An Analytical Essay on

Jean Louis Baudrys

Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Appartus

French Apparatus theorist, Jean Louis Baudrys essay Ideological Effects of the Basic
Cinematographic Apparatus (1970) is on of film theorys greatest hits, the major essay that
explains the function of the camera as an ideological apparatus. He provides an assessment of the
relationship between ideology and the cinematic apparatus. Baudry explicates how
characteristics of cinema and the viewing experience are connected to the cultural study of
ideology from the perspective of film theory.

The birth of western science coincides with the development of the optical apparatus-
telescope-and marks the end of geocentrism with the decentering of the human universe. Later,
another optical apparatus-camera obscura-paradoxically serve to elaborate in pictorial work a
new mode of representation, perspectiva artificalis. This system, a recentering or at least
displacement of the centre (which settles itself in the eye), will assure the setting up of the
subject (here it stands for subjective the perceiving and ordering self) as the active centre
and origin of meaning. The scientific base of the optical instruments assures them a sort of
neutrality and avoids their being questioned/conceal not only their use in ideological products
but also the ideological effects.

Baudry states that critics of the ideological effects of film have focused on the effects that
such film have as finished products, but the technical bases on which these effects depend has
been ignored. Between objective reality and the camera, site of inscription, and between the
inscription and projection are situated certain operations, a work which has as its result a finished
product. The problem is that this product, the film, hides the work that creates this
transformation.

The film goes through transformations, from decoupage, a short breakdown before
shooting, to montage. Between these phases of production a mutation of signifying material
takes place precisely in the place occupies by the camera. That is, the decoupage, which
operates as language is transformed through the apparatus of the camera into image, or exposed
film, which is then transformed again, through the apparatuses that make editing possible, into a
finished product.

Another operation effected through instruments takes place when the finished product of
the film, which is a commodity that possesses exchange value, is transformed through the
apparatuses of the projector and the screen to become the filmic event which can then be
consumed, which is a product with use value.

The finished film restores the movement of the objective reality that the camera has
finished, but it does so by creating the illusion of movement through a succession of separate,
static images. The fact that this transformation, and the instruments that enact it, is concealed
from the viewer, is inherently ideological.

Baudry argues that we must turn towards the technological base of the cinema in order
to understand its truly ideological function. This is constituted by the three technological parts of
the film- the camera, the projector, and the theatre- and film going experience.

The eye of the subject

The camera- an assembly of optical and mechanical instrumentation- carries out a certain
mode of inscription which permits the construction of an image analogous to the perspective
projections developed during the Italian Renaissance. The Renaissance will elaborate a centred
space and the centre of this space coincides with the eye or the subject. Monocular vision of
the camera is based on the principle of a fixed point by reference to which the visualised objects
are organised and specifies the subject. In focusing it, the optical construct appears to be truly
the projection-reflection of a visual image whose hallucinatory reality it creates. It lays out the
space of an ideal vision and in this way assures the necessity of a transcendence-metaphorically
and metonymically. In this sense it contributes (the painting/cinema) in a singularly emphatic
way to the ideological function of art, which is to provide the tangible representation of
metaphysics.

Projection : The Difference Negated

Baudry then explains how the projects produces and illusion of continuity between
successive images while constructing movement, ultimately creating an illusion of reality. This is
the result of the illusion of continuity caused with the help of projector and screen. The
projection operation (projector and screen) restore continuity of movement and the temporal
dimension to the sequence of static images. The effacement of the differences of the static
images creates the illusion in which a film lives. But any breakdown in the projection process
brought the spectator abruptly back to discontinuity. Thus one may assume that the originating
basis of the perspective image, namely the eye or the subject, is liberated by the operation
which transforms successive discrete images into continuity and movement; continuity restores
both meaning and consciousness.

The Transcendental Subject

The eye-subject, the invisible base of artificial perspective becomes absorbed in,
elevated to a vaster function, proportional to the movement which it can perform. The
movability of the camera seems to fulfil the most favourable conditions for the manifestation of
the transcendental subject. Human consciousness identifies the transcendental subject from the
moving images. These images of something constitute the something as their meaning. The
images seem to reflect the world as the domain of natural existence and presupposes the domain
of the transcendental. Limited by the framing of the movie camera, the world offers an object
endowed with meaning, and intentional object, implied by and implying the action of the
subject which sights it.

Each aspect which the mind grasps is revealed in turn as a unity synthesized from a
multiplicity of corresponding modes of presentation. The nearby object may present itself as the
same, but under one or another aspect. Thus the differential aspects that the consciousness
perceive from the subject generated from the narrative continuity, makes possible a specific type
of identification that a film necessitates.

The screen-mirror: Specularization and Double Identification.

The projection and reflection processes happen in the darkened room of a theatre. The
screen-mirror along with the dark, silent ambience facilitate the perception of the transcendental
subject and its meaning from the reflected images. The mise-en-scene of Platos Cave
reconstructs the situation necessary to the realisation of the mirror stage discovered by Lacan.
According to Lacan two complementary conditions-immature powers of mobility and a
precocious maturation of visual organization- are necessary to make this imaginary constitution
of the self in this psychological phase. The reality mimed by the cinema is thus first of all that
of a self. Baudry explains how the spectator identifies with the film at two levels: with the
character onscreen, but more with the transcendental subject whose place is taken by the
camera. The transcendental self unites the discontinuous fragments of phenomena, of lived
experience, into unifying meaning like the mirror which assembles the fragmented body in a sort
of imaginary integration of the self. Through this, each fragment assumes meaning by being
integrated into an organic unity.

The contents of the image and the forms of narrative adopted are little importance if the
(secondary) identification remains possible in cinema. Thus it fulfils its function as support and
instrument of ideology. It is an apparatus destined obtain a precise ideological effect, necessary
to the dominant ideology: creating a fantasmatization of the subject, it collaborates with a
marked efficacity in the maintenance of idealism. Thus the cinema assumes the role played
through out western history by various artistic formations. The ideology of representation and
secularization form a singularly coherent system in the cinema. Both specular tranquillity and the
assurance of ones own identify collapse simultaneously with the revealing of the mechanism,
that is of the inscription of the film-work. Thus cinema appears as a sort of psychic apparatus of
substitution, corresponding to the model defined by the dominant ideology. Reflections on the
basic apparatus ought to be possible to integrate into a general theory of the ideology of cinema.