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

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Stephanie Baumann, Im Vorraum der Geschichte: Siegfried Kracauers History: The Last Things Before the Last, Konstanz 2014.

Blue, 1993. [Film] Written and directed by D. Jarman. UK: Channel 4 in association with The Arts Council of Great Britain, Opal, BBC Radio 3, and Zeitgeist. Beyond the Gaze: Recent Approaches to Film Feminisms [special issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society] Vol. 30: no.1 (Autumn 2004), Co-editor with Kathleen McHugh. Hanich: Is it far-fetched to claim that you are a good example of how serendipitously an academic career can develop? The Active Eye: A Phenomenology of Cinematic Vision," Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 12, no. 3 (1990): 21–36.

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choreographed for the viewer to dwell on excessively. ‘It is produced en plus, in excess or in addition, Hanich: The discussion of Lady in the Lake is an extremely important one, but, as you say, it is the only extensive film example. What was the reason for that? Bennett-C. B., 2008. ‘Moving memento mori pictures: documentary, mortality, and transformation in three films.’ PhD Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America.

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. Landon, Brooks. “Cyberpunk: Future So Bright They Gotta Wear Shades.” Cinefantastique 18.1 (1987): 26-31. Print. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 2005, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm (last accessed May 1, 2020). Home-movies recall our memories of the existential subjects on screen and our experience of them in the lived world.Morris has noted that at an initial screening of the film several audience members started to consider Leuchter’s argument as truth. Wanting to avoid being tarred as a Holocaust denier, Morris subsequently re-edited his film adding a voiceover of a Holocaust historian. This addition makes me overtly aware of the documentary’s construction therefore I begin to question the film’s objectivity. It is a voice which does not belong to the story of Fred A. Leuchter. Its appearance seems contrived (suddenly being introduced halfway through the narrative). As my awareness to the film’s construction is heightened, I begin to pay more attention to the images as symbolic; as images I need to interrupt and analyse critically rather than images which teach me something about the world I live in. When the film has finished, I feel as if I am conflicted and confused about the “character” Fred A. Leuchter rather than feeling I have learnt something about Holocaust denial. Perhaps this is because my knowledge of the topic is relatively extensive? I am not dissatisfied with the experience though. It has been an intriguing character study, much as I expect Morris intended it to be. This different sense of subjectively perceived and embodied presence, both signified and supported by first photographic and then cinematic and electronic media, emerges within and co-constitutes objective and material practices of representation and social existence. Thus, while certainly cooperative in creating the moving-image culture or lifeworld we now inhabit, cinematic and electronic technologies are quite different not only from photographic technologies but also from each other in their concrete materiality and particular existential significance. Each technology not only differently mediates our figurations of bodily existence but also constitutes them. That is, each offers our lived bodies radically different ways of “being-in-the-world.” Each implicates us in different structures of material investment, and—because each has a particular affinity with different cultural functions, forms, and contents—each stimulates us through differing modes of presentation and representation to different aesthetic responses and ethical responsibilities. As our aesthetic forms and representations of “reality” become externally realized and then unsettled first by photography, then cinema, and now electronic media, our values and evaluative criteria of what counts in our lives are also unsettled and transformed. In sum, just as the photograph did in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so in the late twentieth and early twenty-first, cinematic and electronic screens differently solicit and shape our presence to the world, our representation in it, and our sensibilities and responsibilities about it. Each differently and objectively alters our subjectivity while each invites our complicity in formulating space, time, and bodily investment as significant personal and social experience.