aumont point of view

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The point of viewJacques Aumont

a

aTeaches at the Universit de la SorbonneNouvelle , 17 rue

de la Sorbonne, 75231, Paris Cedex 05, France

Published online: 05 Jun 2009.

To cite this article:Jacques Aumont (1989) The point of view, Quarterly Review of Film andVideo, 11:2, 1-22, DOI: 10.1080/10509208909361295

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Quar .

Rev. of

Film

&

Vid eo,Vol. 11, p p . 1-22 1989 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH

Reprints available directly from the pub lisher Printed in the United States of America

Photocopying permitted by license only

The oint of View

Jacques umont

Translated by

rthur Denner

A Q uattrocento canvas characteristically is organized aroun d a poin t, rarely mate-

rialized in the pa inting, w here lines converge which represent rectilinears p erpe n-

dicular to the plan of the paintin g. The image of the infinite extension of this family

of lines, the principal vanishing point is also defined, geometrically, as the posi-

tioning mark for the eye of the painter. Thus, the perspediva artificialis joins the

ima ge of the infinite to man's image, an d th is is the umbilical kno t, the navel, from

which representation is organized.

By a noteworthy metonymy, this geometric point sometimes goes by the same

nam e as the emplacement of the eye of the painter the point of view. A good part

of the history of painting, as it has been w ritten for the last hu nd red years or so, hasconsistently aim ed at following th e avatars of this point of view : the slow and

hesitant elaboration of the technical rules of centered perspective; the evidence of

the hu m anis t marking s of its technical givens, of the reference of the pain ting to a

gaze that constitutes it (that of the painter, to which that of the spectator must

topologically substitute itself); the dissolution of the one and the other toward the

turn of the century.

W hat is essential in this period of the history of represen tation is the indefectible

solidarity betw een the painting and th e spectator, and more precisely, thesym m etry

betwee n the m , this impossible intersection of gazes, this crossing of looks betw een

the spectator and the painter, the description of which , today a classic one , is found

in Foucault and Lacan. It is not insignificant that in classical French , say, until the

eighteenth century, the expression

point de vue

also designated , and quite logically

so,

the place where a n object mu st be placed to make it most visible an admirable

ambiguity in French w hich sanctioned the fundamental duality of beholder/beheld.

Photog raphy ha s absorbed all of these points of view. Like painting, pho to-

graph ic represen tation entails the choice of a positioning of the s ighting eye as well

as fixing agoodplacement for the object seen ;

1

moreover, the lens is m ost generally

constructed in such a way as to produce automatically an image with a central

vanishing point. Thus, cinema, by way of the photographic image, is haunted by

the metaphor of the gaze, of the point of view, in its treatment of visual material.

J A C Q U E S A U M O N T teachesat

the Universit de la Sorbonne-Nouvelle, 17 ru e de la Sorbonne, 75 23 1, P aris, C edex

05 ,

France.

Hi s

most recent book

in

E nglish

isM ontage Eisenstein.

A R T H U R D E N N E R

is a

free-lance translator

a nd

lecturer

in the

program

o f

Visual A rts

a t

Pr inceton U niversity,

Pr inceton, New jersey, 085 40. Th is ar ticle is translated from the

French,

L epoint derue, C ommunications 38,1983.

1

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2 /.A u m o nt

That is not all. As painting was learning how to master the effects of centered

representation, literature at the same time was gradually discovering analogous

phenomena, in particular, the complexity of the relationships between events,

places, situations, and characters, and the gaze broug ht to bear on them thr oug h

narrative agency; modern literature is a literature of

point of view ,

increasingly

obsessed with a difficult division between what derives from the author, and

announces itself as such, and what is to be attributed to the characters.

This,by and large, was the literary period that defines classical cinema as heir

to a narrative system that perhaps culminated during the last century and that

exhaustively brough t to light the questions of the narrator, the narratorial gaze,

and its incarnation as author and character.

It is essentially this concern for ordered arrangement

(agencement),

for the fitting

together of competing narrative instances and points of view on the event, that,

from the cinematograph (or the kinetoscope), brought about cinema. The first

capital event in the history of filmic represen tation was unq ues tionably the recogni-

tion of the narrative potential of the image, by way of its assimilation to a gaze . How

the classical period hypostatized this gaze, from the standpoint of the characteras

from that of theau teur ,is a matter of record .

2

A double dividing line is thus drawn, on the one han d, distinguishing between

the direct figuration (in the image) of the poin t of view an d its indirect figuration (in

the narrative) and, on the other han d, reapportioning these points of view am ong

the three places whence the gaze originates: the character, the auteur, and the

spectator, w ho w atches the other two and watches himself watch ing.

3

Finally, we must add tha t the expression point of view lends itself to further

metaphoric extension: a point of view is an o pinion, a judg m ent, dep end ent on the

light in which thin gs are con sidered, on the point of view (in the literal sense) that is

adopted toward them, and so it informs the very organization of narration and

representation. No poin t of view in these se nse s can escape the effect of this point of

view.

Let us summarize this array of meanings stemming from the banal locution

point of view, wh ile we attem pt to specify each of them in its relationship to

cinema.

1. It is first of all the poin t or position from wh ich the gaze o riginates; thus , the

position ing of the camera relative to the object that is gazed up on . C inema learned

very early on

4

to multiply it, by the ch anging and the joining together of shots, and

to vary it, through the movement of the camera. The first characteristic of the

fictional film is to offer a multiple and variable point of view.

2.C orrelatively, it is the viewitself,to the extent that it is captu red from a specific

point of view: film is image, organized by the play of centered perspective.

5

Here

the major problem is that of the frame and, more precisely, the contradiction

be tween the effect of surface (the plastic occupation of the surface of the frame) and

the illusion of depth.

6

3.The preceding point of view

2

is itself cons tantly referred to the narrative po int

of view; for example, the frame in narrative cinema is always more or less the

representation of a gaze, the auteur's or the character's. Here again, the history of

narrative cinema is one of the acquisition and th e fixing of the rules of correspon-

dence between a POV

a

, the ensuing POV

2

, and this latter, narrative po int of view.



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The Pointo fView 3

4. The constituted whole is overdetermined by a mental attitude (i.e., intellec-

tual, m oral, political, etc.) that conveys the narrator's judg m ent on the event. This

point of view

4

(which we shall call predicative ) obviously informs, m ost of all, the

fiction itself (the auteur's judg m ents of the characters, wh ich seem to be the

pu rview of the better pa rt of ordinary film criticism), bu t it interes ts me here solely

to the extent tha t it is likely to have consequen ces for the w ork of representation and

to shape filmic representation (leaving aside, for the moment, the signifier).

Let us summarize, then, the antecedents of this all-purpose notion of point of

view, for they still have som e bea ring . I have alread y touched on them briefly. The

history of painting from the fifteenth to the twentieth century is one of the regula-

tion, then the mobilization of the point of view: from its institution through its

decentering in the baroque, i ts dilution in the nineteenth-century landscape

painters and in impressionism, until its multiplication and its loss in analytical

cubismand this is the point where cinema takes over.

To cite only one exam ple, we have D egas, defining the work of the painter (or ofthe sculptor; see his brilliant statuettes E tudes des m ouvem ents du cheval ) as a

seizing on the

moment

on that fraction of duration which contains within it the

sugge stion of the movement as a whole (C ohen, p. 28); in other wo rds, a concep-

tion of painting as something of the momentary, a kind of snapshot(Degas, as we

know was

also

a photog rapher). But at the same tim e, no paintings are m ore

compo sed than those of Degas, more mon taged, as E isenstein says, and not so

much with an eye to recording a movement as to expressing a sentiment, a

m ean ing, a plastic effect. This dua l status of the frame in Degas on the one h an d,

innocen t, the snap shot slicing into real; on the other han d, c om posed and saturated

with meaning, the edited imagetranslates into painting

itself,

as Bazin clearly

saw,

7

the opposition photography-cinema, in that cinema is an art of the momen-

tary but multiple point of view.

Furthermore, as I have already recalled, the literary avant-gardes in the nine-

teenth and the early twentieth century show themselves concerned, among other

things, with exposing within fiction itself the narrative process, for example, by

inse rting , like James or Proust, a self-conscious charac ter-narrator or, like C onrad ,

a central reflector. Narrative cinema thus appe ared precisely at the moment wh en

literature was experimenting w ith the exposition, the diversification, and the mobil-

ization of the narrative point of view. The borrowings by narrative cinema from

these literary m odels, moreover, can ha rdly b e said to have followed a linear pa th;

rather, one has the imp ression that it was by rediscovering on its own the p roblem-

atic of the character and the point of view that cinema, in its classical pe riod , was

able to take over from the nineteen th-cen tury novel. (M eanwh ile, in a movem ent in

the opposite direction, the experimentation that marked E urope an cinema d uring

the twen ties had fueled the efforts of new generations of w riters , from Joyce to Dos

Passos.

8

)

C inema, as an art of representation that is, from the very mom ent it disengag es

from spectacle, wh ether itinerant or sedentary, in order to become artis caught

up in this double or triple history: painting, photography, literature. (Some per-

haps,

will find it astounding to find no mention here of theater. The fact isand

wh at follows will ma ke this clear that the point of view in cinema has ve ry little to

do with a theatrical point of view, w hich is rather a question of architecture, and

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that, additionally, the history of the filmic formnot to say the history of cinema

has practically nothing to do with that of the theater.

9

)

The question of point of view, we see, is thus any thing bu tonequestion; rather, it

circumscribes the space of a tangle of problems, and it is these problems that are

central to any theory of cinema that would take into consideration the double

na ture, narrative and rep resentation al, of film. We have still confined ourselves to

the ran ge of the filmmaker's poin ts of view and have not tried to assess how each of

them brings abo ut, or seeks to bring about, the symm etrical adoption of positions

of vision and specific readings in the spectator (this question of the spectator will

obviously resurface, more or less bluntly, in what follows).

M y problem is not to propose a general and abstract model that seeks to u ntang le

this knot theoretically; were this m y tem ptation, moreover, I would be dissuad ed

from it by the absolute discursive impasse into which all studies in this area seem to

fall,

including those pu rsu ed by scholars w hose linguistic and logical baggage is far

superior to my own. Also, I am convinced of the impossibility of constructing a

transhistorical mo del of cinematographic lang uag e. M y goal, therefore, is simply

to bring to the fore, by a few exam ples, the fundamental dua lity in film betw een the

param eters of representation and narration, in connection w ith the notion of point

of view. This duality is almost invariably reabsorbed in discourse on cinema , u nd er

the implicit pretext that, given the habitual conception of film as a story told by

imag e (and sound), sufficient attention is paid to the phenom ena of representation

by referring them to the story, or at best, to the narrative.

Examp le .InThat Obscure Object of Desire(1977), a single female character is portrayed by two

different actresses, in sufficiently complex a way for the principle that governs their substitu-

tion not to be apparent; even aside from the fact that the substitution went completely

unnoticed by many spectators, I believe that no one had serious difficulty in taking the film to

be anormal narrativeor, at all events, one whose abnormality (the famous Bunuelian

surrealism ) lies elsewhere.

Examp le . Primitive films often present themselves as a series of loose tableaux, causing us

to construe them as functioning in a narratively difficult way; in fact, in their normal use,

these films were accompanied by a commentator, who not only would fill in the ellipses in the

narrative but would also specify, if necessary, the place represented, so that there might be no

mistaking the bandits' hideout for the king's palace.

10

These two examples (and a hu nd red others we might have cited) serve simply to

undersco re the spon taneous privileging by the cinematographic institution of the

narrative over the representational. Privileging of this sort, on wh at ap pea rs to be

equally spontaneous and evident grou nds , continues, moreover, even in recent

theoretical and analytical thou ght. On e has only to reread most analyses (whether

textual or otherwise) that have bee n pub lished to be convinced that almo st all of

them , regardless of their quality, concentrate in an unbalanced way on the

analysis of the story, at the expense of reflection on the figurative and representa-

tional levels, which is summoned only when it brings grist to the narratological

mill.

11

As for the theoreticians, the recently propo sed notions of filmic text

(C asetti), of comm unicative dyn am ics (C olin), indeed and paradoxicallyof

param etric analysis (C hateau) have this in comm on: they divest the image of all

but its narrative power (even as it is deemed dysnarrative).



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The P oint

o f

View

5

Furthermore, this wholesale competition (or collaboration) between narrative

and representation redoub les in and is obscured by another: the opposition amon g

all of these (representational and narrative) partial points of view w hich are essen-

tially on the order of the ima ginary (the point of view that we have num bere d 4),

in effect an attempt to

inscribe

meaning in the films, an attempt in which it is the

symbolic register that finds itself mobilized.

M any of the constituents of the narrative an d the image (the auditive as well as

the visual) give rise to th is enco ding that casts them as the expression of a point of

view. All plastic values, all iconic para m eters, m any elements of the narration can b e

invested w ith this value of significationfrom the tilt of the cam era to the color,

from the typecasting of the actors to the film's taking into account a socialg estus.

As I have said, I cannot begin to attem pt to pro pose a m odel or general solution to

these prob lem s. W hat rem ains is the possibility of accounting for them in reference

to history (the history of films and, more generally, the history of representation).

Naturally, the scale of these notes permits me no prtentions to a real historical

work, and my approach calls on a supposed history of cinema that, as we are

reminded daily, exists only in the barest approximations.

12

What follows comes,

therefore, as a series of more or less arbitrary pinpoints in the vast corpus of films

and the theories that accompany themwith the sole aim of delineating the

relationships, perm ane nt and variable, of these points of view.

Let us reread

(e.

g., in Deslandes's authoritative book) the first announ cem ents for

screenings by the cinematographer Lumire (or those by his competitors). These

films are anima ted photogra phs, anim ated scenes, anim ated tableaux, or,

quite simp ly and m ost often, view s. W hat better term for them? Film was first an

imag e, a point of viewj that of the camera prod ucing a point of view

2

, emb odied in a

framing.

Better yet: even before the screening at the Salon Indien of the Grand Caf,

E dison ha d constructed , by 1894, on his property at West O range, the famous Black

M aria open -air stud io, wh ere the films came to the kinetoscope before the latter

wen t to them . There the anim ated tableau was recorded, in an always identical

and always frontal frame (the camera being fixed, once and for all) against a tar

paper background. Two years later (1896), a former Edison collaborator, Dickson,

und ertook the construction of the Am erican M utoscope C omp any stud io, the

future Biograph, on the roof of a building on Broadway. Also outdoors, this studio

contained an improvement: enclosed in a heavy booth, the camera could move

along rails perpendicular to the scene, thus permitting the changing of frame

between two shots (and even forward dollying, although this possibility does not

seem to have been exploited at the time).

13

For a while, th en, to make a film me ant

to set the camera somewhere, and tofram e.

We know the rest: it consists essentially of a mobilization of this frame. It ha s long

been stres sed that th is mobilization was effected, in such a way as to have achieved

privileged status, far m ore by the invention of montage th an by the us e of camera

movements.

14

We can give a trench ant example of this sem iparadox by com paring

two almost contem porary type s of production: on the one ha nd , the views of the Hale's Tour typ e, consisting of placing a camera at the head of a locomotive, or on

the rear platform of a train, an d filming c ontinuously; on the other hand, the famous

first short adventure films, which used a succession of different shots (the famous

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J . Au m ont

Great Train Robberyof E dwin S. Porter and its British predecessor,

A

Daring Daylight

Burg lary ,

bo th from 1903). In the first instanc e, in spite of the cons tant transforma-

tion of the landscape and the interminability, in theory, of the view, the view

rem ains just that, a single view.

15

In the case of the latter tw o films, however, though

they hardly tamper with the fixity of the frame (and thus lead necessarily to the

advent of the theatricality of the

Film

d 'Ar t

and of Griffith-Biograph), they none -

theless draw the capital conclusions that arise from the very nature of the cine-

matographic view. Since it includes time, since it rolls forward, it is essentially

(ontologically, Bazin would have said) on the order of narrative; it recountsand

there is no reason for this narration to be interrupted where the shot ends.

Here is the appearance in films of a narrative point of view, the stages of which

bear the nam es of Porter and especially Griffith: my thic nam es, haloed in legends

into whose detail or criticism I cannot enter here.

16

What concerns me is to

em phasize that with this app earanc e, and long after, comes the loss of the coher-

ence of represented space. Indeed, while montage very quickly allowed for an

effective and unequivocal understanding of chronology and causal processes, the

same cann ot be said for the space represented in the sequence of shots. We shall

keep to the famous exam ples previously cited: from

T h e

Great Train Robbery(where

only the major articulations of the story are easy to understand) to any one of

Griffith's films of 1911 or 1912

(A n U nseen E nem y

or

T he Batt le,

for example), the

progress has been decisive. The Griffithian narrative requ ires no intervention , no

com mentary; it is entirely clear. Yet betw een these films, no co rrespo nding integra-

tion of a fragmentized space has occu rred. In spite of the establishm ent of a (rather

rudim entary) convention concerning movement out of the visual field, by crossing

the lateral edg e of the frame,

17

each space ma intains its own indep ende nt value and

exists in semiautonomy, without the coherence of the diegetic space ever being

gu aranteed, w heth er by firm conventions (such as the classical editing codes

came to be) or by a more or less directly m anage d access (by an establishing shot,

for example) to the global spatial referent.

Let us try to pu t th ese rem arks an other way. W hat cinema becom es aware of at

this moment in its history is first of all that linking framed points of view on

different places produces a chronological development, a narrative whose modes

are quickly perfected, startin g, for example, w ith those shots in the second version

ofEnoch

A r d en

(1911) wh ere Griffith experiments w ith the re lationship betw een a

view and a gaze, between a gaze and a character; cinema learned that linking

induces a narrative point of view.

Again ke eping to the example of the Griffithian sys tem , a relatively diversified

narrative point of view can be seen to function there. The narrative consists

essentially of following the characters, in external focalization (which is quite

app arent in the obligatory chase or final rescue sequences); on occasion, the

narrative po int of view coincides with that of the character, in internal focalization.

Examp le .InEnoch

A rden,

when Annie Lee waits on the beach for her husband's return, her

face suddenly takes on a look of horror, her arms reach out; in the following shot, Enoch's

shipwreck is seen (it is true that to speak here of internal focalization implies a certain belief

in telepathy). A more obvious instance, perhaps: inTheBa ttle,the scene in which the young

man, filled with panic, abandons his post includes a shot of the trench in which he no longer

figuresa shot that represents his gaze.



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The P oint

o f

View

7

Finally, to the omniscient narrator are ascribed the establishing shot, certain

close-ups of objects that are one of Griffith's stylistic trade m arks, and naturally, all

of the titles that comm ent on, a nticipate, or characterize the action. A bundant use of

these titles (such as M eanwhile in C ypru s or Later . . . ) wo uld be m ad e

throu gho ut the silent film era, eventually to be parodie d in an exem plary way in

A n

Anda lus ian Dog

(1928).

But at the same time as it produces this narrative clarity and mastery, the

mobilization of the shot also makes apparent, somewhat by default, the complex

natu re of the representational point of view in cinema. Because the construction of

filmic space implies the element of time and because it also implies topological

relationships (of inclusion, of contiguity, for example) and relationships of order,

the cinematographic point of view m ust in the first instance be referred not to the

immobile view but to the sequence of views. U nlike the pictorial mod el, the point of

view in cinema is defined as an ordered a nd m easuredseries, An d, in primitive

cinem a, this order and m easure are still a long way off. The concern for a coherent

comprehension of space within the sequence would seem to be apparent, for

example, in certain descriptive moments (it is precisely because of the temporal

natu re of the cinem atographic signifier that the notion of description is a tenu ous

one in film, implying as it does a s usp ens ion of the s tory's time). So it is inTheBirth

of aNation(1915) with the string of shots, including two length y pan nin g shots, that

describes the battlefield.

18

Before we come by these almost fixed laws thro ug h w hich classical cinema tried

to rationalize the representation of space (and which I shall pass over, as they have

been widely a nd extensively stud ied), the privileging of narrative clarity continues

in evidence throug hout the silent period , or nearly so, som etimes as caricature, as

in the 1920 film, TheChamber

Mystery,

wh ere the dialogue is rend ered in balloons,

like those from a comic strip, as a text again st a gray background that obsc ures a pa rt

(sometimes almost all) of the character supposedly speaking.

19

At the same time, there gradually eme rges a new concern that of expressing, in

the narrative but also in the im age, a point of view of the narrative instance that goes

beyond the simple play of the various degrees of coincidence betwe en character and

narrator.

The seeds of this predicative poin t of view can already be found in Griffithian

cinema. E ven leaving aside the heavy ma ke up em ployed, for exam ple, to character-

ize the villain (and which remains a pro-filmic device), we might cite Griffith's

efforts to achieve a meaningful use of spotlighting. In T h eDrunkard s Reformation

(1905), the ch aracters' familial h appiness is bathed in an d defined by the light that

emanates from the hearth; the same year, for P ippa P asses,Griffith and Bitzer

experimented with ma sks and complex lighting de signed to convey the soft light of

dawn onto the heroine's angelic face, or, more precisely speaking, to convey the

angelic yearning s of this face.

20

These lighting effects would be pu she d to the limit

in Griffith's later feature films, for example, in the scenes by the riverbank in T h e

White Rose(1923). M eanwhile, these effects become trite and rig id, for exam ple, the

ha lo of M ary Pickford's blond curl, or, be tter still, the obligatory au ra encirclingGarbo's face.

It is not in a Hollywood industry bent for the most part on reducing these

adven tures in lighting to a few stereotypes

21

that the clearest (not to say the m ost

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successful) attempts at a discourse of the image will be found as much as in

European cinema of the twenties. Cropping up in various schools and periods,

these attempts cannot be cataloged here. Three examples follow.

Ca l i ga r i sm .

T his school is still, and most often, calledexpressionism(recycling the

convenient and vague label first proposed in the twenties). If used with reference to

the development of expressionist painting, and th e subseq uent d evelopment of an

expressionist literatu re, the term lacks relevance; it is not witho ut interest, however,

if it refers to its etymological meaning. Then it implies the idea of a more or less

directexpr ession, generally in a pictorial m ode , of precise mean ings particular to a

specific film.

The first dis tingu ishin g feature of this school, as we know, is its pictorialism an d,

correlatively, its extremely particular character of reference to the represented

world. InCaligari(1920), for exam ple, we see the figuration on the backdro p of a

view of the city whe re the fair is to be held an image clearly inspired by m edieval

figurations, w herein the city is an accumulation of houses, taking the general shape

of a kind of cone, without regard for a perspective rendering; in front of this

backdrop, on a kind of theater practicable, are set (slantwise, of course) a few

indications of the fair, the organ grinder, the merry-go-round, thus situated in a

relationship of exteriority-interiority to the city that is scarcely translatable into

topographical terms. In the architectural decors themselves, the real space in

which the extras move about is determ ined by the d em and s of a plastic form wh ich

actually tend to negate or block any potential perspective effect (e.g., the shots

inside Caligari's wagon).

This pictorialness contaminates, tendentially at least, the entire representation:

from the characters' makeup (Werner Krauss's colored hair, the paintings on the

characters' bodies in Genuine) to their gestures (the dismantled body of Conrad

Veidt in Ca l i ga r i , the tortured body of Hans von Twardowsky in Caligari and

Genuine),from an overframed frame (as inThe Last Laugh[1924] orBackstairs)to a

psychotic mo ntage by fragments (the m urd er of the moneylender in

Ra skolnikov).

Hence the paradox that seem s to arise again and again in connection w ith Germ an

silent film: all of these films are su pp osed to fall und er the headin g of expression-

ist (see the constantly cited example of

Th e Las t

Laugh) , while at the same time,

much time is spent conferring on this or that work the title of the only true

expressionist film (see Lotte E isner on

Von Morgens

b is

Mitternach).

Be that as it may, the imp ortan t th ing here is that all of these plastic opera tions aim

almos t exclusively at the sensible, senso rial translation of the idea . The vegetal

sets and costumes ofGenuine materialize the character's animality (rather like a

translation of Baudelaire's famous ph rase abou t la femme na turelle, c'est dire ,

abominable ). The distortion of an already naturally angular set, of the money-

lender's staircase, lets one see the horror of Raskolnikov's nightmare. And a

thou sand other examples might be cited, all of which d emo nstrate this inscription,

flush against the figuration, of a global signified that qualifies the represented.

The vice of the system is well kno wn and has long been exposed: this signified

is ambiguous; it does not, for example, permit the distinction, in the scene from

Caligariwhere Rudolf K lein-Rogge sits in his cell at the center of a kind of spid erw eb

or white star against a black background, between the meaning of the imprison-

ment (a redundant meaning) and the more equivocal meaning of the spider spin-

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ning its intrigues (in the m ann er of M abuse). The only times th is am biguity is lifted

are whe n the idea prese nted is obvious and weak. The shadow, above Alan's be d, of

the sleepwalker who prepares to strangle him signifies, in spite of its plastic

violence (and its beauty), nothing other tha n a very generic horror. M ore serious is

that both this am biguity an d this weakness lend themselves to being reabsorbed,

fatally p erh ap s, into the great signified of M adne ss, or to be more precise, into that

of sick unreality as op posed to a supposed sane reality. We know, moreover, that

this reabsorption , heatedly criticized as soon as Caligariwas released,

22

was fought

by the filmmakers themselves and was finally imposed by the producers, out of

their supp ose d concern for a verisimilitude that is of particular concern to me here

because it translates into a m asking of the predicative point of view by the n arrative

point of view (in this case, the one that the film attributes, in its conclusion, to the

inmates of the asylum a nd to the good doctor). All that survives the operation is the

transformation that affects the representational point of view.

Impressionism.

This label has even less consistency, if that be possible. It arises

unquestionably out of very superficial analogies and can be applied to very few

films,

first and foremost, to those of E pstein who said , The subject of the film

Maupratis the mem ory of my first enthusiastic and very superficial un de rstan din g

of rom anticism. TheFallo ftheHouseofUsher(1927) is my general imp ression about

Poe.

23

Techniques of impressionism: double printing, slow motion, the close-up, and

fragmented montage. Famous images: Gina Mans's face superimposed on the

harbor w aters in Faithful Heart(1923), the m om ents of pu re speed in

T he

Mirrorw i th

Three Faces (1927), the slow motion and the transition into negative image when

M adeleine dies in

T h e

House

of

Usher.

Or, again from this latter film, the passage

analyzed by Keith C ohen : the app earan ce of the visitor Roderick, first on the m oor,

where the film shows him in several shots, each from a different angle and in a

different size, with n one of the shots revealing his face; then at the inn , where the

crisscross of gazes betwe en the characters lets on only that they belong to the sam e

scene, while simultaneously producing a sense of an indeterminate,floatingspace

(Cohen); and also the shots at the end of the prologue in which a woman watches

furtively from behind the windows of the inn and in which the decors and the

framing combine to give the impression that she has been swallowed up, tra pp ed ,

buried alive by a maleficent place.

The point in comm on am ong these three plastically quite different mo men ts of

Epstein's film is that they supplement the elaboration of the narrative and the

diegesis with the figurationthis time through frame and montageof a narra-

tor's point of view on the s tory he tells, which is not only a narrative point of view (a

play of correspondences and divergence between the narrative instance and the

characters) but also a judg m ent, an inflection of these scenes toward a

sensation,

or,

if you will, an impression of mystery, unreality, and anxiety in each sequence,

respectively. Of course , it is less a m atter of the inscription of these sensations in the

representation tha n of their suggestion throu gh it; bu t atmospheric as they may

be,

they nonetheless remain organically integrated into the story in its entirety (they

are, we migh t recall, its introduction) and are far less am biguo us tha n my d escrip-

tion might perhaps convey.

What is happening here? No longer, as was the case with expressionism, the

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ex

nihiloof a pseud o-spa ce that aims at a kind ofideoplastiebut rather the

sometimes contradictory maintenance of the double demand of photogenie (the

requirement that light and image engender an emotion) and thought. Or, in

Epstein's words:

Beautiful films are constructed photographically and celestially. What I call the celestial field

of an image is its moral scope, the reason it was sought after. One ought to limit the action of

the sign to this range and interrupt it as soon as it becomes distracting to thought and draws

the emotion upon itself.Plastic pleasure is a means, never an end. Having provoked a series

of sentiments, the images must do no more than give guidance to their semi-spontaneous

evolution, as these [cathedral] spires guide thoughts heavenward.

24

Cin - l anguage . Paradoxically, the school of Russian filmmakers who developed

the idea that there could be a language of filmand whose theoretical systems

wo uld logically be expected to em phasize the scriptural pow er of the filmm aker

will provide us here with a more ambiguous example.

Let us look at the book published in 1929 by Kuleshov which reflects in a

synthe tic way a decade of experimentation. Apar t from a treatise on filmic practice,

rather obsolete by today's standa rds and largely determ ined by the tactical impulse

to recognize certain formal innovations (e.g., close-up, montage), the book puts

forth a conception wh ose essentials can be sum m arized as a num ber of deductions :

a) Because the film spectator has an obligatory point of view (our POV^ on the

represented event, it is that wh ich is actualized on the screen (and this alone) that

signifies;

b) a shot can thus be assimilated to a sign (of the ideographic kind);

c) the reading of any film, even a documentary, thus presupposes an organiza-

tion (1) internal to the shot and (2) between and amo ng sho ts;

d) whence the promotion of a cinema of brief montage, seeking to preserve in

each shot its value as a simple sign; whence also the insistence on the calculus of a

system of movem ents internal to the frame along certain privileged lines (parallel to

the frame, diagonal) an d, consequently, on a very analytic kind of acting, according

to the dictates of typage.

C uriously, this author, remem bered above all for his developm ents that promoted

cine-language and the cine-ideogram, was in fact the inspiration for and instigator

of those trend s within the massive E urop ean experimentation of the twenties that

drew closest to the model of American cinemafilms in which the work of the

narrator consists less of bringing a judgment to bear on what he shows than of

showing it clearly and in which the essentials of the narrative are conveyed by the

actor's body, wh ich h as become m echanized (biomechanized), the better to achieve

narrative certainty. This indeed is what we find in the films of Kuleshov and his

studio wh ich have survived,M r. West(1924),T h eDeathRa y(1925), an d evenDura

Lex(1926). A nyth ing that un necessarily encum bers the narrative ha s been evacu-

ated from these films, in order that the work of reading might be simplified.

M ore attention was inde ed p aid to cinema's predicative possibilities in the work of

certain of his contemporaries, in Eisenstein, naturally, whom we shall come to

momentarily, and even in Pudo vkin, wh ose films are similarly characterized b y the

linearity and clarity of the narrative but who on occasion allows himself broad

me taphors (see the conclusions ofStorm Over Asia[1929] and ofMother

[1926] :

here is

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anothe r Griffith, bu t one less reluctan t to exploit the symbolic value of his

ma terial. For their pa rt, the formalist theor ists m ake the case for the rhetorical

figure as well; in cinema, the visible world is given not as suc h, bu t in its sem antic

correlation, pos its Tynianov,

25

for whom the image and the linking of image-

fragments are to be calculated as a function of their narrative and (potentially)

metaphoric value.

The conception of cine-language is undoubtedly less simplistic than what we

have sketched out with Kuleshov; it includes the possibility of a direct intervention

of the narrative instance in the represented material, in a mod e analog ous to w hat

we find practiced with the German and French cinastes. The metaphor, or the

rhetorical figure in general, finds its niche in the poetics of cinema

26

as one p ossible

level of the image-sign's signification. Yet, if we survey the actualizations of this

principle in the films of Pudovkin or the FEX, we see that the m etaphors, in sp ite of

their occasional undeniable beauty, are confined, som ewhat timidly, to the play of

camera angle, to rapid m ontage, to intradiegetic comparisons (what M itry calls

implied symbols ), and that, on the whole, they appear as somewhat decorative

supplem ents to an idea the main conveyance of whic h is the assigned task of the

narrative.

M y three examples are anyth ing bu t innocent; rather, they are a skewed samp ling

from the most important and m ost celebrated m anifestations of the spirit of experi-

mentation that generally characterized the silent cinema at its height in Europe.

They seek thu s to make evident in som e of the most conscious examples from this

experimentalist current the presence of the work of direct signification by the im age

and the diverse regimens according to which this work is carried out; these

regimens, in spite of their diversity, all ultimately inscribe in the representation

itself the mark of a qualification of the represented.

Over and beyond their diversity, these examples have two traits in comm on. F irst,

the imposition of a predicative point of view, which it is the assigned task of the

image to convey, entails a treatment of the represented space that, without fatally

impairing the constitution of a good space, still seals it w ith an ineffaceable

imprintthat of insanity, of

Unheimlichkeit

or of literarity.

27

Second, the collusion

brou ght ab out in these films betw een a (representational) poin t of view on the event

and the (predicative) point of view that is inscribed in it is more a matter of

improvisation th an d esign (whence the imprecision of labels and schools) and lacks

the underpinning of a general theorization of these relationships among space,

representation, and the institution of connotative

isotopies.

Which brings us to Eisenstein.

We must not be fetishistic: E isenstein is not as lonely a geniu s as he is sometim es

said to be. His tho ugh t is groun ded in an entire theoretical and practical terrain, to

wh ich he con tributed, of course, and wh ich we have just evoked. I find it natural to

consider his work at this point for the sole and simple reason that it is he w ho has

given the most thoroughgoing formulation of this problematic of figure an d meaning.

This formulation first appears toward the end of the twenties, with his reflec-

tions,developed parallel to the realization of

October

(1927) an d

General

Line

(1929),

on the principles of mon tage. These reflections culm inate in the notion of intellec-

tual montage, the goal of wh ich is to promote a cinema-essay in wh ich the fiction

would b e only a supp ort, a pretext for the linking of representations w hose value

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A u m o n t

would be principally theirattractivecharge with the work of the filmmaker thu s

consisting primarily in correlating both the fictional elements and, among the

possible attractions, those mo st useful to the discourse, the

thesis

of the film.

According to the som ewhat extreme formulation that E isenstein doe s not balk at

producing (although he confines it, to be sure, to his private work notes), it is a

question of think ing directly in images ; this is an exorbitant formula and , more-

over, not an a ltogether lucid one: one of the m ost irrefutable criticisms th at can be

leveled against this theory takes to task its overestimation of the linguistic equiva-

lencies of the image.

28

In fact, intellectual cinema is only a defen se, radical bu t

purely theoretical, of the infinite productive possibilities of montage; Eisenstein's

own view as well is that intellectual montage is no different from harm onic

montage, the play of ordered arrangements (agencements) and relations able to

produce, for example, the following chain:

Sad old man + collapsed sail + flopping tent

+ fingers crumpling a beret + teary eyes

to say

grief

by mobilizing diegetic elements as well as the parameters of the

representation. In the term s we have prop osed , we have before u s a conception of

cinema th at so overinflates the predicative poin t of view that it constitutes the latter,

tendentially, as the only driving force, the only principle of cohesion of a filmic

discourse in which the discursive component itself is hypertrophied.

These are the excesses that Eisenstein worked hard to correct, some ten years

later in a series of texts on montage, through the central concept of imaginic i ty . I

m ust forego a thorough discussion of these texts on which I have w ritten elsewhere.

The aesthetic norm that they propose subjects the film to a dual necessity:

1. It mu st

figur e

(represent) the real by a verisimilitude that d oes not conflict w ith

the normal everyday way of app rehen ding it; a vague requireme nt that nonethe-

less insists on the production both of a good scenic space-time and of a reasonably

linear narrative. This representational (denotative) work is always primary; it can-

not be overlooked.

2.

It m ust convey, begin ning w ith this representation a nd b earing on it, aglobal

i m a g e ,

sometimes conceived as a scheme and sometimes as a metaphoric general-

ization, wh ich in fact is the purely predicative aspect of this cinema.

This somewhat sk etchy remind er of the great principles exposed throug hou t the

1937 treatise on mon tage no d oub t conjures away a little too much the me ander-

ings , the hesitations, the contradictions in o rder to cast into relief the conjunction,

taken here to the point of ideal fusion, of representational point of view and

discourse.

29

1 refer the reader to E isenstein's texts them selves for an appreciation of

the way they embody these principles in a meditation on framing, on sound, on

acting

itself,

and I confine myself here to underscoring a question that is given

privileged status by this approach to filmic form and m eanin g, namely, the ques-

tion of truth.

Imaginicity, that is, the constitution of an abstract image superimposed on and

interpreting the representation, is a meaningful term only if this autointerpretation

of the film is (1) singu lar and exclusive and (2) legitimate. Now, for E isenstein , these

two requirements are one and the same: by virtue of its being true, this auto-

interpretation is, in additio n, devoid of ambiguity. As Barthes (more elegantly) p ut s

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it, E isenstein's art is not polysemo us . . .; the E isensteinian m eaning devastates

ambiguity. . . . E isenstein's decorativism has an economic function: it proffers the

truth.

Without question, it is not a matter of indifference that this truth with wh ich

Eisenstein is concerned should find an ultimate criterion in a pragmatics of class

strugglethus, outside the film itself as a discourse. We may recall the violent

criticisms of the conclusion ofStrike(1924) proffered by Eisenstein himself because

of its concrete inefficacy, and other similar cases, which should suffice to rem ind us

that what is being sought after here is indeed not the logician's abstract truth.

Nonetheless, if there is one element of the E isensteinian system that ap pears to be

still unsu rpa ssed , it is this on e, inasmuch as it posits that filmic form (thus, amon g

other things, any shot, any institution of a representational point of view) is

determined by the meaning assigned to the represented, ha ving in view a certain

effect

in a g iven

context. W hat is foremost in this conception is the m eaning , w hich

literally informsthe entire work of production with a criterion of truth furnishing

the guarantee that this function properly.

This theory, which would be of little consequence if it accounted solely for

Eisenstein's films, sheds incontestable light on the relationships between form and

me aning in his filmic adversaries. W hat ha pp en s if one doe s not have access to

such a criterion of tru th or, what is essentially the same thing , if one says that this

criterion need not be mad e explicit because it inhe res in things themselves (with the

ultimate g uarantee of a Leibnizian God)? We know wh at the corresponding film

theory would look like: it would wa nt its mea ning m ultiple, abu nda nt, analogou s

in its am biguity (Bazin) to life itselfand thus would have the formal work

consist in the first place of pulling away, of making cinema a reprodu ction of

reality, un interrup ted and fluid like reality (Passolini).

To pu t it in the terms of this article, w hat E isenstein dem onstrates, directly a n d

indirectly, is the indivisibility of the link between representation, point of view^

and point of view

4

, the imposed meaning. Eisenstein takes pains to translate his

biases into plastic m etap hors; Bazin, defender of the voice of thin gs , will dem and

that the wo rld, once it has been so arranged as to speak silently, not have its

discourse fettered; in addition to the significations provided by mise-en-scne,

30

Bazin's requirement of additional perception, an enlarging, a deepening and

lengthen ing, in short, an incessantquantitative in-addition, has a generic value: its

purpose is to present in the image, in every image, the idea of ambiguity that

carries an essential judg me nt on reality. A paradox p erh aps , bu t not only that. The

most obstinate refusal to write always gives wayDaney showed this perfectly

with the example of Hawks to the necessity of writing this refusal in one way or

another, and the M acM ahonian extremism that, on many points, speaks the truth of

Bazinism, itself inc ludes this necessity in its definition of Langian film direc tion.

31

And so witho ut go ing any further in this description of the various attitudes that

have historically been a dop ted toward this idea of a discourse of the im age, w hat

draws our atten tion at this stage in our reflections is the institutio nal collusion in a

good pa rt of the history of film (pe rha ps in all of cinema) between tw o functions or,

bette r yet, two natu res of the image. The first is to bring to view, according to several

modalities more or less legitimized by the establishment of appropriate conven-

tions.The image

shows .

The rem ark is often m ad e that in the face of a film (in this it



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1 4

}.

A u m o n t

is similar

to the

dream)

one

does

not

chooseat least

not

entirely what

one

sees.

I

will retur n

to

this point

in a

mom ent to recon sider briefly

the

thorny question

of

the spectator

of

film and will simply note

for the

time being th is first

and

essential

definition

of the

filmic image:

it has us see

something that

is not

there

but is

supposed

to

exist somew here

and

that

it

takes

the

place

of. The

filmic image

is

thus

structured

in the

first instance ,

by

logical anteriority,

so as to

mimic

a

point

of

view.

It

is

structured

as a

representational point

of

view defined

by a

relationship

of

presence

and

absence

(the

question

of the

frame first means: what

to

show?

and

therefore, wh at

is to be

produced

as

existing beyond

the

visu al field, offscreen?)

It

cannot

be

overstated:

in

this function

of

showing,

the

image

is

sovereign, even

if the

signature

of

mastery

in

film ap pears less materially than

it

does

in

painting (where

the painter's

touchis

always

his

most direct metonymy).

At

the

same time,

the

image

has a

second function,

or

nature:

it

literallymakes

sense,mobilizing

the

whole thickness

of the

iconographie m aterial

as

well

as all

traits

of

representation

to

construct

the

signified(s). This constructed, connoted

meaning

may be

sparse

(the

Bazinian ambiguity,

the

Rossellinian I-touch-

nothing

are

perhaps

the

extreme cases

of

this);

it may, on the

contrary invade

the

field like

a

weed, like

the

flowers

of

blackness

and

rhetoric

in

Caligarism:

dia-

phanous

or

opaque, labile

or

consistent, meaning

is

always there.

The

image

of

film,

as it has

been produced until

now, in any

case, always predicates.

Naturally, this collusion between

the

bringing-to-view

(l e

donner

voir)and the

giving-to-understand (le donner

comprendre)certainly,

in

spite

of

what appears

to

me

to be its

universality

in

films, does

not

exist indepen dently

of

narrative.

If one

can read

in the

image

a

qualification

of the

represented,

it

always comes

by way of

the coincidence betw een

the

representational point

of

view

and the

narrative point

of view

and,

correlatively,

via the

institution

of

narrative schmas

and the

charac-

ters'actantial functions, which m ore directly mobilizethesymbolic register. Na rra-

tive

and,

more particularly,

the

narrative po int

of

view, th us seem

to be

that w hich,

inscribing itself bo th

in

iconic term s (notably, und er

the

aegis

of the

frame)

and in

terms

of

meaning

and

jud gm ents, effects

the

mediation nec essary

to any

predica-

tive value

of the

image.

Still, filmic na rrat ion ,

in itself, it

seems

to me, has

only little

to do

with

the

image

and much more

to do

with

the

reapp lication

of

abstract

and

general mechanisms

that, moreover, have been extensively studied

in the

last

few

decades

and

take

a

variety

of

forms

in

film.

The

difficulty obv iously

is

that

it is

impossible

to

assign

a

site, in the

filmic d iscourse,

to

narrative processes: they slip

in

through figures

of

montage

but

also become fixed com positional tec hniques

and

insinuate themselves

into the

represented

itself.

This

is why the

best works

on

filmic narrative canno t

avoid focusing

on the

narrative

inthe

film

(cf.

Vanoye)

and

never really

on the

film

(the film

in its

entirety)

as a

narrative.

Before return ing,

one

last tim e,

to

this interlacing

of the

points

of

view that

the

image offers

to the

spectator,

I

will allow myself

one

final digression

and

attemp t

to

further isolate this loose joint

in

filmic narrative w hich m akes

it

both

the

sturdiest

of

linchpins

of the

work

of the

g ift

as

well

as the

least specific

of the

operations

of the

filmic discourse.

M y example, somewhat arbitrary

in

that

its

choice

is

contingent

on the

availabil-

ity

of

film copies,

is the

beginning

of

Hitchcock'sThe 39S teps,made

in

1935.

32



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1 5

Specifically, I will consider its first 51 shots after the credits, which form a kind of

prologue to the film; apart from the first shot, which I will pass over, these shots

form one single sequ ence , the role of which in the narrative economy of the film is to

organize the meeting of the hero, Hannay, and the secret agent, Annabella Sm ith,

w ho will die a short while later in his arm s, thu s setting him on his adv enture; th is

encounter takes place toward the end of the sequence in question, in a natural

way; they bump into each other, literally by accident. Now the entire sequence,

wh ich is poin ted toward this end th at allows the res t of the film to shift into gear, is

in fact inconspicuously un der pin ned by an altogether different necessitythat of

showing the

face face

between H annay and M r. M emory, the man with the

phenomenal powers of recall who is, as we will understand in the film's last

sequence, the key link in a ring of spies.

Thus,

in this first sequence, the work of the narrative instance is dual: on the one

hand, it has to lead the spectators from the very first shots in which, initially in a

mo de of fragmentation, the hero is introduced , u p to his meeting An nabella, all thewhile insisting on the aleatory and

therefore

natural character of the succession of

events; on the other ha nd , but without saying so, it mu st indicate the relationship

between Ha nnay and M emory, the hero and the secret agent, w ho will later become

each other's enemy. It is this witho ut saying so that poses the prob lem, of course:

because if I can in all certainty assert that the prologue contains this face-to-face

encounter, that is because it is inde ed said on a certain level.

Let us specify this saying . The prologue sequence comprises basically three

mo ments that correspond to three types of framing:

1. Nobody's shots, in Nick Browne's sense, in other word s, framings that can be

attributed to the narrative event and to it alone; these are the first seven shots, in the

course of which w e are first show n the hero, w ithou t his face bein g revealed for the

moment, taking his seat in the music hall, and then the entire hall;

2. A series of shots, in group s of seven or eight, co unterposing hall and stage;

these shots present relatively little regula rity (the read ym ade possibilities for fram-

ing are largely ignored, and the points of view from the hall are particularly

diverse the better to mimic, perh aps , the m ultiple eye of the public, perh aps also

to wave a red herring).

3. Finally, the shots in wh ich the H annay-M emory encounter is articulated: they

constitute a rather complicated setup, including (1) the drawn-out introduction of

M emory, up un til his abrupt projection onto the foreground, in shot 23, in wh ich h e

greets the public and us , at the same tim e, thank s to a fleeting but unm istakable

glance into the camera; (2) Hannay's equally protracted introduction, which, aside

from the very first shots in which he is seen only partially and from the back,

includes shot 31, in which he attempts unsuccessfully to ask his question for the

first time (a sup ernum erary captures bo th M emory's and the spectator's attention),

and at the cost of further man ifesting the narrator's arbitrariness, shot41, in which

Ha nnay sud den ly reap pea rs, frontally, at the end of a pan ning shot, wh ere we no

longer expect to find him; and (3) the face-to-face encounter, properly speaking,

which occurs once and only once, in shot 43, where we see him converse with

Memory.

The entire craft of this encounteror better still, the veritable lure that is

established with itis due to the actualization of the face face (shot 43) being



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treated as a matter of utte r insignificance, exactly as a shot like any o ther that could

have found its way into the vast series of the back-and-forth betw een stage and hall.

Inversely, in shots 23 and 31, the face face finds itself inscribed symbolically

notably by the precise complem entarity of the direction of each man's gaze as a n

infinitely more adequ ate representation of the reality of their relationship, as direct

confrontation. (This is diegetically unactu alized , th us un readab le to the spectator.)

It is perhaps difficult for anyone without a precise recollection of the film to

accept my description at face value, but it seem s to me impossible that any analysis

of the sequence should miss the striking relationships between two shots that are

the only two in this entire piece to show the characters in profile and looking

ostensibly offscreen.

How should all this be summ arized? First, we might unde rscore the ruse of the

narration that, by casting the first sequence as prologue and point of departu re for

the following sequence (the Hannay-Annabella conversation)

vi a

an accidental

event (the pistol shot), permits the submergence of the first sequence by the

second this explains the establishment of the ruse of leaving the character M em-

ory by the narrative wayside and the narrative masking of his key role. Second, we

should reiterate that in the first sequence, the articulation, however spare, of the

relationsh ip Hannay-M emory is one that is effected in a directly symbolic register

(confrontation, a topology of dom inant/dom inated gazes, intertwining of knowl-

edge and truth) and is thus derivable not from a simple seeing but from reading.

Furthermore, this articulation is inscribed in exclusivelyvisual da ta .

I hop e, moreover, tha t, for want of a perfect description, m y example will suffice

for the purposes of this scansion of the relationships in which representation,

narration, and the symbolic order knot together. (The fact that it is drawn from a

filmm aker w hose concern for maste ry and articulation is fully equal to Eisenstein's

should not be surprising but rather indicative of the fact that, materially speaking,

the borders between writing and transparency, if borders there be, are always

permeable.)

This last example has he lped us reiterate in this way the reciprocal play of various

filmic agencies, various points of view. I wo uld like only, by way of concluding , to

situate these instances, these filmic givens, with respect to their receiver: the

spectator. What we have just emphasized, as many others have before, what any

broad study of the history of films demonstrates, is that, like all works of art, the

film is a

g ift.

What any film gives to its spectator, is always:

a) The

view

onto a coherent imag inary space, itself constructed thro ugh a sys tem

of partial (and with rare exception, noncontradictory) views; this first stage of the

relationship of the film to its spectator has long been recognized and isolated as

such. To confine ourselves to the relatively recent p ast, Souriau and the filmological

school, then M itry especially, were am ong those to have called attention to this

ou tstan ding characteristic of the filmic univ erse wh ich is its con stitution of a

space.

3 3

Of course, certain filmm akers in certain periods have laid greater stress on

the filmophanic app eara nce (Souriau) of objects this is how the notion of

photogenie in Delluc or E pstein, or the E isensteinian close-up, are to be u nde r-

stood; but even the telephone in Th e Mir ror w i th Th reeFaces or the wire-rim

spectacles in Potemkin(1925) (or the ke ttle inMurial[1963]) do not totally avoid be ing

captured spatially.



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Th e Point of V iew 17

In term s of the psycholog y or the metapsycholog y of the spectator, film is in the

first instance an act ofshowing; the institution of the frame, its modifications and

mobilization, substitute themselves for the gaze of the subject-spectator: this

function of substitution has been described often and to different ends,

34

and I

would like only to put forth a refinement as to the relationship between the filmic

view and the operation of the scopic drive, a relationship that, in spite of having

become the focus of recent theorizations of the cinematographic apparatus, does

not seem to me to have been clearly correlated to the precise schema by which

Lacan, in his rereading of Freud, described the drive. I am not convinced, in

particular, that the idea of an identification of the subject-spectator with the

camera has indeed b een sep arated from the empirical perspective (the phenom eno-

logical perspective, if you like) that could be invoked by a M nsterb erg, as early as

1916,

in his assimilation of the pa nn ing shot to the m ovement of the eye in its socke t.

I do not dispute the idea that there is a relationship of identification that is

established in the cinematographic app aratus betw een an all-seeing spectator

(M etz) and the projector's beam , a mtonym ie figurant of the gaze projected by

the camera onto the world. But in cinema as in the other visual arts (wh ether or not

they are organized into spectacle), the spectator is also, and perhaps principally,

someone w ho sees himself b eing taken in. We might recall that, in his an alysis of

the scopic drive, Lacan indicates (in his typically lacunary fashion) the veritable

suspensionof the ga zeeffected by the (classical) painting. The pain ter gives to the

prospective viewer of his painting something that, in a whole kind, at least, of

painting, may be sum m ed up as follows: 'You want to look? Good, then see this': He

gives the eye something to feed on, but he invites one to whom the painting is

presented to set down his gaze there, as one lays down his weapon.

35

It is clear

that cinema is not painting , not even landscape pain ting .

36

It is also clear that it h as

not been a mistake to emphasize that which, in the cinematographic apparatus,

calls to mind the primordial mirror.

37

But does not film entail a contemplation,

complicated an d contradicted by the m echanics of narrative bu t always pre sup pos -

ing , before any other consideration, the existence of a

f ilm ic

space tha t is unveiled to

the spectator the all-seeing subject w ho is also , however, and inseparably,

merely aseeingsubject wh ose gaze is chann eled, blocked as it were, by the filmic

representation? Oudart had pertinently called attention, it seems to me, to this

dialectic betw een a du al, identificational, relationsh ip and the emergence of

m eaning , noting in succession how the subject-spectator dizzily and with jubila-

tion app rehe nds the unr eal space (this is the pha se of the all-seeing, of the dual

relationship), and how th en, this unr eal space w hich, a moment ago, was the site

of his pleasu re[jouissance]h as become the distance that separates the camera from

the characters, who are no longer there, who command no longer the innocent

being-there of a moment ago, b ut now the being-there-for {for that is, in order, to

signify th e absent field, an d the figure itself of wh at O ud ar t calls the Absent One ).

O ud art u nqu estion ably greatly forces the issue in assimilating, even analogically,

this turnstile to a mo del that was elaborated elsewhere to designate hypo -

thetically the relationsh ip of the sub ject

to h is or

her

own discourse.

A lso, what I find

convincing in his intuitions is not the mechanical valorization of a cinem atograp hy

that subjects its syntax to the relationship of alternating eclipse betw een the

subject and the subject's disco urse bu t rather his designation of the topical relation-

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sh ip betwee n the field and alter-field (or absen t field ) as a mob ile junction

betw een contemplation and the gaze, betw een the satisfaction of the scopic drive

and its suspension through the view.

b) At the same time, an d in a partially contradictory way, as far as the psychologi-

cal mechanisms that are set into play are concerned, the spectator is led by a

narrative. The place of this spectator has been described quite well (by Nick

Browne) as a

locus:

this

site

represen ts a habilitating function, capable of establish-

ing a link betw een fiction and enunciation or, to be more precise, of assu ring that

there exists between these two instances a passage, a turnstile, which cannot but

call to mind the very model proposed by Oudart for the filmic view.

It wo uld be sim plistic to conclude from this that the film estab lishes two

separate

relationships to its spectator, one in which it gives him an im aginary space to see,

the other in which it gives him a narrative to follow; these two relationsh ips are n o

doubt a single relationship, and the metapsychological approach that we have

touched on here is no better able to distinguish them than the phenomenological

approach we outlined earlier. Still, it appe ars to me that this do uble relationship is

strongly asymmetrical in that, if for no other reason, it is in the unfolding of the

narrative that the identifications are, in the main, p rodu ced . M etz, taking up the

Freu dian meanin g of the term , spea ks of these secondary identifications, which

unquestionably are never stronger than when the represented situations are sim-

ple, abstractarchetypical. These secondary identifications do not easily lend

themselves to study

38

(and are perhaps generally overestimated). I would like,

however, to stress the hyp othe sis that I have implicitly raised : these identifications

seem to be aimed essentially at archetypical narrative situations an d heavily coded

representationa l situation s; concrete presence (in the form of figurative ove rload,

39

for example) would, on the contrary, pose an obstacle to these identifications,

provoking the spectator to look and no longer to annihilate himself in a dual

relationship that is always on the order of incorporation.

c) Finally, in relation to this traditional narrative-representational regimen and

the complex game of seduction/identification that it offers the spectator, the im posi-

tion of a meaning on the filmic representation as a kind of direct inscription at the

analogical level of potentially autonomous signifieds can no longer appear as

anything other than a perversion. Here we meet, at least insofar as I believe I

understand him, Lacan and the enigmatic remark with which he concludes his

analysis of the function of the painting , positing that an entire aspect of painting ,

expression ist pain ting , gives som ething along the lines of a certain satisfaction of

the visual drive, a certain satisfaction of that which is dem and ed b y the gaze ,

therefore something along the lines of perversion.

This is not the place to enter into the exegesis of this ph ras e, w hich is not entirely

clear to me (especially on the ques tion of the distinctive pertinent trait of the

expressionist school of painting at issue. In spite of the precautions with w hich it

is certainly fitting to surro un d a ny reapplication of the Lacanian conceptual system

(which is by no mea ns articulated w ith an aesthetics in mind), this may be the place

to begin a possible description of the singular relationship (relation of consum p-

tion, of usage, an d, tendentially, a form of fetishism) tha t, parallel, as it were, to the

first two, is sustained by the film with its spectator.

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The Point

of

View

1 9

Postscript, February 1987

Upon rereadin g, in Arth ur Denner's perfect translation, an article that was written

six years ag o, I am aware that in some respects this is already a d ated text. I do not

see any way in which I could improve it witho ut h aving to write an entirely new

text; some brief rem arks , however, m ight be in ord er he re. First of all, the A merican

reader should bear in mind that this article was meant for a French-speaking

readership; hence, the occasional reference to some texts that are considered

classics in this co untry b ut are largely ignored in France (e.g., Arvidson's M emoirs)

and the absence of reference to some specialized articles published in American

journals (e.g., on early cinema; see note 10) but generally unavailable to a French

reader.

Essentially, this article sketches in passing a theory of spectatorship based on a

consideration and a historical differentiation of the spectator's cognitive activity;

wh at I just mentioned here as a possible alternative to a (then) dom inant psycho -

analytical model, has, of course, been given its adequate and fully elaborated

treatmen t in David Bordwell's work, m ost notably in hi sNarrationi n

the

FictionF i lm ,

in wh ich he shows in particular that imaginary space construction and un der stan d-

ing of the narrative may be treated as two aspects of one and the same overall

cognitive process, whereby th e spectator resp ond s to cues present in the film, with

reference to external data such as his/her mastery of norms that are historically

defined. I am in complete agreem ent w ith Bordwell's general idea that, aside from

identificatory processes (before they occur, or parallel to them), the spectator is

engaged in a conscious or preconscious activity that at least verges on cognition,

though I would probably never have developed it as strictly and as fully as does

Bord well. His w ork and a num ber of other recent readings, notably on visual

perceptionwould incline me now to take a clearer stance on this matter than I

took in 1981. The last paragraphs of my text, in particular, would have to be

rearticulated in view of my present opinion that the metapsychological model

elaborated by M etz, Baudry, and others arou nd 1975 is not easily supp orted by

empirical evidence which, to m e, doe s not mean (and this is wh ere I mo st visibly

separa te from Bordwell's endeavor) that it does not correspond to a tru th of its ow n.

But that is another story.

NOTES

1. Cf. the obligatory posing of early pho togra phy (for half a century) and the unfailingly to rturou s

apparatuses invented to achieve them.

2. Highly symptomatic examples of this hypostasis appear in all of the literature inspired by the

politique des auteurs and its M acM ahonian avatar. See M ichel M ourlet to be further conv inced. On

a less shrill note, and und ertak ing a more productive chan nel, we find the same preoccupation in the

early work of Raymond Bellour,

LeMondeet la dis tance,

and particularly in his

On Fr itz Lang.

3. We will retu rn to this matter near the end of this article. The numb er of high q uality works dedicated

to this question perm its m y p resent brevity. Besides the classics (Baudry, M etz), see also, in J. P.

Simon's book, the paragra ph entitled Sujet de renonciation et double identification (p. 113).

4. Here I will leave the debate on origins completely aside, its absu rdity bein g generally acknowl-

edged these days.



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20 } . Au m ont

5.Sensitivity toward this contradiction has grown blurry since the cinema of transparency has been

confirmed in its hegemony. At the end of the silent era it was still quite vivid, as is shown so

excellently in the beginning of Arnheim's book.

6. A nd the same often goes for the other param eters of representation implied by mean ing numb er 2.

On this point, see the developm ent of the problematic of seeing/seen in Bellour, in his a lready cited

article on Lang and, again, albeit in a different manner, in his analysis of Th e Bi rds(1969). C or-

relatively, it is instructive to see the de gree to which, for auth ors like Jost (see his article in

Thorie

du

f i lm,

p.

129) or Vanoye, the expression of point of view is monosem ous: it always refers to the

narrative point of view.

7.

In Thtre et cinma (1951): It is Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and M anet, who have

understood from the inside, and in essence, the nature of the photographic phenomenon and,

prophetically, even the cinematographic one. Faced with photography, they opp ose d it in the only

valid way, by a dialectical enriching of pictorial techniqu es. They un derstoo d the laws of the new

cinema better than the photographers and well before the moviemakers, and it is they who first

app lied them. (Translated by Hu gh Gray, in Bazin, Wha t IsCinema? (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1967): 119.)

8. See the remarkable study by Keith Cohen in the first part of his book.

9. An d if the history of cinema converges at times with th at of theater, it is essentially by way of the

actorsin other words, on economic and sociological ground rather than on an aesthetic level.

10. On the subject of narration in primitive films, see, in addition to the widely known histories of

cinema, the work of Nol Burch, his article on Porter in particular, a nd the uneven b ut irreplaceable

collections of texts preferred at regular intervals by the Cahiersde la C inma thque .

11.

This includes some of the best autho rs, as anyone can verify. W hat I find even m ore remarkable is the

concern in M .-C . Ropars's analyses, w hich deal expressly with the problematic of writing, w ith an

inventory a nd the exploitation of the figurative givens.

12.

This in spite of the advances of the last fifteen yea rs. The historical works, by v irtue of their rigor or

lack thereof, only confirm this difficulty: Brownlow's or Deslandes's books, for example, have a

secondary but startling effect in clearly signaling the gaps in our knowledge of the historical past

(cf. Deslandes's refusal, given the absenc e of reliable docu me ntation, to take up the paten t war of

1898 or Brownlow's attestation to the definitive loss of all of Universal's silent films).

13. On the Black M aria and their first films, see the article by Gordon Hendricks, 1959. On the

M utoscope studio , see the ph otograp hs in D eslandes, Volume II, p. 282, and pp . 28-33 in Brownlow,

1979.

14.

M etz, in his article, M ontage et discours, a systemization of some remarks by M itry, draws the

aesthetic and semiological conclusions.

15.O n Hale's Tour see Brownlow, 1979, pp . 48-49. Here we might also cite the famous first dollying

by the cameraman Promio in a Venetian gondola: Mitry, we recall, has expertly shown that this

am bulant shot is not equivalent to a true camera movement, and even less so to a montage within

the shot (see his

Esthetique

. . . , p. 151).

16.Especially, the famous dispute on whether or not Porter invented alternating montage inLifeof an

American Fireman

(1902). Apparently, this is not a dead issue, as Am engual confirms in the

Cahiers

d e

la C inm athque .The literature on Griffith is even more cop ious; see the priceless anecd otes in Linda

Arvidson Griffith's and Karl Brown's recollections.

17. I have tried to examine these conventions in greater detail in my article on Griffith, to which the

reader is referred.

18.In Pierre Sorlin's shot breakdown forL'Avant-scene, these shots are num bered 310 throug h 317 (see

the plate of illustrations, p. 33). The breakdown forTheBattle,mentioned earlier, appears in this same

issue.

19.See descriptions and pictures of this film in the article by Deutelba um. Let us recall that criticism of

the overuse of titles was one of the major themes of the intellectual critique of the teens and

twenties. On this, Vachel Lindsay is highly representative; see pp. 189-190.

20.

On these two films and their lighting, elucidating anecdotes can be found in Linda Arvidson's book.

21.Even in the work of the creative greats of American silent cinema, the sear

aumont point of view

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