JISCMail - FILM-PHILOSOPHY Archives

PERSPECTIVE-REALISM. Perspective rendering of a scene (photographic, cinematic, pictorial in general) does not entail "realism", and in my text there was no reference to "realism". A perfect perspective rendering can be "nonrealistic" - fantastic (surrealism, fantasy films...), extremely stylized on any other accounts... as well as "realistic","naturalistic". And, partial perspective or distorted perspective renderings can be accepted as realist (e.g. Otto Dix; optical - and perspective - distortions in rendering subjective experience of character in highly realistic film) as well as the "perfect" perspective ones. Perspective images can be given a variety, even the opposite stylistic usees. Question of realism is on the different conceptual (stylistic) level from the question of perspective, especially in photography and film.

VANTAGE POINT-SUBJET ASSUMPTION. Now, the idea that perceptual vantage point is ' necessarily (surely?) that of a positioned subject', is (sorry!) just a dogma. As you yourself asserted, vantage point is just "one place in the space of possible places", it is an optical availability , a 'slot', not bound to any particular observer/'subject' (it is not "bodily entreched" - as our eyes and our personal viewpoint is), thou, of course, offered, 'afforded' to any viewer of a perspectively rendered scene, and available to additional ('subject') ascription (specification whose point of view particular perceptual vantage point may particularly be).

Now, the assumption that the single viewpoint of the 'Renaissance perspective' introduces a single viewing subject, and, by the same token, a 'subjective glance' into the history of visual art (and 'automatically' into the photography, and cinema) has one of its roots in Panofsky (on perspective as symbolic form), and is today widely shared, and reiterated mindlessly. But it is based on the misconceived understanding of one of the Renaissance targets (to achieve 'scientific objectivism'), and the real importance of Renaissance cultural achievement. By the discovery of the single viewpoint perspective system Renaissance artist and theorists discovered how to objectivize something that had been otherwise (and still is) 'subjective' by default in human experience: what I see at any particular moment from my viewpoint cannot be seen from that viewpoint at that moment by any other person, because of a simple physical law - two bodies cannot occupy the same place at the same time. And, additionally, no one (even myself) cannot see later the same view from the same viewpoint I see it now; the particular temporal and spatial view cannot be experienced again from some spatially and temporally distant position, it is lost for any other spatial and temporal position of viewing by any person (of course it is not totally lost for memory imagery). The discovery of the single-view perspective rendering offered the way to overcome these subjective, spatial and temporal limitations of our perception of the world, and offered an objectivized - intersubjective, inter-spatial and inter-temporal - sharing (socialization) of the same view from the same position. This was the basis, I believe, of experiential, but also of cultural, fascination with the discovery of full perspective, and its fast spread.