Hanich: Let’s move to your conceptualisation of the ‘film’s body’ – the idea that in films we encounter a quasi-subject that not only perceives a world but also confronts us with the expression of its perception. This was certainly the most controversial concept in the book. I had tried to forget—for years on end. I remembered cities, houses, places, other people. But I had expunged myself from my memories. I constantly invented new goals so that I always had to look forward. If I came too close to myself, I escaped into hectic work—or debilitating illness. I was thirty by the time I realized the past wouldn’t let me go. I was living with a petrified heart that was still thirteen years old. And I forced myself to remember. That summer …. A film is an act of seeing that makes itself seen, an act of hearing that makes itself heard, an act of physical and reflective movement that makes itself reflexively felt and understood. Footnote 5

Bennett-C. B., 2008. ‘Moving memento mori pictures: documentary, mortality, and transformation in three films.’ PhD Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America.Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Print. The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic ‘Presence," in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 83–106.

del Río, Elena. “Rethinking Feminist Film Theory: Counter-narcissistic Performance in Sally Potter’s Thriller” In Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21, 2004, 11–24. Until very recently the photographic has been popularly and phenomenologically perceived as existing in a state of testimonial verisimilitude—the photograph’s film emulsions analogically marked with (and objectively “capturing”) material traces of the world’s concrete and “real” existence. [4] Unlike the technologies that preceded it, photography produced images of the world with an exactitude previously rivaled only by the human eye. Thus, as Comolli suggests, with the advent of photography the human eye loses its “immemorial privilege”; it is devalued in relation to “the mechanical eye of the photographic machine” that “now sees in its place” (123). This replacement of human with mechanical vision had its compensations, however—among them, the material control, containment, and objective possession of time and experience. [5] Abstracting visual experience from an ephemeral temporal flow, the photographic both chemically and metaphorically “fixes” its ostensible subject quite literally as an object for vision. It concretely reproduces the visible in a material process that—like the most convincing of scientific experiments—produces the seemingly same results with each iteration, empirically giving weight to and proving in its iterability the relationship between the visible and the real. Furthermore, this material process results in a material form that can be objectively possessed, circulated, and saved, that can accrue an increasing rate of interest over time and become more valuable in a variety of ways. Photography is thus not only a radically new form of representation that breaks significantly with earlier forms, but it also radically changes our epistemological, social, and economic relationships to both representation and each other. As Jonathan Crary tells us: “Photography is an element of a new and homogenous terrain of consumption and circulation in which an observer becomes lodged. To understand the ‘photographic effect’ in the nineteenth century, one must see it as a crucial component of the new cultural economy of value and exchange, not as part of a continuous history of visual representation” (13). Indeed, identifying the nineteenth-century photograph as a fetish object, Comolli links it with gold and aptly calls it “the money of the ‘real’”—the photograph’s materiality assuring the possibility of its “convenient circulation and appropriation” (142). Fisher, Kevin. Intimate Elsewheres: Simulations of Altered States of Consciousness in Post WW II American Cinema. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California Los Angeles, 2004. In this context we might turn to Fredric Jameson’s seminal discussion of three crucial and expansive historical “moments” marked by “a technological revolution within capital itself” and the related “cultural logics” that correspondingly emerge and become dominant in each of them to radically inform three revolutions in aesthetic sensibility and its representation (77). Situating these three critical moments in the 1840s, 1890s, and 1940s, Jameson correlates the major technological changes that revolutionized the structure of capital—changing market capitalism to monopoly capitalism to multinational capitalism—with the changes wrought by the “cultural logics” identified as, respectively, realism, modernism, and postmodernism, three radically different axiological forms and norms of aesthetic representation and ethical investment. Extrapolating from Jameson, we can also locate within this historical and logical framework three correspondent technological modes and institutions of visual (and aural) representation: respectively, the photographic, the cinematic, and the electronic. Each, I would argue, has been critically complicit not only in a specific technological revolution within capital but also in a specific perceptual revolution within the culture and the subject. That is, each has been significantly co-constitutive of the particular temporal and spatial structures and phenomeno-logic that inform each of the dominant cultural logics Jameson identifies as realism, modernism, and postmodernism.

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Following Walter Benjamin (and contrary to his reservations about film as mass art), it can be maintained that no art can historically articulate the past in the way cinema can, for inherent in the transience of the film image is a specific possibility of experience and thought. Footnote 81 Morris’ documentary details the extraordinary story of a small-town American man who went from fixing electric chairs to defending David Irving by providing “scientific evidence” that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were never used for extermination. Bazin, André. Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? Vols. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958–62; What Is Cinema? 2 vols. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, 1971.

Carroll, N., 1998. ‘The essence of cinema.’ Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 89 (2/3), pp. 323–330. del Río, Elena. “The Body as Foundation of the Screen: Allegories of Technology in Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts.” In Camera Obscura 38, 1996, 93–115. Jo Tollebeek and Tom Verschaffel, De vreugden van Houssaye: Apologie van de historische interesse, Amsterdam 1992, p. 18; Johan Huizinga, Verzamelde werken 2: Nederland, Haarlem 1950.

This overriding and transformation of automatic movement by autonomous movement can be understood as a phenomenon that is not merely brought about as mere technological “illusion” if we consider that our relation to our own lived bodies is precisely similar: that is, our automatic physiological operations are constantly overwritten and transformed by our autonomous and intentional actions unless these operations are foregrounded because, in a particular instance, they trouble us and we specifically attend to them. Morris’ film is as much noir as it is documentary. In the opening sequence chiaroscuro lighting, a wash of blue colour and a birdcage are used to symbolise the anti-hero status of Fred Leutchter. This is very much a sequence which positions me as experiencing the fictional. Hanich: Some critics claimed it was an interesting metaphor, but shouldn’t be taken literally. You did not mean it metaphorically though. del Río, Elena. “The Body as Foundation of the Screen: Allegories of Technology in Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts.” Camera Obscura 37-38 (1996): 92-115. Print.

Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Flaxman Gregory, ed. The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.Mitry, Jean. Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma. 2 Vols. Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1963, 1965. What happens when our expressive technologies also become perceptive technologies—expressing and extending us in ways we never thought possible, radically transforming not merely our comprehension of the world but also our apprehension of ourselves? Elaine Scarry writes that “we make things so that they will in turn remake us, revising the interior of embodied consciousness” (97). Certainly, those particularly expressive technologies that are entailed in the practices of writing and the fine arts do, indeed, “remake” us as we use them—but how much more powerful a revision of our embodied consciousness occurs with the inauguration of perceptive technologies such as the telescope and the microscope or the X-ray? Changing not only our expression of the world and ourselves, these perceptive technologies also changed our sense of ourselves in radical ways that have now become naturalized and transparent. More recently (although no longer that recently), we have been radically “remade” by the perceptive (as well as expressive) technologies of photography, cinema, and the electronic media of television and computer—these all the more transformative of “the interior of embodied consciousness” (and its exterior actions too) because they are technologies that are culturally pervasive. They belong not merely to scientists or doctors or an educated elite but to all of us—and all of the time. Chion, M., 1990. Audio-vision: Sound on Screen. Edited and translated from French by C. Gorbman 1994. New York: Columbia University Press. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Thomas Morsch, “Filmische Erfahrung im Spannungsfeld zwischen Körper, Sinnlichkeit und Ästhetik,” montage AV 19:1, 2010, pp. 55–77.