The Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema

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.

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 Visions in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void

Retrospective