1st Edition

The Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema

By Christian Quendler Copyright 2017
    262 Pages
    by Routledge

    262 Pages 28 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This book explores the cultural, intellectual, and artistic fascination with camera-eye metaphors in film culture of the twentieth century. By studying the very metaphor that cinema lives by, it provides a rich and insightful map of our understanding of cinema and film styles and shows how cinema shapes our understanding of the arts and media. As current new media technologies are attempting to shift the identity of cinema and moving imagery, it is hard to overstate the importance of this metaphor for our understanding of the modalities of vision. In what guises does the "camera eye" continue to survive in media that is called new?

    Introduction



    1. Seeing-As



    Playing with the Senses



    Sensitive Paper and Visual Substance



    Mechanical Brains and Electronic Minds



    The Organic Camera Eye and Walter Benjamin’s Optical Unconscious



    Convergent Theorizing in Jean-Louis Baudry’s Apparatus Theory



    2. Seeing Better and Seeing More



    Camera and Dispositif



    René Descartes and Dziga Vertov on Perfecting Vision



    Seeing Better with Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Cartesian Camera Eye



    Seeing More with Vertov’s Kino-Eye



    3. Seeing and Writing



    Dziga Vertov’s Poetic Map of A Sixth Part of the World



    The Literary Notebooks of Luigi Pirandello’s Silent Camera Operator



    The Sound Image of John Dos Passos’ Camera Eye



    Christopher Isherwood’s Camera Eye on Stage and Screen



    4. Memory and Traces



    A Series of Dated Traces



    Margarete Böhme’s The Diary of a Lost One



    Filming the Diary of a Lost Girl



    William Keighley’s Journal of a Crime



    Cinema as Paper Formatted in Time



    5. Gestures and Figures



    Embodied Gestures and Textual Figures



    Autopsy and Autography



    Cinematic Discovery of the Self



    Filmic Bodies and Figures in Narrative Film Theory



    From Lady in the Lake to La Femme défendue



    6. Roles and Models



    Personal Cinema as Institution, Medium and Genre



    From Psychodrama to Life Models



    Animating the Self in Jerome Hill’s Film Portrait



    Stan Brakhage’s Metaphors and Art of Vision



    Brakhage’s Development of Camera Consciousness



    The Eye Body and the Body Politic in Carolee Schneemann’s Expanded Cinema



    7. Minds and Screens



    Bruce Kawin and Gilles Deleuze on Camera Consciousness



    Visionary Agents in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch



    Enacted Vision

    Biography

    Christian Quendler is Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. He is the author of From Romantic Irony to Postmodernist Metafiction and Interfaces of Fiction.

    "The metaphor of camera as eye is fundamental to both everyday discussion as well as more academic theories of cinema: it is a pervasive metaphor through which we understand cinema on several levels. Christian Quendler’s detailed study of the camera-eye metaphor is therefore a significant and erudite contribution to scholarship. But, more than this, Quendler’s study takes a truly interdisciplinary approach to this metaphor. The Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema is not dogmatic in limiting itself to one or two theoretical positions; far from it. This book encompasses a broad array of theoretical approaches – from the philosophy of mind to art theory, narratology, and gender studies. It therefore has a potentially wide appeal, not only in film studies, but also cultural and media studies more generally."Warren Buckland, Oxford Brookes University, UK