Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema

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.

"The metaphor of camera as eye is fundamental to both everyday discussion as well as more academic theories of cinema: it is a pervasive metaphor through which we understand cinema on several levels. Christian Quendler’s detailed study of the camera-eye metaphor is therefore a significant and erudite contribution to scholarship. But, more than this, Quendler’s study takes a truly interdisciplinary approach to this metaphor. The Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema is not dogmatic in limiting itself to one or two theoretical positions; far from it. This book encompasses a broad array of theoretical approaches – from the philosophy of mind to art theory, narratology, and gender studies. It therefore has a potentially wide appeal, not only in film studies, but also cultural and media studies more generally." – Warren Buckland, Oxford Brookes University, UK

• 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