical painting organized 'every
pictorial element' into a legible, signifying whole, the new photographic
media suffered from an overabundance of visual information that could not
possibly be contained by a homogeneous signifying practice. Furthermore,
while the former presupposed an ideal, even omnipresent subject, the new
media stipulated an invisible, yet specific subject 'who is part of the
same world as the represented scene'. In such a scenario, the random and
the accidental are constituent elements of the work, allowing for the
notion that 'vision and experience could be artistic phenomena in their own
right'. The challenge of classical modes of cinema, then, was to
incorporate such forms of vision within a legible system of signification.
Both Robert B. Ray and Timothy Corrigan expand on these arguments in
reference to amateur snapshot photography and new video technologies,
respectively. Corrigan, in particular, relativizes Jurgen Habermas's
concept of the public sphere, stating that the 'private' modes of
video-image-making, privileging the immediate, unstructured, and constantly
fluctuating nature of vision, have come to redefine public forms of
narrative, away from stable forms of signification (as in classical film
narrative) to images that are constantly in the process of renegotiation.
In this sense, the image is truly in dispute.
Universal Studios
Universal City, California, USA
November 1998
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Jan-Christopher Horak, 'The Archeology of Vision', _Film-Philosophy:
Electronic Salon_, 16 December 1998
<http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/horak.html>.
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