In an article appearing in the Torinese newspaper La Stampa in 1908, art critic Enrico Thovez linked a recent invention with the new century. This invention—the cinema—would become the unmistakable emblem of its time. Thovez writes:
If, in order to give the name to a period of time, we call upon the individual or idea that had the greatest influence on its minds, that most profoundly dominated human existence, we can anticipate the answer: the current century … will simply be the age of film. For no work of art, scientific invention, economic trend, enterprise, thinking or form of fashion can compete in terms of breadth of achievement, depth of diffusion or universality of consensus with this humble wooden box, its handle turned by some poor wretch perched in the shadows, as the interminable strip of celluloid, sown with its microscopic images, unwinds with a gentle humming sound.1
The millennium came to a close as film celebrated its one hundredth anniversary. The two destinies Thovez invokes—that of film and that of the twentieth century—have perhaps run their course. With the advent of the digital age, for example, cinema no longer depends on the photographic image, and earlier technological, social, or political advances have been surpassed or repudiated as well. The bold prescience of this long forgotten essayist is, however, striking. The twentieth century was the age of film—or, at any rate, it was largely perceived as such. Film’s “microscopic images” mirrored the trajectory of this century, recording events as they took place, asserting themselves as a widespread presence, and becoming constant points of reference. Thus, it is worthwhile to inquire what cinema gave to and took from its age, in an exchange based on open and reciprocal complicities. The project of this book will be to trace how cinema—through a series of negotiations—molded modern cultural and intellectual history. Indeed film was not only the perfect translator of the last century but also an active agent determining how its turbulent decades would unfold.
Much has been written in recent years on the close relationship between film and twentieth-century modernity. Such studies have examined, for example, ways in which film has constructed new forms of subjectivity, redefined space and time, expressed social, racial, and gender identities, as well as contributed to the mass industrialization of culture.2 While I will be navigating some of these studies, I want to consider, first and foremost, the import behind Thovez’s prophecy. I will be addressing one key point: how is it possible to define the gaze that film claimed for the twentieth century? Is it true that film, in dialogue with its time, experimented more than any other art with new forms of vision that have become a common language? And what forms of vision did it inaugurate? How did film introduce these visions into the everyday? The following pages will focus on the idea that film was the “eye of the twentieth century.” Not only did it record a large number of its events, but—by recording them—it has also been able to structure a reflexive spectatorial experience in which to receive them.3
I understand that this metaphor of the eye presents some risks. It is no longer “fashionable” to speak of the gaze: many prefer to thematize vision within a wider framework of perceptual, affective, cognitive, and social processes.4 As the trend of these critiques demonstrates, the eye itself is often no longer considered a sensory organ, but is instead inserted within a larger matrix of analytic intelligibility. Yet we must not forget that film, from its inception, was first and foremost identified and publicized as a marvelously unprecedented optical device. As Eugenio Giovannetti, an Italian film critic, wrote at the moment of the rise of sound film: “At the cinema, all eyes—even the near and farsighted—see clearly, deliciously clearly; herein lies the originality of the cinematographic performance, which we have all but forgotten.”5 At the cinema we experience an almost inescapable sharpening of our visual capacity, whatever biological flaws might naturally hinder it.
Second, it is perhaps no longer even “fashionable” to speak of film in and of itself. Most recent scholarship tends, in fact, to place cinema within a cultural studies context of public entertainment, urban life, the spread of mass communication, production, distribution, and consumption.6 Early studies emphasized film’s mimicry of theater, painting, literature, etc. Some scholars advanced more surprising connections: in the aforementioned article, for example, Thovez inserted film among the “surrogates” which typify modern times. As the trinket-like celluloid imitations substitute real ivory, real tortoiseshell, real amber, so the celluloid filmstrip gives “a cheap substitute for the hard-won constructions of genius.”7 Yet even in the most charged of these scholarly treatments, film is recognized as a peculiarly singular phenomenon. Film requires specialized attention in and of itself. It has its own identity.
What kind of gaze, then, did twentieth-century cinema construct? Chapter 1 will examine the reasons for the particular synchrony between film and its time, and will attempt to gesture toward its relevance with respect to contemporary culture. Three characteristics seem to stand out. The first is film’s nature as a medium—not just an art—in an age that prizes the communicative dimension as a guarantee of immediacy, nearness, and accessibility. The second characteristic concerns the rites and myths that film created on screen and in the theaters, in a century that had a special need for original images and imaginative behaviors to reflect the issues of emerging social orders. The third is the compromise that film succeeded in achieving amid the different demands of modernity. It united conflicting stimuli in an age torn by strife and dilemma, offering them up in their mundane, yet at times touching and magical, everydayness. The ability to communicate, the power to shape or define, the drive to negotiate: these are the three central characteristics of film’s “gaze.”
The last characteristic—this aspect of negotiation—is the most decisive for understanding film’s “gaze” as I will define it. At stake, in fact, is a gaze that functions as an oxymoron: that is, it is capable of operating on opposing fronts, and at times collapsing them. Chapters 2 through 6 will explore this oxymoronic quality of the “gaze.” Within its negotiation of twentieth-century modernity, film arbitrated at least five conflicts among opposing stances. It cultivated a partial gaze, tied to the singleness of each take and its point of view, yet at the same time ready to grasp the totality of the world through movement and editing. Film developed a composite gaze, in which reality and fantasy merge, but in which the two planes are often carefully distinguished in order to avoid any confusion between them. In the same way, film promoted a penetrating gaze that utilizes the enhanced prosthetic vision of the camera, but which is also deeply anthropomorphic. Film fostered an excited gaze, rich in perceptive stimuli, but also attentive to maintain spectator orientation. Finally, film elaborated an immersive gaze that gives the impression of being inside the seen world, but which at the same time maintains the sense of distance. Each of these gazes combines two different qualities, balancing them. The threats inherent to one characteristic (the limited seeing tied to a point of view; the mechanical vision linked to a prosthetic camera; the overwhelming sensation due to excitation; etc.) are compensated by means of the other characteristic (the multiplication of the shots; the humanlike behavior of the camera; an implied observer who “masters” the depicted events; etc.). The result was an ever inventive synthesis of gazes that strived to bring about true compromises without ever sacrificing the complexity of contradiction. We thus have a vision that, in making opposites permeable, modeled itself on an oxymoronic principle.
In its search for compromises, film did not conceal tensions, but tried to obtain an advantage from them. In constructing its gaze, the stances of the epoch were combined at the price of slight displacements and condensations. Merged with the sense of totality, a fragment was no more a “single” piece, but a temporarily detached portion of a vaster reality. The need to maintain a reference to the human transformed the mechanical into a familiar presence. Connected with a sense of orientation, excitation became a simple “cadence” in the narration. Framed by the eye of the cinema, the forces and counterforces of modernity changed their orientation and their inflection. Film “rewrote” its epoch in order to answer the question of its time.
This “rewriting” was in accordance with the basic proprieties of the cinema. Each filmic image is a partial record contained within the frame, “capturing” new sides of reality through the mobility of the camera. The cut from one shot to another gives each image the quality of a shock; editing can control its emotional power. Closeness and distance with the depicted world are defined by the apparatus. Basic proprieties were important in defining the possibilities of cinema. Yet the compromises that film defined were attempts to answer the needs of its time. Cinema was a medium subordinated to the social. As Balázs suggests, “technical development depends on social causes, and inventions take place when it is time for them to come.”8
The formulas in which these various compromises were realized varied through time. Mainstream cinema of the thirties to the fifties did not respond in the same way as auteur cinema of the sixties and the seventies. The former carefully searched for “balanced” solutions; the latter was open to more dynamic and precarious answers. But if is true that the “classical” cinema systematically looked for compromises, it is also true that it displayed different strategies: one only needs to compare narratives based on a strong convergence of values around the hero’s vision with stories based on “dual focus” narratives, in which we have the coexistence of two perspectives.9 Hollywood’s modes of representation are characterized by a very articulated history.10 At the same time, the post-classical cinema (as well as the pre-classical and the anti-classical one) brought a more conflicted dimension to light—even though such conflicts hardly ever seemed irremediable. The fact remains that film developed its gaze by intercepting the impulses of twentieth-century modernity. It guided them in a particular direction, regulating their intensity, combining them, tying them to certain patterns or exigencies, finally giving them a model against which the spectator could compare him or herself. Film gave form to the modes of vision of its time, negotiating ongoing cultural processes, but ultimately it was the century’s most astute director. Film’s gaze was revealing. By fine-tuning a means of observation, film helped us to see better, and to see into the spirit of this particular time. Not surprisingly, we are dealing here with a disciplinary gaze as well: in opening our eyes, film told us what to look at and how. In this sense, film gave us a script for reading the modern experience: it not only proposed a reading of that experience, but at times imposed a pattern for its expression and communication.
This reflexivity of film’s function, which I will discuss further in chapter 7, explains how cinema was simultaneously a form of thought, on the one hand, and a discipline, on the other. By negotiating the questions of its time, cinema influenced the articulation of the mental categories used to face reality. And by giving the audience some ready-made formulae, it guided our eyes. Nevertheless, these formulae were always imposed through entertainment and play. If cinema ended up functioning as a “discipline,” it was a “discipline” which sought to embody the presence of a desire and the idea of freedom. Let us call it an unimposed discipline. This paradox confirms the oxymoronic nature of its action in an age that embraced the paradox as one of its most essential traits.11
A quick remark about my methodology may be helpful. The analysis will be guided by both theoretical texts and films, which I will read sometimes in a “heterodox” way. There will be a large variety of references: I will turn to both well-known film scholarship as well as less known contributions, masterpieces as well as B-movies, film as well as philosophical and literary essays. This assemblage of divergent documents and the logic with which I pull them together will not obey philological criteria. Rather, the goal is to collect a network of discourses that can function as a “gloss” for the cinematic phenomenon and give it meaning on a collective stage. Therefore, we will put into play the way in which cinema presented itself to the eyes of society, and how it rendered itself a conceivable experience.
Such attention to the intersections between gaze, discourse, and experience will ground this study. The purpose is to illustrate how this circuit of discourses gave meaning to film within twentieth-century modernity, and—in a magnificent form of specularity—it is film that bestows meaning on the modern experience. Through the elaboration of its gazes, the cinema furnishes the bordering frame within which the age makes itself knowable—and bearable—to its subjects and spectators.