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 Vision