Most media theorists point out that photographic (and cinematic) optics are structured according to a norm of perception based on Renaissance theories of perspective; such perspective represented the visible as originating in, organized, and mastered by an individual and centered subject. This form of painterly representation is naturalized by the optics of photography and the cinema. Comolli, in “Machines of the Visible,” says, “The mechanical eye, the photographic lens, . . . functions . . . as a guarantor of the identity of the visible with the normality of vision . . . with the norm of visual perception” (123-24). Hanich: Some critics claimed it was an interesting metaphor, but shouldn’t be taken literally. You did not mean it metaphorically though.

In this context we might turn to Fredric Jameson’s seminal discussion of three crucial and expansive historical “moments” marked by “a technological revolution within capital itself” and the related “cultural logics” that correspondingly emerge and become dominant in each of them to radically inform three revolutions in aesthetic sensibility and its representation (77). Situating these three critical moments in the 1840s, 1890s, and 1940s, Jameson correlates the major technological changes that revolutionized the structure of capital—changing market capitalism to monopoly capitalism to multinational capitalism—with the changes wrought by the “cultural logics” identified as, respectively, realism, modernism, and postmodernism, three radically different axiological forms and norms of aesthetic representation and ethical investment. Extrapolating from Jameson, we can also locate within this historical and logical framework three correspondent technological modes and institutions of visual (and aural) representation: respectively, the photographic, the cinematic, and the electronic. Each, I would argue, has been critically complicit not only in a specific technological revolution within capital but also in a specific perceptual revolution within the culture and the subject. That is, each has been significantly co-constitutive of the particular temporal and spatial structures and phenomeno-logic that inform each of the dominant cultural logics Jameson identifies as realism, modernism, and postmodernism.Beyond the Gaze: Recent Approaches to Film Feminisms [special issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society] Vol. 30: no.1 (Autumn 2004), Co-editor with Kathleen McHugh. Chion, M., 1990. Audio-vision: Sound on Screen. Edited and translated from French by C. Gorbman 1994. New York: Columbia University Press. Since this essay was originally published, I have been confronted by arguments about this assertion, particularly in relation to virtual reality and various attempts to mobilize the human sensorium in electronic space. The argument is that electronic space “reembodies” rather than “disembodies” us. Although, to some extent, this is true, the dominant cultural logic of the electronic tends to elide or devalue the bodies that we are in physical space—not only as they suffer their flesh and mortality but also as they ground such fantasies of reembodiment. Brophy, P. , 2008. ‘Where sound is: locating the absent aural in film theory.’ In: James D. and M. Renov, eds, The Sage Handbook of Film Studies. London: Sage, pp. 424–35.

Thomas Morsch, Medienästhetik des Films: Verkörperte Wahrnehmung und ästhetische Erfahrung im Kino, Munich and Paderborn 2011. del Río, Elena. “The Body as Foundation of the Screen: Allegories of Technology in Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts.” In Camera Obscura 38, 1996, 93–115. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New York: Ungar Press,1987, rpt., Rutgers University Press, 1997). Although all moving images follow each other serially, each photographic and cinematic image (or frame) is developed or projected analogically rather than digitally. That is, the image is developed or projected as a whole and its elements are differentiated by gradation rather than by the on/off discretion of absolute numerical values.The film and the new psychology.’ In: Sense and non-sense. Translated from French by H. L. D. and P. A. Dreyfus 1964. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 48–59. Bachelard, G., 1958. The Poetics of Space. Translated from French by Maria Jolas 1964. Boston: Beacon Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945; Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. Mitry, Jean. Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma. 2 Vols. Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1963, 1965. Barker, Jennifer. “Bodily Irruptions: The Corporeal Assault on Ethnographic Narration.” In Cinema Journal 34:3, 1995, 57–76.

Cities on the Edge of Time: The Urban Science Fiction Film," East-West Film Journal, 3, no. 1 (December 1988): 4–19. The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic ‘Presence," in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 83–106. Philosopher Arthur Danto tells us, “With the movies, we do not just see that they move, we see them moving: and this is because the pictures themselves move” (17). While still objectifying the subjectivity of the visual into the visible, the cinematic qualitatively transforms the photographic through a materiality that not only claims the world and others as objects for vision (whether moving or static) but also signifies its own materialized agency, intentionality, and subjectivity. Neither abstract nor static, the cinematic brings the existential activity of vision into visibility in what is phenomenologically experienced as an intentional stream of moving images—its continuous and autonomous visual production and meaningful organization of these images testifying not only to the objective world but also, and more radically, to an anonymous, mobile, embodied, and ethically invested subject of worldly space. In this regard it is important to note that the automatic movement of the film through the camera and projector is overwritten and transformed by the autonomous movement of what is phenomenologically perceived as a visual intentionality that visibly chooses the subjects and objects of its attention, takes an attitude toward them, and accumulates them into a meaningful aesthetically and ethically articulated experience. [12] Thus this novel and visible cinematic subject (however physically anonymous) is perceived at the microperceptual level as able to inscribe visual and bodily changes of situation, to dream, hallucinate, imagine, remember, and value its habitation and experience of the world. And, as is the case with human beings, this cinematic subject’s potential motility and experience exist as both open-ended and inextricably bound by the existential finitude and material limits of its particular vision and historical and cultural coherence—that is, its narrative. I had tried to forget—for years on end. I remembered cities, houses, places, other people. But I had expunged myself from my memories. I constantly invented new goals so that I always had to look forward. If I came too close to myself, I escaped into hectic work—or debilitating illness. I was thirty by the time I realized the past wouldn’t let me go. I was living with a petrified heart that was still thirteen years old. And I forced myself to remember. That summer …. Fisher, Kevin. Intimate Elsewheres: Simulations of Altered States of Consciousness in Post WW II American Cinema. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California Los Angeles, 2004.Aristotle, De Anima ( On the Soul), London 1987; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, Paris 1964. T]he liberation . . . from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean, not merely a liberation from anxiety, but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling. This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings—which it might be better and more accurate to call “intensities”—are now free-floating and impersonal, and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria. (64) Morris’ film is as much noir as it is documentary. In the opening sequence chiaroscuro lighting, a wash of blue colour and a birdcage are used to symbolise the anti-hero status of Fred Leutchter. This is very much a sequence which positions me as experiencing the fictional.

Heim, Michael. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. Print. Hersonski attempts to layer voices in a similar vein to Morris. In her film, which shows footage shot by Nazi-commissioned filmmakers of the Warsaw Ghetto, she interrupts the archive footage with freeze frames, voiceovers and images of survivors watching the film in an auditorium. The freeze frames usually highlight the gaze of one of the inhabitants of the Ghetto. These images seem to talk directly to me like nothing I have ever experienced in archive footage. The effect turns the archival or documentary image into a construction, what we might consider to be a fictionalised image. I am forced, unnaturally to linger my gaze for an uncomfortable amount of time on the faces (and particularly the gaze toward me) of these human figures. This is not an experience I can relate to my lived world or my general understanding of the Holocaust – people were not frozen in time as living beings who could gaze at others, they were dehumanized and murdered. I remember the Holocaust as an absence while these images give the deceased victims a long-lasting presence, but an uncanny, still one.Hanich: Were there other phenomenologists on the syllabus or did you read up on phenomenology later? Although the technology of the cinematic is grounded, in part, in the technology of the photographic, we need to again remember that “the essence of technology is nothing technological.” The fact that the technology of the cinematic necessarily depends on the discrete and still photographic frame moving intermittently (rather than continuously) through the shutters of both camera and projector does not sufficiently account for the materiality of the cinematic as we experience it. Unlike the photograph, a film is semiotically engaged in experience not merely as its mechanical objectification—or material reproduction—that is, as merely an object for vision. Rather, the moving picture, however mechanical and photographic its origin, is semiotically experienced as also subjective and intentional, as presenting representation of the objective world. Thus, perceived as the subject of its own vision, as well as an object for our vision, a moving picture is not precisely a thing that (like a photograph) can be easily controlled, contained, or materially possessed—at least, not until the relatively recent advent of electronic culture. Certainly before videotape and DVDs the spectator could share in and thereby, to a degree, interpretively alter a film’s presentation and representation of embodied and enworlded experience, but the spectator could not control or contain its autonomous and ephemeral flow and rhythm or materially possess its animated experience. Now, of course, with the help of consumer electronics the spectator can both alter the film’s temporality and materially possess its inanimate “body.” However, this new ability to control the autonomy and flow of the film’s experience through fast-forwarding, replaying, and pausing [13] and the ability to possess the film’s “body” so as to animate it at will and at home are not functions of the material and technological ontology of the cinematic; rather, they are functions of the material and technological ontology of the electronic, which has come to increasingly dominate, appropriate, and transform the cinematic and our phenomenological experience of its perceptual and representational modalities. Bernhard Groß, Die Filme sind unter uns: Zur Geschichtlichkeit des frühen deutschen Nachkriegskinos: Trümmer-, Genre-, Dokumentarfilm, Berlin 2015.