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?

Introduction 1. Seeing-As Playing with the Senses Sensitive Paper and Visual Substance Mechanical Brains and Electronic Minds The Organic Camera Eye and Walter Benjamin’s Optical Unconscious Convergent Theorizing in Jean-Louis Baudry’s Apparatus Theory 2. Seeing Better and Seeing More Camera and Dispositif René Descartes and Dziga Vertov on Perfecting Vision Seeing Better with Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Cartesian Camera Eye Seeing More with Vertov’s Kino-Eye 3. Seeing and Writing Dziga Vertov’s Poetic Map of A Sixth Part of the World The Literary Notebooks of Luigi Pirandello’s Silent Camera Operator The Sound Image of John Dos Passos’ Camera Eye Christopher Isherwood’s Camera Eye on Stage and Screen 4. Memory and Traces A Series of Dated Traces Margarete Böhme’s The Diary of a Lost One Filming the Diary of a Lost Girl William Keighley’s Journal of a Crime Cinema as Paper Formatted in Time 5. Gestures and Figures Embodied Gestures and Textual Figures Autopsy and Autography Cinematic Discovery of the Self Filmic Bodies and Figures in Narrative Film Theory From Lady in the Lake to La Femme défendue 6. Roles and Models Personal Cinema as Institution, Medium and Genre From Psychodrama to Life Models Animating the Self in Jerome Hill’s Film Portrait Stan Brakhage’s Metaphors and Art of Vision Brakhage’s Development of Camera Consciousness The Eye Body and the Body Politic in Carolee Schneemann’s Expanded Cinema 7. Minds and Screens Bruce Kawin and Gilles Deleuze on Camera Consciousness Visionary Agents in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch Enacted Visions in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void Retrospective

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.