Thank you to William for reminding me of his recent presentation at the 'Texture in Film' symposium at St Andrews.
Indeed, the sequence you mentioned in Fincher's 'Fight Club' - (the movement of the virtual camera through photorealistic space) speaks of a notionally unreal or 'virtual' embodiment. Yet isn't the active constituent here the quality of movement and getting beyond the screen's surface? (Stills say so much less...)
I've found my way in to thinking about the phenomenology of texture and tactility in the things on the screen, and understanding what's beyond, and our sensual identification with moving images through, first;
Barker, J. M. (2009) The Tactile Eye: touch and the cinematic experience. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Then back to Merleau-Ponty, who still has important things to say about embodiment.
William's suggestion of 'entanglement' is interesting. Are we less or differently entangled with a still image to one that contains or re-creates movement?


Gavin Wilson
PhD Research Candidate
The Graduate Centre
York St John University
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Skype i.d.: gavinwi

-----Original Message-----
From: Film-Philosophy [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of William Brown
Sent: 08 May 2013 15:16
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [FILM-PHILOSOPHY] floating POV

Ahem - apologies to mention my own work, but a fair amount of it is on this topic - in part if not on the whole.

And even though it is distasteful, it seems as though we live in times during which promoting one's own work is de rigueur - since no one else is going to do it...

2013: Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age, with Berghahn, May 2013.

2011: 'Deterritorialisation and Schizoanalysis in David Fincher's Fight Club' (with David H Fleming), Deleuze Studies, 5:2, pp. 275-299.

2009: 'Man Without A Movie Camera - Movies Without Men: Exploring the Post-Humanism of Digital Special Effects,' in Warren Buckland (ed.), Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies, London: Routledge, pp.
66-85.

Allegedly Forthcoming: 'Voiding Cinema: Subjectivity Beside Itself, or Unbecoming Cinema in Enter the Void' (with David H. Fleming), submitted to Film-Philosophy. (I saw Greg Hainge mentioned his own work on this film - it's a good film to look at in relation to these
issues.)

And to a lesser extent in:

2009: 'Beowulf: the digital monster movie,' in animation: an interdisciplinary journal, 4:2, pp. 153-168.

And I also have a bit on impossible shots, 3D and Scorsese's Hugo that I presented at SCMS this year, and which I'm hoping to place somewhere (keep eyes open). But the editorial board I have currently approached have not responded in a few weeks... But this is typical. Obviously not important enough!

As for the issue of what to call it... Well, there's been a whole discussion, most of which I've not had time to read because of other constraints at present. But I personally come via Deleuze at it...
Although if we were to call this kind of image something, my most recent thinking has been about calling it an 'entangled image'... Why?
Because the movement of the virtual camera through photorealistic space - passing through solid objects as if they were not solid - suggests that space and all that fills it (really, all that constitutes space itself) is on a single, indivisible continuum (space is not divided in such shots into multiple shots via cuts). That is, we are connected to the so-called empty space that surrounds us - in such a fashion that we are, after Niels Bohr and with work by Karen Barad in mind, entangled. This is the argument in part of Supercinema
- but I'd only read some Barad by the time that was in the printer, and have been reading more since... I wonder that Patricia Pisters'
neuro-image begins to speak of something along these lines at times, but its emphasis on the neuro arguably suggests an ongoing anthropocentrism that the image may not necessarily suggest.

(I should probably acknowledge that Aylish Wood, Lisa Purse and Jenna Ng, among others, are working on/with similar ideas at the moment...)

(And work on the mobility of the virtual camera also comes to mind in work by Kristen Whissel, Tobey Crockett, Stacey Abbott [specifically on the CSI shot], and others... See sometimes one can mention other people's work...?)

Hope that is some food for thought. Happy to send any of my own articles/chapters to you, but not the book (since it's not on sale yet
- in a week in the USA, with it apparently taking about two months thereafter to cross the Atlantic).

William


On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 2:55 PM, Cormac Deane <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear All
>
> I am greatly enjoying the debate on this thread.
>
> My initial query for a term that would describe the free, floating,
> flexible POV shot that is common in CGI sequences has evolved into a
> more general discussion about the essence of POV per se. This
> evolution of the conversation is to my mind in keeping with the state
> of screen-criticism in the digital era generally, i.e. new
> technologies are forcing us to account once again for the fundamental
> attributes of all cinematic artifice, analog and digital.
>
> The capacity of image-capturing technology to reveal to us what is
> normally invisible or imperceptible has been present from the start
> (Muybridge, Marey, Dziga-Vertov,  Edgerton). That the profilmic object
> is no longer in play in CGI is an important consideration, but cameras
> of all kinds have always revealed a reality to us that is not in fact
> congruent with our reality, but which persuades us that it is even
> more real, more faithful, objective, scientific, than our own flawed, subjective, partial vision.
>
> Having said that, I am still interested in images and sequences that
> seem to give a POV that cannot possibly be attached to a human.
> Examples of this pre-date our current era to be sure, as in the
> opening of Rear Window, as Marty points out. What I am still unsure
> about is whether this kind of omniscient descriptive shot is
> fundamentally the same, conceptually speaking, as the floating POV
> that I have described. That is, does the new technology force us to
> think beyond the Deleuzian (and Metzian) categories of the subjective
> image, the semi-subjective image, and so on? Are the images I am
> describing in a realm that is beyond the human and closer to the posthuman?
>
> Here is one more clip that may be of interest and which hopefully will
> invite new thoughts from some of you. It is a 10-second section from CSI:
> Crime Scene Investigation, starting with an overhead shot of a motorbike:
>
> http://youtu.be/wX_i2vhnVKQ?t=58s
>
> This short sequence is a version of what is commonly called the
> 'CSI-shot', which is a bullet's eye's view of the internal organs of a
> human body as it forces its way in. It seems to me that the enhanced
> vision that the computer offers, or seems to offer, is a key
> consideration here - that is, what we are looking at here is a
> technological fantasy. The question is, have moving images always been merely this, a technological fantasy?
>
> Cormac
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Dr William Brown
Senior Lecturer in Film
Department of Media, Culture and Language University of Roehampton London  SW15 5PU
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Blog: http://wjrcbrown.wordpress.com/
Website: http://begstealborrowfilms.wordpress.com/

Author: Supercinema: Film Philosophy for the Digital Age (2013)
Co-author: Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe (2010)
Co-editor: Deleuze and Film (2012)
Co-editor: Special Issue of animation: an interdisciplinary journal on Avatar (2012)
Director: En Attendant Godard (2009), Afterimages (2010), Common Ground (2012), China: A User's Manual (Films) (2012)

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