The Subordination of the Camera Eye to the Human Subject

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Recommended: Critical analysis of visual pleasure and narrative cinema by laura mulvey

The Subordination of the Camera Eye to the Human Subject

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Film, as a medium of sight, exists primarily as a mode of representation.

By the recording of images, a perspective of reality is created and maintained

during viewing. The relation between what the camera records and what the

viewer perceives is a direct one, which is sustained through the material

assumption of the filmic reality as an actual one (The suspension of belief).

Citing examples from Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), 2001: A Space Odyssey

(Stanley Kubrick, 1968), Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929), and

Blow Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) this paper will contend that these films

assert the prevailing domination of the human viewpoint over that of the “cineeye.”

Beginning with Psycho, an analysis of vision and subjectivity can be

composed. The themes of vision are brought up immediately. The first shot in

the film, the lowering camera gradually moving through a hotel window, evokes

familiar positions of perception that are generally associated with scopophilia.

Literally the love of sight, scopophilia is most famously explained by Freud as

vision connected with sexual desire as in the act of voyeurism. This process of

watching, along with surveillance, is a recurring perspective of analysis within the

visual framework. This famous opening shot begins high in the sky, the generally

accepted position of god, perhaps suggestive of the objective, godlike nature of

the camera as the anti-connotative creator of vision. Is this the supposed

implication? As the problem is dissected by Bela Balasz, it is impossible to

connote the objectivity of the filmic experience without simultaneously making the

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viewer aware that they were reco...

... middle of paper ...

...h for Meaning.” New

York: Paulist Press. 1976

Macklin, F. A. “Blow-Up.” Focus on Blow-Up. Ed. Roy Huss. Englewood Cliffs,

NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971. 36-38.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Film Theory and

Criticism. 5th Edition. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford

University Press. 1975. pp. 833-844.

Petric, Vlada. “Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera, A

Cinematic Analysis.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1987.

Spiegel, Alan. “Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and

the Modern Novel.” Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 1976.

Turvey, Malcolm. “Can the Camera See? Mimesis in Man with a Movie Camera.”

October; Summer 1999, Issue 89, pp. 25

Vertov, Dziga “Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov.” Ed. Annette Michelson.

Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984.

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