by Colin Mcginn
Let me now summarize these ideas. Watching a film involves the reciprocal seeing of images and objects, where the object is an embedded referent of the image. In seeing the image we look through it to the object embedded in it, which we look at (the actor, not the character). The image is transparent in the sense that it permits looking into; the object is not transparent in this sense. The fictional characters portrayed are imagined on the basis of all this seeing and looking, but they are not themselves seen or looked at. When we watch a movie, there is a lot going on perceptually, despite the ease with which we do it.
REALISM AND FORMALISM
This analysis has a direct bearing on one of the classic questions of film theory—realism vs. formalism. Early enthusiasts of cinema, such as Hugo Munsterberg and Rudolf Arnheim, were anxious to demonstrate its distance from theatre and from the mere recording of nature, so that its status as an autonomous art form could be established.4 They accordingly stressed the formal properties of film as essential to its aesthetic effect—the way that the medium of film itself imposed its own identity upon the images projected onto the screen. Film was not to be seen as the passive recording of reality—a mere rehashing of ordinary perception—but as a distinctive medium by which the filmmaker could express his artistic vision. Film was compared to music and to literature, which no one could accuse of merely replicating reality (as a waxwork does). The use of montage, in particular, was felt to free cinema from the constraints of reality, since it allowed the filmmaker to sequence his images in ways not sanctioned by nature, but as expressive of the filmmaker's imagination. This, in brief, is the formalist school, which stresses the contribution made by the film medium itself. The emphasis was all on the images themselves, not on what they are images of.
Rebelling against this retreat from the world, the realist school, represented by Siegfried Kracauer and Andre Bazin, insisted that the photographic nature of cinema rendered it uniquely revelatory of objective reality: film by its nature presents raw reality to us, and this is its defining strength as an art form.5 Bazin writes: “In no sense is it [photography] the image of an object or person, more correctly it is its tracing. Its automatic genesis distinguishes it radically from other techniques of reproduction. The photograph proceeds by means of the lens to the taking of a veritable luminous impression in light—to a mold. As such it carries with it more than mere resemblance, namely a kind of identity— the card we call by that name being only conceivable in an age of photography”6 Even more forthrightly he asserts: “The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model7. This is a strong statement indeed of the realist position, maintaining as it does that there is literally an identity between the image on the screen and the object it depicts. On this view, it is quite unapt to compare cinema to music or literature, since these art forms do not harbor any identity between themselves and what they are about: they represent things without being those things. By contrast, Bazin believes that movies, in virtue of their basis in photography, literally bring the world to the screen, so much so that it is wrong to describe what we see on the screen as an image at all. What we see at the movies is reality itself, period. The emphasis here is all on what the image is of and not what it is in itself. Now both these theories stake out extreme positions; the truth lies somewhere between them. Film is not like a language that can be manipulated by the filmmaker to convey his imaginative products, with no essential relation to reality: it is not a conventional mode of representation, but a kind of automatic depiction effected by light and lenses. Film images are not like musical notes or words on the page. But neither is it correct to assert that the image on the screen is the object depicted, since one is a smudge of light and the other is a solid chunk of matter. Watching an actor on screen is not exactly like watching him on the stage. I suggest that the ideas of reciprocal seeing and embedded reference enable us to formulate the correct intermediate position. When you see the image, you thereby see the object; but the object is not seen except under the aspect of the image: form and content are inextricably combined here. It is not that your visual response is confined to one or the other of these entities—the image to the exclusion of the object or the object stripped of its mediation by the image. You see both, and this in such a way as to include one act of seeing in the other. By virtue of the mechanism of embedded reference you are able to apprehend the object simply by apprehending the image of it, but in no sense is it true that the embedded reference is the image in which it is embedded. It is just that photographic images can generate a perceptual relation to the object photographed, as mere words cannot. There is indeed a distinctive medium of film, as the formalists supposed, but it doesn't work to exclude the object from the film medium; and there is a special kind of connection to reality, as the realists insisted, but it is not that reality swallows up the medium. Perceptually, we relate both to the film medium and to the reality it presents, since the medium precisely is an invocation of reality—what stood before the camera lens and left its trace. So the notion of embedded reference and the theory of movie perception as reciprocal seeing allow us to extract the kernel of truth from both the extreme formalist and the extreme realist position. True, the image is a two-dimensional entity, not a three-dimensional one like the object depicted, so that there can be no identity between image and object; but it is misleading to suggest that the image cannot provide us with a way of perceiving the depicted object—it is just that this perception is mediated by the image. After all, the image projected onto the retina when we see an ordinary object is two-dimensional, but that doesn't prevent us from seeing three-dimensional objects by means of this image. (I shall have more to say about the ontological disparity between images and objects in the next chapter; for now I am simply noting that this disparity does not preclude the idea that images enable us to see objects.)
Formalism and realism are, in effect, theories about the nature of the cinematic look. The formalist thinks that the image interposes itself between the viewer and the world, so that it is the image that the viewer looks at—the real world hovering quite elsewhere. The realist thinks that we do not attend to the image but to the object it depicts—hence we look at the object. As I have argued, the realist is right about this, but it is a mistake to infer that the image enjoys no perceptual relation to the viewer—as if she were simply looking right at an ordinary object. The looking at that is directed to the object is conditioned by the image, controlled by the image, made possible by the image. The image is incontro-vertibly seen. Once we understand that the cinematic look incorporates in its essence both the medium of film and the subject matter of film, there should be no temptation to opt for either formalism or realism. You look into the image in order to look at the object. The image does not block off the object, and the object does not consume the image. The dispute between realism and formalism is a spurious dilemma, spawned by not properly analyzing the nature of our visual relation to the screen.
THE PLEASURE OF LOOKING
Much of the discussion of this chapter has been rather theoretical and abstract, though necessarily so if we are to set ourselves on firm foundations. So let me conclude with three topics that bring us back to the sensuous roots of movie watching: the face, visual pleasure, and voyeurism.
Close-ups can be of many things—hands, keys, guns— but it is the face for which the close-up seems designed. Our visual relationship to the screen consists very largely of watching close-ups of the human face (it would be interesting to know what percentage of film time is occupied in this way). The reason for this is evident: the face is what most powerfully conveys the interior life of the character—his or her thoughts, feelings, motivations, and so on. So the type of audience perception that comes into
play here is not merely the perception of material things but of states of mind. You look into the screen and you see the terror on the face of the heroine, the villain's gloating and glee, the hero's resolve—you become aware of the psychological happenings that are so vital a part of the story. The facial close-up is what primarily guides your perception of the actors’ states of mind. Bela Balazs, the film theorist, writes: “Good close-ups radiate a tender human attitude in the contemplation of hidden things, a delicate solicitude, a gentle bending over the intimacies of life-in-the-miniature, a warm sensibility. Good close-ups are lyrical; it is the heart, not the eye, that has perceived them.”8 He also observes that the spatiality of the face “loses all reference to space when we see, not a figure of flesh and bone, but an expression, or in other words when we see emotions, moods, intentions and thoughts, things which though our eyes can see them, are not in space.”9 In the close-up “we can see to the bottom of the soul by means of such tiny movements of facial muscles which even the most observant partner would never perceive.”10
The close-up affords a uniquely powerful window onto the mind of the character, more powerful than any encountered in the world of ordinary perception. No such resource is available to the stage actor, since he is too far away from the audience. The face on the screen becomes a means of psychological revelation to which the viewer's eye is attuned. The close-up exploits what psychologists call “mind reading”: the minds of the characters become overwhelmingly present to us—more so than in real life. Part of our visual relationship to the screen is a kind of magnified reading of minds—soul seeing, as it were. As I noted earlier, looking into the eyes of the actors aids this process enormously; the close-up of the eye is the central means of this cinematic mind reading. Without the close-up movies would lack much of their psychological power, their peculiar dramatic punch. The expressive possibilities of a screen actor's face are surely his or her strongest asset. Viewing the screen is a dynamic interplay between two minds, the actor's and the audience's; and the way we see and interpret faces is a central part of this.
We derive pleasure from our visual encounters with the screen, and sometimes no doubt this reflects the presence of beautiful objects on the screen, people or things. But we also appear to derive pleasure from the screened image as such: our eyes are drawn to the screen and they linger there with obvious delight (a faint smile often accompanies such lingering). Why is the screen a source of visual pleasure? I think there are two connected answers. The first goes back to our discussion of looking into; the very act of looking through one thing to see another gives us pleasure, as if our eyes were performing a magical feat—traversing one domain of reality to reach another. Often such looking is accompanied by visual curiosity—we are looking for something, something of interest or moment. We look into the sky or a person's eyes in order to discern something there that interests us—a star, a self. So the visual pleasure of the screen inherits the pleasure of looking into generally.
Secondly, there is the pleasure of imaginative seeing. Consider looking from an airplane through a blue sky to an accumulation of clouds: the clouds might be seen as a celestial city, with billowing buildings housing feathery citizens. This kind of imaginative seeing enables us to connect the world of imagination and the world of perception. We like to look at things that allow or encourage this kind of imaginative exercise (of course, imagining itself is often pleasurable). There is fun to be had in seeing as; children like to play this game in their pretend play. Well, in the movie theatre we also give free rein to our imagination, as we bring it to bear on the images that flit and dart before us: we imagine the characters, their predicaments, their feelings. It is not that we just passively observe things; we actively construct an interpretation of what we are seeing. It is as if the movie itself really took place in our minds, with the images on the screen acting as mere stimuli. Movie watching is inherently an imaginative act. And it is a kind of imaginative seeing— seeing impregnated with imagining. Movie watching has all the appeal of this kind of seeing—the delights of constructing imaginary worlds from suggestive stimuli. Part of the visual pleasure of movies derives from this conjoining of perception and imagination, of the outer with the inner, of the deterministic world and the free self. This pleasure exists alongside whatever pleasure we derive from the particular things that the screen offers our senses—faces, costumes, scenery, etc. The pleasure of movies is partly the pleasure of integrating what we bring from the inside with what the world imposes on our senses.
Then there is the vexed matter of voyeurism. The essence of voyeurism is the unreciprocated look: I look at you but you do not see me looking at you. In normal life, voyeurism requires concealment on the part of the onlooker, and typically distance. But the camera changes all that: it can look for me, while I safely skulk in hiding for what it relays to my heavy-breathing consciousness. Now I don't wish here to enter into a discussion of the psychological and ethical nature of voyeurism—whether it involves asymmetries of power or simply extreme curiosity, how good or bad it may be—but I take it that cinema is a medium in which voyeurism, in some form or measure, is part of the bargain. The feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey writes: “The extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation. Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world.”11 Alfred Hitchcock notoriously associated film with the voyeuristic impulse and incorporated it into some of his films (notably Rear Window). In the case of the theatre, the actors have the power to stare right back at the audience—the audience is present to them. But film actors are deprived of this power; the audience is never within their field of gaze. The viewer is a voyeur almost by definition—even before we get to the question of sex scenes.
Three factors feed the voyeuristic appetite in the cinema: the close-up, looking into, and psychological foregrounding. In the close-up we can be voyeurs at extremely close quarters: not from one window into another across a dark street, but inches away from the observed individual. This is especially true of the face, whose detail is not revealed except at close quarters: you can see each telltale twitch of the actor's face, while yours is completely invisible to him or her. You can secretly sneer while the actor weeps, or cheer when the character dies, but you emerge unscathed from this act of intimate revelation. Returned eye contact is not a peril of these dramatic proceedings. Blatant staring carries no penalty in the form of a reproving glance. You can look right into the eye of the actor and your own eye has no reality for the object of your brazen gaze. The close-up gives the viewer as much covert access as he could possibly want (and pornography does not stint in respect of the fixated close-up).
Real-life voyeurism often involves peering unobserved into someone else's private space—normally, a room. It may also involve the use of an optical device, such as binoculars. It may take place through a window. All of these instigate feats of looking into, in search of the object to be looked at. As I argued, the movie screen is itself a looked-into medium; so it partakes ofthat rapt directing of attention that looking into brings. The screen entices me to adopt the posture of the voyeur, because of its looked-into character, its simulation of a private space. Very often, an intimate scene will be shot by placing the camera in such a position as to record the private happenings that take place within a closed room. This explicitly induces the audience to look into the room, there to observe the heedless actions of the characters observed. It really is as if we are secretly watching from a safe distance as private events unfold. Surely one of the main attractions of the screened kiss is that it offers the audience a sight they would seldom enjoy in ordinary life—a deeply private moment rendered public (and large). The people kissing have no awareness of anyone but themselves (or so
the scene asserts), but in fact their actions are observed by millions—and the knowledge that this is so never comes to the characters thus intruded upon. We are visually eavesdropping, and the screen urges us on with its invitation to be looked into.
Thirdly, it is not just the bodies of the actors that open up the possibilities of voyeurism; it is also their minds. Indeed, I would say that this is what is most distinctive of screen voyeurism. As intimate witnesses of what is going on in the minds of the characters, we are able to look in on the most private thoughts and feelings of the people we observe. This is in some ways the greatest achievement of voyeurism—to observe the private mental life of someone who has no inkling that he is being observed. Some observers thrill to the prospect of views into the bedroom and bathroom, the body at its most bodily; but the film viewer can get even closer to the private world of his subject (or victim)—to his soul. The tears of the grieving mother are emblems of her inward torment, and we are permitted (for a small fee) to take in the show. The disturbing scene in David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. in which the main female character masturbates and weeps simultaneously is surely as voyeuristic as anyone could wish. This is raw emotional reality rendered public, the private world ripped open for all to see.
