Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity

I have examined a number of films in order to reconstruct the gaze elaborated by the cinema, as well as to understand these films’ departures from and intersections with twentieth-century modernity. The selection might seem obvious to some and slightly random to others: too many well-known works, and too many loose reciprocal ties. I have never, however, been tempted to construct an ideal pantheon of great works. What interests me is the possibility of gathering together a series of proofs in the cinema that are able to show its collective work, in particular the broad assumptions and consequences upon which such diverse works are based. The selected films all possess this feature. In fact, they seem able to put their own mode of functioning into discussion; they offer an excellent point of observation for what the cinema is or what it could be. Searching their depths, even if with a certain levity, we find that these films reveal provocations, problems, and choices characteristic of the medium. If we reflect on what it means to take a world and give it back to the spectator on the screen, these films lay bare the conditions of existence—both symbolic and social—for all films. From this point of view, we have dealt not so much with “works of art” (the artistic value of some is openly problematic), but with “theoretical works”¹ able to develop a general notion of cinema.

In parallel, I have discussed a number of critical works dating from the 1910s to the1930s, taken from far-ranging twentieth-century cultural debates. Here as well, some combinations might seem random in their abrupt jumps from one geographical or chronological setting to another. And yet these texts were chosen with a precise intent. Though in very different ways, they all represent moments in which questions regarding the cinema were being posed—what it is, what it brings with it, and to what it responds. In other words, these texts questioned what kind of experience film constitutes and, at the same time, how it influences our experience of the world. Thus, we are dealing with an idea of the cinema that echoes, while not necessarily conforming to, the idea expressed by the films themselves.

This dual approach represents a desire to work on the cinema, in its intersections with modernity, beginning with the network of social discourses that extend within and around it.² This network, as we have been able to sketch it, leads to several questions. It covers reviews, analyses, essays, prophecies, political speeches, ironic reporting, drafts of laws, literary pieces, and so on. It matches up discourses made of words with those of images and sounds. Yet the problem does not lie in the form or in the status of the discourses which made up this network: in the years taken into consideration, what would later be called “film theory” evolved in ways and situations that were not always canonical. The question really lies elsewhere: in privileging “theoretical works” and “theoretical interventions,” what probationary value can we anticipate from these networked discourses? What authority can they express? To whose authority do they give voice? My answer is that they have hardly any authoritativeness or authority save one that is small yet decisive: that of creating glosses for the cinematographic phenomenon that help, if not directly determine, its intelligence and understanding.³

The discourses that we have tried to interconnect may represent many small moments through which the cinema developed a direct or indirect commentary on itself—not for the pleasure of speaking about itself, but to find its own definition and render it shareable and shared. Through these glosses the cinema was able not only to formulate a certain idea of itself but also make it recognizable in the larger public arena. Thanks to them, it became clearer what film was and what it could have been. Through these glosses, in particular, the cinema “returned” to itself, in order to understand what it was doing, in what way, from which perspectives, and in the name of what hypotheses. In other words, the cinema built the framework through which to be perceived and realized. Glosses helped the cinema to “describe” itself; they also “prescribed” how to take cinema for what it professed to be. The description of these glosses became an “official” definition of the cinema. From this point of view, glosses, overlapping descriptions and prescriptions, helped cinema to find its social “institutionalization” (including the institutionalization of its own ways of observing things).

We therefore have a definition of cinema that gives meaning to its own function, together with a definition of cinema that tries to operate on a collective plane. What characterizes every social discourse is both its self-reflexive capacity and its performative effects. It sees itself and brings about action. The choice of analyzing films and texts which operate as glosses might help us to value both features. The often brief analyses carried out here prevent us from understanding as thoroughly as I might have liked the depth of the self-definition and the path it took to assert itself. In particular, I was unable to give proper emphasis to the element of event, in the Foucauldian sense of the term, which characterizes each of these discourses. The event roots itself in history, creating echoes, establishing points of reference. And yet the often adventurous intersections I have attempted are directed precisely to reveal how the cinema—with its own arms (the films) or with those it acquired (theory)—was able to elaborate an image of itself, and ratify it as well. In this way, I repeat, the filmic or verbal texts analyzed here possesses hardly any authoritativeness, hardly any authority, save the fact that in their role as glosses they have decisively helped along such a process. In “thinking” the cinema, they make the medium both thoughtful and thought-provoking.

If it is in fact true that theoretical works and interventions give shape to the cinema, it is also true that the cinema in turn gives form to the demands that circulate around it. There is a game of subtle complicity between the two forces. The glosses make a certain image of the cinema emerge and impose it on a collective audience; on the other hand, the cinema gives an image (and sound) to its surrounding reality—both actual and possible. The cinema is modeled on the world, but it in turn models that world. Its capacity to construct a gaze of its age is played out primarily within this dual intersection.

Let us briefly run through the process through which the cinema gives form to a series of demands that circulate within a cultural and social space. It is a process that we saw at work in all the films analyzed, which is realized through an “interception” of cues offered by the context, a re-working based on the possibilities of the medium, and finally their restitution in a form that is in some way exemplary.

As for the “interception,” analyses have consistently emphasized the cinema’s capacity to gather various stances—among them fragmentation, the increasing role of subjectivity, the excited perception, etc. All the ideas borne on the wave of the profound transformations imposed by modernity found a precise “echo” on the screen. Yet we are not dealing with a passive recording. First, the very presence of the cinema contributes to nurturing the processes from which these ideas come out. Film is a pivotal element of the modern landscape. Its strength, vivacity, and capacity for provocation let the attitudes of the time emerge and reveal themselves. Second, the cinema reworks the surrounding cues, giving them a particular form and synthesizing them. Cinema embodies the idea that reality cannot be gathered if not in pieces, insofar as the on-screen image is limited by four borders. The shot becomes an emblem of the fragmentation of the world. Cinema embodies the idea that the real is no longer offered in its fullness and immediacy, giving us (particularly on the narrative level) the possibility of seeing things not so much as they are, but as they are perceived by a series of sources for the gaze: the point-of-view shot, the flashback, the flash-forward, the representation of dream or hallucination then become emblematic of the existence of a personal filter of reality. Cinema embodies the idea that machines will end up substituting for man, since its eye moves with an uncommon agility and coldness: the camera, with its extraordinary possibilities, but also with its peculiar sensibility, then becomes the emblem of a prosthesis that begins to move of its own accord. Thus, the preoccupations of the era take shape onscreen, and with them the ways of observing things; it has the effect of anchoring a series of widespread sensations to precise symbols, which allow those sensations to become largely recognizable and recognized.

The cinema’s capacity to construct emblems manifests itself through some exemplary themes, as well as through certain devices of language and apparatus. In my analyses, we have encountered numerous examples of key themes. King Kong concentrates the idea of nature caged and injured by technology; in Old and New the cream separator causes abrupt changes of state that bring with them a profound excitement; the behavior of the spectator in Uncle Josh reflects the imaginative imprudence of a daydreamer; the theatrical audience of The Crowd mirrors a mass that becomes a social body, etc. But the strongest emblems are those that concern either language or the apparatus: it is in these instances that we see how the cinema is literally able to “incarnate” in its own way of enacting the cues that it has intercepted and reformulated. The shot, the camera movements, and then the editing, découpage, flashback, crosscutting, or the semi-point of view—some with their insistence on fragmentation, others on mechanicalness, still others on excitement, others finally on the implication of observer and observed—directly recall questions already circulating in the ambiance of their era. In this sense, we can say that the cinema is a witness of its time. It fine-tunes processes that synthesize a pervasive feeling, and places them at the foundation of its own action.

Yet this is only one part of the game. In elaborating its own emblems, the cinema does not limit itself in giving a proper form to the provocations that it receives or that its own presence provokes. Its work goes beyond, and consists also in gathering the subtle contrasts that accompany these provocations, as well as finding a solution for them. The great demands of modernity briefly outlined here are, in fact, internally contradictory. The world offers itself only in fragments, but the desire for totality continues to press. Reality is always filtered by someone’s perception, but this does not exonerate us from distinguishing between perceptions and facts. The machine offers us a gaze that is extraordinarily sharp, but humans want to continue to feel in some way a part of it. Sensory excitement makes us feel alive and present, but we also must not lose control of our surroundings or ourselves. Spectator and performance are, by now, one and the same, but it is often necessary to establish distance. The counterforces that emerge are not only vestiges of the past; they also constitute elements of modernity. They are the other side of the same coin. The cinema tries to move between these forces and counterforces, negotiating them. It tries to confront the elements concerned, to clarify their different positions, to bring their discordances and concordances to light, and finally to elicit solutions accepted by all; or rather, in which everyone (or almost everyone) can, in the end, recognize him or herself.

Thus, in the process of giving form, the cinema negotiates. In negotiating, it looks for a compromise in which conflicts are not eliminated, but are in some way rewritten.⁴ It is in the light of this convergence, among these contrasting impulses, that we can fully appreciate the value of the emblems that the cinema constructs. Let us take the shot. Because it is framing, it undoubtedly reminds us how the gaze cannot gather anything but fragments of the world; yet the fact that it endures in time and can be moved in space gives it a sense of “openness” to reality. Let us take camera action. Its mobility and flexibility are a celebration of the machine, but the fact that it almost always tries to reproduce human movements in space gives its presence an anthropomorphic value. Let us take the flashback or the point-of-view shot. These two conventions indicate that the gaze is always filtered, but they also give a strong objectivization to an outcome that is purposefully personal. Let us take editing. Editing offers a great variety of viewpoints, it stimulates our perception to the maximum. By regulating the shot sequence, however, it manages and orders the shocks that it offers. Finally, let us take the close-up. The close-up seems to invite us into a close communion with the object represented, and yet precisely because of its structure it includes the observer only in an imaginary way. In the cinema, modernity’s forces and counter-counterforces find a possible meeting point.

Confronting these drives and counterdrives, the cinema inevitably ends up redefining them in some way. The negotiation has a second face that cannot be forgotten: in putting modernity’s different exigencies in contrast, it rearticulates them if, for nothing else, to find a compromise. Let us take once more the shot: in its “permeable” borders (the camera can always move laterally, and the reality next to that shot can always encroach upon the shot itself), it marks the presence of both an “in” space and an “off” space while trying to connect them. On the screen, I see only a portion of the world, but I am aware of the presence of the rest. I can slip from what I am offered to what I am denied. The shot, creating an “on-screen” and an “off-screen,” places them in opposition and at the same time makes them meet up. In other words, it operates a mediation: the fragment can dialogue with the whole, the visible with the invisible. What the shot does not succeed in doing with its duration and mobility, editing does. The practice of shot/reverse-shot shows us that what stays outside a shot can be “had” in the next one. But if it is true that the shot (and editing) seem(s) to offer a remedy to an otherwise unsolvable conflict, it is also true that they rearticulate this conflict just the same. Let us take visibility and invisibility. Brought back to an exercise of framing, the two terms lose the ontological value that they have long had in cultural history. Their dialectic is reduced to a mere question of spaces, the one “in” the frame and the other “off.” In this dialectic, there are no longer different realities at play—the human and the godly—neither is there a knowledge and a non-knowledge that wants to be fulfilled, but simply a “here” and a “there,” a piece of world and another piece of world. The comparison between visibility and invisibility becomes a simple problem of topography. Certainly, as I have said, the “off-screen” can present itself as the space of the possible, and in this sense makes its value grow. There is a “can be” that does not become saturated with the simple restitution of further fragments. Yet the fact remains that the cinema, negotiating between two exigencies of modernity, not only individuates a point of compromise, but it also offers their reformulation (and a reformulation directed at compromise). In this sense, it demonstrates how it is able to become an optimal interpreter of a latent tension, but it is nonetheless a non-neutral witness. It “rewrites” contrasts.⁵ It is under this aspect that the cinema can be considered as a “form of thought”:⁶ historically, it has been able to give “flexion” to the categories of its time, when it has not actually reworked them on its own.

I would add that the cinema’s capacity to “think”—thanks to the reformulation of problems and its search for compromise—realizes one of modernity’s other great intentions. As Georg Simmel perceived at the beginning of the twentieth century, we live in an age in which the greatest amount of knowledge is located in technological devices and in social institutions. Simmel writes: “In language as well in law, in the technique of production as well as in art, in science as well as in the objects of the domestic environment, there is embodied a sum of spirit. The individual in his intellectual development follows the growth of this spirit very imperfectly and at an ever increasing distance.”⁷ The elaboration of knowledge is no longer in the hands of the individual: institutions and devices know more than he does. From here, we have a twofold effect. On the one hand, stimulations and consciousnesses offered to an individual “from all sides … carry the person as if in a stream, and one needs hardly to swim for oneself.” On the other hand, knowledge becomes largely impersonal. As Simmel points out, the individual “can cope less and less with the overgrowth of the objective culture.”⁸ In this sense, if the cinema “thinks,” it does so for mankind, but also beyond it.

In any case, it remains true that the cinema presents itself as an extraordinary place to redefine circulating social demands. In giving a form to them, it necessarily negotiates. It does this in search of compromises, but in doing so it also provokes a reworking of preexisting concepts. It is precisely this that makes the cinema a crucial presence, a protagonist of its time.

What is more, this intense world of negotiated redefinitions makes the cinema an ambivalent presence: beyond being an active witness, it also promises to be a site in which the various solutions offered may become models to which one must conform. Let us think, in fact, of what a redefinition might mean, as well as a rewriting of the different demands running through modernity. It is not difficult to see in these demands a way of keeping under control a situation that is otherwise too complicated. What emerges is a question of maîtrise: the problem lies in mastering a series of elements that seem to exceed all sides. Compromise (and rearticulation) seem(s) to assure manageability. The solutions offered seem like formulas ready to be adopted.

In recent times, it has become almost obligatory, on the wave of studies such as those from Jonathan Crary,⁹ to analyze the cinema as one vast discipline. The term discipline clearly recalls Foucault,¹⁰ and designates a series of practices typical of modernity intended to render the subjects—particularly their bodies—“docile,” in a historical phase in which a progressive “liberation” of previously strict bonds can represent a risk in the light of social order. Discipline assures this order not through repression, but the organization of activities on the spatial, temporal, categorical, and logical levels. It dictates the norms that subjects in some way interiorize, and that render their behaviors functional and productive. I will not try to see if and to what extent the practices brought to light by Foucault are found in the cinema. I will only observe that a film organizes it own gaze (and that of its spectator) on principles not dissimilar to those Foucault theorizes. In the cinema, we also find processes of spatial localization, temporal articulation, segment structure, and construction of a compact organism. We have only to think, for example, of how a film defines points of view that situate who sees and what is seen (the spectator, the character, the implied observer, etc.); how it connects these points of view through recursive principles such as the match-ongaze (of the character acting as observer) or the match-on-action (of the observed character); how it places these points of view along a cogent line, fixed by the advancing of the action and the progress of an exploration; and finally how it integrates these points of view into a complex plan that gives us back as much the meaning of the situation depicted as an understanding of its ideal observer. The four great dimensions that Foucault recognized in all disciplines—the cellular, organic, genetic, and combinatory, respectively—return here. Yet, more than expanding upon the possible analogies, I would like to take up a contribution that was influential both in Europe and America, in which the idea of the cinema as a machine directed at framing the gaze emerges with extreme clarity. I am referring to the writings that Pudovkin dedicated in the late 1920s to filmmaking and filmscript, whose influence on scholars and professionals was notable.¹¹

Pudovkin outlines a discussion that might seem exemplary. He equates the camera-eye and the eye of the spectator: “The lens of the camera is the eye of the spectator,” or “The lens of the camera replaces the eye of the observer.”¹² Now if this eye intends to be truly efficient, it must understand what is and is not essential: the filmmaker, in order to obtain the clearness and the evidence of the scene, has to “concentrate the attention of the spectator on only that element important to the action.”¹³ Here, a true work of selection is thus needed—with the resulting elimination of some pieces of the world and the conservation of others—that is able to return to us what counts. “The camera assumes the task of removing every superfluity and directing the attention of the spectator in such a way that he shall see only that which is significant and characteristic.” Pudovkin continues: “The film is exceptionally precise in its work. There is, and must be, in it no superfluous element.”¹⁴ This allows for the realization of what we might call a true economy of attention: “The film, by showing [the spectator] the detail without its background, releases [him] from the unnecessary task of eliminating superfluities from his view-field. By eliminating distraction it spares the spectator’s energy, and reaches thereby the clearest and most marked effect.”¹⁵ The film spectator can then operate better than he or she could in following other performances, such as the theater, or even better than he or she could in everyday life. “The film spares this work of stopping and downward-gliding. Thus the spectator spends no superfluous energy. By elimination of the points of interval the director endows the spectator with the energy preserved, he charges him, and thus the appearance assembled from a series of significant details is stronger in force of expression from the screen than is the appearance in actuality.”¹⁶ In other words, the spectator becomes a truly optimal observer. All this certainly has a consequence, which becomes clearer when one thinks, in addition to the shots, of their editing: “editing is not merely a method of the junction of separate scenes or pieces, but is a method that controls the ‘psychological guidance’ of the spectator.” Moreover, “The guidance of the attention of the spectator to different elements of the developing action in succession is, in general, characteristic of the film. It is its basic method.”¹⁷ The cinema in some way takes the eye of the spectator by the hand, so to speak; it directs it toward what is essential, accompanies all its movements, takes away its unnecessary strain. In exchange, it offers it a better point of view. It disciplines it, because the act of seeing becomes a functional and productive activity.

Here is Pudovkin, albeit drastically summarized. It is not hard to see in his discourse a reference to the practices that Foucault would then bring to light. The cinema fragments the world; it makes a selection, connects the chosen pieces, and finally integrates them into an organic vision. The cinema rests its observation of reality on a structured and replicable schema. More importantly, the cinema organizes this process in order to assure maximum efficacy. Through these acts, it makes functional and productive elements emerge. And at the same time, organizing this process in this way, it gives an order to its vision that it can then impose on the spectator. In this sense, the cinema is totally disciplinary.

Of course, Pudovkin certainly presents only one of the possible disciplines of the gaze: the one that circulates around the découpage, or analytical editing. The cinema also knows other forms of discipline. I am thinking, for example, of the regulation of perceptive shock in the early period (in Pudovkin, we are dealing with a modulation of attention more than a modulation of attractions); or, beginning in the 1940s, of the construction of visual paths that no longer pass through the forced splintering of reality by the camera (Pudovkin does not yet contemplate cases like the sequence shot, depth of field, the unfocused shot, and so on, that would become common in modern cinema). There are, therefore, many ways of regulating scopic activity—many disciplinary styles, if you will.¹⁸ But if the modalities with which the discipline works can change, the end result is unique: the cinema’s gaze as well as that of the spectator must compete with patterns of action. In the name of a principle of efficiency, they find an internal order of their own. In this way, the eye becomes docile.

I would add some observations necessary to complete the picture. I have underlined how Pudovkin speaks of the preservation of perceptive energy, as well as the efficiency of the filmic gaze, and thus creates a criterion of “economy.” This criterion is often evoked in regard to the cinema. I am thinking, for example, of Münsterberg and his request to “adapt” filmic procedures to the cognitive processes of the spectator.¹⁹ But I am also thinking of Eisenstein and his hypothesis of “calculating” the effects provoked by visual shock.²⁰ Such a reference to “economy” brings us directly back to one of the underlying characteristics of modernity. As Simmel reminds us, this is an age in which the logic of money permeates the whole of social behaviors.²¹ This idea emerges in many commentaries on film. I will limit myself to a passage from 1907 that is certainly indicative. The Italian essayist Giovanni Papini writes:

His words not only offer a weighty portrait of the cinema but, in explaining the reasons for its success and the modes of its operation, they confirm what I am saying. There is a need for functionality and efficiency reflected in it, and it is for this reason that it is presented as discipline.

A second observation. If it is true that the cinema regulates the eye, it does not however regulate bodies in the same way. Without a doubt, in fact, the cinema shapes both the gaze and postures of social subjects. In particular, the rise of the traditional movie theater leads to a series of rituals connected to the consumption of films and, consequently, to a category to which a “good spectator” must conform. Yet these rituals are not rigidly restrictive: on the contrary, they break old social divisions, encourage promiscuity, allow immediate reactions to the onscreen performance, etc. Once more, I will limit myself to testimony from the first decade of the twentieth century. An anonymous Italian journalist writes in 1908:

Moreover, their filmic representation confirms this freedom. Onscreen, bodies move challenging the laws of physics and morality. They run, jump, react continually, openly express sentiments; they undress, they meet up, they exhibit themselves, they transform themselves, they move toward the animal dimension or reveal features of the divine. In other words, they assume an extraordinary agility and flexibility, and at the same time they disclose their intimacy almost without shame. It is not a coincidence then that in 1912 an anonymous reporter characterized a group of French criminals known as the Bonnot band in this way: “Its morality is resoluteness, its rhythm vertigo…. They have learned something from film: organic speediness. They have a filmic style that is becoming the manner of our existence.”²⁴ The reference to the cinema shows us how the agility and the effrontery of onscreen bodies can end up serving as a sign of anarchy.

A third observation. The freedom enjoyed by bodies, though subject to discipline, also shows us how the eye has space in which to move. The cinema renders the whole world available to see. It adds to it fantasies and desires, hypotheses and dreams, nightmares and perfections. The camera is independent from a single observer and may move everywhere. Its gaze challenges the laws of physics and morality. Thus, it is true that the cinema works toward a docile eye, but this docility does not signify submissiveness. Let us say, in other words, that at the very moment in which the cinema tries to gives order to the scopic activity, it defies sight as well, provoking it, putting it to the test, bringing it to its limits. In other words, film fills and surprises the human gaze. For this reason as well (indeed, especially for this reason), discipline is needed. But it is an open discipline, one that measures itself against an enlargement of traditionally connected possibilities, and that unites the need to regulate the excesses and the desire of exploring the limits of the given order. We have, then, a discipline in search of liberty. Here lies another paradox for a cinema that continually struggles to negotiate and fuse apparently irreconcilable fronts, allowing for otherwise impossible convergences to be realized onscreen and in the movie theater.

I have insisted on how negotiation effects a rearticulation of positions at stake and, at the same time, reaches for a compromise. The different stances of modernity are brought together, redefined and rematched via cinema. In the end, they find positions that are entirely practicable—and in some way inevitably practiced.

Let us remember now the major points of comparison discussed here. The first is the one that sees fragment and totality at play. The cinematographic image, defined by its four borders, seems to confirm what modernity brings to the surface. Tied to a point of view, every glimpse is always partial and therefore gives us the world back only in fragments. Yet this does not mean a rejection of a larger vision. The machine movement allows for the systematic widening of the visual field; the shot/reverse-shot for the integration of one portion of space in another; the superimposition or the split screen for offering many glimpses in the same frame; the close-up for concentrating us on what summarizes the entire situation; the “off-screen” finally for perceiving that something escapes, at the same time staying aware of it. A gaze is born that, penetrating fragmentation and totality, witnesses and rewards both.

The second point of comparison concerns subjectivity and objectivity. The point of view loads every glimpse with a strong subjectivity as well; the “what” always unfolds in relationship to the “who.” The filmic image exemplifies this situation; more than an image of reality, it is an image of a perception of reality; the real is brought back to us filtered by an eye. And yet the evidence that things assume on the screen gives them an absolute consistency of the real; the world is there, in its immediacy and its actuality. From here, there is the necessity of identifying what seems to appear in itself and what instead represents someone’s vision or imagination. The cinema distinguishes between the two levels through stylistic devices such as the impersonal shot or the point-of-view shot, the direct presentation or the flashback. Nevertheless, it rotates the real and the mental, or the real and the possible, so that one dimension nurtures the other and vice versa.

The third point relates to the tension between man and machine. The advances of technology change not only the surrounding landscape but also the very conditions of existence. Man risks becoming machine, and his environment risks falling into artificiality. The cinema is granted a mechanical eye, which directly competes with the human one: its mobility, precision, and indifference are qualities that only technology can assure (and moreover, they are qualities that only modern means of transport and observation can succeed in making emerge). Yet we also find in the cinema ways of observing the world that are typically human: the foci of attention are traditional (the body, the face, the landscape), just as are its forms and developments (exploration, witness). Thus, the cinema-eye is mechanical as well as anthropomorphic. It unites both virtues, without nurturing their conflict.

The fourth point involves the tension between excitement and order. The world around us is in chaos, and bombards us with continuous stimuli. The cinema reproposes the features of an excited perception. The way in which bodies move onscreen, situations transform, and events overlap is the source of continual surprise and often potential displacement. To follow a film is to test our senses. But the cinema also causes the spectator—though subject to authentic visual shock—to have the sensation of being in control of what he or she sees: methods such as crosscutting, shot/reverse-shot, refiguration, and, more generally, editing allow us to orient ourselves with respect to the world represented onscreen, as well as to the forms of its representation.

The last point, finally, includes immersion and detachment. The modern experience tends to cancel all distance between observer and observed reality: the former is implicated in the latter, and the latter includes the former. The extraordinary participation that the cinema provokes seems to move in the same direction. The spectator is immersed in the spectacle. Similarly, the immersion also takes place in the surrounding crowd at the movie theater. Such a state can make us lose sense of our own position and role. To avoid this, the cinema creates a communion between spectator and spectacle only on an imaginary level and in a transitory form, while it favors its connection with the audience in the name of the establishment of a social body. From this experience derives a participation that allows distance and with it a true control over the situation.

These are the essential problems we have discussed, which show how the cinema is able to gather the demands of modernity, reread, and mediate them. Its work is that of negotiation, which leads the cinema to unite opposites in order to make practicable and practiced solutions emerge. This has the effect of constructing a gaze that takes various exigencies into account and tries to reconcile them. In this sense, we deal with an oxymoronic gaze. Let us conclude by going over the features of this gaze, which emerge from the analysis explored here.

1 Visibility and evidence. Reality is openly revealed on the screen, thanks to an eye that becomes its explorer and witness. According to Balázs, the world becomes visible once again and in its totality. Indifference to the surrounding world is defeated, just as the uncertainty of our senses finds solid anchors. Things are “out there,” and we can grasp them. And yet, on the screen there are only images.

2 Visibility and completeness. The filmic image, defined by four borders, gives us back only fragments of the world. We see in pieces. But thanks to editing, the pieces can be joined, giving us in some way a sense of the whole. Thanks to the movement of the camera, we may grasp more and more reality. Thanks to the imagination, we can go beyond in the “off-screen” space, prefiguring what we have not yet seen. We become ubiquitous: our gaze can move anywhere, at any moment. It can reach what is only a possibility. The “limits” of the image are never barriers.

3 Visibility and immediacy. The camera works as a filter on the world. Yet the camera is a subject-object, as Epstein reminds us: this status renders its filter devoid of all traditional psychological dimensions. It seems to see without human prejudice, hindsight, or mental schema. The mediation thus assumes a paradoxical character: we depart from a gaze, but we arrive straight at the heart of things. The world becomes a kind of gift that is personally delivered.

4 Visibility and intensity. The cinema challenges perception: it forces a constant attention, and it holds continual surprises. Yet editing, especially when it assumes the form of découpage, regulates the intensity of sensorial stimuli; it highlights only what counts, and prefigures what arrives. Also, the presence of recurrent figurative schema is directed toward the same aim. In this way, excitement and order are joined in the same gaze.

5 Visibility and intelligibility. At the cinema, we live things even before we understand them. Moreover, films are able to restore to us first and foremost ordinary moments, fleeting seconds, the small areas of existence unrelated to the unraveling of a destiny. Yet, thanks primarily to the narrative, the on-screen world reveals a plot and events … a logic. Reality, more than simply visible, also becomes intelligible. We see and decipher, in one single glimpse.

6 Visibility and collectivity. The cinema gives the right to see to everyone. Each of us sees how everyone else sees. In this sense, it is a perfectly democratic instrument, as scholars such as Delluc and Giovannetti emphasized. The scopic experience becomes a mass experience. The “I see” is declined as “we see,” remaining however always in the first person singular.

7 Visibility and prosthesis. The cinema’s gaze rests on a technological device; at its source, there is a glass eye. Though the latter offers performances that go beyond human possibility, it is offered as an extension of our sight organ. Or rather, as a point of conjunction of the physical eye and the mental one. Machine and man can renew the alliance.

8 Visibility and immersion. At the cinema, the spectator is immersed in the performance. More than simply in front of the events, the spectator finds him or herself in the heart of them, in communion with the world. And yet, the separation between observer and observed persists; the universe of the one is never completely confused with that of the other. This allows one to live what one sees, but also, in seeing it, to be able to subtly dominate it.

9 Visibility and cost. At the cinema, seeing has a price. Shooting the real world has a cost; it costs even more to construct a possible one; finally, it costs to follow the one or the other on the screen. The scopic experience becomes a commodity whose value is determined by an entrance ticket.

10 Visibility and security. The cinema guarantees a vision that is protected from risk. On the screen, the most dangerous situations can be faced, without however enduring the consequences. The cost of your ticket covers this as well. The world is then turned from a possibly poisonous gift to a treasure with which to fill one’s pockets.

The ten characteristics that I have just listed, taken from the analyses of the preceding pages, demonstrate the intersections around which the cinema works. They define points of compromise and paths that are navigable, around which the cinema has woven a dialogue with its time, offering an interpretation and an original contribution. Ten characteristics, a small decalogue, though one without precepts. A decalogue of the cinema. A decalogue of modernity.