ABSTRACT
When a camera is considered as a feature embedded within a text, it acquires some of the properties of the text, much like a particular aspect of a design in a tapestry can be used to talk about the tapestry. In this chapter I will review several major analytical concepts that help to bring out the features of a camera-in-the-text. I will be concerned primarily with four large-scale concepts that are used to delineate a camera: “motivation,” degree of “anthropomorphism,” “point of view,” and “movement.” My purpose in this chapter is to provide a systematic account of some of the ordinary critical language that is used to discover a camera situated-in-the-text. Later chapters will undertake to find the sources of this language, where they lead, and what sorts of cameras are brought into existence.
