“Sicily! The night was an eye full of gaze”: The Cinema Seen from Etna (Le cinématographe vue de l’Etna), one of Jean Epstein’s most fascinating essays, starts with this evocative image.1 The essay describes, in a sort of diptych, an ascent and a descent. The ascent is the one to the volcano, “the great actor that explodes his show two or three times a century” and of which Epstein came to film “the tragic fantasy.”2 On this journey—both physical and moral—the filmmaker finds himself crossing a threshold: the carabineers have set roadblocks, but the “colored leaflet of the aspirins’ bottle” has on it “more effect than the genuine signature of the prefect of Catania,” and allows the troupe to penetrate the forbidden land. In front of their eyes a grand and terrible scenery bursts open. “The fire had covered up everything in the same tintless color, gray, opaque, livid, dead. Every leaf on every tree, as far as the eye could see, went through all the shades and crackles of the autumn, and, in the end, twisted, burnt, fell to the breath of fire. And the tree, naked, black, stood up for an instant in its burning winter.”3 The effect is one of authentic revelation: things suddenly reveal a soul. Indeed, they come to life, and they seem to talk to whoever is watching them. “The earth had a human and stubborn face. We felt in the presence of someone and awaiting him.”4 Thus, Epstein is amidst a vivid landscape openly involving him. This situation, made of chance, closeness, and complicity, brings us back to the very core of cinema. Films also offer revelations “to unexpectedly discover, as for the first time, all things in their aspect divine, with their symbolic profile and their greatest sense of analogy, with an air of individuality, this is the joy of cinema.”5 In films even landscapes come to life. Epstein goes on: “One of cinema’s greatest powers is its animism. Objects have their attitudes. Trees gesticulate. The mountains, as the Etna, signify.”6 In the film reality is literally born again before our eyes. We are captured and included in this world: “In the end, when man appears in his entirety, it is the first time that he is seen through an eye—an eye that is not human.”
The descent, symmetrical to the ascent, takes place, however, in a closed-in space.
Two days before, in the morning, I was leaving the hotel for that expedition and the elevator was stuck since half past six between the third and fourth floors…. To go down I had to take the main staircase, still with no banisters, where some workmen were singing insults against Mussolini. That huge spiral of steps gave me vertigo. All the walls were covered in mirrors. I descended, surrounded by many selves, by reflections, by the images of my gestures, by the cinematographic projections.7
It is thus a descent that is as terrible and revealing as the ascent. Epstein, step by step, ends up facing himself. “Those mirrors forced me to look at myself,” he writes, “with their indifference, with their truth.”8 He finds himself naked, stripped of all former self-conceptions: “I thought of myself in one way and saw myself in another; that spectacle was destroying all the usual lies I had been building around myself.” Naked and manifold at once: “I moved my head and to the right I saw only a root of the gesture, while to the left that gesture was raised to the fourth power. Looking at one side and then the other, I started to have a different awareness of my prominence.” Manifold and ephemeral at once: “Each of these images lived but an instant, just the time to grasp it and it was gone out of sight, different already”9. Epstein is naked, manifold, ephemeral, surrounded by his own reflection, and uncertain of himself. Obviously a sense of authentic bewilderment takes over:
I saw myself void of illusions, astonished, denuded, eradicated, arid, veritable, net weight. I wanted to run away from that spiral movement in which I felt I was swirling down toward a terrible center of my self. Such a lesson of egoism is merciless. An upbringing, an education, a religion, had patiently consoled me of the fact of existing. Now everything had to be started all over again.”10
In this journey of initiation, what emerges once more is the call to the cinema. “The cinématographe provokes such unexpected encounters with oneself, more than a play of reflecting mirrors,” Epstein concludes. The camera lens is “an eye of inhuman analytical abilities.”11 It displays individuals in their bare truth, forces them to look at themselves with no excuses; reveals to each person the self that was theretofore unknown. From this, of course, comes a sense of unease: “the restlessness in front of one’s own cinematographic image is utter and sudden”;12 moreover, “the first reaction to the cinematographic reproduction of ourselves is a sort of horror.” To the point that the person filmed quite often does not recognize himself in his own portrait. What he sees is a stranger. The moment after finding himself, he has literally lost it.
Epstein’s essay is a parable. The ascent that he describes is a voyage to the core of things: we may discover that things are alive, and we may participate in their existence. But as we are in the middle of the spectacle, we also become the object of our own gaze. As the descent shows, we perceive ourselves as such and as other, and we feel a sense of bewilderment. In short, Epstein’s parable speaks of plunging into what surrounds us, and finding it difficult to get ourselves back. Cinema repeats this double movement. The camera is indeed inevitably implicated in what it is being filmed. In chasing things, it somehow shares their destiny. In exchange, it cannot hide its presence. Its action, laid bare by its object of interest, ends up being expropriated, so to speak. A similar dynamic applies to the spectator as well. The spectator before the screen tends to connect with what he is watching. He projects himself onto and at the same time identifies with the shown reality. He feels it as living and feels himself living it. In the very moment that he achieves this intimacy, though, he finds himself suspended between different worlds—the one from which he is watching and the one from which he is watched. The risk is the uncertainty of his position, indeed of his identity.
Such a situation refers directly to the new status that modernity seems to assign to the relationship of observer and observed. Instead of an opposition between two poles, what emerges is a mutual interdependence. The observer partakes in the destiny of the observed. He moves on its same ground, but intertwines his existence with the object of his gaze. He also ends up losing his privileged position, such that he blends in with what he observes, or what surrounds him.
Hans Blumenberg, going over the metaphor of the shipwreck from Lucretius to Otto Neurath, skillfully shows how this new pattern imposes itself.13 His starting point is Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura), in which a person on shore watches a ship in a storm and is very pleased to be on solid ground. Beginning with Pascal, however, the situation changes: the ship somehow takes us on board (“vous êtes embarqué”), and we share its struggle. From here on, the implication of spectator and spectacle goes further. There are no more safe places to seek shelter. Life itself is a big tempest, and he who thinks that he is merely watching the sea’s surging waves actually does so from its throes. We are wrecked, and we have always been, so much so that the only thing we can do is build ourselves a raft with the debris from earlier shipwrecks.13
Away from dry land, we are in the midst of waves and winds, cast away in the middle of the eruption, rebuilding ourselves from the fragments of a mirror. It is not difficult to see a parallel between Epstein’s metaphors and the ones explored by Blumenberg. In both cases, there is the idea that what modernity brings to light is an ever-closer intimacy with the surrounding universe and, at the same time, the progressive loss of all certainty. All distance is wiped out. Complicities are created. Coordinates are lost. We enter into an unstable world, and we feel unstable as well. The observer is “inside” the observed world, yet with no precise place. He is situated amidst the sea, on the mountain of fire, on the glass stairs. He is at risk, exposed to winds and waves, exposed to the lava, exposed to himself.
The lesson of The Cinematograph View from Etna becomes clear: what Epstein discovers along the paths of a volcano and the mirrored hotel staircase is a more general condition of which cinema is an excellent witness, and, as we will see, interlocutor. It is a condition marked by an overlapping of presences (rather than a strict division of roles) and by an interweaving of gazes (rather than the dominance of one). It is the condition of an observer with apparently no safety net, who finds himself immersed in the landscape he observes, compelled to share his destiny with that of the object of his gaze, and at the same time to himself become the object of a gaze. This is the condition with which we must finally come to terms, perhaps with some unease, but in the unyielding spirit of truth.
Let me now attempt to clarify this general idea in my own way (winding, as it were, a path for myself up and down a magic mountain). I would like to consider some films that, though highly dissimilar, seem to thematize this new position of the observer; this way of being inside and on top of things; this living side by side the object of one’s own gaze; between losing and finding oneself.
I will begin with a work from the early cinema, Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (E. Porter, USA, 1902). This film develops a theme already examined and destined, in turn, for further adaptations: the fool who goes to the cinema and mistakes its illusion for reality. We find the same theme, for example, in The Countryman’s First Sight of the Animated Pictures (R. W. Paul, Great Britain, 1901),14 which was decidedly the basis for Porter’s film, or in Godard’s Les Carabiniers (France, 1960), which gives this situation a subtly tragic hue. Beyond these references, Uncle Josh is a film that seems to offer a direct illustration of what Epstein evokes in metaphorical form: it is a “live” description of the spectatorial experience.15 Let us follow the images one by one.16
Josh is at the cinema, sitting next to the screen, apparently alone. The Kinetoscope Edison program presents its first piece, “Parisian Danger,” in which a woman dances the cancan. Josh jumps down from the platform and gets closer to the screen, clumsily miming the dance. “The Black Diamond express” follows; in it, a train approaches until it appears in the foreground, and Josh becomes afraid, returning once more to his seat. The third piece is “The Country Couple.” A beautiful peasant girl goes to the water pump. A boy approaches her, but is hit by the bar of the pump. He gets up and hugs the girl, finding in her a sort of consolation. Josh, who has descended once again from the stands, becomes even more agitated at the sight of their embrace. He takes off his jacket, throws it to the ground, and finally hurls himself at the screen in an attempt to enter into the scene. Instead, he makes the curtain fall, revealing the operator projecting the film and his equipment. Josh and the operator come to blows, and both end up tumbling to the ground.
Through this amusing story, Uncle Josh offers us a definition of the cinematic apparatus, its characteristics and dynamics. We have a spectator placed before a screen. A spectacle draws him in, ultimately provoking his reaction. He confuses the spectacle for a real scene and wants to participate in the situation he sees. Finally, an interference upsets the show, putting an end to the filmic experience. The spectator lets himself get involved in the spectacle, but he goes too far in his desire to take part in it. Having placed himself in the middle, he ends up destroying the conditions upon which the spectacle itself operates, such that he loses his own status as spectator. Game over.
Let us analyze more closely the journey illustrated by Uncle Josh, beginning with the attraction that images exercise. This is an attraction in the literal sense: images are striking. We cannot be indifferent to them. But our attraction is also an ambiguous one that can incite fear. The spectacle he sees on the screen causes Josh to flee (the train episode) as well as to penetrate deeper (the other two episodes in which Josh attempts to participate). Moreover, it is an attraction that leads to action. The performative force of these images is evident, as they provoke Josh’s continuous reaction. What is an attraction like this based on, and to what does it appeal?
Little more than fifteen years after Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show, Victor Freeburg offered one of the first concise studies of the audience in his book The Art of Photoplay Making.17 Filmic images attract, and they do so through three forms of appeal—the sensory appeal to the eye, the emotional appeal, and the intellectual appeal. There are many factors at play in this attraction: the beauty of the filmed subject (for example, “a moon-lit lake, a surf-swept beach, spruce-covered foothills”),18 the presence of certain movements that only film is able to convey (as, for example, “the rhythmic undulations of the sea, the fan-like spreading of a sky rocket, the slow curling of smoke from a factory tunnel, the varying balance of a bird in flight”), and finally, above all, the movement of the human body “individually, as in the case of a dancer, and en masse as the case of a regiment on parade.”19 But the decisive factor is the spectator’s sense of contact with what appears on the screen. “In the motion picture theatre this illusion of personal contact with the characters is especially strong,”20 Freeburg states. The contact is almost physical, and it is immediately transformed into a moral intimacy. “We select our friends from among the heroes and heroines, but we scorn the villainous, the stupid, and the low.”21 In particular, this sense of contact with the characters is what allows the feeling of participation in the narrated events. “By a law of psychology,” Freeburg explains, “we project our very selves into the characters on the screen. Thus, every spectator in the audience may get by proxy the experiences and emotions of the character he is observing.”22 This need for contact operates on the intellectual level as well, in the form of a curiosity. “We constantly desire new material to add to our store of knowledge,” Freeburg remarks. “We crave novelty.”23 It is here that the cowboy from South Dakota finds satisfaction “in the story which is laid in a Cape Cod fishing village,” just as the fisherman finds satisfaction “in the spacious drama of the South Dakota ranches.”24 They enter into a relationship with another reality, and this allows them to acquire a real knowledge, though it is through the onscreen illusion.25
Though Freeburg speaks of film already in its “classical” phase, he helps us to better understand the film we are analyzing here, putting it into perspective. The Kinetoscope images attract Josh because they have some essential qualities. They possess a beauty of their own, however naive; they show movement both human (the dancer) and mechanical (the train); they present bodies caught in movement (seduction, dance); they depict “exotic” situations that stimulate the curiosity (the Parisian cancan). In short, they excite the vision and feelings of the naive spectator. Most of all, they create contact between the spectator and what is depicted on the screen: observer and observed are brought side by side. They interact, as shown on the one hand by the various situations that “jump out” at Josh—the train that advances on him, the dancer who offers her favors, and the two lovers who let him in on their intimacy—and on the other, by Josh’s continuous movement, culminating in his seizing and pulling down the curtain.
So there is contact, and with it, a nearness and an interaction. This inevitably compels us to talk about the close-up. Let us put aside Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show for the moment, given that the naive spectator witnesses Kinetoscope pieces filmed as long shots.26 Beyond its various functions in the passage from early to classical cinema—in the former, to exalt the observed reality, in the latter to direct observation—the close-up primarily celebrates drawing the object of the gaze near in such a way that, occupying the entire visual field, this object establishes a quasi-exclusive relationship with the spectator. On the screen, a face, body, or thing suddenly grows. These enlarged images might evoke surprise or focus the attention: the face, the thing, the body have come out of their most intimate sphere. They turn themselves over to their observer, enter into close communion with him or her, and create a new union together.
Epstein examined this dynamic with great intensity in “Enlargment” (“Grossissement”),27 written in 1921:
The close-up changes the drama thanks to its impression of nearness. Pain is within one’s reach. Extending my arm, I touch you; intimacy. I count the lashes of that suffering. I could feel the taste of its tears. I have never had a face so close to mine. It follows me from so near, and I seek it face to face. Nothing comes between us: I devour the air that separates us. It is like a sacrament in me. Maximum visual acuity.28
With his usual lyric prose, Epstein establishes how the blown-up close-up compels the observer to get closer to the object of his or her vision, ultimately fusing (and perhaps also confusing oneself) with it. We are certainly dealing with a process of amplification (“The close-up adds force, if only for its dimensions”).29 It brings about a true explosion on an emotional level (“this enlargement works on emotion”), and consequently, the need to regulate the sensory flux (“The close-up limits and directs the attention”).30 Yet what counts most is really its ability to create a nearness that directly involves the observer and implicates him or her in the observed world: “I can’t say how much I like American close-ups. Neat. Suddenly the screen shows a visage and the drama, in a face-to-face, speaks directly to me, growing with an unexpected intensity. Hypnosis. Now Tragedy is anatomical.”31 Nearness, interpellation, union with the object, transformation of landscape: these are the axes on which the close-up revolves.
These measures recall a more general process that materialized between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: a progressive narrowing of distances, through which the world seemed to diminish in size, finally handing itself over into the possession of its subjects. We have only to think of the geographic explorations that reminded us that nothing was truly “elsewhere.” From the discovery of the Nile’s sources to the conquest of the Poles and beyond (Everest, the Mariana Trench, the Moon), each step let us know that distances had been shattered, and that nothing was beyond man’s reach. On a day-to-day level, we have only to think of the transportation system, the waves of immigration, mass tourism. The world no longer possessed insuperable barriers. Everything could be put into contact with everything else. Even the most protected recesses were reachable. The close-up (and with it the detail) shapes this generalized accessibility on a visual plane: things are now “reachable by gaze.” Or rather, they offer themselves up to my gaze in their entirety—I no longer have to go look for them. They are not prey to conquer, but gifts borne to me. The world has condensed itself, it has thrust itself forward, made itself mine. In offering itself up in this way, it in turn captivates me.
Let us return to Uncle Josh. It is precisely the realization of a “contact”—along with the sensations of absolute proximity and close interaction that accompany it—that characterizes the experience of the naive character. At this point, Josh feels entitled to act. He can advance upon the world before him. He can respond to the gift that he is offered, seeking to grasp it and thus transform it into his prey. He can try to overcome the barrier between himself and the spectacle, descending into the universe that has opened itself up before his eyes. If the world no longer has barriers—if the “there” has become “here” and vice versa, if there is no longer an “outside” to watch from and look at, but everything is now an “inside,” hosting both seer and seen—the step that Josh prepares to make should be almost obvious. And indeed, Josh advances, strong in this initiative. But in the cinema nearness is only an illusion, as Freeburg, as well as Epstein, reminded us en passant. It is true that the stimuli coming from the screen lead to the creation of images having many characteristics of reality.32 Yet the impression of reality does not correspond to factual reality. The other world within reach is definitively a different world. Thus, the barrier that seemed to have dissolved instead remains; it has only rendered itself impalpable, here as elsewhere.33 All spectators should know this.34 Yet Josh advances: he is now so close to this reality that he is ready to take part in it. He runs up against the screen, and it gives way. Falling to the ground, it reveals the apparatus in action.
That is Porter’s film. It gives an overt “reading” of the spectatorial situation. It shows us what a cinematographic séance is and elucidates its qualifying criteria; it offers a spectator type, though ironic, and puts forth an idea of what is typical of a spectator; and, finally, it adds a prescription to the description, warning us not to be naive spectators. However, as in every “reading,” there are blind spots. In order to see them, we need to move on to a new film.
King Vidor’s The Crowd (USA, 1928) concludes with a memorable sequence. Husband and wife are watching a vaudeville performance. It is the first moment of relaxation they share after a long series of misfortunes: the death of their daughter that made the husband forget the enthusiasm of his arrival in the big city, the excitement tied to a social life filled with friends, and his minor work ambitions. What follows is a period of depression and a series of mutual misunderstandings that almost push him to suicide. Now the spouses enjoy themselves, together again in a public space. The camera frames the two in a close-up. Next, with a movement drawing backwards and up,35 it shifts to frame the whole theater, where dozens and dozens of other men and women are watching the same performance, having the same reactions and expressing the same feelings. John Sims and his wife Mary are lost in the crowd—a crowd made of many Johns and Marys, each couple with its own story, perhaps not so dissimilar from that of the two protagonists.
The sequence stands out for at least two reasons. First of all, it has a clear metalinguistic value. The film leaves the spectator with the image of two spectators in the hall, surrounded by a multitude of other spectators. It almost seals the narrated story with a dedication such as, “I am speaking to you, about you.” We have, once again, a work that reflects upon the very experience that it offers, representing it on the screen. Second, the sequence is significant because it not only constitutes a dedication, but it posits a moral as well. Its magnificent camera movement—essentially a crane movement—serves to unite an individual to the mass of individuals surrounding him, to plunge him into an audience, to transform him into one of the many, until we finally lose him. Throughout the narrative, John Sims resists the idea of melting into the masses, yet this is what happens. Thus, we are once again dealing with the problem of proximity and participation. This time, however, the question is perpendicular, so to speak, to the one illustrated by Uncle Josh. That is, the character in the hall finds himself relating to those at his side, rather than to the screen itself. In fact, this is an axis that Uncle Josh chooses to omit. In Porter’s film, rather paradoxically, the protagonist enjoys the performance alone, and only through Freeburg might we see the black hole there, the something “unseen.” “It must never be forgotten that the theatre audience is a crowd.”36 Vidor’s film invites us to reflect on the individual and the mass—spectator and audience—a single position and its surroundings.
The Crowd explores, in a systematic way, the relationship between John Sims and his environment. For example, John’s arrival in New York, full of hope, is accompanied by a real portrait of the big city, with a series of shots dedicated to the cars on the street, the crowds on the sidewalks, the subway, the boats, the skyscrapers. Even his daughter’s accident and subsequent funeral reveal the urban context. This time it is hostile, with neighbors who curiously congregate at the site of the tragedy along with cars that—indifferent to the drama—block the procession. Among these narrative poles, other moments produce the same connection. One has only to think of John and Mary’s courting, which takes place in a dazzling amusement park full of wonders. This narrative strategy holds a gesture typical of film, with its tendency to “set” the events it recounts. It isn’t by chance that the discipline of the master shot—fundamental to classic editing—rests on the idea that next to the shots detailing the protagonist’s actions, it is necessary to have shots that contextualize the action that occurs. In fact, the classic sequence often begins with one full shot (the establishing shot) and closes with another (the re-establishing shot) in such a way that this context and its evolution are clear. This is then proof that they merit just as much attention as the hero’s behavior. We can even say that the character’s insertion into his or her setting is, after all, achieved by every filmic shot. It is enough that the character be surrounded by a bit of “air,” so that his or her environment makes itself felt at once. Film, unlike literature, which can only say one thing at a time, can include in the same frame not only the he or she who is acting but also the fragments or effects of his or her field of action.37 Thus, film expresses a marked tendency to offer us the character and the environment. The two terms tend to turn up on the screen together.
Yet The Crowd brings to light a second element as well: the difficulty John Sims experiences in adapting to his setting. Relating to one’s context is never easy, but for our protagonist it seems almost impossible. John Sims suffers from boundless ambition, which leads him to obsess over his very destiny as an individual. This conviction is instilled in him by a father who had always expected extraordinary things from his son—expectations initially confirmed by his serendipitous birthday, the Fourth of July. Waiting for the right occasion to show everyone his true worth, John refuses to adapt to his surroundings. Yet the world does not wait for him. It moves on its own, proving itself not only indifferent, but even hostile. This becomes clear in the sequence that constitutes the climax of this situation. His daughter’s death, his wife’s detachment, and his difficulties at work drive John to attempt suicide. Precisely at the moment in which he needs others, he finds himself terrifyingly alone. He is not a part of his metropolis. All that is left for him is his obsession and disappointment. There is, therefore, no connection between character and environment, but only a dysphoric or adversarial relationship: this is no character-environment but, if anything, character/environment.
Only in the last two sequences does The Crowd present a journey in reverse, which will lead John to reintegrate himself into the social body. It begins at the moment in which Mary leaves the family house and John tries to stop her. He has brought her presents: a bouquet of flowers, three tickets for a show, purchased with the little money he has earned as a clown. Suddenly, he chooses a record and puts it on the gramophone. He takes his wife in his arms and dances with her. In this moment, only John and Mary exist in the small room and a true intimacy is created between them. They act in a true unity, as in a world unto themselves, if you will. Immediately after, in the immense vaudeville theater, John is able—with Mary at his side, surrounded by dozens and dozens of others like him—to fully connect to the environment in which he lives, to see himself alongside others, laugh in unison with them, and to become part of a whole. He finds himself, all told, by losing himself in the crowd.
Going over the film, we understand why the final sequence is so crucial. The complex crane shot, carrying John Sims to the public that he will join, fulfills the contact with his surroundings that he had so long refused, despite the occasions that film paradoxically seemed to offer him. More than a contact, it carries out a true fusion. In the last shot of The Crowd, John is not only inserted into the context of his action, he is organically joined with this context, almost as though one and only one shot can completely embrace both of them.
But why this fusion? What makes it somehow necessary? A symptomatic reading of The Crowd allows us to suggest at least three answers. In the first place, against the backdrop of modernity, there is a new perception of space to which the cinema is not extraneous. We are immersed in not only a compressed space (thanks to the apparent elimination of distance) but also a full and active one.38 In one way, the things that take up this space thoroughly determine it, modeling its shapes and fields of energy. This space in turn acts on what is contained in it; it inserts it within a complex environment, it declines it according to this accent or that, it defines its weight and role. In this sense, we are not before a simple container, but something that dictates and responds. In a word, we are in front of a world.39 The manner in which the cinema outlines the relationships between character and environment reflects the modern sensibility for space: if the two are tightly correlated in the cinema, it is precisely because the one finds itself immersed in a space that it must take into account, to which it gives and from which it receives, in which it acts and by which it is acted upon, in a game of reciprocity that leads precisely to a kind of reciprocal fusion.
This is true particularly when the environment in which the character moves is the human one. Here, the exchange and interdependence are even more evident, and the necessity of a reciprocal fusion is imposed, seeing that an individual can end up as part of the social body. Certainly, this is neither easy nor simple. As The Crowd shows, the individual has his own motives, and when he becomes part of the mass, he risks losing his individuality. The confrontation between John Sims and his friend Bert is exemplary. The latter adapts himself too readily to his environment. He makes a career for himself, yet he betrays himself in some way, too. John Sims, on the contrary, does not accept becoming like others at all. Consequently, at a certain point in his life, he finds himself adrift, wandering alone in the metropolis that moves of its own accord.40 Here, we face a crucial problem in modernity:41 how to conform to others without losing oneself? Or better, how to immerse oneself in the surrounding world and still maintain one’s own status? The cinema’s obsession with representing the crowd while conserving the individual features of its components is indicative. Spottiswoode, who in his mid-1930s Grammar of the Film attempted to standardize the forms of filmic representation, called a sequence exemplary in which “the camera, flashing from one part of it to another, discovers one man expectant, another already assured, a third confident or disappointed; the film, running in perfect silence, catches the tension of all.”42 The important thing is to seize the individuality of each member of the crowd. Then he or she can be integrated into the whole.
In this picture, the fact that John Sims is finally rejoined with his setting, finally melding with it inside a theater (or perhaps a cinema),43 is significant as well. The cinema hall is a perfect mirror of the social context within which an individual moves. In particular, as Freeburg reminded us, “it must be never forgotten that the theatre audience is a crowd.”44 This means that we are dealing here with “a compact mass of people held together by a single purpose,” and with “various units [that] are in close contact with each other.”45 Here, too, we find a reality characterized by an actual closeness and sharing. Identifying with the masses and identifying with an audience is therefore the same thing. If anything, the reasons for which one needs to join the masses become clearer in a movie theater. It is a question of creating a new and denser community, in the Wagnerian sense of the term, as Ricciotto Canudo emphasized in 1908. In the cinema hall emerges “the will for a new party, a new joyful humanity in a spectacle, in a party, in a meeting place in which the oblivion of one’s own isolated individuality is dispensed, in small and large doses.”46 It is, too, a question of creating a group of individuals capable of a collective dream, as Jules Romains pointed out in 1911: “They sleep; their eyes no longer see. They are no longer conscious of their bodies. Instead, they are only passing images, a gliding and rusting of dreams.”47 And finally, it is a question of arriving at a sort of elementary life, which does not mean one that is less rich or intense. As Matilde Serao emphasized in 1916, in the audience “a single simple soul” is formed, which “becomes annoyed and irritated at complications,” but is nonetheless “sensitive, tender,” recognizes “true affection, sincere affection,” and responds “to the great sentimental calls of love and pain.”48
Above all, it is a question of creating a real and modern public opinion. Let us return to Freeburg. He writes: “Close contact is spiritual as well as physical. You not only touch elbows with your neighbour and live in his atmosphere but you are infected by his emotions and share his desires, purposes, reactions.”49 Yet this does not lead to a cancellation of individuality. “While the crowd is single-minded, the public is many-minded,” Freeburg continues. “It may be looked upon as a vast web-like association of unified groups, families, cliques, coteries, leagues, clubs and crowds…. Its groups come in contact, though not simultaneously; views are exchanged, discussions are carried on, letters are written, until as a result of all this reflection a deliberate expression is arrived at. This deliberate expression is called public opinion.”50
Here then are the reasons underlying an authentic fusion between an individual and his environment: we move in a full and active space, we must contend with the masses, and we must become part of a social body (of public opinion, for example), in which our individuality, instead of being sacrificed, finds a wider representation.51
This last observation lets us conclude by returning to Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show and comparing it with The Crowd. In Porter’s film, we have the spectator’s desire to give himself up to the spectacle, a desire frustrated in the end by the illusory nature of the onscreen world; in King Vidor’s film, we have instead the individual’s resistance to giving himself up to the social body, resistance that is conquered in the end when the individual becomes spectator and his environment is a theater hall. Thus, we find ourselves dealing with two paths that put a “fusion” into play. We can see here the two fundamental traits of all spectatorship: the relationship of those who follow a film with the world that the film represents, and his or her relationship with the surrounding world, beginning with the audience of which he or she is part, respectively. These two relational axes coexist in the frame of the spectatorial experience. Those who follow a film are just as much scopic subjects as social ones.52 Quite simply, it is a scopic subject who relaxes his or her own social constraints when the house lights go down, while it is the social subject waiting for or leaving his or her scopic state when the lights are on or when they go back up.53 But the comparison between the two films reveals something else as well. They are characterized by two attitudes that are in some way contradictory: one underscores that becoming immersed in the performance is fascinating, yet silly. The other stresses how giving oneself up to the social body is difficult, yet necessary. To put it in another way, one illustrates the force of the call of the fictional world, but also the risk of identifying oneself fully with it. The other shows the difficulty of establishing social relationships that limit one’s subjectivity, but also the usefulness of doing so. From here a sort of chiasmus emerges. In one case we have a “fusion” that is desired yet feared, while in the other a “fusion” that is feared yet proper. Why then can we not imagine that the fulfillment of the latter is the subtle effect of the difficulty of realizing the former? That, in other words, one occurs because the other does not fully occur, and better still, that the one does not occur so that the other may occur? There is a world in which one would like to take part, and that is taken away. It is taken away by the apparatus, which offers only representations (that is, substitutions of a reality destined to remain absent) and taken away by common social sense that derides those who desire what they cannot have. And there is a world in which one can take part—rather, in which one must take part in order to be social subjects—but it takes some prodding to identify with it. Then an imperfect relationship with the represented world perhaps serves precisely to improve one’s relationship with the surrounding world. Removing an object of desire conceivably makes one desire an object within reach. These two components of spectatorship—the scopic and the social—can therefore put internal adjustments into effect. The impossibility of a unity with the fiction finds release in a unity with the audience.54
In conclusion, we have a spectator-spectacle manqué in order to arrive at a spectator-public. And we have a spectator-public as a positive answer to an impossible spectator-spectacle. A 1925 review by the surrealist critic Robert Desnos offers paradoxical evidence of this exchange:
The other night at the Marivaux I wasn’t particularly enjoying the long French film when a white light irresistibly attracted my gaze: it was the bare arm of my neighbor. For an instant, it was enough to stare at the luminous white shade; then I rested my hand on the apparition. The woman didn’t retract her arm. Meanwhile, some imbecilic heroes clamor around on the screen. Benign darkness propitiates illusions.55
The terms used emphasize the equivalence of the two objects with which it meets. The whiteness and the luminosity refer to the screen and the arm of the woman. The progression of the action shows the change of objective: the interest in the (bad) film makes way for the interest in his neighbor. The surroundings, with their “benign darkness,” favor this blurring between one “illusion” and another. “Her hand squeezes mine. My knee presses against hers, without either saying a word. I became aware of her slightly agitated breathing,” Desnos writes. Desnos obeys a personal impulse (and goes further than what is allowed in a cinema). The John Sims of the day obeys a social obligation instead (he must fall into a collective to feel a part of it, to integrate with it). Yet the path is analogous from one observed object to another, from one unity to another. The being inside of things, in the field of our own gaze, in the world, can become reality.
As for Desnos and his adventure with the beautiful neighbor, I’ll skip how that story ended.
If the shift from Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show to The Crowd involves a leap in perspective, our third film involves a greater leap still. We find ourselves in another time, in another stylistic and historical environment. Yet we encounter again a strongly reflexive film, one that is able to convey the spectator’s experience.
Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (Italy/Great Britain, 1966) contains a rather tense sequence, though nothing important seems to happen in it. The film’s protagonist, Thomas, a trendy fashion photographer, takes some pictures in a park. He then develops them and hangs them on the walls of his studio. He is collecting images of London for a book of his work. When Thomas gets closer to one of the photographs, going over its surface with a large magnifying glass—he notices a detail. The detail is enlarged and placed next to other images. The camera passes smoothly from one photograph to the next, before resting on the photographer who goes over the various images, looking for a connection between them. The photographer works feverishly in the dark room. He hangs the newly printed photographs on the walls. Once again, the camera passes over the different images, and at the end of the uninterrupted pan it captures the photographer intent on examining the results of his work. This final shot contains a surprising element: it begins with a scene that seems to be seen by someone (the movement of the camera on the photographs simulates, in fact, the gaze of the photographer who inspects them), but instead of cutting to that person who is watching, it ends with the discovery that the observer has always been in the scene, inside what was thought to be his field of vision. Thus, we are no longer dealing with a point-of-view shot—that is, with the image of what is seen, followed by an image of the person seeing.56 We have here what has traditionally been called a semi-point-of-view shot (or semi-subjective shot), or a single shot that incorporates both the object seen and the subject seeing in the same field of vision.57 The two elements could not coexist in the same image, since if someone is seen, that someone cannot be inside his or her own field of vision (that is, the person looking ahead cannot frame him or herself as well). Yet here object and subject coexist as equal parts inside one single gaze. This is the small paradox that renders the shift surprising: what is usually divided, and should remain as such, is instead reassembled. Thus, a unity—conspirational and a bit disturbing—emerges.
Taking this semi-subjective shot as a point of departure, let us try to expand on what it can teach us. It is hardly necessary to say that this is not the first time that Antonioni has employed such a process. He uses it in other films, always in order to mark moments in which the character’s capacity to understand a situation on both perceptive and cognitive levels seems to deteriorate and rupture.58 But the semi-subjective shot seems to assume an even greater significance in Blowup. The definitive elimination of the barrier between observer and observed (the two share the same shot; there is no editing cut that separates them) appears both intentional and expected in this film in particular. The story begins, in fact, with Thomas dressed as a lower-class, blue-collar worker, photographing London’s lost humanity. His clothing shows not only how he wants and needs to camouflage himself, but also that he chooses to make himself into the object of his own gaze. Unlike when he works in his studio, where he behaves as absolute master of his environment, here he is conforming to what is before his camera.
In the second instance, Thomas is looking at landscape photos. In one way they constitute for him a sort of spectacle, particularly because they are born from a (possible) crime and thus function as a small story unfolding in perfect mystery style that must be carefully analyzed. In another way, however, these photos represent nothing more than the environment. Thomas had photographed a couple in the park, just as he had previously photographed some vagrants. He has London’s complex humanity—and therefore the social milieu in which he lives—in his viewfinder. Here, spectacle and environment are superimposed. The environment is presented as a true spectacle, and the spectacle has moved into everyday life (e.g., the procession of clowning street revelers-protesters-panhandlers and, some sequences later, the same group, more or less, who improvise a tennis match show). This blending of spectacle and environment means that the unity realized between the observer and the observed is also a unity between the individual and the surrounding world. Thomas, next to the photos and inside his own field of vision, is both a scopic subject that has been connected to his object, and a social subject that has been united with the physical and human universe.
Thomas is undoubtedly in the position of observer, yet this is not the only scopic role that he knows how to fill. We shouldn’t forget that, before beginning to look at his photos, he shot a series of viewpoints, printed them, then chose details to enlarge. He then printed the new images and arranged them in his studio in careful order. In other words, he “put together” his own show. Previously in his studio, Thomas had lined up a group of models and made them assume stylish unnatural poses. Scolding them, he finally orders them to close their eyes and to stay still. In this way, he reaffirms his role as “boss of the set.” He is the one individual able to “manipulate” a scene. As producer and director, Thomas, in addition to being the subject who sees, is also the subject who shows. He is, furthermore, a seen subject. At the very moment in which he begins to think that he has photographed a crime, he also suspects that he is being spied on by someone. He discovers, after returning home, that all the films have been stolen, giving him proof of this fear. The killers are watching him, and he is not able to identify them. Thomas is a scopic subject in various ways who, in turn, faces other scopic subjects, ready to cross their action with his. The semi-subjective shot puts us on the alert: in it, the character saw and was seen at the same time, seen in his own gaze, which inevitably becomes our own as well. Let us say, in other words, that the protagonist of Blowup has always moved on a terrain with a dense network of gazes running through it. Glances follow each other, they mix and overlap. They outline rich trajectories, in which seeing, making others see, making oneself be seen and being seen are positions that somehow seem to blur into each other.59
Finally, in this game of crossed gazes, Thomas ends up losing both himself and the reality he seeks to observe. Once again, the semi-subjective shot should have aroused our suspicions. By giving us an observer who inside his own field of vision, both the source of the gaze (aligned to seen objects) and the substance of the vision (characterized by ambiguity) seem lost. Blowup continues in this direction. Thomas enlarges his photos one by one, in search of a detail that can confirm the crime. The images develop, however, as simple dotted surfaces, not very different from his neighbor’s abstract paintings. He returns to the park, where he discovers a body. He doesn’t have his camera with him, and as a result he will never have evidence of what he has seen. He throws himself into a crowd at a rock concert, where concertgoers come to blows over a piece of the guitar smashed by the bassist. Thomas grabs it, only to throw it away, as if it had suddenly lost all value. Finally, at the end of his nighttime wanderings, Thomas crosses a group of revelers—the same group that appeared at the beginning of the film—playing tennis without a ball. Asked to pick up an invisible ball that has apparently gone out of bounds, he complies. Witness to a reality that fully draws him in, Thomas is no longer sure of his gaze or the reality that he is observing. Perhaps too close, too much a part, too involved, he is left nothing but a game that takes from him both his role as scopic subject and the object of his vision.
Here we have Blowup, reread in the light of a significant sequence. At least three issues emerge: first, the fusion of an observer, what he watches, and the context in which he operates; second, the creation of a terrain in which multiple gazes intersect; and third, the loss of all certainty due to an intimacy and interdependence that is perhaps excessive. Here we recognize a series of themes that we have already encountered, but expressed in an even more radical way. We have a “spectator” who measures himself against both a performance and an environment to which he is drawn. Only, in this film, he is no longer made to choose between reality and its representation. He can literally immerse himself in both, making himself part of them in every possible way. This is possible since the worlds (the depicted and the surrounding ones), not only share many characteristics but also form a single large field of vision, in which many gazes intersect and overlap. Entering into these two worlds means finding oneself in a web of gazes that envelops and perhaps even imprisons. In this web, a spectator in fact experiences the changeability of his or her own position. If for an instant he or she is a seeing subject, he or she can become a subject that makes one see, and then move on to becoming a subject who is, in turn, seen. Similarly, in this network a spectator experiences reciprocity. If it is true that he or she sees, it is also true that he or she can be seen, and seen by those whom he himself tries to see. The spectator experiences the reification of his or her own view: the world is no longer sustained only by his or her gaze, but by a gaze that circulates and unifies independent of that from which it comes (in other words, a gaze without a source, a gaze in some way in and of itself). Finally, in this network, the spectator experiences defeat: he/she loses both him or herself and the surrounding world. On one hand, he or she experiences the loss of function as observer. Though moving in a world permeated by his or her gaze as well, the spectator no longer has either the exclusivity or the certainty of this role. On the other, he or she lives the loss of the observed world. However literally placed in view, this world no longer knows to which view to respond, pervaded as it is by a gaze that can no longer reveal anything but its own pervasiveness.
If this reading is correct, Blowup offers itself as a great celebration of modern spectatorship. It embodies its themes and brings them to their extreme. In fact, the film seems to take up the crucial points that we have encountered in the preceding analyses and leads them to their logical conclusion. In proposing the intersection of the scopic subject and what surrounds it, contact becomes total immersion, interaction becomes complicity, domination becomes dispossession, and certainty becomes loss of self and the other. In other words, it is as if the path whose steps we first traced speaking of Etna and Catania, ends here, with the “modern cinema” represented by Blowup (though this “modern cinema” is no less modern than “classical cinema”). Perhaps it would then be helpful to place alongside the film a text that is one of the manifestos of the modern gaze. Remembering that extra leap I alluded to in the beginning of this section, let us look at Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.60 I will not go through it in detail, but refer to only some of its most important pages.
The chapter “The Look” begins with the observation that a person entering into a visual field assumes the status of an object: “This woman I see coming toward me, this man who is passing by in the street, this beggar whom I hear calling before my window, all are for me objects—of that there is no doubt.”61 It is enough, however, that we realize that these objects are human for the organization of the visual field to change. Placing themselves at the true epicenter of the scene, they have the capacity to make everything turn in relation to them. Thus, the reality before my eyes suddenly reveals itself in its totality (as it is structured around these human objects), yet in its totality it escapes me (as it converges toward them). Consequently, “there is now an orientation which flees from me.”62 In front of me there is not something that I am simply framing, but something that conditions me entirely: “An object has appeared which has stolen the world from me.”63 Now let us imagine that I am, in turn, observed: “But all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking at me!”64 The situation changes further: in discovering that I am seen, I discover that I am myself in turn the object of another’s gaze. I am a rather special object, capable of structuring the surrounding world for the other, and at the same time capable of taking it away from him or her (and of taking myself from him). Now, in this game of crossed purposes and assumptions, some important information emerges. First of all, I discover the reversibility between myself and the other. I discover the possibility that the other I see watching me is the subject, as well as object, of my gaze. I also discover the possibility that I, seeing myself watched, am an object, in addition to being the subject of a gaze. Second, my objectification is also the objectification of my gaze itself. In the eyes of the other, I not only see myself seen, but I also see the seeing (his/hers, mine, the seeing). Finally, I discover my rootedness, my being in the world. The world that I formerly observed, and that was organized around the other, now turns around me, even flowing away in a sort of “internal hemorrhage.” In this sense, entering into the gaze of others leads to a moment of self-reflexivity (“The look which the eyes manifest, no matter what kind of eyes they are, is a pure reference to myself”).65 Primarily, however, it leads to an immersion in reality (“To apprehend myself as seen is, in fact, to apprehend myself as seen in the world and from the standpoint of the world”).66 Let us add that the gaze on me is not necessarily linked to the presence of an eye, and therefore a person: “the look will be given just as well on occasion when there is a rustling of branches, or a sound of a footstep followed by silence, or the slight opening of a shutter, or a light movement of a curtain.”67 One can be observed not only by another but also by a natural element. Any object can be the source of a gaze; it is the world that watches me, that world that I myself watch, which swallows me up, yet escapes me completely.
I have certainly gone over Sartre’s work too quickly. The scenario that emerges is, however, clear enough. Sartre offers a phenomenological description of what now seems to be the visual experience, an experience characterized by the reversibility of subject and object, the taking root in a world that simultaneously disappears, the reification of the gaze, which detaches itself from the sight organ and from concrete vision, in order to act in some way by itself. This description will resurface in Merleau-Ponty and Lacan.68 But these pages of Sartre’s that go over the visual experience essentially describe a spectatorial experience, or rather, a filmic experience. It is not, in fact, a coincidence that these pages contain numerous resonances with the crucial points that we came across in a self-reflexive film like Blowup. The observer in the modern consciousness finds the spectator of the cinema to be something more than its simple extension. He or she is, instead, the realization of the idea of the observer. Moreover, it is precisely in front of a screen that we best feel the observed observing, that we feel ourselves inside a gaze that is no longer ours alone, in communion with a world that carries us away. In front of the screen we experience the comings and goings of subject and object, possession and loss, vision and gaze. Applying Sartre’s philosophies to film is not an unjust act. It confirms that the latter is able to insert itself into the processes of modernity, to make them its own, and to reinvent them in a way that becomes canonical. “This woman I see coming toward me, this man who is passing by in the street”: why not imagine that, as I am living my ordinary day, I can also be seeing a film?
We began with a voyage up Etna. Epstein gave us a way of understanding how the problem of the film spectator is that of feeling him or herself implicated in the spectacle that is occurring, finally losing him or herself in the moment of shared experience. He clarified how there is at play the breaking of the boundary between the scopic subject and the object of his or her gaze, the creating of a close intimacy, and, at the same time, the loss of all privileged positions. On this terrain, film echoes the more general condition of the modern observer. We were able to put such a picture to the test with three films reflecting on the spectatorial experience. Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show gave us an ironic illustration of the attraction that a film exercises over its viewers, and consequently the sense of closeness and interaction that is established between theatergoers and what is onscreen: the represented world is within reach; it offers itself up directly and demands our participation. The desire that it ignites cannot, however, have a reciprocal response. The Crowd shifted our attention to a different axis, that of the relationship between the spectator and his or her fellow audience members. Here as well, however, we deal with a sense of unity: the spectator is called to be a part of his or her own environment. He or she must recognize him or her self not only as scopic subject but also as social subject. If he or she reaches this status, it is also because the impossible unity with the fictitious world enacts some kind of compensation: we immerse ourselves in the surrounding world because we are not able to completely enter the represented one. Blowup seemed to close the circle: we can “merge” with both the spectacle and the environment, insofar as both are permeated by a network of gazes. In this network, the spectator experiences an uncertain position (he or she is both subject and object) and the reification of his or her gaze (the act of seeing becomes independent from any agent). This intimate unity with the spectacle and the environment makes him or her feel lost. This has been our path. It was marked by three devices: the close-up, with the sense of nearness that it conveys; the crane shot, with its capacity to immerse the character in his or her environment; and the semi-subjective shot, in which the character who observes is captured together with the seen objects, reduced to their same status, and perhaps also deprived of his or her own gaze. This journey has been facilitated by a series of theoretical texts, starting from Epstein’s narration of an ascent and a descent and concluding with Sartre’s description of the act of seeing.
The complex situation that has come to emerge, and that precisely marks the experience of the spectator as well as the condition of the modern observer, leads us to some additional considerations. First of all, it is evident how this condition corresponds to a farewell to that sort of “theater of vision” that had long worked as a model for scopic activity. Such a “theater” was based on the presence of a seeing subject and a seen object. They were conceived as well separated—one faced the other, with the former seizing and keeping hold of the latter through its own look, and the latter one entrusting itself to the former, revealing itself in a direct and exclusive relationship. Blumenberg, with his shipwreck metaphor, gave us the basic elements for such a model, as well as the more general paths of its crisis. We might recall some crucial passages of this path. For example, among the factors that strongly undermine this model, there is the awareness that things do not show themselves; reality becomes a perceived reality only thanks to a series of mental processes that makes it perceivable, but which also inevitably act as a filter. Jonathan Crary, in Techniques of the Observer, highlights this passage, reconsidering physiological studies from the first half of the eighteenth century as well as the discovery of phenomena such as the afterimage or perceptive adaptation. Max Milner, in The Phantasmagoria (La Phantasmagorie), reminds us that this new orientation originates in the Kantian revolution.70 Similarly, there is also the awareness that the observer does not operate innocently: he or she approaches reality with the sometimes heavy burden of mental assumptions, almost forced orientations. In this regard, it will serve us to recall Marx and his notion of “ideology.” The complex network of social and productive relationships creates an “environment” in which the social subject finds himself inserted, and that deeply conditions his or her thought processes. We could go on and on: the fact remains that, from some point on, the relationship between the scopic subject and the object seen can no longer present itself as direct and exclusive. It is not direct: there are mediations that intervene on both sides. It is not exclusive: the context in which subject and object find themselves also plays a decisive role. Most of all, it is not a face-to-face confrontation. It is a two-player game based on a common belonging, intertwined with mutual determinations, and therefore sustained by a strong complicity. Along these lines, we must begin to think of scopic activity as leading to confrontation with and immersion into what one sees, as well as into one’s own environment.
Film then seizes on this ongoing transformation and makes it its own. If, as Crary reminds us, what I have called the “theater of vision” found its emblem in the fifteenth century’s camera obscura—then film and its stereoscopic vision can posit itself as the emblem of this new pattern of vision. Its position is sealed by its capacity to offer itself as a field of cross-gazes that include and embrace the observer, the observed and the situation. Yet if it is true that film can intercept and give form to the turning points that agitate modernity, offering itself as an exemplar, it is also true that it does so by negotiating between innovation and resistance. There is a subtle sort of wariness that accompanies its desire for what is new, almost allowing the old to leave its mark. And so it happens that cinema incarnates the need for a deep relationship between subject, object, and environment, but it does so by offering a fusion that is partly imaginary and temporally delimited.
An imaginary fusion. Uncle Josh has already suggested how the relationship between spectator and spectacle is based on illusion. The observer watching a film faces not reality itself, but images that “look like” reality. This status undoubtedly depends on their photographic nature. It is reinforced, however, owing to the fact that the spectator reelaborates and perceptively integrates the filmic stimuli,71 and at the same time he or she deliberately suspends his or her disbelief.72 We must add to this the mechanism of projection and identification.73 If the spectator participates in the onscreen adventures, it is because he/she is placed in the hero’s shoes, and in this way he/she lives firsthand what the character is experiencing. At the theater, spectator and spectacle are tied together, but through a bond that is essentially imaginary.
A temporally limited fusion. When the house lights go up once again, the spectator’s relationship with the spectacle is interrupted. When a member of the audience begins to leave the theater, his or her relationship with the audience is broken. The lightness of an experience that transported him or her to a different world, however, remains. But along with this fleeting wonder is the sticky closeness of the rest of the audience, the subtle thrill of having fully been part of some collective body. Roland Barthes, in his “Leaving the Movie Theater,” describes the moment in which a spectator departs from a cinema.74 What he or she leaves is a darkness that is “the very substance of the reverie [and] also the ‘color’ of a diffused eroticism.”75 Barthes adds: “In this darkness of the cinema (anonymous, populated, numerous—oh, the boredom, the frustration of so-called private showings!) lies the very fascination of the film (any film).”76 The spectator leaves as well “that dancing cone which pierces the darkness like a beamer” and “whose imperious jet brushes our skulls, glancing off someone’s hair, someone’s face.”77 Moreover, the spectator leaves a state of immersion. “The image captivates me, captures me; I am glued to the representation, and it is this glue which established the naturalness (the pseudo nature) of the filmed scene.”78 This “glue” involves the image, but it also induces the spectator to “be fascinated twice over, by the image and by its surroundings—as if [he/she] had two bodies at the same time: a narcissistic body which gazes, lost, into the engulfing mirror, and a perverse body, ready to fetishize not the image but precisely what exceeds it.”79 In this way, when the spectator moves away from the movie theater, he/she abandons both a relation with the images and a situation in which he/she enjoyed the ambience. Outside the hall, he or she loses the possibility of taking part of a represented world and of a public. Now “he walks in silence, … a little dazed, wrapped up in himself, feeling the cold …” 80
The viewer is immersed in the spectacle and the environment, though only in a partial and momentary way. The cinematographic apparatus plays an important role in this interplay. It encourages a fusion between subject and object and between subject and environment. It also lays the conditions that prevent this fusion from ever totally being realized, once and for all. The illusion of reality is supported by the specific physical and mental conditions brought about in the spectator during the screening (representations that can be taken for direct perceptions of the world,81 and a suspension of the flow of life that permits this belief). Meanwhile, thanks to the simultaneity of the spectators’ reactions, a veritable community is created in which each can feel a part of a whole. The structure of the theater results instead in a double segregation: the spectator cannot physically touch the screen and what is on it. Neither can he or she share intimacy with the other spectators, for they are separated. In this sense, the setting partially reverses the mental and social attitudes. This ambiguity of the apparatus is not an innocent one, but functions to keep alive a practice that would otherwise be interrupted, as demonstrated with Uncle Josh. It is only the preservation of an intangible boundary that permits the spectator to enjoy the show and enjoy it as spectator. But this non-innocence goes even further. In fact, in preserving this boundary, the apparatus allows the spectator to keep believing that he or she has some sort of control over what is observed and what surrounds him or her. The spectator not only “takes part” in the show; he or she also “dominates” it. On this basis, some scholars have made the connection between the cinema and Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon.82 In both structures, we are dealing with a situation in which a subject “oversees” all that is happening from the center of the scene. This connection is useful. It illustrates an important side of the spectatorial experience. In fact, if the spectator were to be completely immersed in the represented and surrounding worlds, he or she would not be able to control anything at all. Only the slightest distance from the action (that is, a single seat) is enough, however, to make him or her look at things “from the outside,” and thus allows the spectator to seize and master them. Cinema provides this distance. It is a partial detachment: the spectator may always feel at the mercy of winds and waves—in a wreck, though a happy one (“And sweet to me is shipwreck in this sea”: Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, not Blumenberg)—but it is not a real wreck. The spectator is at sea, yet within safety’s reach. In this virtual state, he or she can go as far as to orchestrate the storm.
Thus, film is precisely an occasion to “confuse” oneself with the performance and the environment, while keeping some form of distance, if only for safety. The boundary is quite useful—indeed, it is necessary. Nonetheless, the dream of its complete elimination remains alive, and it has always haunted film. From Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, USA, 1924) to The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, USA, 1985), films that enact the dissolution of all film’s boundaries and the perfect fusion of fiction and reality are numerous. They depict the desire of an immersion in the spectacle which could be no less than absolute—come hell or high water. How sweet the shipwreck.