The Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema

This book explores the cultural, intellectual, and artistic fascination with camera-eye metaphors in film culture of the twentieth century. By studying the very metaphor that cinema lives by, it provides a rich and insightful map of our understanding of cinema and film styles and shows how cinema shapes our understanding of the arts and media. As current new media technologies are attempting to shift the identity of cinema and moving imagery, it is hard to overstate the importance of this metaphor for our understanding of the modalities of vision. In what guises does the "camera eye" continue to survive in media that is called new?

Introduction1. Seeing-AsPlaying with the SensesSensitive Paper and Visual SubstanceMechanical Brains and Electronic MindsThe Organic Camera Eye and Walter Benjamin’s Optical UnconsciousConvergent Theorizing in Jean-Louis Baudry’s Apparatus Theory2. Seeing Better and Seeing MoreCamera and Dispositif René Descartes and Dziga Vertov on Perfecting VisionSeeing Better with Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Cartesian Camera EyeSeeing More with Vertov’s Kino-Eye3. Seeing and WritingDziga Vertov’s Poetic Map of A Sixth Part of the WorldThe Literary Notebooks of Luigi Pirandello’s Silent Camera OperatorThe Sound Image of John Dos Passos’ Camera EyeChristopher Isherwood’s Camera Eye on Stage and Screen4. Memory and TracesA Series of Dated TracesMargarete Böhme’s The Diary of a Lost OneFilming the Diary of a Lost Girl William Keighley’s Journal of a Crime Cinema as Paper Formatted in Time 5. Gestures and FiguresEmbodied Gestures and Textual FiguresAutopsy and AutographyCinematic Discovery of the Self Filmic Bodies and Figures in Narrative Film Theory From Lady in the Lake to La Femme défendue 6. Roles and ModelsPersonal Cinema as Institution, Medium and GenreFrom Psychodrama to Life ModelsAnimating the Self in Jerome Hill’s Film PortraitStan Brakhage’s Metaphors and Art of VisionBrakhage’s Development of Camera ConsciousnessThe Eye Body and the Body Politic in Carolee Schneemann’s Expanded Cinema7. Minds and ScreensBruce Kawin and Gilles Deleuze on Camera ConsciousnessVisionary Agents in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and Bertrand Tavernier’s Death WatchEnacted Vision

Christian Quendler is Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. He is the author of From Romantic Irony to Postmodernist Metafiction and Interfaces of Fiction.