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

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Hanich: Why the importance of Merleau-Ponty rather than Husserl, Sartre, or other phenomenologists? Bachelard, G., 1958. The Poetics of Space. Translated from French by Maria Jolas 1964. Boston: Beacon Press. Stern, Lesley, and George Kouvaros, eds. Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance. Sydney: Power Publications, 1999. Bennett-C. B., 2008. ‘Moving memento mori pictures: documentary, mortality, and transformation in three films.’ PhD Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America. Home-movies recall our memories of the existential subjects on screen and our experience of them in the lived world.

Heim, Michael. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. Print. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review I/146 (1984): 53-92. Print.With the electronic and the advent of the VCR and DVD player, a pause is indeed a pause. However, in the cinema, an image can appear “frozen” on the screen only if it is replicated many times over so that it can continue moving through the projector; unlike the still photograph, the film always has to actively work at “arresting” its gaze. For further elaboration, see my “The Active Eye.” Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Reference here is not only to the way in which automotive transportation has extended the capacity for movement of our physical bodies and thus our lived sense of distance and space, the rhythms of our temporality, and the hard currency that creates and expresses our cultural values relative to such things as class and style but also to the way in which it has changed the very sense we have of our bodies. The vernacular expression of regret for “being without wheels” speaks ontologically to our very real incorporation of the automobile, as well as to its incorporation of us. Now, historically, it is the techno-logic of the electronic—and not the residual logic of the cinematic—that dominates the form and in-forms the content of our cultural representations. And, unlike cinematic representation, electronic representation by its very structure phenomenologically diffuses the fleshly presence of the human body and the dimensions of that body’s material world. However significant and positive its values in some regards, however much its very inventions and use emerge from lived-body subjects, the electronic tends to marginalize or trivialize the human body. Indeed, at this historical moment in our particular society and culture, we can see all around us that the lived body is in crisis. Its struggle to assert its gravity, its differential existence, status, and situation, its vulnerability and mortality, its vital and social investment in a concrete lifeworld inhabited by others, is now marked in hysterical and hyperbolic responses to the disembodying effects of electronic representation. On the one hand, contemporary moving images show us the human body (its mortal “meat”) relentlessly and fatally interrogated, “riddled with holes” and “blown away,” unable to maintain material integrity or moral gravity. If the Terminator doesn’t finish it off, then electronic smart bombs will. On the other hand, the current popular obsession with physical fitness and cosmetic surgery manifests the wish to reconfigure the human body into something more invulnerable—a “hard body”; a lean, mean, and immortal “machine”; a cyborg that can physically interface with the electronic network and maintain a significant—if altered—material presence in the current digitized lifeworld of the subject. Thus, it is no historical accident that, earlier in our electronic existence, bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger played the invulnerable, hard-body cyborg Terminator, whereas, much more recently and more in tune with the lived body’s dematerialization, the slightly built Keanu Reeves flexibly dispersed and diffused what little meat he had across The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999), The Matrix Reloaded (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 2003), and The Matrix Revolutions (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 2003).

Philosopher Arthur Danto tells us, “With the movies, we do not just see that they move, we see them moving: and this is because the pictures themselves move” (17). While still objectifying the subjectivity of the visual into the visible, the cinematic qualitatively transforms the photographic through a materiality that not only claims the world and others as objects for vision (whether moving or static) but also signifies its own materialized agency, intentionality, and subjectivity. Neither abstract nor static, the cinematic brings the existential activity of vision into visibility in what is phenomenologically experienced as an intentional stream of moving images—its continuous and autonomous visual production and meaningful organization of these images testifying not only to the objective world but also, and more radically, to an anonymous, mobile, embodied, and ethically invested subject of worldly space. In this regard it is important to note that the automatic movement of the film through the camera and projector is overwritten and transformed by the autonomous movement of what is phenomenologically perceived as a visual intentionality that visibly chooses the subjects and objects of its attention, takes an attitude toward them, and accumulates them into a meaningful aesthetically and ethically articulated experience. [12] Thus this novel and visible cinematic subject (however physically anonymous) is perceived at the microperceptual level as able to inscribe visual and bodily changes of situation, to dream, hallucinate, imagine, remember, and value its habitation and experience of the world. And, as is the case with human beings, this cinematic subject’s potential motility and experience exist as both open-ended and inextricably bound by the existential finitude and material limits of its particular vision and historical and cultural coherence—that is, its narrative. Ihde, Don. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. Print. 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) 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 Dagrada, Elena, Raffalele de Berti, and Gabriele Scaramuzza, eds. Estetica e cinema a Milano. Milan: Cuem, 2006.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. Howe, D., 1994. Review of Blue. Washington Post [online] 11 February. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/bluenrhowe_a0b031.htm [Accessed 11 November 2009]. It is no accident, for example, that in our now dominantly electronic (and only secondarily cinematic) culture, many people describe and understand their minds and bodies in terms of computer systems and programs (even as they still describe and understand their lives in terms of movies). Nor is it trivial that computer systems and programs are often described and understood in terms of human minds and bodies (for example, as intelligent or susceptible to viral infection) and that these new computer-generated “beings” have become the explicit cybernetic heroes of our most popular moving-image fictions (for example, Robocop, Paul Verhoeven, 1987; or Terminator 2: Judgment Day, James Cameron, 1991). As Elena del Río suggests, “[T]echnology springs from the very human condition of embodiment and . . . the human imaginary is of necessity a technologically drawn and grounded structure” (97). Thus, even in the few examples above we can see how a qualitatively new techno-logic begins to alter our perceptual orientation in and toward the world, ourselves, and others. Furthermore, as this new techno-logic becomes culturally pervasive and normative, it can come to inform and affect profoundly the socio-logic, psycho-logic, axio-logic, and even the bio-logic by which we daily live our lives. Indeed, through its motor and organizational agency (achieved by the spatial immediacy of the mobile camera inhabiting a world and the reflective and temporalizing editorial re-membering of that primary spatial experience), the cinema inscribes and provokes a sense of existential presence that is at once subjectively introverted and objectively extroverted; centered synoptically and synthetically yet also decentered and split, mobile and self-displacing. Thus, the cinematic does not evoke the same sense of self-possession generated by the photographic. Indeed, the cinematic subject is sensed as never completely self-possessed, for it is always partially and visibly given over to the vision of others at the same time that it visually appropriates only part of what it sees and also cannot entirely see itself. Furthermore, the very mobility of its vision structures the cinematic subject (both film and spectator) as always in the act of displacing itself in time, space, and the world; thus, despite its existence as materially embodied and synoptically centered (on the screen or as the spectator’s lived body), it is always eluding its own (as well as our) containment.

Here it is worth noting that James Joyce, in 1909, was “instrumental in introducing the first motion picture theater in Dublin” (Kern 76-77). 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.Deleuze, Gilles. Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1983; Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

del Río, Elena. “The Body as Foundation of the Screen: Allegories of Technology in Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts.” In Camera Obscura 38, 1996, 93–115. Landon, Brooks. “Cyberpunk: Future So Bright They Gotta Wear Shades.” Cinefantastique 18.1 (1987): 26-31. Print.Most media theorists point out that photographic (and cinematic) optics are structured according to a norm of perception based on Renaissance theories of perspective; such perspective represented the visible as originating in, organized, and mastered by an individual and centered subject. This form of painterly representation is naturalized by the optics of photography and the cinema. Comolli, in “Machines of the Visible,” says, “The mechanical eye, the photographic lens, . . . functions . . . as a guarantor of the identity of the visible with the normality of vision . . . with the norm of visual perception” (123-24).