In realizing a single point of view on the world, the shot not only bears a limited gaze rather than an all-encompassing one but also a subjective gaze instead of an objective one. Béla Balázs developed this theme in The Spirit of Film (Der Geist des Films), particularly in the chapter “The Shot.”1 He analyzed both the subjectivity of the camera (“the camera shot corresponds to an inner shot”), and that of a character who offers onscreen his or her vision of things (in this way eliciting an “identification” on the part of the spectator, who is able to feel “the sense of space and position of the protagonists” like “no other art can give us”).2 This subjective dimension of the filmic image is such that Balázs asks, “Is objectivity no longer possible in the cinematographic image? It certainly is. It is, however, nothing but the impression of objectivity … that is possible to achieve. And the objectivity expressed by the film shot is naturally a subjective arrangement of the observer.”3 Thus, everything is subjective at the cinema. Balázs is aware that this subjectivity is a risk: filmic images could be reduced to abstract impressions (as in “absolute film”) or simple representations of the psychic process in itself (as in “surrealist film”). So, precisely at the moment in which Balázs emphasizes the subjectivity of the shot,4 he also recognizes the presence of an objectivity. The filmed event “occurs in a determined space and time. This sense of the determination of time and space gives the things represented a reality that goes beyond the image. They still seem facts, to which the images are simple reports.”5 In other words, things have an existence that goes beyond the cinema. What appears on the screen is also reality in and of itself.
Subjectivity and objectivity operate side by side. Balázs wrote at a moment in which film was institutionalized as a story of images and sounds. He was thinking of film as a form of “literary” expression, in which an “author” lays out his or her “self.”6 Yet the problem that he raised directly implicates the properties of the filmic gaze as such (property in its double meaning: what kind of gaze, and whose gaze?). To better understand the ways in which subjectivity and objectivity advance their own “causes,” as well as influence each other, let us look at two articles: though different in tone and method, they both reveal a line of thought that has existed since the advent of film. The first was inspired by psychoanalysis. Entitled “The Psychological Value of the Image” (“La valeur psychologique de l’image”), it was signed by Dr. René Allendy and appeared in the prestigious series Cinematographic Art (L’art cinématographique), which was published between 1926 and 1928.7 “There is a principal difference between the two orders of reality: the image can simply be a sensorial fact of vision—the direct perception of the exterior world in its clearest characteristics—but it can also be understood as the subjective representation that we make of the outward world, beyond visual data. In this way, we in fact possess the ability to create images: the imagination.”8 If the image “comes from the vision that perceives it,” it appears objective. If it “comes from the imagination that creates it,”9 the image appears subjective. The film that
is not an image of the first degree, but is instead one that transforms the screen into an image of an image, represents both elements: real pictures of the objective world as the gaze perceives them, and unreal creations of our imagination. These are the two paths by which film can move us. It can take one or the other, or it can mix them, as it mixes immediate reality with a hint of memory and the product of dream in each of our consciences.10
Film gives space to the subjective and the objective; primarily, though, it superimposes them. In this way, it mimics our own psychic process, in which we superimpose immediate data and our own mental elaboration, even when we deal with a witnessed fact.
The second contribution, from noted philosopher Georg Lukács, was written thirteen years earlier and published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.11 Lukács noted that reality is not physically present onscreen (as opposed to the theatrical stage), yet it takes on such empirical weight that what we see automatically seems possible.
“Everything is possible”: this is film’s Weltanschauung. In every single moment, the cinematographic technique expresses absolute reality—even if in a merely empirical way—of the moment itself. “Possibility” is no longer a category in opposition to “reality.” Possibility and reality are placed on an interchangeable plane. “Everything is true and real, everything is equally true and real”: this is what film sequences teach us.12
Film, in offering things up with such extreme precision, gives its images a strong “life truth” (which is, adds Lukács, often disquieting). This “life truth” makes even what is not real seem real. As a result, the cinema elides “strictly natural reality and extreme fantasy.” Filmic images offer what exists de facto and what is only imagined, and with the same concreteness. It is no wonder then, that “in a drunkard’s room, the furniture moves by itself, his bed flies with him beyond the city.”13 On the screen, the set has the same value as a real experience. Under the gentle nudge of the “evidence” it provides, what is real and what is virtual can go hand in hand.
These articles by Allendy and Lukács, though quite different, help clarify the dialectic between objective and subjective vision introduced with Balázs. First, they confirm how film is able to offer both immediate data (or “reports”) and a mental reworking of them (or “inner shots”). On the screen, we have both “visions” and “things.” Second, the subjective dimension pervades a range of phenomena, going from the moment in which, observing the world, we make it our own, to the moment in which, through our imagination, we give life to an imaginary world. There is continuity between the interpretation of the real and the construction of a fantastic reality: the action of a subject is vital to both. Third, there is also a continuity between immediate data and a mental elaboration or reworking of that data. On the screen, reality is always an observed reality, and observation (like the imagination) is based on concrete objects and situations. When everything appears perfectly subjective in a film, it is because the inevitable choices of the camera are emphasized (in other words, the presence of a gaze). When everything appears perfectly objective, what is foregrounded is the feeling that film offers things up—that is, the capacity of the object to assert itself onto its own observation. The subjective and the objective dimensions are strictly interdependent: the problem lies in the placement of emphasis.
Let us go over this slippery terrain with the help of a most diverse set of examples. We will examine how film sought to make these two dimensions emerge: how it characterized and contrasted them, but also how it put them together. Using their uncertain borders as starting point, we will pass to the ways in which they distinguish themselves. We will examine their reflections on the reality depicted onscreen—suspended as it is between the return of what is real and the invention of what is possible—and we will conclude with the investigation of how film as witness leads to an equilibrium between the two forces.
AND WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT HIM?
The first film that we will examine, Jean Epstein’s The Three-Sided Mirror (La glace à trois faces, France, 1927) dates from the same period as the Allendy article. My analysis here will focus on the film’s narrative structure, rather than its figurative elements and audacious syntax.
The film presents a series of stories that refer to each other, beginning with a prologue, which poses an opening riddle that refers to the identity of the protagonist. Four episodes follow, the first three of which (entitled “1,” “2,” and “3,” respectively) are dedicated to three women: Pearl, Athalia, and Lucie. The fourth and final episode, entitled “He,” is devoted to the male hero. In the three episodes dedicated to the women, they relate their relationship to the man, each giving a different picture of him. In the man’s episode, we realize that he does not seem to correspond to any of the three accounts offered. The film ends with a highly symbolic image: a three-paneled mirror in which the man’s face is reflected into three figures.
Clearly, this narrative structure contains a topos that will recur in numerous variations, not the least of which is Citizen Kane (Welles, USA, 1941) or Rashomon (Kurosawa, Japan, 1950). The Three-Sided Mirror presents itself not as a story of facts in the strict sense: the narrated events mix with the way they are experienced by their protagonists. We are not told (or, rather, not shown) who “He” is, but instead who “He” is in the minds of people he has met. In this sense, the film fosters a gaze that takes into account both events and experiences. Things are what they are, but they are also what they end up being in the eyes (and minds) of those who live them. This is a gaze in which perception and interpretation, reality and possibility, readily blend.
Let’s examine this scenario more closely. Here, the gaze is born from the presence of an observer, before even that of an observed object. What is seen depends on who does the seeing: on his or her position, on the way in which he or she looks at things, on the interests that emerge, and so on. In each part of The Three-Sided Mirror, there is a different gaze—each attributed to a different observer—and thus, sustained by a different point of view. What Pearl sees is neither what Athalia nor what Lucie see. On the other hand, it could not be any other way. Even the camera gaze follows the same rule: in the section entitled “He,” the film seems to give us a more direct version of the facts, one that is no longer tied to the impressions of the three women. Yet this same section—coupled with the others—shows us that even here there is an observer, a point of view. This time, it belongs to a machine, and even the camera has its own positions, its own interests. When we the spectators—after having seen the protagonist through the eyes of Pearl, Athalia, and Lucie—are placed before a “he” devoid of their filter, we continue to see him filtered through an eye, a new eye of glass. Reality in its immediacy is irretrievably lost to us.
Some crucial passages of “Meaning Ibis” (“Le Sens Ibis”), one of Epstein’s most beautiful essays, come to mind.14 In it, Epstein distances himself from the naive idea of documenting the real. Many believed that the cinema was able—even required—to help us to see nature directly. Epstein cites no one specifically, but we might recall both the appeals of a “reactionary” critic like Paul Souday—who would save the cinema only for this15—as well as a 1914 address by the president of the French Chamber of Deputies to professionals of the field: “There is a series of areas that belong only to you: that of your beginnings, science, the life of plants, animals and man…. Then nature, landscape, travels.”16 Against these hypotheses, Epstein commented with great irony, “Serious and insufficiently over-cultured gentlemen applaud the life of the ant, the metamorphosis of larvae. Exclusively. To instruct others’ youth.”17 The cinema is quite a different matter. It is a new eye, but one that has a way of understanding things all of own. “This vision has a way of seeing all its own, just as the other does.”18 In particular, it gives us “only symbols of reality, constant metaphors, proportionate and suitable. And not symbols made of material—which does not exist—but of energy; something that in itself does not seem to exist, but for its effects when they touch us.”19 This means that when the cinema captures, it captures to the core, but not what we mistakenly believe things to be in and of themselves, in their literalism. It captures what it can gather through the eyes, which results in sometimes unpredictable realities. “Think about it: that eye sees waves that are imperceptible to us; onscreen love holds what no love has had until now, its own piece of ultraviolet.”20
Love in ultraviolet is a beautiful symbol that shows how the camera does not offer us a direct reflection of things, but a personal, often deeper, restitution. It filters and interprets reality as Pearl, Athalia, or Lucie do. It is a tendentious witness, as all witnesses are. But it also carries out this work of filtering and interpreting, going where the human eye cannot, some steps higher in the spectrum of light. After all, it cannot be attributed with the same subjectivity as a human being: “The Bell-Howell is a metallized, standardized brain, produced and circulated in some thousand specimens, which transform the surrounding world into art.”21 Epstein pointed to both the camera’s capacity to transform the observed object and its mechanical quality, which makes it “a subject that is object, void of conscience, that is lacking hesitation and scruples, lacking venality, satisfaction, possible errors. It is an absolutely honest artist; it is exclusively an artist, a model artist.”22 I will return to this characterization later in the book. Here, I will only say that it is equally an observer and a player in the story. We access things through its eye. This eye—gathering what others do not see—functions as an intermediary of the world. Finally, this intermediary gives a subjective tone to everything, as Balász pointed out. As a machine, however, its “subjectivity” is beyond that of a simple psychological dimension. This results in a pronounced lack of clarity with respect to what we see as spectators: an indeterminateness that The Three-Sided Mirror seems to thematize. We perceive a mediation. Perhaps we even enjoy this mediation. But we do not know who is responsible, to what extent, or at what cost. We see that someone is seeing: But who? And how? And what does it contain of the real, once captured by a gaze?
The Three-Sided Mirror accentuates this uncertainty by suggesting that reality—and in particular, the character “He”—does not wish to offer itself up for definitive understanding. “He” is what appears from time to time, and that’s that. There is certainly an allusion to Pirandello here, which was not hidden in the film’s publicity:23 the character—indeed, more than one—is always superimposed over the person, and in the dialectic between the two, the former wins. Going one step further, we could cite Goffman and the construction of the self through its representation for the benefit of the others.24 Conversely, we could recall the numerous social situations, tied to urban life in particular, in which appearance is a decisive factor in acquiring a sense of self.25 We find ourselves faced with the essential questions of modernity: the emergence of an identity based not on belonging, but on a complex and reciprocal game of relations between individuals. We are not what we are by nature or by destiny, but what we are in the eyes of an other. The Three-Sided Mirror confirms this assumption by telling us that the real is always filtered through a gaze and, moreover, that it is nothing more than what is presented for view. This, of course, does not prevent a large part of the world from attempting to reassert itself. In this regard, the film’s conclusion is symptomatic: in the protagonist’s mad car race, a bird hits him in front, forcing him off the road and leading to his death. The bird—more a symbol, like Coleridge’s albatross—heralds the “return of the real.” Yet the conclusion of these events does not coincide with the conclusion of the film. The last image is an image within an image: a three-paneled mirror appears on the screen, and “He” is reflected in each of the panels. There is no face: there are only masks, masks to which we must refer in our search for the truth.
I would add that in this game of appearances, the cinema functions as a cause more than effect. If the face is confused with the mask, it is because we film it. In the following passage, dated 1914, an anonymous journalist who signs as “Fantasio” understood this: “The cinema is so deep-seated in our habits, our existence, that we no longer know if our pain or joys are real or simply a mise-en-scène captured by the lens. We are not convinced of their sincerity if not by taking them in some night on the cinema’s luminous screen.”26 It is the cinema that forces reality to make its appearance and, in the end, establishes its own law of truth.
But let us return to The Three-Sided Mirror. The film seems to do away with reality: never offered in its totality, it is always subject to filters and interpretations. Reality is always a qualified appearance. The world returns because there is an eye that follows it. And if it returns, it is only in a form conceded by the eye. The presence of multiple observers, each with particular traits, results in a kaleidoscopic picture. In addition to the camera’s perspective, we experience that of Pearl, Athalia, and Lucie. As a consequence, we are left with a situation involving many and coinciding components: the eye of a mechanical device that, in Epstein’s words, is a subject as well as object; human eyes, tied to character’s visions; and a reality that plays with its own eradication, offering us perhaps some umpredictable sides, but ones that are always filtered by something or someone. Clearly this situation is rife with ambiguity—indeed there is no possibility of a decision.27 What do we see? And with whose gaze?
The answer is found in the narrative structure of the film, which raises a terrain on which things become more practicable. I am referring to the sectional subdivisions, each with a different title, either specifying the number of the version presented (“1,” “2,” and “3,” which in turn reference the three women), or conversely the observed object (“He”). This is the film’s ordering principle: thanks to it, we know through whose eye we are watching things as they happen, and in this way we know how to understand them. The effect is one that redistributes and reorganizes an otherwise unsolvable mix. Everything tends to blend, yet we can also make distinctions. Chaos is in some way transformed into a cosmos.
Cinema will manifest precisely this concern each time that it tries to distinguish—through a typology of gazes—the camera’s vision from that of the characters, and the vision of a camera as neutral witness from that of a camera ready to openly reinterpret the world.
This typology of gazes is the product of a patient and continuous work, which began early in film history and became established in mainstream production. This is not the place to reconstruct such a process, however briefly. But it is useful to look at its outcome, with the help of a film from the late 1940s, Dark Passage (D. Daves, USA, 1947).28
The first part of the film is dominated by one character’s gaze. We see things from the point of view of a faceless escapee from San Quentin. In the second part of the film, we get a more direct vision: the fugitive gets plastic surgery, and we see his face. Subsequently, we no longer follow his actions from his perspective. This two-part division is actually much more subtle. In the first part, the shots from the fugitive’s point of view dominate, but they are not exclusive: we see through his eyes—especially when he encounters nearby objects (when he turns on the radio, or opens the tap) or when he looks his interlocutors in the face (in particular, Irina, the woman helping him)—yet events are often presented in the manner that a neutral on-the-scene witness might see them. The first sequence is a good example. After an establishing shot of the prison, we have the image of a truck transporting trashcans. We understand that one of them is carrying the man. Only when the trashcan rolls off the truck do we see the landscape spin, as if it were seen by someone hiding inside. We follow him in a full-length shot as he climbs out of the trashcan, then we return to seeing things through his eyes as he moves forward and crouches down. His escape to San Francisco will alternate between these two types of vision: in particular, when the fugitive, Vincent, gets into Irina’s car, we abandon his gaze (there is also a diegetic motivation: he is hiding under a tarp); only when they arrive at her house are we put back in his shoes, adopting his point of view. Thus, a double register: we see with the character’s eye and we also see him from outside. We are far from the position taken in Lady in the Lake (R. Montgomery, USA, 1947), which is in some ways extreme: the entire film is shot from the point of view of the protagonist, a detective working on a clearly delicate investigation.
The second part of Dark Passage reestablishes a more direct vision of things. We see the protagonist’s actions without passing through his eyes. I must emphasize, however, that we arrive at this point through a sequence that puts us in the fugitive’s head. After he has plastic surgery, which changes his appearance and renders him unrecognizable to the police (in other words, it enables him to become Humphrey Bogart and us to finally see the actor’s face), there is a long moment in which we see his dreams in an extended series of abstract and spectral images. Then, when Vincent fully enters the action, the general atmosphere becomes all the more threatening and dark. The spectator feels assaulted by the unavoidable events, exactly as the protagonist does. Thus, the reference to what Vincent Perry has seen and lived does not disappear. If anything, it contracts and expands. Here, we are brought to the searing conclusion: Vincent is in front of the ocean, in a café he told Irina about before escaping San Francisco once and for all. Their music begins, and suddenly she is in the same café. He sees her, and they begin to dance. The sequence (certainly a tribute to Bogart and Bacall) is so utterly improbable and, at the same time, so dazzling that it lies beyond any strict definition in terms of the gaze and its ownership.
This is a general outline of the scopic system in Dark Passage. It would be interesting to explore why late 1940s Hollywood production felt the need to experiment with a vision attributable to a central character on such a grand scale. Dark Passage is one example; Lady in the Lake is another. Still, we cannot leave out those films characterized by long oneiric sequences (Spellbound, A. Hitchcock, USA, 1945) and lengthy flashbacks (Letter from an Unknown Woman, M. Ophüls, USA, 1948; or A Letter to Three Wives, J. L. Mankiewicz, USA, 1949). A widespread need for more introspective narrations emerged, tied to the success of psychoanalysis, the need to value the individual, and also the call to explore new expressive solutions. I would like to underline yet another element. This search seems rooted in the idea that it is possible—indeed necessary—to emphasize what Balázs identifies as the subjective dimension of the gaze: this emphasis must also foreground a specific “agent” to whom the subjectivity can be attributed, and in this way must identify this subjectivity as a specific form of gazing. In other words, the filmic image’s subjectivity can be emphasized, as long as it is anchored to a shot “seen by a character” (the so-called point-of-view shot), which is quite distinct from its inverse, the shot “seen by no one” (which we may call the “impersonal shot”). The effects are many. The two great dimensions that were, for Balázs, natural to film—the “inner shots” and the “reports”—are identified in two distinct types of shots: the point-of-view shot and the impersonal shot. The former refers to the character’s vision and could turn into imagination or nightmare, the latter is a neutral and immediate insight. Translated into a point-of-view shot or an impersonal shot, the subjectivity and objectivity that are latent in film become clearly placed in opposition. As an effect, they are transformed from intrinsic qualities of the filmic image (as they still were in Balázs) into simple narrative processes. We are no longer dealing with two inherent and converging faces of a filmic image: we are confronted with two modes of telling a story, with two “grammatical categories” that are easily distinguishable as such.
Dark Passage is exemplary in this regard. Everything hinges on the fact that the shots either imitate Vincent Perry’s gaze or come from a neutral observer who is outside the story. The former type of shot is certainly distinguishable from the latter. Film’s subjectivity is traced back to the point of view of a character and reduced to a problem of shots.
Not surprisingly, this brings us back to the extensive work of the “grammarians of the cinema” of the 1930s and 1940s. I am thinking, for example, of Raymond Spottiswoode and his A Grammar of the Film: An Analysis of Film Technique,29 published in the mid-1930s, in part influenced by Pudovkin and his writings and in part as a response to Rudolf Arnheim and his Film as Art (both of whom had a great deal of success in the United States and Europe).30 Spottiswoode in particular connects the dimension of subjectivity to the recognizable presence of the gaze’s “source,” as well as the use of “grammatical markers.” For example, “emotional or physical disturbances are often represented by a multiplicity of simultaneous shots. They contain movements in constant conflict with one another, while the shots themselves loom out of the distance and, before coming into focus, disappear into it again.”31 It seems a description of Vincent Perry’s dream. We can say more generally that these “grammarians” describe (and with it, indeed prescribe) the great processes through which we can construct an objective or subjective gaze: the particular kind of shot, forms of punctuation, use of sound, ways of editing. In this context, objectivity and subjectivity cease to be considered intrinsic properties of the cinematographic gaze. They become the product of linguistic work, but they can no longer be considered latent properties either. Brought back to linguistic processes, they are recognizable to the spectator. I would add that the work of the “grammarians” has its roots in a reflection dating back to the 1910s and 1920s. I have Hugo Münsterberg in mind. He writes: “The screen may produce not only what we remember or imagine but what the persons in the play see in their own minds. The technique of the camera stage has successfully introduced a distinct form for this kind of picturing.”32 Jean Epstein, as well, offers interesting insights. In “Magnification” (“Grossissement”), placing himself in a dance scene, he imagines himself also able to film a “double [sequence], according to the point of view of the spectator and that of the dancer, objective and subjective.”33 Finally, let me say that each nation has had its own (often multiple) “grammarians”: France, for example, had Robert Bataille and André Berthomieu,34 while Italy had Renato May.35 The latter was particularly exacting in his insistence that objectivity and subjectivity are what would today be called “effects of discourse.” He first reminds us of a precise typology: “Shots … seen by those outside the situation are called ‘objective’ [and] shots seen as if by someone in the situation take the name ‘subjective.’”36 Then, owing to the fact that this characterization comes from a narrative mode, he empties these two terms of all intrinsic value: “one shot is, in itself, neither subjective nor objective, but assumes one characteristic or the other according to what precedes or follows it narratively.”37
Distinguishing and marking: the cinema can allow itself all the gazes that it wants (or almost all), as long as it makes it clear to whom they belong. The game of attribution is, however, naturally quite complicated and must be kept under control. Dark Passage exemplifies this process. In its second part—the very moment in which a visual objectivity seems restored—the films falls, in fact, into deepest nightmare. San Francisco is no longer a transparent city: anyone could be someone else (indeed, everyone is someone else). Nor is it a sunny city: everything is cast in the literal shadow of night, or the metaphorical shadow of doubt. Visual objectivity is thus tinged with tones that are not so objective. And yet, though it is pervaded by a disquiet that later aligns with the character, we know that what we see is not filtered by his gaze. We feel with him, but we do not see with him. We inhabit his skin, but are cut off from his eyes. The finale accentuates this mixing: here, we see with eyes that seemingly belong to no one, not even the neutral observer who assures the images’ objectivity. Yet nevertheless we see through the eyes of desire and imagination—Vincent’s, Irina’s, our own. We could succumb once more to a sense of vertigo, but the words “The End” intervene, closing the adventure and beginning a myth.
With this brief outline, I have tried to reveal the two antithetical paths that the cinema seems to pursue. On the one hand, it deals with a subjective and an objective dimension, connecting and superposing them. On the other hand, it distinguishes the two planes through a series of markers that retrace their presence into a narrative problem. Film works with the two principal levels of the image, collapsing them; at the same time, it tries to keep them separate, transforming them into clearly identifiable categories. It is likely that cinema itself creates this short circuit. While it is true that cinematic images bear witness before even offering documentation (someone has seen and now reports), they must also blend objectivity and subjectivity; similarly, they cannot but strive to set them apart. The narrative structure reveals this foundation and, simultaneously, attempts to smooth it out (thanks to one character’s presence, we may compare a “subjective” vision and an “objective” vision, differentiating between them by contrasting the point-of-view shot and the impersonal shot).
I would like to focus on this short circuit with another example that particularly illustrates the nature of cinema as witness. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (J. Ford, USA, 1962) is the story of the small village of Shinbone, which is rife with abuse and violence.38 A young attorney, Ransom Stoddard, assisted by the rough cowboy Tom Doniphon, succeeds in bringing law and order to the town by ridding it of the bandit Liberty Valance. The film does not present these events directly, but through a long flashback that takes up the entire film. In it Ransom Stoddard, who has since become an influential U.S. senator, recalls events that have taken place long before. It is, in fact, a double flashback: within the first, there is another, entrusted this time to Tom Doniphon. He recalls the duel in which Liberty Valance was killed, revealing how this actually happened. We never see what took place; rather, we see how a certain character recalls these events.
What implications does this narrative structure have? And what does it tell us about film, and ownership of the gaze? I will forgo any specific observations on the flashback, as I did with the point-of-view shot: they are both subjects that have been adequately studied.39 Similarly, I will leave aside any consideration of the history of the western, and the evolution of Ford’s poetics. In the 1960s the genre attempted to shed its skin, and the work of the director assumed a darker tone. What interests me is how this film, during the period of classical film’s decline, faces a problem that we have found in The Three-Sided Mirror and Dark Passage, films which are at classical cinema’s margins and center, respectively. This problem is the need to get to the facts through mediation. All stories are subjectively evoked rather than objectively presented and, correspondingly, all actions pass through some sort of conscience.
Let us linger for a moment on this contrast between action and conscience (or, if you will, between action and reflection). In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the polarity is established with the central pair of heroes, Doniphon and Stoddard. The first is a man of few words and many deeds. It is he who takes the initiative at the crucial moment and shoots Liberty Valance, though he lets everyone believe that the young lawyer did it. His is a language of arms. Stoddard, on the contrary, is a man of thought. More than directly interfering with events, he wants to understand what he sees, confining himself to the position of an “observer.” Yet it is precisely through reflection that Stoddard is able to impose reason on a world seemingly dominated by brutality and abuse. His two keystones are the book and the assembly. The book is the collection of precedents that the young lawyer, working as a dishwasher, reads with attention, in search of a legal solution to resolve the conflict that plagues the growing small city of Shinbone. But the book also holds the pages with which its inhabitants learn to read, in the school established by Stoddard. The assembly is instead the meeting in which Shinbone elects the two representatives who will go to Capital City to decide the future of the Territory, just as the convention in Capital City will decide the representatives to send to Congress in Washington. The book and the assembly recall two central elements of the Protestant community of America’s Founding Fathers, drawing on the Bible and the public confrontation between group members. Here, they become two symbols of Western civilization. Yet, all in all, they are not enough to actualize this civilization. It takes an act—specifically a duel. Liberty Valance must be challenged. The bandit is shot in the back—assassinated—in order to prevent him from killing Stoddard. As the reflection gives space to action, the act produces a violence that is justified, though not justifiable—a violence that brings us paradoxically back to the world that should be left behind.
Such a game of reflection, action, and violence calls to mind many sources. Hazarding a guess, I would say that Goethe’s Faust40 comes to mind. We find a hero who, rereading the Gospel of John, stakes everything on action: “The Spirit’s helping me! I see now what I need /And write assured: In the beginning was the Deed!” (vv. 1236–37). At the same time, he wants to tie this action to knowledge. “There, to stand and look around, /I’ll build a frame from bough to bough, /My gaze revealing, under the sun, / A view of everything I’ve done, /Overseeing, as the eye falls on it, /A masterpiece of the human spirit, / Forging with intelligence, / A wider human residence” (vv. 11243–11250): a desire that brings him, as Moretti emphasizes, to an “inertia” in some way reminiscent of the spectator. Finally, in acting, he is mixed up in violence, justified and unjustifiable, as in the episode of Baucis and Philemon: to proceed with what today would be called his plans of land development, he is forced to do away with an innocent elderly couple. Action, reflection, violence: in Faust, the three things are deeply connected. In the most advanced modernity, they are often tragically separated: no longer are their reciprocal justifications found in one plan. But this Goethian analysis of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance would lead us too far astray. I would instead like to offer two points.
First, the contrast between action and reflection is something that the cinema explores in several ways, often obsessively. I am thinking of the actor system. There is the energetic actor, a true body in movement, like Douglas Fairbanks; and there is the introverted actor, wrapped up in his own thoughts, like Spencer Tracy. We may also consider the typology of shots. We have shots useful to show bodies in action, such as the medium full shot, which goes from the face to the waist (that is, from the eyes to the pistol); and we have shots more useful for showing states of mind, such as the close-up, especially when it functions as a reaction shot. Finally, I am thinking of filmic syntax. There is an editing tied to onscreen action, in which cuts are made to the actors’ movements, and there is an editing tied to the exploration of the scene, in which cuts are determined by the gaze of the spectator (or by his onscreen alter ego). Naturally, this series of contrasts does not preclude an integration of the two poles, especially in the classical cinema. The man of action withdraws into himself and his energy transforms into a nervous tic, like Humphrey Bogart. There is also an alternation of various shots, in which action and reaction are regarded equally. And there is an editing which, in the name of continuity, employs both cuts on movement and cuts on gaze. Yet the polarization continues to make itself felt, in this way giving the spectator better orientation.
Second, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the opposition between action and reflection helps to differentiate events from the awareness that an individual can have of them. Embodied in the two principal heroes, this contrast is projected onto the entire film, leading us to recognize two different planes: that of the world, and that of thoughts—that in which things happen, and that in which one reflects upon the action itself. In one, the history of the West is made and, in the other, the story of Liberty Valance is recounted. As a result, while the facts are entangled insofar as they are known, they are nevertheless distinguishable as such. A gesture analogous to “grammatical markers” intervenes: representation (of events) creates a space for memory (someone’s memory of what happened). It is, however, important that we are able to discriminate between the two planes.
How is memory shaped in Liberty Valance? We have thus far held off on giving a response. Memory seems primarily an act of reparation—toward an old friend who has died, for example. Doniphon lies in his casket, watched over by Stoddard’s wife Hallie and his elderly black servant, Pompey. Stoddard recalls for the journalists what the old cowboy represented for Shinbone’s story and, in this way, returns to him the merits that his solitary existence had prevented him from receiving. Memory, then, restores a life to us. The first descriptions of the Lumiére shows focused on this idea of return: they saw in the new invention of the cinema a device able to keep our dead friends and relatives with us. As Boleslaw Matuszewski wrote: “Cinema holds thousands of images in one scene and, made up of a bright source and a white sheet, makes the dead get up and walk. This simple exposed celluloid ribbon constitutes not only a historical document, but a piece of history, the history that has not disappeared, that does not need a genius to be resuscitated.”41 Lucio D’Ambra put forward the same idea, almost to the letter, in his 1914 proposal to found a cinema archive or museum. He spoke of films as “strips of miniscule photographs that, with a jet of light projected on a white screen, reanimate what was, give life back to death, remake the past into present, and miraculously capture, allowing us to recall when we want the ‘fleeting moment.’”42 In the same year, the president of the French Chamber of Deputies, addressing the cinematographic community, reiterated that through the cinema, “we see the beings we have lost, for whom we weep, live again before our eyes.” He added that if the invention had been made earlier, we would have had the opportunity to see “Bonaparte in his Italian campaign, the ‘Tennis Court Oath,’ Molière acting before Louis XIV, Mohammed, Caesar.”43 In 1922, Elie Faure imagined that the inhabitants of a planet two thousand light years away could have filmed Christ’s death with a powerful telescope, and sent it back to us as living memory.44 Bazin’s landmark essay, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,”45 claims that cinema is intrinsically a memory device that serves as a remedy to death. The filmic flashback highlights this ability.
Memory’s reparation has a second objective as well: it heals violence. Hallie is in the other room, watching over Doniphon. Years before, she had almost married him, before the young lawyer charmed her away from the coarse cowboy. Even Stoddard has in some way mortally wounded someone, though in a symbolic way. Just as Doniphon shot Liberty Valance in the back, Stoddard took Doniphon’s future from him, leaving him alone. Remembering the episode in some way rights the wrong: violence is denounced, and excuses are offered for it, though posthumously. Again, this element of memory refers back to the cinema in general. I am thinking in particular of its social use, as an instrument of celebration. The filmic image not only preserves the filmed reality from change and deterioration, but it also gives us that reality in its purity. It is the opposite of the use we explored in The Three-Sided Mirror. Cinema not only brings us a reality as seen by somebody, it also breaks the masks that it encounters, freeing the underlying face of reality from its constraints. “The cinema is a terrible revealer of secrets, unconscious but very cruel. Brought to the screen, the most cautious and astute man loses his mask; he is revealed for what he in fact is, just like the man are the earth, sea, and sky, all of nature, veiled and otherwise impenetrable,” said Alberto Savinio in 1924.46 This idea of a preserving and purifying memory seems the basis of a suggestion put forth in 1925 by Jacques de Baroncelli: if there is another great flood, “it will be enough for the few superstitious on an Ararat far away to have saved some rolls of film so that, after the catastrophe, not only the image of the swallowed-up civilization can be re-created, but its secrets, resources and power.”47 The cinema gives us back the world as it was before its ruin. I would add that this function of preservation is mirrored in a complementary function, that of proclamation: memory can extend to utopia. The last remarkable chapter of Vachel Lindsay’s 1915 The Art of the Moving Picture signals this utopian power of the cinema, in its construction of a purer universe. Lindsay writes:
Oh you who are coming tomorrow, show us every-day America as it will be when we are only halfway to the millennium yet thousands of years in the future! Tell what type of honors men will covet, what property they will be apt to steal, what murders they will commit, what the law court and the jail will be or what will be the substitutes, how the newspaper will appear, the office, the busy street …48
Furthermore, the reparation of memory reworks the truth. The long flashback reveals who actually killed Liberty Valance, and thus who liberated that part of the West from bullying and abuse. The person behind the act incorrectly attributed to Stoddard (who is rewarded with a long and illustrious political career) is actually Doniphon. The old senator’s memory, offered to the journalists, reconstructs what really happened.49 Again, there is a reference here to the cinema in general. I am thinking specifically of the debate on its use as an instrument of scientific observation. Jean Painlevé recalls in a 1931 essay how “famous researchers have discovered in animated images things that they had never perceived by their specialty, direct examination. The eye had registered them, but the effort of forced vision, the tension of concentration (either on many different points or in one place) had only an inhibitory effect.”50 In these cases, the cinema rearranges the truth of things, revealing how they are in reality. And yet, Painlevé adds, “having said this, we must not delude ourselves regarding the value of ‘impartial witness’…. attributed to the cinema.” It certainly records things in a way that is seemingly faithful, but “the terrible interpretation maintains its dominance.”51 The filmic image reflects both the world and our imagination of it, with all its distortions.
This brings us back to our film. Through his flashback, Stoddard attempts to reinstate the events that took place in Shinbone. He tries to give the dead a new life, to heal violence, to reestablish the truth. His account—a reflexive moment—rids itself of any subjectivity, in favor of objective deeds. Yet his effort is unsuccessful. He cannot be exclusively an “impartial witness”; he must account for the presence of the “terrible interpretation.” Alongside his interpretation of the facts, there is a social interpretation, which has grown year after year. It is not by chance that, even though Stoddard puts things right, the journalist throws his testimony away. The legend of the West demands that the young lawyer, not the cowboy, commit this act. Between truth and legend, legend must win. For this reason, no newspaper will ever reveal what really happened.
This lays bare the ambiguity of memory. On the one hand, it offers a reparative understanding of the past. On the other, however, nothing can go against our image of the facts. A remembrance is inevitably a personal report. Moreover, offered to the listeners, a remembrance immediately becomes a story and, as such, it is destined to succumb to the great social story, which includes fantasy and dreams. It is the same for the filmic image. Even if it is presented as a direct trace of things, this image cannot be solely documentary. It provides a personal reconstruction of the events, and this is enough to distance it from simple objectivity. The image reexposes the events: it recounts. The cinema is, inevitably, a complex terrain: the subjective always lies in wait.
Told in another way, memory offers a trace of what was, yet it must also yield to the fact that every recovery is a renovation as well. It replicates the dialectic intrinsic to every work of restoration—to preserve or to reconstruct?52 Cinema, as form of memory—memory of what passed before the camera53—rearticulates the same dilemma: should it preserve the traces of what is no longer or stage the past whatever the cost? Liberty Valance displays a desire for the first solution juxtaposed next to the inevitability of the second. By the end, the reconstruction wins over the preservation.
Stoddard’s memory is not tripped up, but it does slip, and we spectators slip along with him. “Print the legend.”
OBSERVING, RECONSTRUCTING, INVENTING
This long digression on memory has clarified the cinema’s nature as witness. The image on the screen always gives back something that the camera has seen. As the flashback exemplifies, seeing at the cinema is always a re-viewing. It is running over with the eyes what “was.” In this act of witnessing, there is always some uncertainty—something slippery, if you will. It is true that this represents a reparation (with respect to what has disappeared, the violence exercised on the past, the truth that must be reestablished). But it is also true that what is restored vacillates between different states. We can have a mere observation of what has happened, for the purpose of preserving the total objectivity of the facts (as if it were nothing more than reestablishing them). But we can also have a personal reconstruction of the events, and thus the intervention of a subjectivity acting as a filter with respect to what has happened. Finally, we can have a reconstruction that openly adds something of its own, even while giving reasons for something through the brush stroke of invention. In this case, witnessing becomes a narrative act. The confession of those present at the events becomes a story, and the recovery of those events slips into the realm of imagination. The risk remains that the latter version should triumph: indeed, “Print the legend.”
It is evident that, in passing from the second to the third case (that is, from reconstruction to invention), we are faced with a different form of subjectivity. We no longer simply encounter an eye or a conscience that “filters” the objectivity of the facts, but a mind that imagines possible facts. The (subjective) interpretation of things becomes the (subjective) elaboration of a reality. Thus, Stoddard’s flashback, marking for us the ambiguity of all memory restoration—suspended as it is between preservation and reconstruction—shows us also that re-creation can end up becoming a new and fresh creation. We have a story, a fictitious story, which is in essence the epic of Liberty Valance in the context of the great western sagas.
Such a dialectic runs through the very heart of the cinema. Cinema has been an excellent witness to the events of the century, but it has primarily been an outstanding narrator of fiction. Its eye has scrutinized the most intimate folds of reality, but it has also braved possible worlds, while giving all the density of the real one, to take up Lukács once again. Many have discerned an irresolvable contrast in these two abilities (critical legend would have it that Méliès betrayed Lumiére by entering the world of the imagination). In the conceptual picture that we are constructing, the two activities must be intersecting: they are both born from a “subjective” work that is, in turn, compared to and mixed with the “objectivity” of things. Briefly, to witness is to offer the story of facts as they effectively occurred. To narrate, instead, is to witness possible facts. The two gestures are in some way circular. The cinema exalts this circularity, passing from one face to another with extraordinary fluidity (which allows Godard to say that Méliès is the documentarian, while Lumière is, if anything, a narrator of fiction). It is certainly right to ask ourselves how much this circularity is excessive and how much it is instead authorized. The fact that, on the level of genre, two different categories were instituted for documentary and narrative film gives us the answer: they are two paths that often use the same methods and often obey specular forms of logic. There is, however, a series of recognizable characteristics that—analogous to the grammatical markers called to define the point-of-view shot and the impersonal shot—allow us to distinguish between different forms of discourse. In this light, observing (facts), reconstructing (a witness), and producing (a possible world) are activities that intersect more at the cinema than anywhere else. Yet it is possible to distinguish these activities, however indistinct their outline.
This game of indeterminateness and determinateness finds an interesting documentation in a curious 1917 critical text.54 The piece, dedicated to the “cinematography of the real,” defends the genre in question, though its author Giovanni Livoni denies that the cinema “portrays nature as it is.” In order to have a perfect reproduction of nature, “it is necessary to photograph with special criteria, which have to have as their goal to render or represent nature as beautiful as possible: in a word, to improve upon it.” Restoration of the world requires direct intervention: one cannot observe a fact without reconstructing it and, if reconstructing it, adding some bit of invention. In fact, “how many times have we seen on the screen places that we knew or that we came to know and how many times, seeing them on the white screen, did they not seem more vast and beautiful than they really are?” The cameraman, in filming those places, used all of his talents; he applied “insight, prudence, an expert eye, an innate aesthetic sense, artistic gift developed with practice.” In this way, he also ended up constructing an image of things that goes beyond what exists. Only in this way could he produce a portrait that rings in some way “true.” Only by forcing some elements was he able to make the “characteristics and curiosities” of what he was filming emerge. Only by becoming a bit of a storyteller was he able to be an effective witness. Livoni concludes his article with a piece of advice: “the cameraman must operate in a way that makes others believe he has shot the film in site conditions that were terribly unfavorable and dangerous. This increases his merit and thus, its value.”
This text is certainly at the margins of the great theoretical debate, yet it is fairly indicative. The opportunity to distinguish between the documentary and narrative dimensions is never called in doubt. Rather, there is the awareness that they constitute two readily recognizable genres.55 What it instead emphasized is the circularity between a subjectivity connected to an interpretation of the facts and a subjectivity that is pushed further and inserts something of itself (though its purpose is to make what is witnessed stand out better). Film’s gaze is undoubtedly a slippery terrain: different forms of vision converge on it, and in doing so, they tend to overlap. But at the very moment in which we have a clear typology of the situation, the confusion fades. The filmic image represents a field of convergence for different dimensions, but it is also a place in which these qualities articulate and define one another. Thus, we can say that film inherited the capacities of both the documentary and the narrative; it put them side by side as never before, collapsing them with all the ensuing vertigo. More productively, it also reformulated their nature and identity. The cinema is precisely a site of overlapping uncertainty and elucidation.
Before concluding this analysis, I will try to further develop this idea of the ambiguity tied to cinema’s nature as witness. In what way does the cinema recognize, or make recognizable, the reality to which it offers itself as witness? To what degree does it recover the existence of something already experienced and, at the same time, allow it to acquire for the conscience something unforeseen? I am taking the term recognition for its deeper characteristics: to recognize is to associate what is being seen to something previously encountered (the dog Argus recognizes Ulysses) and, at the same time, it means admitting the legitimacy of something that one encounters (I recognize someone’s authority). It is thus an act that implies both identification and reception, knowledge and acceptance. What paths, then, does this recognition take when set in motion by a film-witness?
To start with, if it is true that the cinema presents things not as they are but as the camera sees them, it is also true that the cinema can be a site of authentic revelation. On the screen the world shows an unexpected face, which allows us to find in it what we already know, while expanding on that knowledge. Ricciotto Canudo offers a useful confirmation in his posthumous collection The Factory of Images (L’usine aux images). He writes:
[Cinema] was born from the will, science, and art of modern men …, to gather, through time and space, the meaning of life, which is perpetually renewing itself. It was born to be the Total Representation of the body and soul, a visual story made of images painted with a brush of light.56
Moreover,
[Cinema] expresses the whole of life, with the infinite range of its feelings, aspirations, defeats, and triumphs, aided by this eternal game of lights, taking in being and things only as forms of light, harmonized and orchestrated according to the inspiring idea of action. This is the secret and the glory of Visual Drama.57
And finally:
Nature as character. The subconscious revealed. The immaterial … evoked in visible form and in movement. These are the things that no other art could touch…. The cinema, only the cinema, can and must represent them.58
In these passages, Canudo is quite clear. The filmic image restores reality to us in its entire range of manifestations, including those most difficult for us to gather in our normal activity and those we are unable to gather at all. It permits a “total representation of body and soul,” bringing to light the vitality of nature, the subconscious and the immaterial. This restoration of reality is not neutral: the cinema transforms what it encounters, giving it an altogether different quality. What was formerly a concrete body becomes a “form of light.” Such involvement, which we can call “subjective,” from the moment it makes evident the presence of action or “agency,” does not imply a betrayal. If anything, as Canudo suggests, it allows an “abstraction”59 of mere empirical data. They can be gathered beyond their mere appearance, interpreted in their essence, revealed in their plot, and put together in their most general design. In repainting the world, the “brush of light” proves perfectly able to grasp it, and thus to give it back completely. As a result, reality—in its masks and in its true face, to use our previous terms—opens up on the screen, before our eyes in all its richness. We can recognize this reality and, at the same time, connect this recognition to discovery and acceptance.
Canudo is not the only one who points out that film, as a witness, permits a recognition that leads to discovery and acceptance. The debate on animism, which swept the world when it came to the screen, illustrates this.60 Two memorable references will suffice. Hugo von Hofmannsthal: “From the film’s sparkling, the eyes gather an image of life made into 1,000 facets. This obscure and profound origin of life …, inaccessible to the word, can only just be realized through prayer or the stammerings of love.”61 And Antonin Artaud: “Isolating objects, film gives them a life of their own, which tends to become ever more independent and deviates from the usual meaning of such objects. [It] reveals an occult life, with which we are placed into direct contact.”62 Revelation, illumination, discovery. The terms persist, just as they recur in the reflection on the photogenic quality of being.63
Nevertheless, when it meets with the gaze, reality can unsettle us by unleashing trouble and unease, as well. Sometimes presented in an unexpected way, it proves almost unrecognizable. Next to the pleasure of the discovery, there is also the risk of creating true displacement, which occurs in particular when seeing oneself onscreen. Epstein returns to this moment on more than one occasion: “The uneasiness at seeing one’s own cinematographic image is sudden and complete”; and again, “the initial reaction to our own filmic reproduction is a kind of horror.”64 But it is perhaps Pirandello who offers the richest description of the matter in his novel The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio. Speaking of the actress Varia Nestorova, he says, “She remains speechless and almost frightened by her image on the screen—so altered and fragmented—on the screen. She sees there is someone who is herself but whom she does not know. She would like not to recognize herself in that person, but she would at least like to know her.”65 Thus, the image does not always offer us an illuminating revelation. It can also be the font of a profound unease. The cinematographic gaze often lays things too bare: “The camera lens is an eye … with an inhuman analytic capacity.”66 This gaze returns us to a past that has ceased to belong to us: in the filmic image, “we feel that we are fixed there in a moment of time which no longer exists in ourselves.”67 This means that a displacement intervenes when film’s capacity to witness becomes too direct, too crude; paradoxically, that is, when it lacks the right measure of reinterpretation (a reinterpretation that is often an adjustment and revision). Too much objectivity is never a good thing. Neither is too much subjectivity: testimony based on an exclusively personal reconstruction makes us fall into an arbitrary story, which can be accepted only through the power of illusion. In both cases, the fact remains that there is no full and correct recognition: it is impossible either to bring an image back to one’s own point of reference, or to accept this image as trustworthy. The cinema puts us in check, and we can withdraw only by ending the game.
Neither too much objectivity, nor too much subjectivity. This is film’s last recommendation. After challenging the inevitable superposition of immediate data and a mental reworking of them (“reports” and “inner shots,” according to Balázs), and after trying to keep the two planes separate (through grammatical and narrative markers), cinema discovers that if it wants to recognize and make recognizable the world, it must be nourished by things “as they are” and by visions “of somebody.” Recognition deals with a revelation and an interpretation—it implies a world that opens itself and an eye that takes possession of this world. Thus, neither a simple subjectivity, nor a simple objectivity. But both, once again.
Let’s end with a final example: a film entrusted to an exemplary “observer,” which stages a game of witness and recognition, objectivity and subjectivity.
A detective, Scottie, has seen a police colleague fall to his death, and the resulting trauma causes him to suffer from vertigo. He tries to accept the situation and agrees to follow a friend’s wife, Madeleine, who—convinced she is the reincarnation of an ancestor—has begun to exhibit strange behavior. Scottie falls in love with Madeleine, yet he is unable to save her when she climbs to the tower of an old church and, in an apparent fit, throws herself off. After this episode, Scottie falls into a deep depression: he no longer realizes what is happening around him, and is tormented by terrible nightmares. One day, he meets Judy, a young woman who reminds him of the dead woman. He follows her back to her hotel, and eventually forces her to dress and make herself up like his lost love. But at the moment in which Judy becomes identical to Madeleine, he realizes the trap into which he has fallen. It was actually the real wife of his friend—murdered by him—who plunged from the tower; the woman he met was her double, called to play a part so that the crime could take place without arousing suspicion. Under the guise of the fake Madeleine, he loved Judy, and now he sees her once again before his eyes. But the woman, forced by Scottie to return to the scene of the crime, climbs the tower and falls to her death …
I have just recounted Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (USA, 1958),68 one of the most extraordinary meditations on vision that the cinema has ever produced, and a film that reveals all the threads we have followed here (observation, memory, reconstruction, exorcism of the dead, etc.). Let us concentrate on the process that leads Scottie to recognize Madeleine in Judy, from the moment in which he sees her for the first time, to the moment in which he is certain about what had really happened in the past. This process of recognition shows us the different sides of subjectivity and objectivity involved in the filmic gaze and, at the same time, the forms that such a gaze accordingly encounters. Scottie, recognizing Madeleine in a passerby met by chance, makes a discovery: he draws from the real what it would normally hide. And the real, for its part, opens to his gaze like an authentic revelation: the passerby is the former Madeleine. Here, the observer is like an oracle, facing the splendor of things and deploying a deeply personal insight. Second, Scottie gives the woman a name; he decides her identity. She says that her name is Judy, but he insists in seeing Madeleine. For Scottie, reality becomes what he decrees it to be: Judy can be Madeleine. Here, the observer’s subjectivity is that of a bureaucrat, though an unseemly one. He is the administrative authority that defines the “who” and “what” of individuals and things. Third, in a dramatic crescendo, Scottie compels the woman he encountered to be what he has lost. He forces her to dress and make herself up as the other woman: Judy must be Madeline. The subjectivity is that of desire, or perhaps madness. The observer falls into a hallucination: the same hallucination that any film brings about when it causes us to mistake a representation for perception, according to Oudart’s striking principle.69 Finally, Scottie wakes up from his obsession and is able to see straight once more. He sees things for what they are. But Judy and Madeline are no longer there. For this awakening to occur, the real had to withdraw; it had to die once more, as it must do under the pressure of the passing of time. The End.
This finale clarifies our entire path. Beginning with Balázs, and adding Allendy and Lukács, we demonstrated how the cinema is as radically objective as it is subjective. The camera filters and transforms, though outside a traditional psychology. On the other hand, the screen shows with the incontrovertible evidence of the real what can only be imagined. This leads to a possible uncertainty that is highlighted when the two categories overlap. One remedy is a typology of filmic gazes that attempts to distinguish, due to a series of grammatical markers, what is offered as fact and what instead appears as a mental state. In these cases, the objective and subjective dimensions of the filmic gaze are traced back to a series of essentially narrative processes, such as the point-of-view shot and the flashback, which “locate” the subjectivity in a narrative character, making it function as the alter ego of the camera or the spectator. Subjectivity and objectivity are reduced to mere effects of language. Yet the superimposition of a fact and a mental state—or better still, in the words of Balázs, of “report” and “inner shot”—continue to operate. This uncertainty is tied to the filmic gaze’s nature as witness, the merging of the recording of facts and their interpretation, the repetition of what was and its reconstruction. This is true also when witness is inflected by memory, or involves a recognition. Memory, as restoration, vacillates between reparation and reconstruction. As for recognition, it needs both the revelation of the real and an interpretation by an observer. In this sense, it is decisive to understand who carries the keys to defining what appears before us, and when he/she/it does that. On this path, we may discover that film’s subjectivity is connected to the presence of a mechanical device for recording the real (a subject-object), an almost official device for the handling of things (defining identity, legitimating a presence), and a social device for the preservation of memory (to make the dead live), etc. The fact remains that objectivity and subjectivity continue to overlap and, at the same time, to distinguish themselves: the cinema shapes a gaze that both joins and simultaneously divides these different levels; it unites them and separates them at the same time.
In the mid-1950s, during an extreme phase of the “ontological theories” (and in the decline of the “classical cinema”), Edgar Morin’s Cinema, or The Imaginary Man (Le cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire) explored how objectivity and subjectivity indissolubly merge in the filmic experience. Onscreen, the world is presented in its immediacy, the effect of a mere recording. The spectator, however, projects him or herself onto and identifies with what is being seen, and in this way charges it with an entirely personal value. In Morin’s words, image and imagination permeate each other in what can be called, under Sartre’s influence, the imaginary. The penetration is total: “Cinema is exactly this symbiosis: a system that tends to integrate the spectator into the flow of the film. A system that tends to integrate the flow of the film into the psychic flow of the spectator.”70 Morin takes the process from the side of its reception: he analyzes how the camera’s gaze meets that of the spectator. But his attention climbs the summit, to the camera’s (or director’s) encounter with the world: “Subjectivity and objectivity are not only superimposed but endlessly reborn, the one from the other, in a ceaseless round of subjectivizing objectivity and objectivizing subjectivity. The real is bathed, bordered on, crossed, swept along by the unreal. The unreal is molded, determined, rationalized, internalized by the real.”71 Moreover, these are two sides of the same coin, which in the filmic experience find their point of intersection: what comes to be seen on the screen, and how the spectator sees it; what the camera saw and what I see now.
Almost forty years before Morin, Hugo Münsterberg’s The Photoplay shed light on film’s capacity to capture the real and shape it according to our psychological processes (attention, memory, imagination).72 We see the world in its essential state, yet we reinsert it in a mental experience. Twenty years after Morin, Christian Metz in The Imaginary Signifier asserts how the onscreen image inserts the action of the psychological processes (specular identification, voyeurism, fetishism) within the recording of the real.73 In the filmic signifier there is an overlapping of extremely vivid states (all related to something that seems to be there, even if it is absent) and a desire (a desire for seeing and, more generally, perceiving).
We began with Balázs and the dialectic between “report” and “inner shot,” arriving at Metz and the dialectic between recording the real and desire. It is only on this wide canvas that we can truly understand how film is able to put subjectivity and objectivity into play. It is only against this background that we can appreciate the ways in which these two essential categories take their respective shapes and mutually redefine one another. It is their inevitable meeting—together with the necessity of articulating their presence, categorizing their respective abilities, and defining their significance—that constitutes one of the richest terrains on which film is wagered. Here, it defines the modes of its own gaze. Here, the eye is at stake.