Eye of the Century

Film, Experience, Modernity

Francesco Casetti

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9780231511490
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

Is it true that film in the twentieth century experimented with vision more than any other art form? And what visions did it privilege? In this brilliant book, acclaimed film scholar Francesco Casetti situates the cinematic experience within discourses of twentieth-century modernity. He suggests that film defined a unique gaze, not only because it recorded many of the century's most important events, but also because it determined the manner in which they were received.

Casetti begins by examining film's nature as a medium in an age obsessed with immediacy, nearness, and accessibility. He considers the myths and rituals cinema constructed on the screen and in the theater and how they provided new images and behaviors that responded to emerging concerns, ideas, and social orders. Film also succeeded in negotiating the different needs of modernity, comparing and uniting conflicting stimuli, providing answers in a world torn apart by conflict, and satisfying a desire for everydayness, as well as lightness, in people's lives. The ability to communicate, the power to inform, and the capacity to negotiate-these are the three factors that defined film's function and outlook and made the medium a relevant and vital art form of its time.

So what kind of gaze did film create? Film cultivated a personal gaze, intimately tied to the emergence of point of view, but also able to restore the immediacy of the real; a complex gaze, in which reality and imagination were combined; a piercing gaze, achieved by machine, and yet deeply anthropomorphic; an excited gaze, rich in perceptive stimuli, but also attentive to the spectator's orientation; and an immersive gaze, which gave the impression of being inside the seen world while also maintaining a sense of distance. Each of these gazes combined two different qualities and balanced them. The result was an ever inventive synthesis that strived to bring about true compromises without ever sacrificing the complexity of contradiction. As Casetti demonstrates, film proposed a vision that, in making opposites permeable, modeled itself on an oxymoronic principle. In this sense, film is the key to reading and understanding the modern experience.

The Gaze of Its Age

SEEING

Stupor, appreciation, expectation. Since its invention, film has provoked debate about its significance and much speculation about what it might contribute to the new century. The conviction soon emerged that film could make us look at the world anew. It taught us not only to take a second look at the world, but to look in a different way. Film set our sense of vision free, restoring it to us with an invigorating potential.

This idea became a leitmotif of film criticism in the 1920s. Bela Balázs summed it up in a formulation that would become popular:

From the invention of printing, the word became the principal channel of communication between men … in the culture of words, the spirit—once so conspicuous—became almost invisible…. Now film is impressing on culture a change as radical as that of the invention of the press. Millions of people each night experience with their own eyes, sitting before the screen, the destinies of men, their personalities and feelings, states of mind of every sort, without needing words…. Man will go back to being visible.¹

Balázs said it clearly: film restores human visibility, and gives reality back to the gaze. Some of his contemporaries expressed it similarly. For example, Sebastiano A. Luciani:

The art of film has rendered us sensitive to the dynamic beauty of the face, in the same manner in which the theater made us sensitive to the voice. Where we once saw—in art and in life—only partially expressive masks, today we can say that we see faces.²

Or Jean Epstein:

The lens of the camera is an eye without prejudice, without morals, untouched by any influence; it sees in the face and in gesture features that we, consumed with our likes and dislikes, habits and thoughts, are no longer able to see.³

And for Abel Gance, this notion assumed a jubilant tone:

The cinema will endow man with a new sense. He will see through his eyes. He will be sensitive to brilliant versification as he has been to prosody. He will see the birds and the wind come to rest. A ray will shine down. A street will seem as beautiful as a Greek temple.⁴

Film taught us to look at the world as we had never been able to before. This idea recurs in many contemporary works.⁵ It is supported by another belief that in some ways clarifies and radicalizes it: if film reconquered and recast our manner of seeing, it was not only because it embodied the gaze of the human eye, but because it embodied the gaze of the twentieth century. The camera captured what lay before it in forms that revealed the attitudes and orientations with which people were compelled to look at the world around them. On the screen, more than a reality objectively recorded, we saw reality in the spirit of the time.⁶

Frequently, the same scholars who emphasized the renewal of vision with film became its chief interpreters as well. Luciani, for example, goes on to comment:

The telephone, automobile, airplane and radio have so altered the limits of time and space within which civilizations have developed, that today man has ended up acquiring not so much a quickness of understanding unknown to the ancients, as a kind of ubiquity. Film seems the artistic reflection of this new condition of life, both material and spiritual.⁷

Scholars from related fields also seized onto film’s power to reclaim the visual dimension and thus to interpret its time. Only a few years later, Erwin Panofsky stressed the way in which the figurative and plastic arts “start with an idea to be projected into shapeless matter, and not with the objects that constitute the physical world.” This journey from the abstract to the concrete allows them to transmit an “idealistic conception” that is no longer in line with their times. With bodies and things at its point of departure, “it is the movies, and only the movies, that do justice to that materialistic interpretation of the universe which, whether we like it or not, pervades contemporary civilization.”⁸ Film’s tendency to lay bare the spirit of its age did not, however, necessarily require that it function merely as a mirror. Siegfried Kracauer, who gave careful attention to the typical themes running through early cinema, pointed out that even the most fantastic of these “reveal how society wants to see itself.”⁹ The pervasive thought is that film, in its complexity, is a sign of its time. Léon Moussinac observed in 1925: “Within the great modern upheaval, an art is born, develops, discovers its laws one by one, moves slowly toward its perfection, an art that will be the very expression—bold, powerful original—of the ideal of the new age.”¹⁰

Keeping all of this in mind, let us move ahead to the German cultural theorist and critic Walter Benjamin and his canonical essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”¹¹

SYNCHRONIES

According to Benjamin, every phase of the history of man grasps reality in its own way: “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception.”¹² The kind of gaze that a historical period adopts manifests the concerns and interests of that period, and refers back in turn to the underlying social processes that feed these concerns. Benjamin suggests that twentieth-century modernity is dominated by two tendencies, “both linked to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life.”¹³ The two tendencies are “the desire of the present-day masses to ‘get closer’ to things spatially and humanly, and their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness.”¹⁴ We see here on the one hand an attempt to overcome distance, a need for nearness; on the other, a sense of universal sameness. With their emphasis on proximity and equality, these two tendencies legitimate a novel stance: what surrounds us must be captured in a plain and direct manner, without hindrance or restraint—even if, by necessity, through mechanical reproduction.

Film is an exemplary tool for attaining this end. Its gaze breaks down conventional barriers between ourselves and reality:

Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories seemed to close relentlessly around us. Then came film and exploded this prison-world with the dynamite of the split second, so that now we can set off calmly on journeys of adventure among its far-flung debris.¹⁵

Its gaze is able to draw us into the very fabric of things:

Just as enlargement not merely clarifies what we see indistinctly “in any case,” but brings to light entirely new structures of matter, slow motion not only reveals familiar aspects of movements, but discloses quite unknown aspects within them.¹⁶

This is a gaze that can astonish us with the rapidity of its insight. While the traditional arts stimulated contemplation, floods of filmic images provoke continuous shock.¹⁷ The filmic gaze is a leveling gaze that can reframe everything and everyone within a principle of equality. Benjamin writes: “the newsreel offers everyone the chance to rise from passer-by to movie extra.”¹⁸ Finally, it is a gaze that can dispense with the uniqueness that characterizes the traditional work of art, since it can be replicated on every film print and during every projection. Speaking about actors, Benjamin notices: “now the mirror image has become detachable from the person mirrored and is transportable.”¹⁹ Of course, there are contrary impulses as well. Cinematic technology operates as a filter; habit leads to inattention; the “optical unconscious,” giving the spectator the knowledge of things that could never be seen previously,²⁰ complicates the relationship between observer and what is observed. Nevertheless it is true that film celebrates and manifests the nearness and the sameness of things. It does so in conjunction with an age that privileges these values by stripping any “aura” from the work of art, which is transformed from an object of veneration to a mere object of display.²¹

Here it becomes important to define more precisely film and its relation to the century it represents. If these two spheres really do converge, at what points do they meet? And how does this convergence mutually condition each? What kind of film and what kind of modernity does this convergence produce? In short, what made film an interlocutor for modernity?

I will try to answer these questions by following three parallel paths. To begin with, it is film’s power as a medium that played a decisive role in creating the convergences we have identified. It acted primarily as a means of communication—even more than as a means of expression. And it did this in an age which saw the media, rather than the traditional arts, as the preferred instrument for exploring and unifying experience. Film was the medium of choice in a profoundly “mediated” era. It was significant too that film not only highlighted the questions of its time, but recast them, making them its own, and at the same time giving them an iconic value in the eyes of all. It did this in a period when cultural institutions charged with elaborating social values and concerns were in deep crisis. Cinema redefined the conceptual field at a time when this function was partly unfilled. Yet film would not have been so successful as a medium if it had not been able to resolve contradictory impulses and negotiate compromises between them. Let us remember that this was an age that had numerous and distressing conflicts in need of mediation. Film is a space of reconciliation: it forces us into contact with reality, but is simultaneously grounded in distraction. It offers fantastical images and ideas but reincorporates them in plausible scenarios. It provokes and stimulates, but also organizes and disciplines.

First, film is a medium for the exhibition and exchange of proposals; second, it is a sphere in which the impulses of its time can be reworked and made iconic; and third, it is a space in which these contradictory impulses can come to the negotiating table. In the remainder of this chapter I will elaborate on these three theses with the help of three essays by Louis Delluc as well as other theoretical texts from the 1920s. I have privileged the 1920s here because the debate of this decade is highly interesting. It occurred after two decades of examining film as a surprising modern experience, and it came before the “standardization” of film’s linguistic and expressive devices in the 1930s. The 1920s constitute an essential hinge between moments of utopian euphoria and subsequent systematization. What unfolds in this decade is the attempt to gradually transform a novelty into an institution.²² We have various positions scattered over various geographical poles (Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Rome, America), but also a largely common concern. In this framework, Delluc’s relevance lies in his basic attitude: suspended between the defense of traditional values and attention to the clashes within them, he is more subtly contradictory than most early critics, and shows the complicated way in which awareness of cultural change often develops.

“DE L’ART ET DU TRAFFIC”

It quickly became clear that film was, more than anything else, an instrument of communication in the broad sense of the term. Undeniably, film also claimed for itself a place in the field of aesthetics: the terms “fifth art,” “eighth art,” and even “seventh art” prove this (the last, coined by Ricciotto Canudo, having come into everyday use).²³ But however much its expressive possibilities were extolled, its masterpieces enumerated, or its influence on other arts recognized, the aspects of film that stood out most prominently were its popular appeal, the universality of its language, and the industrial quality of its production. Critics sometimes seemed uncomfortable acknowledging these latter characteristics of film as an object of mass consumption. Rather than recognize them, they recycled old categories from the field of art history such as authorship. Yet even those who most wished to incorporate film into the aesthetic traditions of the past (beginning with Canudo himself)²⁴ had to realize it was a new form of experience that demanded new critical canons.

Louis Delluc’s short essay, “The Fifth Art” (“Le cinquième art,” 1919),²⁵ seems exemplary of this critical dilemma. Delluc begins the piece with his usual mélange of aesthetic dissatisfaction with the cinema and hope for what it could be: “An art, of course it will be an art.” He goes on, however, to list a series of characteristics that point to a different line of criticism. First he points out film’s spatial diffusion: “Film goes everywhere. Theater halls are built by the thousands in every country, films have been shot all over the world.” Next, he acknowledges its extraordinary power of persuasion: “The screen … has more impact on the international masses than a political speech.” He notes as well the instant stardom that film offers its actors: “A year—even six months—is sufficient for a name, a grimace, a smile to compel recognition from the world.” And similarly, the attention it stirs in the public: “It is a powerful means to get the people to speak.” Finally, he stresses the importance of not only the commercial but also the technical dimension of cinema. American supremacy in the field, he argues, is linked to the “technical improvement of the image, lighting, sets, and scripts, which gives a harmonious nature to their science.” In the conclusion of the piece Delluc revises his opening thoughts: “We are witnessing the birth of an extraordinary art: perhaps the only modern art that already has a place apart and one day will have astonishing glory; for it—and it alone, I tell you—is son of the mechanical and the human ideal.” Delluc echoes here, in more positive terms, the withering definition of cinema that he provided some lines earlier: “This expressive industry is heading toward the simultaneous perfection of art and traffic.”

Art and traffic. In this biting characterization, Delluc not only expresses the need to draw attention to a dimension other than—though linked to—the artistic; he also offers a powerful image of what makes a medium. What, in fact, do we normally mean by this term? A medium is, above all, a means of transmitting sensations, thoughts, words, sounds, and images. Its main objective is the spreading of information and, in the case of mass media, the widest spreading of information that technology will allow (“film goes everywhere”). The pursuit of this objective gives rise to three closely interrelated features which define all media. In order to spread information, a medium must also be able to gather, readapt, and conserve it: a medium works on content in order to render it consumable (the happy fate of “a name, a grimace, a smile”). By spreading information, a medium grants its audience the opportunity to enter into contact with the information being offered, the source or agent offering that information, and finally its other audiences; it works to produce a system of relationships that is as interactive as possible. Finally, a medium cannot distribute information without the appropriate technical apparatus: it depends on a host of reproductive technologies, from which it seeks the greatest possible efficiency (the role played in an “expressive industry,” by “the improvement of image, lighting, sets,” etc.). A medium, then, is a conjunction of content, inte...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• A Hundred Years, A Century
• 1. The Gaze of Its Age
• 2. Framing the World
• 3. Double Vision
• 4. The Glass Eye
• 5. Strong Sensations
• 6. The Place of the Observer
• 7. Glosses, Oxymorons, and Discipline
• Remains of the Day
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List