AUMONT Point of View

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The point of view

Jacques Aumont
Teaches at the Universit de la SorbonneNouvelle , 17 rue

de la Sorbonne, 75231, Paris Cedex 05, France
Published online: 05 Jun 2009.
To cite this article: Jacques Aumont (1989) The point of view, Quarterly Review of Film and
Video, 11:2, 1-22, DOI: 10.1080/10509208909361295
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509208909361295
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The Point of View
Downloaded by [Royal Holloway, University of London] at 12:07 24 August 2015
Jacques Aumont
Translated by
Arthur Denner
A Quattrocento canvas characteristically is organized around a point, rarely materialized in the painting, where lines converge which represent rectilinears perpendicular to the plan of the painting. The image of the infinite extension of this family
of lines, the principal vanishing point is also defined, geometrically, as the positioning mark for the eye of the painter. Thus, the perspediva artificialis joins the
image of the infinite to man's image, and this is the umbilical knot, the navel, from
which representation is organized.
By a noteworthy metonymy, this geometric point sometimes goes by the same
name as the emplacement of the eye of the painterthe point of view. A good part
of the history of painting, as it has been written for the last hundred years or so, has
consistently aimed at following the avatars of this "point of view": the slow and
hesitant elaboration of the technical rules of centered perspective; the evidence of
the "humanist" markings of its technical givens, of the reference of the painting to a
gaze that constitutes it (that of the painter, to which that of the spectator must
topologically substitute itself); the dissolution of the one and the other toward the
turn of the century.
What is essential in this period of the history of representation is the indefectible
solidarity between the painting and the spectator, and more precisely, the symmetry
between them, this impossible intersection of gazes, this crossing of looks between
the spectator and the painter, the description of which, today a classic one, is found
in Foucault and Lacan. It is not insignificant that in "classical" French, say, until the
eighteenth century, the expression point de vue also designated, and quite logically
so, the place where an object must be placed to make it most visiblean admirable
ambiguity in French which sanctioned the fundamental duality of beholder/beheld.
Photography has "absorbed" all of these points of view. Like painting, photographic representation entails the choice of a positioning of the sighting eye as well
as fixing a good placement for the object seen;1 moreover, the lens is most generally
constructed in such a way as to produce automatically an image with a central
vanishing point. Thus, cinema, by way of the photographic image, is haunted by
the metaphor of the gaze, of the point of view, in its treatment of visual material.
JACQUES AUMONT teaches at the Universit de la Sorbonne-Nouvelle, 17 rue de la Sorbonne, 75231, Paris, Cedex 05,
France. His most recent book in English is Montage Eisenstein.
ARTHUR DENNER is a free-lance translator and lecturer in the program of Visual Arts at Princeton University,
Princeton, Newjersey, 08540. This article is translated from the French, "Le point de rue," Communications 38,1983.
2 /. Aumont
That is not all. As painting was learning how to master the effects of centered
representation, literature at the same time was gradually discovering analogous
phenomena, in particular, the complexity of the relationships between events,
places, situations, and characters, and the "gaze" brought to bear on them through
narrative agency; modern literature is a literature of point of view, increasingly
obsessed with a difficult division between what derives from the author, and
announces itself as such, and what is to be attributed to the characters.
This, by and large, was the literary period that defines "classical" cinema as heir
to a narrative system that perhaps culminated during the last century and that
exhaustively brought to light the questions of the narrator, the narratorial "gaze,"
and its incarnation as author and character.
It is essentially this concern for ordered arrangement (agencement), for the fitting
together of competing narrative instances and points of view on the event, that,
from the cinematograph (or the kinetoscope), brought about cinema. The first
capital event in the history of filmic representation was unquestionably the recognition of the narrative potential of the image, by way of its assimilation to a gaze. How
the classical period hypostatized this gaze, from the standpoint of the character as
from that of the auteur, is a matter of record.2
A double dividing line is thus drawn, on the one hand, distinguishing between
the direct figuration (in the image) of the point of view and its indirect figuration (in
the narrative) and, on the other hand, reapportioning these points of view among
the three places whence the gaze originates: the character, the auteur, and the
spectator, who watches the other two and watches himself watching.3
Finally, we must add that the expression "point of view" lends itself to further
metaphoric extension: a point of view is an opinion, a judgment, dependent on the
light in which things are considered, on the point of view (in the literal sense) that is
adopted toward them, and so it informs the very organization of narration and
representation. No point of view in these senses can escape the effect of this point of
view.
Let us summarize this array of meanings stemming from the banal locution
"point of view," while we attempt to specify each of them in its relationship to
cinema.
1. It is first of all the point or position from which the gaze originates; thus, the
positioning of the camera relative to the object that is gazed upon. Cinema learned
very early on4 to multiply it, by the changing and the joining together of shots, and
to vary it, through the movement of the camera. The first characteristic of the
fictional film is to offer a multiple and variable point of view.
2. Correlatively, it is the view itself, to the extent that it is captured from a specific
point of view: film is image, organized by the play of centered perspective.5 Here
the major problem is that of the frame and, more precisely, the contradiction
between the effect of surface (the plastic occupation of the surface of the frame) and
the illusion of depth. 6
3. The preceding point of view2 is itself constantly referred to the narrative point
of view; for example, the frame in narrative cinema is always more or less the
representation of a gaze, the auteur's or the character's. Here again, the history of
narrative cinema is one of the acquisition and the fixing of the rules of correspondence between a POVa, the ensuing POV2, and this latter, narrative point of view.
The Point of View 3

4. The constituted whole is overdetermined by a mental attitude (i.e., intellectual, moral, political, etc.) that conveys the narrator's judgment on the event. This
point of view4 (which we shall call "predicative") obviously informs, most of all, the
fiction itself (the "auteur's" judgments of the characters, which seem to be the
purview of the better part of ordinary film criticism), but it interests me here solely
to the extent that it is likely to have consequences for the work of representation and
to shape filmic representation (leaving aside, for the moment, the signifier).
Let us summarize, then, the antecedents of this all-purpose notion of point of
view, for they still have some bearing. I have already touched on them briefly. The
history of painting from the fifteenth to the twentieth century is one of the regulation, then the mobilization of the point of view: from its institution through its
decentering in the baroque, its dilution in the nineteenth-century landscape
painters and in impressionism, until its multiplication and its loss in "analytical"
cubismand this is the point where cinema takes over.
To cite only one example, we have Degas, defining the work of the painter (or of
the sculptor; see his brilliant statuettes "Etudes des mouvements du cheval") as a
seizing on the moment, "on that fraction of duration which contains within it the
suggestion of the movement as a whole" (Cohen, p. 28); in other words, a conception of painting as something of the momentary, a kind of snapshot (Degas, as we
know was also a photographer). But at the same time, no paintings are more
composed than those of Degas, more "montaged," as Eisenstein says, and not so
much with an eye to recording a movement as to expressing a sentiment, a
meaning, a plastic effect. This dual status of the frame in Degason the one hand,
innocent, the snapshot slicing into real; on the other hand, composed and saturated
with meaning, the edited imagetranslates into painting itself, as Bazin clearly
saw,7 the opposition photography-cinema, in that cinema is an art of the momentary but multiple point of view.
Furthermore, as I have already recalled, the literary avant-gardes in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century show themselves concerned, among other
things, with exposing within fiction itself the narrative process, for example, by
inserting, like James or Proust, a "self-conscious" character-narrator or, like Conrad,
a "central reflector." Narrative cinema thus appeared precisely at the moment when
literature was experimenting with the exposition, the diversification, and the mobilization of the narrative point of view. The borrowings by narrative cinema from
these literary models, moreover, can hardly be said to have followed a linear path;
rather, one has the impression that it was by rediscovering on its own the problematic of the character and the point of view that cinema, in its "classical" period, was
able to take over from the nineteenth-century novel. (Meanwhile, in a movement in
the opposite direction, the experimentation that marked European cinema during
the twenties had fueled the efforts of new generations of writers, from Joyce to Dos
Passos.8)
Cinema, as an art of representationthat is, from the very moment it disengages
from spectacle, whether itinerant or sedentary, in order to become artis caught
up in this double or triple history: painting, photography, literature. (Some perhaps, will find it astounding to find no mention here of theater. The fact isand
what follows will make this clearthat the point of view in cinema has very little to
do with a theatrical "point of view," which is rather a question of architecture, and
}. Aumont
that, additionally, the history of the filmic formnot to say the history of cinema
has practically nothing to do with that of the theater.9)
The question of point of view, we see, is thus anything but one question; rather, it
circumscribes the space of a tangle of problems, and it is these problems that are
central to any theory of cinema that would take into consideration the double
nature, narrative and representational, of film. We have still confined ourselves to
the range of the filmmaker's points of view and have not tried to assess how each of
them brings about, or seeks to bring about, the symmetrical adoption of positions
of vision and specific readings in the spectator (this question of the spectator will
obviously resurface, more or less bluntly, in what follows).
My problem is not to propose a general and abstract model that seeks to untangle
this knot theoretically; were this my temptation, moreover, I would be dissuaded
from it by the absolute discursive impasse into which all studies in this area seem to
fall, including those pursued by scholars whose linguistic and logical baggage is far
superior to my own. Also, I am convinced of the impossibility of constructing a
transhistorical model of "cinematographic language." My goal, therefore, is simply
to bring to the fore, by a few examples, the fundamental duality in film between the
parameters of representation and narration, in connection with the notion of point
of view. This duality is almost invariably reabsorbed in discourse on cinema, under
the implicit pretext that, given the habitual conception of film as a story told by
image (and sound), sufficient attention is paid to the phenomena of representation
by referring them to the story, or at best, to the narrative.
Example. In That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), a single female character is portrayed by two
different actresses, in sufficiently complex a way for the principle that governs their substitution not to be apparent; even aside from the fact that the substitution went completely
unnoticed by many spectators, I believe that no one had serious difficulty in taking the film to
be a normal narrativeor, at all events, one whose abnormality (the famous Bunuelian
"surrealism") lies elsewhere.
Example. "Primitive" films often present themselves as a series of loose tableaux, causing us
to construe them as functioning in a narratively difficult way; in fact, in their normal use,
these films were accompanied by a commentator, who not only would fill in the ellipses in the
narrative but would also specify, if necessary, the place represented, so that there might be no
mistaking the bandits' hideout for the king's palace.10
These two examples (and a hundred others we might have cited) serve simply to
underscore the spontaneous privileging by the cinematographic institution of the
narrative over the representational. Privileging of this sort, on what appears to be
equally spontaneous and "evident" grounds, continues, moreover, even in recent
theoretical and analytical thought. One has only to reread most analyses (whether
"textual" or otherwise) that have been published to be convinced that almost all of
them, regardless of their quality, concentrate in an "unbalanced" way on the
analysis of the story, at the expense of reflection on the figurative and representational levels, which is summoned only when it brings grist to the narratological
mill.11 As for the theoreticians, the recently proposed notions of "filmic text"
(Casetti), of "communicative dynamics" (Colin), indeedand paradoxicallyof
"parametric" analysis (Chateau) have this in common: they divest the image of all
but its narrative power (even as it is deemed dysnarrative).
The Point of View 5

Furthermore, this wholesale competition (or collaboration) between narrative
and representation redoubles in and is obscured by another: the opposition among
all of these (representational and narrative) partial points of view which are essentially on the order of the imaginary (the "point of view" that we have numbered 4),
in effect an attempt to inscribe meaning in the films, an attempt in which it is the
symbolic register that finds itself mobilized.
Many of the constituents of the narrative and the image (the auditive as well as
the visual) give rise to this encoding that casts them as the expression of a point of
view. All plastic values, all iconic parameters, many elements of the narration can be
invested with this value of significationfrom the tilt of the camera to the color,
from the typecasting of the actors to the film's taking into account a social gestus.
As I have said, I cannot begin to attempt to propose a model or general solution to
these problems. What remains is the possibility of accounting for them in reference
to history (the history of films and, more generally, the history of representation).
Naturally, the scale of these notes permits me no prtentions to a real historical
work, and my approach calls on a supposed history of cinema that, as we are
reminded daily, exists only in the barest approximations.12 What follows comes,
therefore, as a series of more or less arbitrary pinpoints in the vast corpus of films
and the theories that accompany themwith the sole aim of delineating the
relationships, permanent and variable, of these "points of view."
Let us reread (e. g., in Deslandes's authoritative book) the first announcements for
screenings by the cinematographer Lumire (or those by his competitors). These
films are "animated photographs," "animated scenes," "animated tableaux," or,
quite simply and most often, "views." What better term for them? Film was first an
image, a point of viewj that of the camera producing a point of view2, embodied in a
framing.
Better yet: even before the screening at the Salon Indien of the Grand Caf,
Edison had constructed, by 1894, on his property at West Orange, the famous Black
Maria open-air studio, where the films came to the kinetoscope before the latter
went to them. There the "animated tableau" was recorded, in an always identical
and always frontal frame (the camera being fixed, once and for all) against a tar
paper background. Two years later (1896), a former Edison collaborator, Dickson,
undertook the construction of the American Mutoscope Company studio, the
future Biograph, on the roof of a building on Broadway. Also outdoors, this studio
contained an improvement: enclosed in a heavy booth, the camera could move
along rails perpendicular to the scene, thus permitting the changing of frame
between two shots (and even forward dollying, although this possibility does not
seem to have been exploited at the time).13 For a while, then, to make a film meant
to set the camera somewhere, and to frame.
We know the rest: it consists essentially of a mobilization of this frame. It has long
been stressed that this mobilization was effected, in such a way as to have achieved
privileged status, far more by the invention of montage than by the use of camera
movements.14 We can give a trenchant example of this semiparadox by comparing
two almost contemporary types of production: on the one hand, the "views" of the
"Hale's Tour" type, consisting of placing a camera at the head of a locomotive, or on
the rear platform of a train, and filming continuously; on the other hand, the famous
first short adventure films, which used a succession of different shots (the famous
6 J. Aumont
Great Train Robbery of Edwin S. Porter and its British predecessor, A Daring Daylight
Burglary, both from 1903). In the first instance, in spite of the constant transformation of the landscape and the interminability, in theory, of the view, the view
remains just that, a single view.15 In the case of the latter two films, however, though
they hardly tamper with the fixity of the frame (and thus lead necessarily to the
advent of the "theatricality" of the Film d'Art and of Griffith-Biograph), they nonetheless draw the capital conclusions that arise from the very nature of the cinematographic view. Since it includes time, since it rolls forward, it is essentially
(ontologically, Bazin would have said) on the order of narrative; it recountsand
there is no reason for this narration to be interrupted where the shot ends.
Here is the appearance in films of a narrative point of view, the stages of which
bear the names of Porter and especially Griffith: mythic names, haloed in legends
into whose detail or criticism I cannot enter here.16 What concerns me is to
emphasize that with this appearance, and long after, comes the loss of the coherence of represented space. Indeed, while montage very quickly allowed for an
effective and unequivocal understanding of chronology and causal processes, the
same cannot be said for the space represented in the sequence of shots. We shall
keep to the famous examples previously cited: from The Great Train Robbery (where
only the major articulations of the story are easy to understand) to any one of
Griffith's films of 1911 or 1912 (An Unseen Enemy or The Battle, for example), the
"progress" has been decisive. The Griffithian narrative requires no intervention, no
commentary; it is entirely clear. Yet between these films, no corresponding integration of a fragmentized space has occurred. In spite of the establishment of a (rather
rudimentary) convention concerning movement out of the visual field, by crossing
the lateral edge of the frame,17 each space maintains its own independent value and
exists in semiautonomy, without the coherence of the diegetic space ever being
guaranteed, whether by firm conventions (such as the classical "editing codes"
came to be) or by a more or less directly managed access (by an establishing shot,
for example) to the global spatial referent.
Let us try to put these remarks another way. What cinema becomes aware of at
this moment in its history is first of all that linking framed points of view on
different places produces a chronological development, a narrative whose modes
are quickly perfected, starting, for example, with those shots in the second version
of Enoch Arden (1911) where Griffith experiments with the relationship between a
view and a gaze, between a gaze and a character; cinema learned that linking
induces a narrative point of view.
Again keeping to the example of the Griffithian system, a relatively diversified
narrative point of view can be seen to function there. The narrative consists
essentially of following the characters, in external focalization (which is quite
apparent in the "obligatory" chase or final rescue sequences); on occasion, the
narrative point of view coincides with that of the character, in internal focalization.
Example. In Enoch Arden, when Annie Lee waits on the beach for her husband's return, her
face suddenly takes on a look of horror, her arms reach out; in the following shot, Enoch's
shipwreck is seen (it is true that to speak here of internal focalization implies a certain belief
in telepathy). A more obvious instance, perhaps: in The Battle, the scene in which the young
man, filled with panic, abandons his post includes a shot of the trench in which he no longer
figuresa shot that represents his gaze.
The Point of View 7

Finally, to the omniscient narrator are ascribed the establishing shot, certain
close-ups of objects that are one of Griffith's stylistic trademarks, and naturally, all
of the titles that comment on, anticipate, or characterize the action. Abundant use of
these titles (such as "Meanwhile in Cyprus" or "Later . . .") would be made
throughout the silent film era, eventually to be parodied in an exemplary way in An
Andalusian Dog (1928).
But at the same time as it produces this narrative clarity and mastery, the
mobilization of the shot also makes apparent, somewhat by default, the complex
nature of the representational point of view in cinema. Because the construction of
filmic space implies the element of time and because it also implies topological
relationships (of inclusion, of contiguity, for example) and relationships of order,
the cinematographic point of view must in the first instance be referred not to the
immobile view but to the sequence of views. Unlike the pictorial model, the point of
view in cinema is defined as an ordered and measured series, And, in "primitive"
cinema, this order and measure are still a long way off. The concern for a coherent
comprehension of space within the sequence would seem to be apparent, for
example, in certain descriptive moments (it is precisely because of the temporal
nature of the cinematographic signifier that the notion of description is a tenuous
one in film, implying as it does a suspension of the story's time). So it is in The Birth
of a Nation (1915) with the string of shots, including two lengthy panning shots, that
describes the battlefield.18
Before we come by these almost fixed laws through which classical cinema tried
to rationalize the representation of space (and which I shall pass over, as they have
been widely and extensively studied), the privileging of narrative clarity continues
in evidence throughout the silent period, or nearly so, sometimes as caricature, as
in the 1920 film, The Chamber Mystery, where the dialogue is rendered in "balloons,"
like those from a comic strip, as a text against a gray background that obscures a part
(sometimes almost all) of the character supposedly speaking.19
At the same time, there gradually emerges a new concernthat of expressing, in
the narrative but also in the image, a point of view of the narrative instance that goes
beyond the simple play of the various degrees of coincidence between character and
narrator.
The seeds of this "predicative" point of view can already be found in Griffithian
cinema. Even leaving aside the heavy makeup employed, for example, to characterize the villain (and which remains a pro-filmic device), we might cite Griffith's
efforts to achieve a meaningful use of spotlighting. In The Drunkard's Reformation
(1905), the characters' familial happiness is bathed in and defined by the light that
emanates from the hearth; the same year, for Pippa Passes, Griffith and Bitzer
experimented with masks and complex lighting designed to convey the soft light of
dawn onto the heroine's angelic face, or, more precisely speaking, to convey the
angelic yearnings of this face.20 These lighting effects would be pushed to the limit
in Griffith's later feature films, for example, in the scenes by the riverbank in The
White Rose (1923). Meanwhile, these effects become trite and rigid, for example, the
halo of Mary Pickford's blond curl, or, better still, the obligatory aura encircling
Garbo's face.
It is not in a Hollywood industry bent for the most part on reducing these
adventures in lighting to a few stereotypes21 that the clearest (not to say the most
8 }. Aumont
successful) attempts at a discourse of the image will be found as much as in

European cinema of the twenties. Cropping up in various schools and periods,
these attempts cannot be cataloged here. Three examples follow.
Caligarism. This school is still, and most often, called expressionism (recycling the
convenient and vague label first proposed in the twenties). If used with reference to
the development of expressionist painting, and the subsequent development of an
expressionist literature, the term lacks relevance; it is not without interest, however,
if it refers to its etymological meaning. Then it implies the idea of a more or less
direct expression, generally in a pictorial mode, of precise meanings particular to a
specific film.
The first distinguishing feature of this school, as we know, is its pictorialism and,
correlatively, its extremely particular character of reference to the represented
world. In Caligari (1920), for example, we see the figuration on the backdrop of a
view of the city where the fair is to be heldan image clearly inspired by medieval
figurations, wherein the city is an accumulation of houses, taking the general shape
of a kind of cone, without regard for a perspective rendering; in front of this
backdrop, on a kind of theater practicable, are set (slantwise, of course) a few
indications of the fair, the organ grinder, the merry-go-round, thus situated in a
relationship of exteriority-interiority to the city that is scarcely translatable into
topographical terms. In the architectural decors themselves, the real space in
which the extras move about is determined by the demands of a plastic form which
actually tend to negate or block any potential perspective effect (e.g., the shots
inside Caligari's wagon).
This pictorialness contaminates, tendentially at least, the entire representation:
from the characters' makeup (Werner Krauss's colored hair, the paintings on the
characters' bodies in Genuine) to their gestures (the dismantled body of Conrad
Veidt in Caligari, the tortured body of Hans von Twardowsky in Caligari and
Genuine), from an "overframed" frame (as in The Last Laugh [1924] or Backstairs) to a
"psychotic" montage by fragments (the murder of the moneylender in Raskolnikov).
Hence the paradox that seems to arise again and again in connection with German
silent film: all of these films are supposed to fall under the heading of "expressionist" (see the constantly cited example of The Last Laugh), while at the same time,
much time is spent conferring on this or that work the title of "the only true
expressionist film" (see Lotte Eisner on Von Morgens bis Mitternach).
Be that as it may, the important thing here is that all of these plastic operations aim
almost exclusively at the sensible, sensorial translation of the idea. The "vegetal"
sets and costumes of Genuine materialize the character's animality (rather like a
translation of Baudelaire's famous phrase about "la femme naturelle, c'est dire,
abominable"). The distortion of an already naturally angular set, of the moneylender's staircase, lets one see the horror of Raskolnikov's nightmare. And a
thousand other examples might be cited, all of which demonstrate this inscription,
flush against the figuration, of a global signified that qualifies the represented.
The vice of the system is well knownand has long been exposed: this signified
is ambiguous; it does not, for example, permit the distinction, in the scene from
Caligari where Rudolf Klein-Rogge sits in his cell at the center of a kind of spiderweb
or white star against a black background, between the meaning of the imprisonment (a redundant meaning) and the more equivocal meaning of the spider spin-
The Point of View 9

ning its intrigues (in the manner of Mabuse). The only times this ambiguity is lifted
are when the idea presented is obvious and weak. The shadow, above Alan's bed, of
the sleepwalker who prepares to strangle him signifies, in spite of its plastic
violence (and its beauty), nothing other than a very generic horror. More serious is
that both this ambiguity and this weakness lend themselves to being reabsorbed,
fatally perhaps, into the great signified of Madness, or to be more precise, into that
of sick unreality as opposed to a supposed sane reality. We know, moreover, that
this reabsorption, heatedly criticized as soon as Caligari was released,22 was fought
by the filmmakers themselves and was finally imposed by the producers, out of
their supposed concern for a verisimilitude that is of particular concern to me here
because it translates into a masking of the predicative point of view by the narrative
point of view (in this case, the one that the film attributes, in its conclusion, to the
inmates of the asylum and to the good doctor). All that survives the operation is the
transformation that affects the representational point of view.
Impressionism. This label has even less consistency, if that be possible. It arises
unquestionably out of very superficial analogies and can be applied to very few
films, first and foremost, to those of Epstein who said, "The subject of the film
Mauprat is the memory of my first enthusiastic and very superficial understanding
of romanticism. The Fall of the House of Usher (1927) is my general impression about
Poe."23
Techniques of impressionism: double printing, slow motion, the close-up, and
fragmented montage. Famous images: Gina Mans's face superimposed on the
harbor waters in Faithful Heart (1923), the moments of pure speed in The Mirror with
Three Faces (1927), the slow motion and the transition into negative image when
Madeleine dies in The House of Usher. Or, again from this latter film, the passage
analyzed by Keith Cohen: the appearance of the visitor Roderick, first on the moor,
where the film shows him in several shots, each from a different angle and in a
different size, with none of the shots revealing his face; then at the inn, where the
crisscross of gazes between the characters lets on only that they belong to the same
scene, while simultaneously producing a sense of an indeterminate, floating space
(Cohen); and also the shots at the end of the prologue in which a woman watches
furtively from behind the windows of the inn and in which the decors and the
framing combine to give the impression that she has been swallowed up, trapped,
buried alive by a maleficent place.
The point in common among these three plastically quite different moments of
Epstein's film is that they supplement the elaboration of the narrative and the
diegesis with the figurationthis time through frame and montageof a narrator's point of view on the story he tells, which is not only a narrative point of view (a
play of correspondences and divergence between the narrative instance and the
characters) but also a judgment, an inflection of these scenes toward a sensation, or,
if you will, an impression of mystery, unreality, and anxiety in each sequence,
respectively. Of course, it is less a matter of the inscription of these sensations in the
representation than of their suggestion through it; but "atmospheric" as they may
be, they nonetheless remain organically integrated into the story in its entirety (they
are, we might recall, its introduction) and are far less ambiguous than my description might perhaps convey.
What is happening here? No longer, as was the case with expressionism, the
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fabrication ex nihilo of a pseudo-space that aims at a kind of ideoplastie but rather the
sometimes contradictory maintenance of the double demand of photogenie (the
requirement that light and image engender an emotion) and thought. Or, in
Epstein's words:
Beautiful films are constructed photographically and celestially. What I call the celestial field
of an image is its moral scope, the reason it was sought after. One ought to limit the action of
the sign to this range and interrupt it as soon as it becomes distracting to thought and draws
the emotion upon itself. Plastic pleasure is a means, never an end. Having provoked a series
of sentiments, the images must do no more than give guidance to their semi-spontaneous
evolution, as these [cathedral] spires guide thoughts heavenward.24
Cin-language. Paradoxically, the school of Russian filmmakers who developed
the idea that there could be a language of filmand whose theoretical systems
would logically be expected to emphasize the scriptural power of the filmmaker
will provide us here with a more ambiguous example.
Let us look at the book published in 1929 by Kuleshov which reflects in a
synthetic way a decade of experimentation. Apart from a treatise on filmic practice,
rather obsolete by today's standards and largely determined by the tactical impulse
to recognize certain formal innovations (e.g., close-up, montage), the book puts
forth a conception whose essentials can be summarized as a number of deductions:
a) Because the film spectator has an obligatory point of view (our POV^ on the
represented event, it is that which is actualized on the screen (and this alone) that
signifies;
b) a shot can thus be assimilated to a sign (of the ideographic kind);
c) the reading of any film, even a documentary, thus presupposes an organization (1) internal to the shot and (2) between and among shots;
d) whence the promotion of a cinema of brief montage, seeking to preserve in
each shot its value as a simple sign; whence also the insistence on the calculus of a
system of movements internal to the frame along certain privileged lines (parallel to
the frame, diagonal) and, consequently, on a very analytic kind of acting, according
to the dictates of typage.
Curiously, this author, remembered above all for his developments that promoted
cine-language and the cine-ideogram, was in fact the inspiration for and instigator
of those trends within the massive European experimentation of the twenties that
drew closest to the model of American cinemafilms in which the work of the
narrator consists less of bringing a judgment to bear on what he shows than of
showing it clearly and in which the essentials of the narrative are conveyed by the
actor's body, which has become mechanized (biomechanized), the better to achieve
narrative certainty. This indeed is what we find in the films of Kuleshov and his
studio which have survived, Mr. West (1924), The Death Ray (1925), and even Dura
Lex (1926). Anything that unnecessarily encumbers the narrative has been evacuated from these films, in order that the work of reading might be simplified.
More attention was indeed paid to cinema's predicative possibilities in the work of
certain of his contemporaries, in Eisenstein, naturally, whom we shall come to
momentarily, and even in Pudovkin, whose films are similarly characterized by the
linearity and clarity of the narrative but who on occasion allows himself broad
metaphors (see the conclusions of Storm Over Asia [1929] and of Mother [1926] : here is
The Point of View 11

another Griffith, but one less reluctant to exploit the "symbolic" value of his
material. For their part, the "formalist" theorists make the case for the rhetorical
figure as well; "in cinema, the visible world is given not as such, but in its semantic
correlation," posits Tynianov,25 for whom the image and the linking of imagefragments are to be calculated as a function of their narrative and (potentially)
metaphoric value.
The conception of cine-language is undoubtedly less simplistic than what we
have sketched out with Kuleshov; it includes the possibility of a direct intervention
of the narrative instance in the represented material, in a mode analogous to what
we find practiced with the German and French cinastes. The metaphor, or the
rhetorical figure in general, finds its niche in the poetics of cinema26 as one possible
level of the image-sign's signification. Yet, if we survey the actualizations of this
principle in the films of Pudovkin or the FEX, we see that the metaphors, in spite of
their occasional undeniable beauty, are confined, somewhat timidly, to the play of
camera angle, to rapid montage, to intradiegetic comparisons (what Mitry calls
"implied symbols"), and that, on the whole, they appear as somewhat decorative
supplements to an idea the main conveyance of which is the assigned task of the
narrative.
My three examples are anything but innocent; rather, they are a skewed sampling
from the most important and most celebrated manifestations of the spirit of experimentation that generally characterized the silent cinema at its height in Europe.
They seek thus to make evident in some of the most conscious examples from this
experimentalist current the presence of the work of direct signification by the image
and the diverse regimens according to which this work is carried out; these
regimens, in spite of their diversity, all ultimately inscribe in the representation
itself the mark of a qualification of the represented.
Over and beyond their diversity, these examples have two traits in common. First,
the imposition of a predicative point of view, which it is the assigned task of the
image to convey, entails a treatment of the represented space that, without fatally
impairing the constitution of a "good" space, still seals it with an ineffaceable
imprintthat of insanity, of Unheimlichkeit, or of literarity.27 Second, the collusion
brought about in these films between a (representational) point of view on the event
and the (predicative) point of view that is inscribed in it is more a matter of
improvisation than design (whence the imprecision of labels and schools) and lacks
the underpinning of a general theorization of these relationships among space,
representation, and the institution of connotative isotopies.
Which brings us to Eisenstein.
We must not be fetishistic: Eisenstein is not as lonely a genius as he is sometimes
said to be. His thought is grounded in an entire theoretical and practical terrain, to
which he contributed, of course, and which we have just evoked. I find it natural to
consider his work at this point for the sole and simple reason that it is he who has
given the most thoroughgoing formulation of this problematic of figure and meaning.
This formulation first appears toward the end of the twenties, with his reflections, developed parallel to the realization of October (1927) and General Line (1929),
on the principles of montage. These reflections culminate in the notion of "intellectual" montage, the goal of which is to promote a cinema-essay in which the fiction
would be only a support, a pretext for the linking of representations whose value
22 /. Aumont
would be principally their attractive chargewith the work of the filmmaker thus
consisting primarily in correlating both the fictional elements and, among the
possible "attractions," those most useful to the discourse, the thesis of the film.
According to the somewhat extreme formulation that Eisenstein does not balk at
producing (although he confines it, to be sure, to his private work notes), it is a
question of "thinking directly in images"; this is an exorbitant formula and, moreover, not an altogether lucid one: one of the most irrefutable criticisms that can be
leveled against this theory takes to task its overestimation of the linguistic equivalencies of the image.28 In fact, "intellectual" cinema is only a defense, radical but
purely theoretical, of the infinite productive possibilities of montage; Eisenstein's
own view as well is that intellectual montage is no different from "harmonic"
montage, the play of ordered arrangements (agencements) and relations able to
produce, for example, the following chain:
Sad old man + collapsed sail + flopping tent
+ fingers crumpling a beret + teary eyes
to say grief, by mobilizing diegetic elements as well as the parameters of the
representation. In the terms we have proposed, we have before us a conception of
cinema that so overinflates the predicative point of view that it constitutes the latter,
tendentially, as the only driving force, the only principle of cohesion of a filmic
discourse in which the discursive component itself is hypertrophied.
These are the "excesses" that Eisenstein worked hard to correct, some ten years
later in a series of texts on montage, through the central concept of imaginicity. I
must forego a thorough discussion of these texts on which I have written elsewhere.
The aesthetic norm that they propose subjects the film to a dual necessity:
1. It must figure (represent) the real by a verisimilitude that does not conflict with
the "normal" everyday way of apprehending it; a vague requirement that nonetheless insists on the production both of a "good" scenic space-time and of a reasonably
linear narrative. This representational (denotative) work is always primary; it cannot be overlooked.
2. It must convey, beginning with this representation and bearing on it, a global
image, sometimes conceived as a "scheme" and sometimes as a metaphoric "generalization," which in fact is the purely predicative aspect of this cinema.
This somewhat sketchy reminder of the great principles exposed throughout the
1937 treatise on montage no doubt conjures away a little too muchthe meanderings, the hesitations, the contradictionsin order to cast into relief the conjunction,
taken here to the point of ideal fusion, of representational point of view and
discourse.291 refer the reader to Eisenstein's texts themselves for an appreciation of
the way they embody these principles in a meditation on framing, on sound, on
acting itself, and I confine myself here to underscoring a question that is given
privileged status by this approach to filmic form and meaning, namely, the question of truth.
Imaginicity, that is, the constitution of an abstract image superimposed on and
interpreting the representation, is a meaningful term only if this autointerpretation
of the film is (1) singular and exclusive and (2) legitimate. Now, for Eisenstein, these
two requirements are one and the same: by virtue of its being true, this autointerpretation is, in addition, devoid of ambiguity. As Barthes (more elegantly) puts

it, "Eisenstein's art is not polysemous . . .; the Eisensteinian meaning devastates
ambiguity. . . . Eisenstein's decorativism has an economic function: it proffers the
truth."
Without question, it is not a matter of indifference that this "truth" with which
Eisenstein is concerned should find an ultimate criterion in a pragmatics of class
strugglethus, outside the film itself as a discourse. We may recall the violent
criticisms of the conclusion of Strike (1924) proffered by Eisenstein himself because
of its concrete inefficacy, and other similar cases, which should suffice to remind us
that what is being sought after here is indeed not the logician's abstract truth.
Nonetheless, if there is one element of the Eisensteinian system that appears to be
still unsurpassed, it is this one, inasmuch as it posits that filmic form (thus, among
other things, any shot, any institution of a representational point of view) is
determined by the meaning assigned to the represented, having in view a certain
effect in a given context. What is foremost in this conception is the meaning, which
literally informs the entire work of productionwith a criterion of truth furnishing
the guarantee that this function properly.
This theory, which would be of little consequence if it accounted solely for
Eisenstein's films, sheds incontestable light on the relationships between form and
meaning in his filmic "adversaries." What happens if one does not have access to
such a criterion of truth or, what is essentially the same thing, if one says that this
criterion need not be made explicit because it inheres in things themselves (with the
ultimate guarantee of a Leibnizian God)? We know what the corresponding film
theory would look like: it would want its meaning multiple, abundant, analogous
in its "ambiguity" (Bazin) to life itselfand thus would have the formal work
consist in the first place of "pulling away," of making cinema a "reproduction of
reality, uninterrupted and fluid like reality" (Passolini).
To put it in the terms of this article, what Eisenstein demonstrates, directly and
indirectly, is the indivisibility of the link between representation, point of view^
and point of view4, the imposed meaning. Eisenstein takes pains to translate his
biases into plastic metaphors; Bazin, defender of "the voice of things," will demand
that the "world," once it has been so arranged as to speak silently, not have its
discourse fettered; in addition to the significations provided by mise-en-scne,30
Bazin's requirement of additional perception, an enlarging, a deepening and
lengthening, in short, an incessant quantitative "in-addition," has a generic value: its
purpose is to present in the image, in every image, the idea of ambiguity that
carries an essential judgment on reality. A paradox perhaps, but not only that. The
most obstinate refusal to write always gives wayDaney showed this perfectly
with the example of Hawksto the necessity of writing this refusal in one way or
another, and the MacMahonian extremism that, on many points, speaks the truth of
Bazinism, itself includes this necessity in its definition of Langian film direction.31
And so without going any further in this description of the various attitudes that
have historically been adopted toward this idea of a discourse of the image, what
draws our attention at this stage in our reflections is the institutional collusion in a
good part of the history of film (perhaps in all of cinema) between two functions or,
better yet, two natures of the image. The first is to bring to view, according to several
modalities more or less legitimized by the establishment of appropriate conventions. The image shows. The remark is often made that in the face of a film (in this it
14 }. Aumont
is similar to the dream) one does not chooseat least not entirelywhat one sees. I
will return to this point in a momentto reconsider briefly the thorny question of
the spectator of filmand will simply note for the time being this first and essential
definition of the filmic image: it has us see something that is not there but is
supposed to exist somewhere and that it takes the place of. The filmic image is thus
structured in the first instance, by logical anteriority, so as to mimic a point of view.
It is structured as a representational point of view defined by a relationship of
presence and absence (the question of the frame first means: what to show? and
therefore, what is to be produced as existing beyond the visual field, offscreen?) It
cannot be overstated: in this function of showing, the image is sovereign, even if the
signature of mastery in film appears less materially than it does in painting (where
the painter's touch is always his most direct metonymy).
At the same time, the image has a second function, or nature: it literally makes
sense, mobilizing the whole thickness of the iconographie material as well as all
traits of representation to construct the signified(s). This constructed, connoted
meaning may be sparse (the Bazinian ambiguity, the Rossellinian "I-touchnothing" are perhaps the extreme cases of this); it may, on the contrary invade the
field like a weed, like the flowers of blackness and rhetoric in Caligarism: diaphanous or opaque, labile or consistent, meaning is always there. The image of
film, as it has been produced until now, in any case, always predicates.
Naturally, this collusion between the bringing-to-view (le donner voir) and the
giving-to-understand (le donner comprendre) certainly, in spite of what appears to
me to be its universality in films, does not exist independently of narrative. If one
can read in the image a qualification of the represented, it always comes by way of
the coincidence between the representational point of view and the narrative point
of view and, correlatively, via the institution of narrative schmas and the characters' actantial functions, which more directly mobilize the symbolic register. Narrative and, more particularly, the narrative point of view, thus seem to be that which,
inscribing itself both in iconic terms (notably, under the aegis of the frame) and in
terms of meaning and judgments, effects the mediation necessary to any predicative value of the image.
Still, filmic narration, in itself, it seems to me, has only little to do with the image
and much more to do with the reapplication of abstract and general mechanisms
that, moreover, have been extensively studied in the last few decades and take a
variety of forms in film. The difficulty obviously is that it is impossible to assign a
site, in the filmic discourse, to narrative processes: they slip in through figures of
montage but also become fixed compositional techniques and insinuate themselves
"into" the represented itself. This is why the best works on filmic narrative cannot
avoid focusing on the narrative in the film (cf. Vanoye) and never really on the film
(the film in its entirety) as a narrative.
Before returning, one last time, to this interlacing of the points of view that the
image offers to the spectator, I will allow myself one final digression and attempt to
further isolate this loose joint in filmic narrative which makes it both the sturdiest of
linchpins of the work of the gift as well as the least specific of the operations of the
filmic discourse.
My example, somewhat arbitrary in that its choice is contingent on the availability of film copies, is the beginning of Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, made in 1935.32

Specifically, I will consider its first 51 shots after the credits, which form a kind of
prologue to the film; apart from the first shot, which I will pass over, these shots
form one single sequence, the role of which in the narrative economy of the film is to
organize the meeting of the hero, Hannay, and the secret agent, Annabella Smith,
who will die a short while later in his arms, thus setting him on his adventure; this
encounter takes place toward the end of the sequence in question, in a "natural"
way; they bump into each other, literally by accident. Now the entire sequence,
which is pointed toward this end that allows the rest of the film to shift into gear, is
in fact inconspicuously underpinned by an altogether different necessitythat of
showing the face face between Hannay and Mr. Memory, the man with the
phenomenal powers of recall who is, as we will understand in the film's last
sequence, the key link in a ring of spies.
Thus, in this first sequence, the work of the narrative instance is dual: on the one
hand, it has to lead the spectators from the very first shots in which, initially in a
mode of fragmentation, the hero is introduced, up to his meeting Annabella, all the
while insisting on the aleatory and therefore natural character of the succession of
events; on the other hand, but "without saying so," it must indicate the relationship
between Hannay and Memory, the hero and the secret agent, who will later become
each other's enemy. It is this "without saying so" that poses the problem, of course:
because if I can in all certainty assert that the prologue contains this face-to-face
encounter, that is because it is indeed "said" on a certain level.
Let us specify this "saying". The prologue sequence comprises basically three
"moments" that correspond to three types of framing:
1. "Nobody's shots," in Nick Browne's sense, in other words, framings that can be
attributed to the narrative event and to it alone; these are the first seven shots, in the
course of which we are first shown the hero, without his face being revealed for the
moment, taking his seat in the music hall, and then the entire hall;
2. A series of shots, in groups of seven or eight, counterposing hall and stage;
these shots present relatively little regularity (the readymade possibilities for framing are largely ignored, and the points of view from the hall are particularly
diversethe better to mimic, perhaps, the multiple eye of the public, perhaps also
to wave a red herring).
3. Finally, the shots in which the Hannay-Memory encounter is articulated: they
constitute a rather complicated setup, including (1) the drawn-out introduction of
Memory, up until his abrupt projection onto the foreground, in shot 23, in which he
greets the public and us, at the same time, thanks to a fleeting but unmistakable
glance into the camera; (2) Hannay's equally protracted introduction, which, aside
from the very first shots in which he is seen only partially and from the back,
includes shot 31, in which he attempts unsuccessfully to ask his question for the
first time (a supernumerary captures both Memory's and the spectator's attention),
and at the cost of further manifesting the narrator's arbitrariness, shot 41, in which
Hannay suddenly reappears, frontally, at the end of a panning shot, where we no
longer expect to find him; and (3) the face-to-face encounter, properly speaking,
which occurs once and only once, in shot 43, where we see him converse with
Memory.
The entire craft of this encounteror better still, the veritable lure that is
established with itis due to the actualization of the face face (shot 43) being
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treated as a matter of utter insignificance, exactly as a shot like any other that could
have found its way into the vast series of the back-and-forth between stage and hall.
Inversely, in shots 23 and 31, the face face finds itself inscribed symbolically
notably by the precise complementarity of the direction of each man's gazeas an
infinitely more adequate representation of the reality of their relationship, as direct
confrontation. (This is diegetically unactualized, thus unreadable to the spectator.)
It is perhaps difficult for anyone without a precise recollection of the film to
accept my description at face value, but it seems to me impossible that any analysis
of the sequence should miss the striking relationships between two shots that are
the only two in this entire piece to show the characters in profile and looking
ostensibly offscreen.
How should all this be summarized? First, we might underscore the ruse of the
narration that, by casting the first sequence as prologue and point of departure for
the following sequence (the Hannay-Annabella conversation) via an accidental
event (the pistol shot), permits the submergence of the first sequence by the
secondthis explains the establishment of the ruse of leaving the character Memory by the narrative wayside and the narrative masking of his key role. Second, we
should reiterate that in the first sequence, the articulation, however spare, of the
relationship Hannay-Memory is one that is effected in a directly symbolic register
(confrontation, a topology of dominant/dominated gazes, intertwining of knowledge and truth) and is thus derivable not from a simple seeing but from reading.
Furthermore, this articulation is inscribed in exclusively visual data.
I hope, moreover, that, for want of a perfect description, my example will suffice
for the purposes of this scansion of the relationships in which representation,
narration, and the symbolic order knot together. (The fact that it is drawn from a
filmmaker whose concern for mastery and articulation is fully equal to Eisenstein's
should not be surprising but rather indicative of the fact that, materially speaking,
the borders between writing and transparency, if borders there be, are always
permeable.)
This last example has helped us reiterate in this way the reciprocal play of various
filmic agencies, various "points of view." I would like only, by way of concluding, to
situate these instances, these filmic givens, with respect to their receiver: the
spectator. What we have just emphasized, as many others have before, what any
broad study of the history of films demonstrates, is that, like all works of art, the
film is a gift. What any film gives to its spectator, is always:
a) The view onto a coherent imaginary space, itself constructed through a system
of partial (and with rare exception, noncontradictory) views; this first stage of the
relationship of the film to its spectator has long been recognized and isolated as
such. To confine ourselves to the relatively recent past, Souriau and the filmological
school, then Mitry especially, were among those to have called attention to this
"outstanding characteristic of the filmic universe" which is its constitution of a
space.33 Of course, certain filmmakers in certain periods have laid greater stress on
the "filmophanic" appearance (Souriau) of objectsthis is how the notion of
"photogenie" in Delluc or Epstein, or the Eisensteinian close-up, are to be understood; but even the telephone in The Mirror with Three Faces or the wire-rim
spectacles in Potemkin (1925) (or the kettle in Murial [1963]) do not totally avoid being
captured spatially.
In terms of the psychology or the metapsychology of the spectator, film is in the

first instance an act of showing; the institution of the frame, its modifications and
mobilization, substitute themselves for the gaze of the subject-spectator: this
function of substitution has been described often and to different ends,34 and I
would like only to put forth a refinement as to the relationship between the filmic
view and the operation of the scopic drive, a relationship that, in spite of having
become the focus of recent theorizations of the cinematographic apparatus, does
not seem to me to have been clearly correlated to the precise schema by which
Lacan, in his rereading of Freud, described the drive. I am not convinced, in
particular, that the idea of an "identification" of the subject-spectator with the
camera has indeed been separated from the empirical perspective (the phenomenological perspective, if you like) that could be invoked by a Mnsterberg, as early as
1916, in his assimilation of the panning shot to the movement of the eye in its socket.
I do not dispute the idea that there is a relationship of identification that is
established in the cinematographic apparatus between an "all-seeing" spectator
(Metz) and the projector's beam, a mtonymie figurant of the gaze "projected" by
the camera onto the world. But in cinema as in the other visual arts (whether or not
they are organized into spectacle), the spectator is also, and perhaps principally,
someone who sees himself being taken in. We might recall that, in his analysis of
the scopic drive, Lacan indicates (in his typically lacunary fashion) the veritable
suspension of the gaze effected by the (classical) painting. "The painter gives to the
prospective viewer of his painting something that, in a whole kind, at least, of
painting, may be summed up as follows: 'You want to look? Good, then see this': He
gives the eye something to feed on, but he invites one to whom the painting is
presented to set down his gaze there, as one lays down his weapon."35 It is clear
that cinema is not painting, not even landscape painting.36 It is also clear that it has
not been a mistake to emphasize that which, in the cinematographic apparatus,
calls to mind the primordial mirror.37 But does not film entail a contemplation,
complicated and contradicted by the mechanics of narrative but always presupposing, before any other consideration, the existence of a filmic space that is unveiled to
the spectatorthe "all-seeing" subject who is also, however, and inseparably,
merely a seeing subject whose gaze is channeled, blocked as it were, by the filmic
representation? Oudart had pertinently called attention, it seems to me, to this
"dialectic" between a dual, identificational, relationship and the emergence of
meaning, noting in succession how the subject-spectator "dizzily and with jubilation apprehends the unreal space" (this is the phase of the "all-seeing," of the dual
relationship), and how then, "this unreal space which, a moment ago, was the site
of his pleasure [jouissance] has become the distance that separates the camera from
the characters, who are no longer there, who command no longer the innocent
being-there of a moment ago, but now the being-there-for" {for, that is, in order, to
signify the absent field, and the figure itself of what Oudart calls the Absent One).
Oudart unquestionably greatly forces the issue in assimilating, even analogically,
this "turnstile" to a model that was elaborated elsewhere to designate hypothetically the relationship of the subject to his or her own discourse. Also, what I find
convincing in his intuitions is not the mechanical valorization of a cinematography
that "subjects its syntax" to the relationship of "alternating eclipse" between the
subject and the subject's discourse but rather his designation of the topical relation-
18 ]. Aumont
ship between the field and alter-field (or "absent field") as a mobile junction
between contemplation and the gaze, between the "satisfaction" of the scopic drive
and its suspension through the view.
b) At the same time, and in a partially contradictory way, as far as the psychological mechanisms that are set into play are concerned, the spectator is led by a
narrative. The place of this spectator has been described quite well (by Nick
Browne) as a locus: this site represents a "habilitating" function, capable of establishing a link between fiction and enunciation or, to be more precise, of assuring that
there exists between these two instances a passage, a turnstile, which cannot but
call to mind the very model proposed by Oudart for the filmic view.
It would be simplistic to conclude from this that the film establishes two separate
relationships to its spectator, one in which it gives him an imaginary space to see,
the other in which it gives him a narrative to follow; these two relationships are no
doubt a single relationship, and the metapsychological approach that we have
touched on here is no better able to distinguish them than the phenomenological
approach we outlined earlier. Still, it appears to me that this double relationship is
strongly asymmetrical in that, if for no other reason, it is in the unfolding of the
narrative that the identifications are, in the main, produced. Metz, taking up the
Freudian meaning of the term, speaks of these "secondary" identifications, which
unquestionably are never stronger than when the represented situations are simple, abstractarchetypical. These secondary identifications do not easily lend
themselves to study38 (and are perhaps generally overestimated). I would like,
however, to stress the hypothesis that I have implicitly raised: these identifications
seem to be aimed essentially at archetypical narrative situations and heavily coded
representational situations; concrete presence (in the form of figurative overload,39
for example) would, on the contrary, pose an obstacle to these identifications,
provoking the spectator to look and no longer to annihilate himself in a dual
relationship that is always on the order of incorporation.
c) Finally, in relation to this traditional narrative-representational regimen and
the complex game of seduction/identification that it offers the spectator, the imposition of a meaning on the filmic representation as a kind of direct inscription at the
analogical level of potentially autonomous signifieds can no longer appear as
anything other than a perversion. Here we meet, at least insofar as I believe I
understand him, Lacan and the enigmatic remark with which he concludes his
analysis of the function of the painting, positing that "an entire aspect of painting,"
expressionist painting, "gives something along the lines of a certain satisfaction" of
the visual drive, a certain "satisfaction of that which is demanded by the gaze,"
therefore something along the lines of perversion.
This is not the place to enter into the exegesis of this phrase, which is not entirely
clear to me (especially on the question of the distinctive "pertinent trait" of the
"expressionist" school of painting at issue. In spite of the precautions with which it
is certainly fitting to surround any reapplication of the Lacanian conceptual system
(which is by no means articulated with an aesthetics in mind), this may be the place
to begin a possible description of the singular relationship (relation of consumption, of usage, and, tendentially, a form of fetishism) that, parallel, as it were, to the
first two, is sustained by the film with its spectator.
Postscript, February 1987

Upon rereading, in Arthur Denner's perfect translation, an article that was written
six years ago, I am aware that in some respects this is already a dated text. I do not
see any way in which I could improve it without having to write an entirely new
text; some brief remarks, however, might be in order here. First of all, the American
reader should bear in mind that this article was meant for a French-speaking
readership; hence, the occasional reference to some texts that are considered
classics in this country but are largely ignored in France (e.g., Arvidson's Memoirs)
and the absence of reference to some specialized articles published in American
journals (e.g., on early cinema; see note 10) but generally unavailable to a French
reader.
Essentially, this article sketches in passing a theory of spectatorship based on a
consideration and a historical differentiation of the spectator's cognitive activity;
what I just mentioned here as a possible alternative to a (then) dominant psychoanalytical model, has, of course, been given its adequate and fully elaborated
treatment in David Bordwell's work, most notably in his Narration in the Fiction Film,
in which he shows in particular that imaginary space construction and understanding of the narrative may be treated as two aspects of one and the same overall
cognitive process, whereby the spectator responds to cues present in the film, with
reference to external data such as his/her mastery of norms that are historically
defined. I am in complete agreement with Bordwell's general idea that, aside from
"identificatory" processes (before they occur, or parallel to them), the spectator is
engaged in a conscious or preconscious activity that at least verges on cognition,
though I would probably never have developed it as strictly and as fully as does
Bordwell. His workand a number of other recent readings, notably on visual
perceptionwould incline me now to take a clearer stance on this matter than I
took in 1981. The last paragraphs of my text, in particular, would have to be
rearticulated in view of my present opinion that the metapsychological model
elaborated by Metz, Baudry, and others around 1975 is not easily supported by
empirical evidencewhich, to me, does not mean (and this is where I most visibly
separate from Bordwell's endeavor) that it does not correspond to a truth of its own.
But that is another story.
NOTES
1. Cf. the obligatory "posing" of early photography (for half a century) and the unfailingly torturous
apparatuses invented to achieve them.
2. Highly symptomatic examples of this hypostasis appear in all of the literature inspired by the
"politique des auteurs" and its MacMahonian avatar. See Michel Mourlet to be further convinced. On
a less shrill note, and undertaking a more productive channel, we find the same preoccupation in the
early work of Raymond Bellour, Le Monde et la distance, and particularly in his On Fritz Lang.
3. We will return to this matter near the end of this article. The number of high quality works dedicated
to this question permits my present brevity. Besides the classics (Baudry, Metz), see also, in J. P.
Simon's book, the paragraph entitled "Sujet de renonciation et double identification" (p. 113).
4. Here I will leave the debate on "origins" completely aside, its absurdity being generally acknowledged these days.
20 }. Aumont
5. Sensitivity toward this contradiction has grown blurry since the cinema of transparency has been
confirmed in its hegemony. At the end of the silent era it was still quite vivid, as is shown so
excellently in the beginning of Arnheim's book.
6. And the same often goes for the other parameters of representation implied by meaning "number 2."
On this point, see the development of the problematic of seeing/seen in Bellour, in his already cited
article on Lang and, again, albeit in a different manner, in his analysis of The Birds (1969). Correlatively, it is instructive to see the degree to which, for authors like Jost (see his article in Thorie du
film, p. 129) or Vanoye, the expression of "point of view" is monosemous: it always refers to the
narrative point of view.
7. In "Thtre et cinma" (1951): "It is Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and Manet, who have
understood from the inside, and in essence, the nature of the photographic phenomenon and,
prophetically, even the cinematographic one. Faced with photography, they opposed it in the only
valid way, by a dialectical enriching of pictorial techniques. They understood the laws of the new
cinema better than the photographers and well before the moviemakers, and it is they who first
applied them." (Translated by Hugh Gray, in Bazin, What Is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1967): 119.)
8. See the remarkable study by Keith Cohen in the first part of his book.
9. And if the history of cinema converges at times with that of theater, it is essentially by way of the
actorsin other words, on economic and sociological ground rather than on an aesthetic level.
10. On the subject of narration in "primitive" films, see, in addition to the widely known histories of
cinema, the work of Nol Burch, his article on Porter in particular, and the uneven but irreplaceable
collections of texts preferred at regular intervals by the Cahiers de la Cinmathque.
11. This includes some of the best authors, as anyone can verify. What I find even more remarkable is the
concern in M.-C. Ropars's analyses, which deal expressly with the problematic of writing, with an
inventory and the exploitation of the figurative givens.
12. This in spite of the advances of the last fifteen years. The historical works, by virtue of their rigor or
lack thereof, only confirm this difficulty: Brownlow's or Deslandes's books, for example, have a
secondary but startling effect in clearly signaling the "gaps" in our knowledge of the historical past
(cf. Deslandes's refusal, given the absence of reliable documentation, to take up the "patent war" of
1898 or Brownlow's attestation to the definitive loss of all of Universal's silent films).
13. On the "Black Maria" and their first films, see the article by Gordon Hendricks, 1959. On the
Mutoscope studio, see the photographs in Deslandes, Volume II, p. 282, and pp. 28-33 in Brownlow,
1979.
14. Metz, in his article, "Montage et discours," a systemization of some remarks by Mitry, draws the
aesthetic and semiological conclusions.
15. On "Hale's Tour" see Brownlow, 1979, pp. 48-49. Here we might also cite the famous "first dollying"
by the cameraman Promio in a Venetian gondola: Mitry, we recall, has expertly shown that this
ambulant shot is not equivalent to a "true" camera movement, and even less so to a montage within
the shot (see his Esthetique . . . , p. 151).
16. Especially, the famous dispute on whether or not Porter invented alternating montage in Life of an
American Fireman (1902). Apparently, this is not a dead issue, as Amengual confirms in the Cahiers de
la Cinmathque. The literature on Griffith is even more copious; see the priceless anecdotes in Linda
Arvidson Griffith's and Karl Brown's recollections.
17. I have tried to examine these conventions in greater detail in my article on Griffith, to which the
reader is referred.
18. In Pierre Sorlin's shot breakdown for L'Avant-scene, these shots are numbered 310 through 317 (see
the plate of illustrations, p. 33). The breakdown for The Battle, mentioned earlier, appears in this same
issue.
19. See descriptions and pictures of this film in the article by Deutelbaum. Let us recall that criticism of
the overuse of titles was one of the major themes of the "intellectual" critique of the teens and
twenties. On this, Vachel Lindsay is highly representative; see pp. 189-190.
20. On these two films and their lighting, elucidating anecdotes can be found in Linda Arvidson's book.
21. Even in the work of the creative greats of American silent cinema, the search for expressivity in the
image is, in the last instance, always subject to the strict constraints of verisimilitude. An excellent
example is related by King Vidor (interviewed by Kevin Brownlow in his television series on
Hollywood) of the sequence of the attack on Belleau Woods in The Big Parade (1925) in which the

deadly element of the action is conveyed through the imposition of a uniform and implacable
rhythm on the movements of the soldiers. Vidal justified this idea by giving actual events as
precedents.
22. See especially Herbert Jhering's critique published in Kino Debatte.
23. "De l'adaption et du film parlant," Ecrits, Volume I, p. 201.
24. "Les images de ciel" (1928), Ecrits, Volume I, p. 190.
25. In his article "Poetika Kino" (French trans., p. 61)
26. Bear in mind that this is the title (Poetika Kino) of the collection of articles on cinema published by the
formalists Chklovski, Tynianov, Eichenbaum, Piotrovski, and Kazanski. English translation: Richard Taylor, ed., The Poetics of Cinma (in Russian Poetics in Translation, No. 9 [Oxford: Holden Books,
1982]).
27. On the highly literary nature of metaphors in the Russian cinema influenced by formalist theories,
consult the examples given by Tynianov himself, in particular, the very striking billiard sequence in
The Devil's Wheel, in which the falling of the balls into the pockets is intended as a metaphor for the
"fall" of the protagonist.
28. Here, I simply refer the reader to the pages I have devoted to this subject in Montage Eisenstein, where
further critical references may be found.
29. For a clear idea, we need only recall that most famous frame from Ivan the Terrible (1945) in which (on
the righthand side of the frame, in closeup profile) the tsar watches the procession of the Russian
people (like the unwinding of a black ribbon in the snow, in longshot, frame left). Eisenstein wrote
about this in 1947: "Here, the violent plastic contrast of scale and color between the tsar and the
procession is held together by the content of the scene (the unity of the tsar and the people), by the
dramatic element (the bend of the head, marking acquiescence), and by the agreement between the
line of the tsar's profile and the outline of the procession." We have come upon a dramatic situation
whose mise-en-scne as such and whose "truth" are directly translated into visual terms through the
opposition and conjunction of the various parameters.
30. Because Bazin, contrary to the simplistic notion, is no partisan of some kind of untenable "nonintervention . " Speaking of Welles, he says, "The placement of an obj ect in relation to the characters is such
that the viewer cannot escape its signification. . . . In other words, the deep focus shot sequence of
the modern film maker does not renounce montage, but integrates it into its plasticity."
31. See Serge Daney, Vieillesse du Mme, and Mourlet, Sur un art ignor.
32. A rather useful shot breakdown of this film in Avant-scene, no. 249 (June 1980)to which I refer here
for the numbering of shots.
33. As Mitry pertinently shows, such constitution of space occurs only in the mobilization of point of
view: "[With a fixed camera] it is not space that is felt but its extension. Indeed, space can be
apprehended only from the moment that we move in it, oressentially the same thingfrom the
moment we contemplate several successive points of view.
34. For Mnsterberg, for example, the aim is in a sense reversed: he is essentially interested in showing
that all the characteristics of cinema are "mental," to the extent that all the representational machinery of cinema implicitly relies on the laws (grosso modo, for him, Gestalt laws) of perception and on
the apprehending of the world by the human spirit.
35. Sminaire XI, p. 93.
36. About which Lacan, a few lines before the citation we have just given, says that paintings in which no
human figure is represented nonetheless implicitly present a gaze.
37. Although we have good reason to question a certain exaggeration in mimetic detail by the unilateral
insistence on immobility, on the darkness of the auditorium, and especially on the position of the
projector "behind the head" (which is far from being a universal given).
38. However, see the work of Alain Bergala in his Initiation la smiologie du rcit en images and in the final
chapter of Esthtique du film.
39. Here, we might also recall Metz on the blocking of identifications in theater by reason of the physical
presence, in the same space as the spectator, of the actor and the set. Jean-Louis Schefer has this same
"presence" in mind when he postulates in a whole area of cinema a relationship of sideration
between the film and its spectator: if the spectator (who, in Schefer's assessment, is always more or
less an infantile spectator) is siderated, it is because there is something, a presence, on the screen
and not only a representation.
22 /. Aumont
TEXTS CITED
Amengual, Barthlmy, "Un point d'Histoire: La vie d'un pompier amricain et la naissance du
montage." Cahiers de la cinmathque 17 (1975).
Arnheim, Rudolf. Film as Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.
Arvidson, Linda. When the Movies Were Young. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1925.
Aumont, Jacques. Montage Eisenstein, trs. Lee Hildreth, Constance Penley, and Andrew Ross. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
. "Griffith, le cadre, la figure," Le Cinma amricain: Analyse de films, ed. Raymond Bellour. Paris:
Flammarion, 1980.
Bazin, Andr. "Theater and cinema," in What is Cinema? tr. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1967.
. "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema." ibid.
Bellour, Raymond. "Le monde et la distance." Dictionnaire du cinma. Paris: Larousse, 1966.
. "Sur Fritz Lang," Critique 226 (March, 1966).
. "Les Oiseaux [The Birds]: analyse d'une squence." Cahiers du Cinma 216 (1969). (These three
articles are reprinted in L'Analyse du film. Paris: Albatros, 1980).
Bergala, Alain. Initiation la smiologie du rcit en images, Cahiers de l'audiovisuel (1977).
Browne, Nick. "The Spectator in the Text: the Rhetoric of Stagecoach." Film Quarterly 22:3 (1975).
Brownlow, Kevin. The Parade's Gone By. New York: Knopf, 1968.
Burch, Nol. "Porter ou l'ambivalence," Le Cinma amricain: Analyses de films, op. cit.
Cohen, Keith. Film and Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Daney, Serge. "Vieillesse du Mme." Cahiers du Cinma 230 (1971).
Deslandes, Jacques and Jacques Richard. Histoire compare du cinma. 2 vols. Tournai-Paris: Casterman,
1966-1968.
Deutelbaum, Marshall. "Trial Balloons: The Chamber Mystery. Image 18:1 (1975). rpt. in "Image" on the Art
and Evolution of the Film. New York: Dover, 1979.
Eisner, Lotte H. L'cran dmoniaque. 2nd ed. Paris: Terrain Vague, 1965.
Epstein, Jean. crits. Paris: 1974. Vol. 1.
Hendricks, Gordon. "A collection of Edison Films." Image 8:3 (1959). rpt. in "Image" on the Art and
Evolution of the Film. op. cit.
Jhering, Herbert. "Ein expressionistischer Film." (1920). Kino-Debatte, hrsg. von Anton Kaes. TlbingenMnchen: 1978.
Jost, Franois. "Discours cinmatographique, narration . . ." Thorie du film. eds. J. Aumont and J.-L.
Leutrat. Paris: Albatros, 1980.
Kuleshov, Lev. Iskousstvo Kino. Moscow: 1929. Cited from translation in Kuleshov on Film. ed. R. Levaco.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
Lacan, Jacques. Le Sminaire livre XI. Paris: Seuil, 1973.
Lindsay, Vachel. The Art of the Moving Pictures. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1922.
Metz, Christian. "Montage et discours dans le film." Essais sur la signification au cinma. Paris:
Klincksieck, 1972. Vol. 2.
. Le Signifiant imaginaire. Paris: Bourgois, 1977.
Mitry, Jean. Esthtique et psychologie du cinma. Paris: ditions Universitaires, 1965. Vol. 1.
Mourlet, Michel. Sur un art ignor. Paris: Table Ronde, 1965.
Mnsterberg, Hugo. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. New York: D. Appleton, 1916.
Oudart, Jean-Pierre. "La Suture." Cahiers du Cinma 211-212 (1969).
Revuz, Christine. "La thorie du cinma chez les formalistes russes." Ca cinma 3 (1974).
Schefer, Jean-Louis. L'Homme ordinaire du cinma. Paris: Gallimard, 1980.
Simon, Jean-Paul. Le Filmique et le Comique. Paris: Albatros, 1978.
Souriau, tienne, et al. L'Univers filmique. Paris: Flammarion, 1953.
Tynianov, Youri. "Des fondements du cinma." Poetika Kino. Moscow: 1927. Cited from French tr. in
Cahiers du cinma 220-221 (1970).
Vanoye, Francis. Rcit critRcit filmique. Paris: CEDIC, 1979.

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Andalusian Dog (1928).

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successful) attempts at a discourse of the image will be found as much as in

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In terms of the psychology or the metapsychology of the spectator, film is in the

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Postscript, February 1987

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