ABSTRACT
The metaphor of the camera eye is ontological, impervious and utopian. It is, to appropriate the title of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s best-selling study, the metaphor cinema lives by. As a mind-as-machine trope, the camera eye ontologizes the filmic experience by converting it into a mysterious psycho-mechanical entity.1 Yet, the camera eye is not limited to cinema; it rather predates and will perhaps outlive film history. Its organic-mechanical hybridity partakes of an age-old science fiction that our technological imagination has been living up to. This book explores the cultural, intellectual, and artistic fascination with camera-eye metaphors in film culture of the twentieth century. By examining the ontological, transhistorical and projective scope of camera-eye metaphors, I aim to reconstruct a map of our understanding of cinema and film styles and of the multifarious ways in which cinema shapes our understanding of the arts and media.
