ABSTRACT
The history of experimental research in technological devices and how these devices have transformed human perceptual structures provides a way to look at cinema as a laboratory for the feelings and sensations provoked by technology, which form the basis of all histories of the screen. Film critics, even without treating the apparatus as a fetish in their analyses, have examined the technical aspects of the cinema as objective and describable data striving to become a form of expression that can no longer, or not yet, be called language, and that can only manage to claim syntax and grammar for short historical episodes. But placing the cinema in the history of devices and technologies that were developed in psychological laboratories since the middle of the nineteenth century, devices that were used to measure and simulate mental functions and emotions, also means understanding cinema as an illustrative system that expresses and alters perception and the corresponding nerve-psychological relations in bodies as it transmits its impulses. Viewed from this perspective, the various faculties of cinematic technology – recording, editing, and projection – can also be seen in a different and unfamiliar light: as opportunities to place spectators, the subjects of perception, into new relations, in which they only consciously find themselves after they have already given themselves over to the transformation caused by this cinematically constructed perceptual relation.
