The Scene Of The Screen Envisioning Cinematc — страница 7

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object for vision. Rather, the moving picture, however mechanical and photographic its origin, is semiotically experienced as also subjective and intentional, as presenting representation of the objective world. Thus perceived as the subject of its own vision as well as an object for our vision, a moving picture is not precisely a thing that (like a photograph) can be easily controlled, contained, or materially possessed. Up until very recently in what has now become a dominantly electronic culture, the spectator could share in and thereby, to a degree, interpretively alter a film’s presentation and representation of embodied and enworlded experience, but could not control or contain its autonomous and ephemeral flow and rhythm, or materially possess its animated experience.

Now, of course, with the advent of videotape and VCRs, the spectator can alter the film’s temporality and easily possess, at least, its inanimate “body.” However, the ability to control the autonomy and flow of the cinematic experience through “fast forwarding,” “replaying,” and “freezing” [24] and the ability to possess the film’s body and animate it at will at home are functions of the materiality and technological ontology of the electronic–a materiality that increasingly dominates, appropriates, and transforms the cinematic. In its pre-electronic state and original materiality, however, the cinematic mechanically projects and makes 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 that invisible and private structure we each experience as “my own.” That is, the materiality of the cinematic gives us concrete and empirical insight and makes objectively visible the reversible, dialectical, and social nature of our own subjective vision. Speaking of human vision, 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.”[25] The cinematic uniquely allows this philosophical turning, this objective insight into the subjective structure of vision, into oneself as both viewing

subject and visible object, and, remarkably, into others as the same. Again, the paradoxical status of the “more human than human” replicants in Blade Runner is instructive. Speaking to the biotechnologist who genetically produced and quite literally manufactured his eyes, replicant Roy Baty says with an ironic concreteness that resonates through the viewing audience even if its implications are not fully understood: “If you could only see what I’ve seen with your eyes.” The perceptive and expressive materiality of the cinematic through which we engage this ironic articulation of the “impossible” desire for intersubjectivity is the very materiality through which this desire is visibly and objectively fulfilled.[26] Thus, rather than merely replacing human vision

with mechanical vision, the cinematic mechanically functions to bring to visibility the reversible structure of human vision (the system visual/visible)–a lived-system that necessarily entails not only an enworlded object but always also an embodied and perceiving subject. Indeed, through its motor and organizational agency (achieved by the spatial immediacy of the mobile camera and the reflective and temporalizing editorial re-membering of that primary spatial experience), the cinematic inscribes and provokes a sense of existential “presence” that is as synthetically centered as it is also mobile, split, and decentering. The cinematic subject (both film and spectator) is perceived as at once introverted and extroverted, as existing in the world as both subject and object.

Thus, the cinematic does not evoke the same sense of self-possession as that generated by the photographic. 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, indeed, also cannot entirely see itself. Further, the very mobility of its vision structures the cinematic subject as always in the act of displacing itself in time, space, and the world–and thus, despite its existence as embodied and centered, always eluding its own (as well as our) containment. The cinematic’s visible inscription of the dual, reversible, and animated structure of embodied and mobile vision radically transforms the temporal and spatial