Cinema as eye – look and gaze

If we regard the eye as an interface between spectator and film, we can distinguish among several configurations that shape the look and the activity of seeing in different ways. Even before they were adopted and further developed by the cinema, some of these configurations have long been culturally predetermined and deeply rooted in popular imagination. For instance, the eye is central to several myths of agency that range from the creative (or inner) eye of the Romantic imagination to the evil eye of the ethnic and cultural Other. The benevolent eye of an all-seeing Christian God (as depicted on the US dollar bill) translates into the democratic ideal of an eye that stands for transparency and visibility: the look of enlightenment and reason, characterized by light (le siècle des lumières) equates eye and sun as sources of knowledge. But the eye and the look can also be the occasion for an unrelenting demand for self-examination to the point of self-incrimination, as demonstrated by the witch-hunts of the Inquisition, by the Stalinist show-trials or any other type of extorted confession. In each case the guilt that one assigns to oneself is activated by the (imagined) gaze of the Other, which need not be transmitted through looking at all. Opaque and obscure, it can be invisible, while drawing its power in direct proportion to its capacity to remain outside the field of vision. The subsequent organization of the chapter will follow these two fundamental instances of the look and the gaze – on the one hand transparent and inoffensive, connoting knowledge and enlightenment, and, on the other hand, dark and malicious, associated with power and subjugation. Many of these configurations can also be found in the cinema, where they translate into the somewhat different dynamics of active and passive look on the one hand (with a clear division of subject and object, of power and subjugation), and the all-pervasive, surveillant and punitive eye on the other hand. Before turning to these configurations in detail, a brief survey of the history of the eye in early cinema and classical avant-garde film is in order. The cinematic lens, from its beginnings, has often functioned as a prosthetic eye, serving as a mechanical extension of human perception. The world of a century ago, largely without aviation and private motorcars, knew only the railway as a readily available mechanized means of transportation.2 Into this world, the cinema burst as an infinitely pliable, unfettered mobile eye: what a sense of elation it must have been to finally possess an organ that was no longer tied to the body and which, thanks to a mechanical invention, could roam and travel freely, could practically become invisible, was barred from almost no place (be it private, social or physical)3 and not only seemed ever-present, but also made time travel possible – back into history and forward into the future, as for instance in Georges Méliès’ LE VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE (FR, 1902, A TRIP TO THE MOON). No wonder, therefore, that films shot from the front or rear of railway trains (so-called “phantom rides”4) were immensely popular during the early

days of the cinema, or that the arriving train has become such a powerful symbol for a force that overcomes all obstacles and reaches even the remotest reaches. The disembodied eye was celebrated as a strong illusion of power and omnipotence. One tends to forget that the voyeurism which was to become such an abiding preoccupation for film theory depends on forms of disembodiment, especially the idea of not having to take responsibility for one’s bodily presence in a given space or at a given time. Dziga Vertov’s famous avant-garde film MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (SU, 1929, CELOVEK S KINOAPPARATOM) can be read – in addition to influential recent readings by Lev Manovich, Yuri Tsivian or Jonathan Beller5 – as giving expression to this jubilant eye, a sense-organ that discovers the world as if for the first time. When window shutters open in the beginning of the film as eyes onto a new day, and when the daredevil cameraman confronts an oncoming train in another scene to capture it on film without incurring bodily harm, Vertov’s “cinema eye” appears disembodied and all-seeing. Indeed, he and his group of collaborators called themselves kino-glaz (“cinema eye”), evoking the mechanized seeing that challenges “the visual perception of the world by the human eye and offers its own ‘I see!’ ”6 In his writings and films, Vertov celebrated the technological dissociation of filmic seeing from the insufficiencies of human perception, i.e. the absolute, triumphal (optical) victory of film over the limitations of the human senses and the world they perceive. Walter Benjamin also enthusiastically welcomed the penetration of the human environment by the camera; for him, film facilitated access to the “optical unconscious”, i.e. all those phenomena that for the first time become observable through enlargement, slow-motion, freeze-frame, eccentric angles and camera positioning, and time-lapse photography. In this respect, Benjamin sees film not as a realistic medium of representation, but endows it with the possibility of breaking open the urban space as well as regimented time:

Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling.7