The Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema

Christian Quendler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138911369
• eBook ISBN: 9781317434184
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

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?

1 Seeing-As

There are long rhetorical and philosophical traditions that demand metaphors and media to be clear and transparent. Even though—or because—for most philosophers and rhetoricians metaphors and media are fundamental to language and thought, they are routinely suspected of obfuscating reality and confusing the mind. The metaphor of the camera eye is not an exception; it has been celebrated and denounced as a metaphor that enlightens and illudes the mind.¹ As a metaphor that relates vision (in optical, physiological or psychological senses) to bodies and machines, the camera eye illustrates well an issue that has vexed theories of metaphors since Aristotle: Apparently, a metaphor can itself only be described in metaphorical terms. This curious phenomenon seems to underscore the importance of metaphors for organizing structures of analogous (e.g. ‘the eye is a camera’) and disanalogous relations (e.g. ‘no man is an island, entire to himself’) that are paradigmatic of human understanding. Strictly speaking, camera-eye metaphors do not tell us anything about cameras and eyes or the knowledge fields associated with them. Yet, they can persuasively show how meaning and thought develop from embodied simulations that involve perception, object manipulation and bodily movement.² In this sense, the philosophical truth of metaphors lies in establishing congruent relations across different domains of cognitive and experiential domains. Mark Johnson puts it in practical terms: “From this perspective, truth is a matter of how our body-based understanding of a sentence fits, or fails to fit, our body-based understanding of a situation.”³

This chapter approaches the camera eye as an instrument of alignment. I propose looking at the physical and figurative alignment of camera and eye as the formal and formative arrangements of a subject matter for a specific purpose.⁴ ‘Form’ in this context relates to a specific function or a mode of being in which a subject matter is recognized.⁵ Aligning eye and camera can be seen as a basic form of engineering mind and matter. The metaphor of the camera eye becomes useful and thoughtful when it formally organizes its content in a meaningful way. At the core of the camera-eye metaphor is a play with the senses, or more precisely a playful confusion of ‘sensory’ and ‘conceptual’ senses. I will introduce the interrelation of embodied and abstract senses by drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of aspect seeing or seeing-as before tracing such productive (con-)fusions of sense across technological and physiological uses of camera-eye metaphors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While productive exchanges between technological and physiological uses of the camera eye were instrumental in the development of film theory, I argue that film theory only emerged when these two camera-eye notions were synthesized. I will discuss Walter Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious that develops a synthetic camera-eye conception and sets the model for the convergent theorizing that characterizes Jean-Louis Baudry’s apparatus theory.

Playing with the Senses

Many definitions and descriptions of metaphor rely on visual images and acts of perception. Wittgenstein addressed this relationship by introducing the term “seeing-as” or, more generally, “aspect seeing” to describe a moment of visual consciousness.⁶ When looking for something or when looking at something for its particular mode of appearance, we shift to an aspect of seeing that frames our experience. For instance, the experience of seeing may be framed as a search when we are looking for something that we cannot see, or as a discovery when we see something we have not seen before. Yet, aspect-seeing is not necessarily motivated by intentions as we find our gaze captivated by aspects of our sight and our perception guided by interpretative frames. For Wittgenstein, the ability to shift between different aspects of seeing allows us to distinguish between seeing and thinking and to account for its fusion in processes of comprehension. Aspect-seeing allows us to hold multiple views of the same thing. Without this ability, he argues, there would be merely a descriptive apprehension of things.⁷

Central to aspect-seeing, Wittgenstein notes, is a sense of wonder.⁸ The integration of (aspects of) seeing and (conceptual) meaning is characterized by an experience of astonishment. When an aspect emerges or, as Wittgenstein puts it, “flashes up,” a new perception is created.⁹ What is perceived is not an external trait or the characteristic of an object, but a (new) relation of this object among other objects. Seeing-as in this sense means seeing things in relations, according to rules and conventions that organize our views.¹⁰ If the rhetorical power of metaphor results from the sound and accurate alignment of embodied and conceptual senses, the philosophical insight of metaphors lies in the very processes of blending embodied and conceptual meanings. Wittgenstein sometimes refers to the fusion of perceptual and conceptual frames as the original language game of perception. René Descartes calls this mixing of perceptual and intellectual senses (or the sensible and the meaningful) a habitual perversion of the order of nature.¹¹ For him this analogy between perceptual and rational senses is a makeshift solution in order to address things of which there is no positive knowledge.¹² Throughout this book I will be concerned with what happens when we avert our gaze from projected and moving images and our wondrous experience turns into a theoretical discourse or an artistic vision. What happens when the play with the senses extends to a conceptual play and consolidates into a language game with its own emerging rules of formal alignment?

The prehistory of this question can be found in Laurent Mannoni’s monumental study The Great Art of Light and Shadow. In this archaeology of cinema, Mannoni outlines a history of how optical toys are transformed into scientific tools. He compiles eleven chapters spread out over three parts before, in the forth part, he turns to the canonical patrons of cinematography: Jules Janssen, Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. The first part is entitled, quite poetically, “The Dreams of the Eye” and surveys a variety of image-projection devices that, like the camera obscura and the magic lantern, were developed in the seventeenth century. The two subsequent parts, headed “Triumphant Illusions” and “The Pencil of Nature,” trace the development of moving slides in the eighteenth century and the invention of photography in the nineteenth century.

In his introduction to the English translation of The Great Art of Light and Shadow, Tom Gunning reflects on the governing themes and the trajectory suggested by the section headings, which place projected-image and moving-image technologies in a long tradition where magic and trickery mix with science and precise craftsmanship. Drawing on Jonathan Crary’s discussion of optical devices in Techniques of the Observer, Gunning posits a crucial difference between the illusion conveyed by projection devices of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the display of motion in nineteenth-century optical toys such as the thaumatrope, anorthoscope, phenakistoscope or stroboscope:

The projected images of the original magic lantern amazed viewers because in some sense they did not know whether to take them for substance or shadow, image or reality. Careful observation and familiarity with the projection techniques could dispel these illusions, revealing them as figures merely composed of light and shadow. But in the optical toys of the nineteenth century (and we could add here Crary’s main example of the stereoscope), the illusion of motion was no longer based on credulity: the viewer actually saw the images superimposed or the succession of motions or the illusion of three-dimensionality. In other words, the senses themselves were fooled; even understanding the nature of the device could not dispel the illusions.¹³

Like Crary, Gunning associates these optical toys with an epistemological turn. The human body itself is invested as a perceptual device and optical devices become models of perception or even human consciousness. Gunning characterizes this turn by distinguishing between two senses of illusion, which for him also serve as a phenomenological difference between projected and moving images. On the one hand, there is the sense of deception or ignorance of whether an image is material or a figment of light. Thus, posed as an ontological question, illusion seems to be merely a matter of enlightenment (“careful observation and familiarity”). On the other hand, stereoscopy or moving images evoke a kind of illusion that lingers on and does not seem to resolve. They create a spectacle of continuous amazement and lend themselves to illustrating ‘scientifically’ what seems cognitively inaccessible. It is an illusion that does not simply relate to the nature of the things depicted but to the physiological and psychological premises of our perception. The optical impression of motion and depth is not an act of deception that is to be seen through. The image’s wondrous effect rather seems to mimic an aspect of consciousness; it makes us see the images as having depth or motion. The effect points to the camera and eye as the non-human and human producers of the image. In aligning camera and eye, the image thereby creates a common ground for exploring conscious phenomena in terms of non-conscious events. We can also say it offers a conceptual basis for explaining consciousness (in a non-tautological way).¹⁴ In playing with our senses, moving images create a linkage that enables us to explore images as mental models or explain them in terms of human physiology.

Gunning’s distinction between illusions that diminish with the viewer’s increasing familiarity and knowledge, on the one hand, and illusions that refuse to be dispelled, on the other, can be mapped onto the scientific controversy between empiricist and nativist theories of vision of the nineteenth century. The perception of depth in stereoscopic images became the testing ground for rivaling approaches of the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz and physiologist Ewald Hering. While Helmholtz contended that the perception of depth was a mental phenomenon acquired through experience, Hering regarded it as an effect predisposed by the physiology of the human eye.

As imaging technologies become gauges for physiological and psychological dimensions of seeing, the camera eye emerges as shorthand for this dichotomy and sometimes even as an imaginary solution for overcoming it.¹⁵ George Lakoff and Mark Johnson describe metaphors like the camera eye as ontological metaphors. Like notions of the mind as a machine, such metaphors view “events, activities, emotions, ideas, etc., as entities and substances.”¹⁶ While this appears to be a valid general observation, it is important to examine more closely the ontological work performed by the camera eye. What are the specific modes, processes and forms of metaphorical ontologizing?

Camera-eye metaphors are bi-directional; they can be viewed under anthropomorphic or mechanomorphic aspects. The camera eye may tell us something about the eye or visual perception in terms of the optical apparatus of a camera. Or, it may work as a mechanomorphic figure that draws on principles of human vision to illustrate how a camera or film works. In yet another sense, both anthropomorphic and mechanomorphic aspects can be seen to build upon each other. When Johannes Kepler wondered if human vision occurred like light forming an image in a camera obscura, he transferred vision to a scientific and technical domain. His assumption came with the promise of new interrelations and the lure that perception may be measurable and computable like geometrical forms. Probing and questioning the scientific perfection of nature, Descartes fantasized about a better nature that would have made the human eye as long as a telescope.

By inviting us to shift aspects of seeing, the camera eye lends itself to a dialectical reasoning. Rather than confining itself to defining one thing in terms of another, it underscores the dynamic constitution of experience and knowledge. The camera eye is a prime example to illustrate embodied, extended and situated processes of cognition.¹⁷ Kepler’s and Descartes’s recourse to the camera obscura and the telescope illustrates this.¹⁸ The camera eye dissects and reconstructs the human body by mapping across (and projecting from) bodily and technological domains: human visual perception and the visual apparatus of the camera. These two domains or mental spaces inform a wide range of metaphorical extensions ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Seeing-As
• 2 Seeing Better and Seeing More
• 3 Seeing and Writing
• 4 Memory and Traces
• 5 Gestures and Figures
• 6 Roles and Models
• 7 Minds and Screens
• 8 Retrospective
• Bibliography
• Index