The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (27)

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As did André Bazin, we might think of photography as primarily a form of mummification (although, unlike Bazin, I will argue that cinema is not) (9-10). Although it testifies to and preserves a sense of the world’s and experience’s once-real presence, it does not preserve their present. The photographic neither functions—like the cinematic—as a “coming-into-being” (a presence always presently constituting itself), nor—like the electronic—as “being-in-itself” (an absolute presence in the present). Rather, it functions to fix a “being-that-has been” (a presence in a present that is always past). Thus, and paradoxically, as it materializes, objectifies, and preserves in its acts of possession, the photographic has something to do with loss, with pastness, and with death, its meanings and value intimately bound within the structure and aesthetic and ethical investments of nostalgia. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT P, 1990. Print.

Ingarden, Roman. “Der Film.” In his Untersuchungen zur Ontologie der Kunst. Musikwerk–Architektur–Film. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1962, pp. 319–341; “The film.” In his Ontology of the Work of Art. Trans. Raymond Meyer and John Goldthwait. Athens: Ohio U. Press, 1989, 317–342. Most powerful of all, in this regard, are those perceptual technologies that serve also as technologies of representation—namely, photography, cinema, television, and, most recently, computers. These technologies extend not only our senses but also our capacity to see and make sense of ourselves. Certainly, a technological artifact that extends our physical capacities like the automobile (whose technological function is neither perception nor representation but transportation) has profoundly changed the temporal and spatial shape and meaning of our lifeworld and our own bodily and symbolic sense of ourselves. [1] However, such perceptual and representational technologies as photography, motion pictures, television, video, and computers in-form us twice over: first through the specific material conditions by which they latently engage and extend our senses at the transparent and lived bodily level of what philosopher of technology Don Ihde calls our “microperception,” and then again through their manifest representational function by which they engage our senses consciously and textually at the hermeneutic level of what he calls our “macroperception” (29). [2] Most theorists and critics of cinematic and electronic media have been drawn to the latter—that is, to macroperceptual descriptions and interpretations of the hermeneutic-cultural contexts that inform and shape both the materiality and social contexts of these technologies and their textual representations. Nonetheless, we would not be able to reflect on and analyze either technologies or texts without, at some point, having engaged them immediately—that is, through our perceptive sensorium, through the immanent mediation and materiality of our own bodies. Thus, as Ihde reminds us, although “there is no microperception (sensory-bodily) without its location within a field of macroperception,” it is equally true that there is “no macroperception without its microperceptual foci.” Indeed, all macroperceptual descriptions and interpretations “find their fulfillment only within the range of microperceptual possibility” (Ihde 29; emphasis added). It is important to emphasize, however, that because perception is constituted and organized as a bodily and sensory gestalt that is always already meaningful, a microperceptual focus is not reducible to a focus on physiology. That is, insofar as our senses are not only sensible but also “make sense,” the perceiving and sensible body is always also a lived body—immersed in, making, and responding to social as well as somatic meaning. These preliminary remarks are grounded in the belief that historical changes in our sense of time, space, and existential, embodied presence cannot be considered less than a consequence of correspondent changes in our technologies. However, they also must be considered something more—for, as Martin Heidegger reminds us in the epigraph that begins this essay, “The essence of technology is nothing technological” (317). That is, technology never comes to its particular material specificity and function in a neutral context to neutral effect. Rather, it is historically informed not only by its materiality but also by its political, economic, and social context, and thus it both co-constitutes and expresses not merely technological value but always also cultural values. Correlatively, technology is never merely used, never simply instrumental. It is always also incorporated and lived by the human beings who create and engage it within a structure of meanings and metaphors in which subject-object relations are not only cooperative and co-constitutive but are also dynamic and reversible. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Print.

Fisher, Kevin. Intimate Elsewheres: Simulations of Altered States of Consciousness in Post WW II American Cinema. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California Los Angeles, 2004.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinéma 2: L’image-temps. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1985; Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.Although my most novel contributions here are, I hope, to our understanding of the technologies of cinematic and electronic representation (those two materialities that constitute our current moving-image culture), something must first be said of that culture’s grounding in the context and phenomenology of the photographic (which has provoked a good deal of phenomenological description). [3] The photographic mode of perception and representation is privileged in the period of market capitalism located by Jameson as beginning in the 1840s. This was a “moment” emergent from and driven by the technological innovations of steam-powered mechanization, which both enabled unprecedented industrial expansion and informed the new cultural logic of realism. Not only did industrial expansion give rise to other modes and forms of expansion, but this expansion was itself historically unique because of its unprecedented visibility. As Jean-Louis Comolli points out: “The second half of the nineteenth century lives in a sort of frenzy of the visible. . . . [This is] the effect of the social multiplication of images. . . . [It is] the effect also, however, of something of a geographical extension of the field of the visible and the representable: by journies, explorations, colonisations, the whole world becomes visible at the same time that it becomes appropriatable” (122-23). Thus, although the cultural logic of realism has been seen as represented primarily by literature (most specifically, the bourgeois novel), it is, perhaps, even more intimately bound to the mechanically achieved, empirical, and representational “evidence” of the world constituted—and expanded—by photography. phenomenologist would see this opening sequence of Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007, In its pre-electronic state and original materiality, however, the cinema mechanically projected and made visible for the very first time not just the objective world but the very structure and process of subjective, embodied vision—hitherto only directly available to human beings as an invisible and private structure that each of us experiences as “our own.” That is, the novel materiality and techno-logic of the cinema gives us concrete and empirical insight and makes objectively visible the reversible, dialectical, and social nature of our own subjective vision. Writing of human vision and our understanding that others also see as we do, Merleau-Ponty tells us: “As soon as we see other seers . . . henceforth, through other eyes we are for ourselves fully visible. . . . For the first time, the seeing that I am is for me really visible; for the first time I appear to myself completely turned inside out under my own eyes” (143-44). Prior to the cinema this visual reflexivity in which we see ourselves seeing through other eyes was accomplished only indirectly: that is, we understood the vision of others as structured similarly to our own only through looking at—not through—the intentional light in their eyes and the investments of their objective behavior. The cinema, however, uniquely materialized this visual reflexivity and philosophical turning directly—that is, in an objectively visible but subjectively structured vision we not only looked at but also looked through. In sum, the cinema provided—quite literally— objective insight into the subjective structure of vision and thus into oneself and others as always both viewing subjects and visible objects. Thomas Morsch, Medienästhetik des Films: Verkörperte Wahrnehmung und ästhetische Erfahrung im Kino, Munich and Paderborn 2011.

Though it may have identical content, the film viewed through personal videocassette technology is not really the same film projected on the . . . silver screen. There is a profound change in the experience, . . . in the sense of what is being seen, when the projected images are no longer bigger than life and are manipulable through fast-forward, freeze-frame, and every kind of fingertip control. Such viewing is no longer an occasion to which you must adjust your attention. With it, cinema culture comes to be on tap, manipulable at will. The videocassette provides a different psychic framework for the film.” (118) Brophy, P. , 2008. ‘Where sound is: locating the absent aural in film theory.’ In: James D. and M. Renov, eds, The Sage Handbook of Film Studies. London: Sage, pp. 424–35. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Barker, Jennifer. “Bodily Irruptions: The Corporeal Assault on Ethnographic Narration.” In Cinema Journal 34:3, 1995, 57–76.

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Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. Vol. 1. 1922. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Random House, 1981. Print. Hanich: Another criticism sometimes leveled at phenomenology is that it is a-political. With its insistence on the description of lived experience, it focuses on what is rather than what should be. The Active Eye: A Phenomenology of Cinematic Vision," Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 12, no. 3 (1990): 21–36.

Ihde distinguishes two forms of perception: “What is usually taken as sensory perception (what is immediate and focused bodily in actual seeing, hearing, etc.), I shall call microperception. But there is also what might be called a cultural, or hermeneutic, perception, which I shall call macroperception. Both belong equally to the lifeworld. And both dimensions of perception are closely linked and intertwined” (29: emphasis added). that stories have the power to convey other people’s experiences to us and allow us to imaginatively “relive” them, such that by using imagination and empathy we are able, from the perspective of the narrator or characters, to relate to their experience as if we ourselves were having it right now. Footnote 103 Here it is worth noting that James Joyce, in 1909, was “instrumental in introducing the first motion picture theater in Dublin” (Kern 76-77). The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic ‘Presence," in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 83–106. Since this essay was originally published, I have been confronted by arguments about this assertion, particularly in relation to virtual reality and various attempts to mobilize the human sensorium in electronic space. The argument is that electronic space “reembodies” rather than “disembodies” us. Although, to some extent, this is true, the dominant cultural logic of the electronic tends to elide or devalue the bodies that we are in physical space—not only as they suffer their flesh and mortality but also as they ground such fantasies of reembodiment.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind.” Trans. Carleton Dallery. The Primacy of Perception. Ed. James Edie. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964. 159-90. Print. Again, the paradoxical status of the more-human-than-human replicants in Blade Runner is instructive. Speaking to the biotechnologist who genetically manufactured his eyes with an ironic literality that not only resonates in the narrative but also describes the audience of the film, replicant Roy Batty says, “If you could only see what I’ve seen with your eyes.” The perceptive and expressive materiality of the cinematic through which we engage this ironic articulation of the desire for a supposedly “impossible” form of intersubjectivity is the very materiality through which this desire is objectively and visibly fulfilled. [14] Thus, rather than merely replacing human vision with mechanical vision, the cinema functions mechanically to bring to visibility the reversible structure of human vision: this structure emerges in the lived body as systemically both a subject and an object, as both visual (seeing) and visible (seen), and as simultaneously productive of both an activity of seeing (a “viewing view”) and an image of the seen (a “viewed view”). Hanich: Film studies has long entertained plural methodologies. While some frameworks seem to be more popular than others, not a single paradigm dominates. What can film phenomenology add to this huge toolbox that scholars and students can choose from? What makes it valuable over and above the ones also on offer? Morris’ documentary details the extraordinary story of a small-town American man who went from fixing electric chairs to defending David Irving by providing “scientific evidence” that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were never used for extermination. Katharina Lindner, “Questions of embodied difference: Film and queer phenomenology,” NECSUS, autumn 2012: “Tangibility,” https://necsus-ejms.org/questions-of-embodied-difference-film-and-queer-phenomenology/ (last accessed May 1, 2020).