10.54103/ai/15446



Representing altered states of consciousness, even through the most phantasmal of technical images, is an inherent contradiction; once we attribute a physical body, i.e. objectivity, to mental images, we deny what Husserl considers their very essence. Jean Mitry draws from this assumption when discussing filmic access to mental states from a phenomenological perspective. The following essay reconsiders Mitry’s contribution with specific reference to the role of projection, technically and metaphorically speaking, in the cinematic technique and imagination; this, with the intention of suggesting some crucial questions for the comparison between the filmic forms of the visible and those inaugurated by the technology of the virtual. 



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Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness: Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (I)
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Barbara Grespi
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Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness: Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (I)
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1
               Between the mind
               and the senses:
Jean Mitry’s approach
to cinematic consciousness.
Toward an idea of the virtual
image in the    cinema
by Barbara Grespi
          Mitry
                       (I)
                    Husserl
                    Mental state
                    Projection
                    Imagination




                                   Issue №1 Year 2022
                                   → Altered states
                                   Edited by Giancarlo Grossi
                                   and Andrea Pinotti
Between the mind and
the senses: Jean Mitry’s
approach to cinematic
consciousness.
Toward an idea of the vi1 rtual
image in the cinema (I)
by Barbara Grespi

Abstract                      Representing altered states of consciousness,
                 even through the most phantasmal of technical images, is
                 an inherent contradiction; once we attribute a physical body,
                 i.e. objectivity, to mental images, we deny what Husserl
                 considers their very essence. Jean Mitry draws from this
                 assumption when discussing filmic access to mental states
                 from a phenomenological perspective. The following essay
                 reconsiders Mitry’s contribution with specific reference to
                 the role of projection, technically and metaphorically speak-
                 ing, in the cinematic technique and imagination; this, with
                 the intention of suggesting some crucial questions for the
                 comparison between the filmic forms of the visible and
                 those inaugurated by the technology of the virtual.



Mitry           Husserl            Mental state              Projection             Imagination
To quote this essay: B. Grespi, “Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach
to cinematic consciousness. Toward an idea of the virtual image in the cinema (I)”,
AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 17-36

      1 This essay is the result of research activity developed within the frame of the project
      AN-ICON. An-Iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images. AN-ICON
      has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s
      Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. [834033 AN-ICON]),
      and is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” of the University of Milan
      into the project “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2018-2022” attributed by Ministero dell’Istruzione,
      Università e Ricerca (MIUR).
BARBARA GRESPI                                    17                                          AN-ICON
Le cinéma transforme l’écran en une image d’image.2
                            A silver visor, you would say an ancestor of a
              VR headset were it not for the cap that wraps around the
              lower part of the skull. It causes a sharp pain in the eyes
              and its function is not to watch images, but to record
              them, like an ordinary video camera. Nevertheless, it has
              no lens but two satin panels, one for each eye. From the
              outside, you can see the signal of a scanner running; fr m
              the inside, the captured images appear on two side-by-side
              screens. It is the device invented by Wim Wenders for Until
              the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt, 1991) (Fig.1),
              in the story, a prototype which all the great world powers
              are hunting down in the fevered climate of the end of the
              millennium. Its camera captures the biochemical event of
              vision, that is, not only what you see but also how your
              brain reacts to the perceived images, collecting electrical
              stimuli directly from the nerves. The recorded “visual”
              impulses can thus be transmitted to the brain of another
              person, even a blind one, and this allows them to see
              without using the retina. Still, as the story progresses, the
              machine evolves into something even more complicated: a
              technique for extracting from the mind images which are
              completely independent of sight and correspond to pure
              imagination, dreams or memories. Sight translated into
              data gives birth to “artificial” images, segmented in a grid
              and the result of numbers; imagination, on the other hand,
              has pictorial qualities, strong colours and blurred
              borders. Sci-fi cinema provides a long list of vision
              machines, but Wenders’ possesses a special allure,
              balanced, as it is, between the old and the new.




      2 Dr. Allendy [René Allendy], “La valeur psychologique de l’image”, in AA.VV., L’art
      cinématographique (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1926): 75-103, 77.

BARBARA GRESPI                                  18                                           AN-ICON
                                        Fig. 1. Wim Wenders, Until the End of the World
                                         (Bis ans Ende der Welt), 1991. Screen capture.
                          Between cinema and VR: an exquisitely optical
            prosthesis, it creates abstract images, devoid of somatic
            and sensory traces, but at the same time it is a medium of
            intersubjectivity, which allows the exchange of visions at a
            neural level. It is a digital device, but also a truth machine:
            it records, documents, reflects even the unconscious, or
            the deepest levels of our psyche. It represents the cinema
            in its increasingly sharp juxtaposition to other technologies
            of the contemporary era, such as VR: the first in perpetual
            balance between body and mind, the second completely
            biased towards the sensory.
                         The representation of mental acts in cinema
            is always, as in Wenders’ movie, a metafilmic moment in
            which the image consciousness is elaborated, together with
            the ways in which multiple factors, material and immaterial,
            contribute to it, including the gaze and its structure. In the
            following pages, by rediscovering Jean Mitry’s reading of
            Husserl’s thinking, we will discuss the role of projection,
            technically and metaphorically speaking, in filmic access
            to the mental; this with the intention of bringing out some
            crucial questions for the comparison between the cinematic
            forms of the visible and those inaugurated by the technol-
            ogy of the virtual.



BARBARA GRESPI                     19                                         AN-ICON
                                 The mental image and the filmic image

                             Beyond what they represent, filmic images are
              “situated” in a space halfway between the mental and the
               real: the iconic stream that the spectator sees flowing would
               not exist outside his or her mind, which integrates and
               merges the perception of the single frames thus creating
               the movie. Even before the birth of cinema, the paradoxi-
               cal nature of the moving image struck William James, who
               referred to it to describe consciousness in terms of a zoe-
               trope: just as that optical toy produces effects of continuity
               by making discontinuous fragments flow, so the conscious-
               ness merges its sequences of scattered and uninterrupted
               micro-perceptions into an illusory whole.3 The similarity
               between the film and the activity of the mind will be at the
               core of one of the first essays in film theory, The Photoplay
               by Hugo Münsterberg, a former student of medicine who
               converted to psychology under the influence of Wilhelm
               Wundt, and later became James’s colleague at Harvard.4
               The reference to James’s metaphor of the zoetrope allows
               us to understand what Münsterberg meant by suggesting
               that photographic images had been estranged from physi-
               cal reality once they had achieved movement – contrary to
               what one might naturally think – and were brought closer
               to the reality of consciousness.

The massive outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from
space, time, and causality, and it has been clothed in the forms of
our own consciousness. The mind has triumphed over matter, and
the pictures roll on with the ease of musical tones.5
                           Münsterberg develops a precise parallel be-
                tween cinema and mind, seeing the main filmic techniques

       3 “Is consciousness really discontinuous, incessantly interrupted and recommencing (from
       the psychologist’s point of view)? And does it only seem continuous to itself by an illusion
       analogous to that of the zoetrope? Or is it at most times as continuous outwardly as it inwardly
       seems?”. W. James, The Principles of Psychology (Create Space, 2017): 125.
       4 M. Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg: His Life and Work (New York: Appleton & Co., 1922): 21-22.
       5 H. Münsterberg, “The psychology of the photoplay” (1916), in A. Langdale, ed., The
       Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings (New York-London: Routledge, 2002):
       153-154.

BARBARA GRESPI                                   20                                          AN-ICON
              as reflecting the activities of consciousness, such as atten-
              tion (corresponding to the close-up and the shifting from
              in-focus to out-of-focus), memory (represented by flash-
              back as enclosure of the past in the present) and emotion
              (in its development, according to William James, from a
              kinesthetic sensation).6 This early conception of the mind
              as a movie justifies the most common visual rhetoric that
              complemented the representation of a character’s mental
              acts: fading, superimposition, soft focus. Becoming con-
              solidated precisely in the years in which Münsterberg wrote
              his essay, these optical effects aim at framing a segment
              of the visible within a zone which is not real and not certain,
              just as the discontinuous hyphens of the thinking bubbles in
              comics highlight the difference between a thought spoken
              out loud and one which remains unspoken in the charac-
              ter’s mind. Transitions in classical cinema in essence pro-
              duce the slow fading of the actual into the mental, evoking
              an idea of the mind as a place of weakening, intermingling
              and metamorphosing of sensory input.
                             These narrative fragments which interrupt the
              flow of the film by jumping onto a different level and moving
              beyond the diegetic physical reality, are thus presented and
              interpreted as the “contents” of a fictional consciousness;
              this implies believing that the human mind operates by
              storing impressions derived from perception in the shape
              of ghostly pictures to be inspected, when needed, by the
              mind’s eye. We are familiar with this notion, its ancient roots
              and its points of junction with modern thinking,7 as well as
              its confutation by phenomenology, whose intake is crucial
              but still difficult to integrate into studies of the imagination.8
              Even a thinker like Sartre who tries to get rid, precisely
              through Husserl, of the idea of the mind as a repository of
              images, was victim to the same “illusion of immanence” that

      6 Münsterberg shares the Jamesian perspective (the famous: “we do not weep because
      we are sad, but we are sad because we weep”). H. Münsterberg, “The psychology of the
      photoplay”: 107-108.
      7 See the ancient idea of the mind as a room furnished with images in F.A. Yates, The Art of
      Memory (New York-London: Routledge, 1966).
      8 See for instance J. Jansen, “Imagination: phenomenological approaches”, in M. Kelly, ed.,
      Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 430-434.

BARBARA GRESPI                                 21                                         AN-ICON
               he intended to criticize once he admitted the existence of
               a “psychic object” (the analogon) and presented it as the
               mediator of the imaginative process.9
                            Sartre is very much present in Esthétique et
               psychologie du cinéma by Jean Mitry, the massive trea-
               tise in two volumes written by the French critic, activist
               and director between 1963 and 1965,10 a work capable of
               bridging, as Dudley Andrew wrote, the formalism of clas-
               sical theory with emerging semiotics.11
                            The second volume, centered on form and cin-
               ematic language, is the best known and most appreciated,
               while volume one, particularly eclectic, has suffered from
               an evident removal, also highlighted by the significant cuts
               made in current French and English editions.12 Here we
               find the first remarkable confrontation of film theory with
               Husserl, an attempt recognized by the pioneers of the phe-
               nomenological approach to cinema, but never investigated,
               and even dismissed, in the numerous developments of this
               branch of study.13 Mitry discusses precisely the theme of
               mental images, which Husserl brought together under the
               umbrella term of Phantasie, to indicate both the ensem-
               ble of images devoid of physical support and the act of
               imagination through which they “appear” (erscheinen).14
               It is an act of imagination that which gives shape to a
               physical image, deposited on a support and capable of

      9 Casey recognized the error. See E.S. Casey, “Sartre on imagination”, in P.A. Schilpp, ed.,
      The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (La Salle: Open Court 1981): 16-27.
      10 J. Mitry, Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma (vol. I: Le structure, and vol. II: Les formes)
      (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1963, 1965). A useful rediscovery of Mitry’s contribution to film
      theory in: M. Lefebvre, “Revisiting Mitry’s Esthétique et Psychologie du Cinéma at Fifty”, Mise
      au point [online], no. 6 (2014), accessed February 20, 2021.
      11 See D. Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University
      Press,1976): 181ff.
      12 The current English edition The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema (Bloomington:
      Indiana University Press, 1997) was translated from the abridged French edition of 1990. We
      will quote from this book, unless otherwise specified.
      13 Vivian Sobchack recognizes his engagement in a Husserlian phenomenology of
      cinema – see her The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton:
      Princeton University Press, 1992): 29 – while A. Casebier, Film and Phenomenology: Toward
      a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University
      Press, 1991) prefers to lean upon Baudry. Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Julian Hanich dismiss
      Mitry’s idea of mental image as a distortion of the phenomenological arguments. See their
      stimulating introduction “What is film phenomenology?” to “Film and phenomenology”, Studia
      Phaenomenologica XVI (2016): 36.
      14 E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925) (Dordrecht:
      Springer, 2005).

BARBARA GRESPI                                   22                                            AN-ICON
              depicting an absent entity (Bildvorstellung), as well as that
              which creates mental images (Phantasievorstellung), which
              are by no means comparable to “iconic contents” of the
              consciousness, but rather to be understood as intuitions
              based on “sensorial phantasms”.15 Mitry does not refer to
              these precise pages of Husserl, whose essential theses
              are however echoed, but rather he remodels phenomenol-
              ogy under the influence of his experience of the cinema.
              Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma stems indeed from a
              general philosophical position – a unique case in film theory,
              if we exclude Deleuze’s two tomes – a thesis in which it is
              of primary importance to define the role of perception by
              mediating among Husserl’s theses, Sartre and psychology.
                            In Mitry’s interpretation of intentionality, per-
              ception is an act based on sensory impressions but is
              not reduced to them; consciousness completes them, by
              extracting an object from the undifferentiated continuum
              that constitutes matter and hence giving form, by difference,
              also to the subject. Consciousness is based on mental
              images, which are not residues of ocular perception which
              have survived in the absence of the object, and nor are they
              entities existing in themselves and of which thought could
              avail itself; they are rather forms through which thought
              became aware of itself. With this idea, Mitry gets rid of the
              metaphor of consciousness as a receptacle of data and
              substitutes it with that of consciousness as a reflex of per-
              ception. With perception in the absence of the object, that
              is Phantasie, the glare of consciousness is, so to speak,
              one-way: “the mental image is the product of a wish di-
              rected toward the object which we know to be absent [...]
              it is the consciousness of that wish becoming ‘known’ in
              the object of its volition”.16




      15 In Husserl called precisely “Phantasmen”. In the comment on Husserl’s theory of
      imagination, we follow C. Calì, “Husserl and the phenomenological description of imagery:
      some issues for the cognitive sciences?”, Arhe 4, no. 10 (2006): 25-36 and Husserl e
      l’immagine (Palermo: Aesthetica Preprint, 2002): 113-114.
      16 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 35-36.

BARBARA GRESPI                                 23                                         AN-ICON
                                 The moving image consciousness

                             Mitry’s starting point, therefore, is not the cin-
               ematic representation of consciousness, but the mental
               images that become part of the imaginative process; this
               process is extremely important in cinema, a medium which
               powerfully simulates the real but at the same time possess-
               es a deep-rooted ghostly nature. According to Mitry, this
               double character of cinema is reflected by the two kinds
               of signs of which it is composed: linguistic and psycholog-
               ical signs; linguistic signs give shape to the filmic images
               (through a grammar of the visible), psychological signs con-
               struct mental images (with the collaboration of the spectator).
                             To understand how these two “signs” intersect
               in the beholder’s experience, it is necessary to come back
               to Husserl and his well-known tripartition regarding image
               consciousness, which is not clearly referenced in Esthétique
               et psychologie du cinema, but still recognisable in many
               lines. Husserl’s classification is based on three perceptive
               dimensions: the first is the “image-thing” (Bildding), that
               is, the concrete material of which the image is made, its
               support; the second is the “image-object” (Bildobje t), that
               is, the immaterial object which depicts something (the ide-
               al content of a series of perception);17 the last is the “im-
               age-subject” (Bildsujet), that is, the depicted subject (the
               referent in the real world).18 A subtle but substantial differ-
               ence separates the image-thing from the image-object: if
               the support were damaged or destroyed (for instance, if a
               canvas was torn), the image-object would not be affected,
               because it does not possess a real existence, neither inside
               nor outside of consciousness (only a complex of sensations
               experienced by the spectator in front of the pigments exists,
               as well as the way in which he invests it with intentionality,
               by creating image consciousness). This component is more
               easily understood in the case of the mental image, which

      17 In Mitry’s words, see J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 27.
      18 I use this expression, although I am aware that between the image and the subject
      there is not properly a semiotic relationship. See C. Rozzoni, Nell’immagine: Realtà, fantasia,
      esperienza estetica (Milan: Le Monnier, 2017): 9.

BARBARA GRESPI                                   24                                          AN-ICON
               lacks a material support, in contrast to the physical image.
               Still, there is a minor difference between the two, because
               what matters is their common capacity of actualizing absent
               objects (that is to say, making them present). The illusion
               of presence is based on the production of sensorial phan-
               tasms that allow us to guess how an object would be if it fell
               under the sphere of our senses, for instance touch or hear-
               ing, but first and foremost sight.19 An “optical” phantasm
               makes us intuit how a specific object would appear to our
               gaze within a particular environment, and this imaginative
               act covers our perception, albeit not totally. Indeed, the
               mental image as well as the physical image insert them-
               selves into the perception in a contrastive way, that is, not
               fully covering and substituting our reality, but allowing us
               to keep it alive. It is not a question of greater or lesser illu-
               sionistic power (some images could appear so real to be
               mistaken for reality), and neither of frames (a more or less
               marked discontinuity in the space where they are situated),
               rather it is a matter of time: Husserl points out that this is
               more the contrast between the time of the image-object
               and the actual present,20 to which our body belongs above
               all (but also the Bildding, if we are talking about physical
               images). Here below, the echo of these concepts in Mitry:

We have seen that the mental image presents a reality both vi-
sualized and recognized as absent. If, as I write these lines, I think
of my car in the garage, I can see it perfectly well, mentally - or,
at least, I can see a certain aspect of it - but I am seeing it as not
present. It appears to my consciousness as an image certifying
the absence of what I am thinking about - more especially since,
      19 This is what was brightly called an “artificial presence”. See L. Wiesing, Artificial Presence:
      Philosophical Studies in Image Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
      20 “[The image-thing] bears within itself the characteristic of unreality, of conflict with the
      actual present. The perception of the surroundings, the perception in which the actual present
      becomes constituted for us, continues on through the frame and then signifies ‘printed paper’
      or ‘painted canvas’”. E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925):
      51 (emphasis in the original). On this base, I suspect that we should abandon the optical idea
      of the frame when we face an environmental image (like VR), and rethink it in corporeal terms,
      considering the spectator’s real body as the border; indeed, you always have the possibility to
      leave the artificially present world not by seeing outside of the image, but certainly by touching
      the surrounding space and objects (or people), that is, paradoxically, becoming aware of the
      unreal in the very moment in which we get the chance to imagine the real through our body
      (thus in a perfect inversion of the cinematic relationship between reality and imagination).

BARBARA GRESPI                                   25                                           AN-ICON
in so doing, I do not stop perceiving the world impinging on me
from all sides. The mental image is therefore a product of the will
standing in opposition to our normal perception of the world and
its objects and which, though coexisting with it, becomes more
isolated the more directly in opposition it stands.21
                            Mitry realises that these ideas are of great im-
               portance for the analysis of cinematic images, which had
               also attracted Husserl’s attention, albeit fleetingly. The great
               philosopher’s reflections about the art of the twenty-century
               concern the repeatability of cinematic screenings such as
               to leave the image-object unaltered,22 and the intensity of
               the actualization produced by filmic images, so high as to
               reduce the perception of the image-thing to the minimum.
              “Deception and sensory illusion of the sort belonging to
               panorama images, cinematographic images, and the like”,
               he wrote, “depend on the fact that the appearing objects
               in their whole appearing state are slightly or imperceptibly
               different from the objects appearing in normal perception.
               One can know in these cases that these are mere image
               objects, though one cannot vitally sense this”.23 His ger-
               minal reflection on cinema has been taken up by some
               important contributions, mainly centered on the relation-
               ship between consciousness and true believing and on
               the interplay between actor and character;24 but the path
               indicated by Mitry is just as interesting and perhaps more
               in line with Husserl’s suggestions. Mitry wrote:

Stuck to a cellulose base, projected onto a screen [...] the film image,
in contrast with the mental image, is objectively present; but, like
the mental image, it is the image of an absent reality, a past real-
ity of which it is merely the image. Its concrete reality is that it is
       21 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 82-83.
       22 “If I let a cinematographic presentation run off repeatedly, then (in relation to the subject)
       the image object in the How of its modes of appearance and each of these modes of
       appearance itself is given as identically the same image object or as identically the same mode
       of appearance”. E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925): 646.
       23 E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925): 146.
       24 See C. Rozzoni, “Cinema Consciousness: Elements of a Husserlian Approach to Film
       Image”, Studia Phaenomenologica, XVI (2016): 294-324; J. Brough, “Showing and Seeing:
       Film as Phenomenology”, in J. D. Parry, ed., Art and Phenomenology (New York-London:
       Routledge, 2010): 192-214.

BARBARA GRESPI                                   26                                           AN-ICON
fixed to a support and is thus objectively present and analyzable.
The reality recorded on the celluloid strip is at all times capable of
being projected. In this sense, projection is a kind of “actualization”
in the same way as the mental image.25
                             In these lines, a central question arises: in cin-
                ema, the act of making something present (“actualization”,
                he writes, alluding specifically to Husserl) takes place in
                the very moment of projection, because the strip of film is
                only a “latent movie”; according to Mitry, the celluloid is
                the main support (the image-thing), while the screen un-
                balances perception from the thing to the object, allowing
                movement to be seen. Neither the destruction of the film,
                nor even a scratch in the screen cancels the object-film,
                which, as we said, is that ideal content which, though cre-
                ated during the projection, survives it – as Orson Welles’
                Don Quixote never ceases to teach us, a foolish spectator
                who stabs the white screen with his sword in an attempt to
                heroically oppose his enemies of light and shadow. Welles
                shows that the screen is not the canvas, is not one and the
                same with the image, which resists its destruction, both
                because it is anchored to another, more real support, and
                because it lives in the mind, paradigmatically in that of the
                visionary Don Quixote. The celluloid is more similar to the
                concrete materials of the painter, so much so that the di-
                rector selects carefully its size and sensitivity, while he can
                do nothing with the surface of the screen. But if we look
                back at the origins, we find the two supports imploded
                into each other: in pre-cinema, frame and screen coincide,
                because the illusion of movement, for instance in Muto-
                scope, depends on the flow of photographs bound one on
                top of the other, within the screen format created by their
                borders: the “book”.
                             Do we have thus a double “thingness” in the
                filmic image? And if so, is it not a fundamental prop-
                erty of all technical images,26 even in the many variants

       25 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 31, 83.
       26 This is perhaps another way to interpret the idea of technical images as proposed by V. Flusser,
       Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

BARBARA GRESPI                                    27                                           AN-ICON
              of the analogue, but also digital system? The material cin-
              ematic film behaves like photosensitive paper in photogra-
              phy, or data code in the digital system, while the shadows
              projected on the screen correspond to the photographic
              positive, and to the extraction of the mpeg file on the dis-
              play. From photography onwards,27 to codify an image and
              to visualize it, that is to render it accessible to the human
              eye, became two different and not necessarily concurrent
              processes; obviously, with the transition to digital, the gap
              between the two moments widens, because there the ma-
              trix is no more a first, far-fetched or incomplete visualization
              of the subject, but its translation into a numerical language,
              not accessible to the senses, and thus potentially shared
              only by machines.28 But the point is: to develop a theory of
              cinematic image anchored to the process of visualization
              instead of that of encoding – focusing at the same time on
              the spectator because, as Münsterberg said, without him
              the image in motion simply does not exist – we have to work
              on the intersection between the physical and the mental.
                             By a different route, Tom Gunning drew similar
              conclusions, when he re-launched the theory of realism
              moving from Metz’s brief incursion into phenomenologi-
              cal territory;29 Gunning is not a supporter of the deviation
              toward the mental, but certainly an adversary of Peirce’s
              indexicality when used to reduce the impression of reality
              in cinema to the sole photographic base. Thomas Elsaess-
              er, on the other hand, is not a phenomenologist but he
              rediscovered the “mental side” of cinema when he drew
              the distinction between the transmission of the image to
              the human senses and its recording through traces, rather
              than optical geometry. Indeed, he saw the model of this
              process in the human memory, as Freud had conceived it
              (that is like a Mystic Writing Pad), and proposed to re-start

      27 But not in its daguerreotype version, which did not use the positive-negative reverse
      process: the metal film plate in the camera was developed as a positive and as a unique copy.
      28 On this topic see: F. Casetti, A. Pinotti, “Post-cinema ecology”, in D. Chateau, J. Moure,
      eds., Post-cinema: Cinema in the Post Art Era (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
      2020): 193-218.
      29 C. Metz, “On the impression of reality in the cinema”, in Film Language: A Semiotics of the
      Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974): 3-28, discussed by T. Gunning, “Moving
      away from the index: cinema and the impression of reality”, differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 29-52.

BARBARA GRESPI                                  28                                          AN-ICON
              the theoretical discourse about cinema from its nature of
              interface between data and the human senses, in the key
              of an archaeology of the digital.30
                            These excellent contributions are perfectly in
              tune with Mitry’s emphasis on projection as a Husserlian
              moment of actualization, an effect in which the perception
              of physical image intersects with mental envisioning; in it
             “the film frame merely takes the place of the mental image
              with all the force of its credible reality”.31 Moreover, Metz
              quoted by Gunning builds on Mitry in his analysis of the
             “filmic mode”, which he defines “the mode of presence”,32
              thinking not of a state of sensory overwhelming, but of an
              active consciousness made up of the mental reflexes of
              perception. Nevertheless, the mental, though it is a reflex
              and a logic of the images, is precisely what the film could
              never make visible. “It is completely impossible to repre-
              sent a mental image”, Mitry wrote, “since, having become
              visual, it ceases to be mental”.33
                            The filmic image is helpless in the face of what
              is not accessible to the sight or at least what no one has
              ever seen; for this reason, Mitry would probably have ap-
              preciated the frameless film by Douglas Gordon (Feature
              Film, 1999), a video installation that basically consists of an
              orchestra performing the full soundtrack written by com-
              poser Bernard Hermann for the film Vertigo (Alfred Hitch-
              cock,1958). On the two walls of the exhibition room, only
              the conductor appears in large mirror projections. However,
              the real images filling the room are not the physical ones
              on the walls, but those which flow in the viewer’s mind
              in correspondence with the musical notes: the sequence
              where Kim Novak jumps into the bay under San Francisco’s
              Golden Gate Bridge, or when she comes back in her green
              suit like a ghost. The spectator experiences a kind of vision

      30 T. Elsaesser, “Freud as media theorist: mystic writing pads and the matter of memory”,
      Screen 50, no. 1 (2009): 100-113. Kuntzel already worked on the similarities between Freudian
      model of memory and the cinema, see: T. Kuntzel, “A note upon the filmic apparatus”,
      Quarterly Review of Film Studies, no. 1 (1976): 266-271.
      31 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 86.
      32 C. Metz, “On the impression of reality in the cinema”: 4.
      33 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 209.

BARBARA GRESPI                                 29                                         AN-ICON
                 not based on retina, as the director himself reports, refer-
                 ring to interviews with spectators coming out of the gallery:
                 Vertigo is projected through the ears into the mind of the
                 person listening to Hermann’s notes.

                             States of mind and self projection

                               Are we to think, then, that only the absence of
                 images triggers imagination? And if it is totally impossible
                 to simulate the mental with the means of cinema, how shall
                 we construe the numerous attempts, since the origins of the
                 medium, to simulate altered states of consciousness? Mitry
                 argues that dream sequences, hallucinations and premo-
                 nitions are not the most mental but the most subjective,34
                 and in this he joins Wenders, whose machine will show
                 that the mental could be translated into the visible only by
                 sharing subjectivity. Therefore, the result of the cinematic
                 simulation of altered states depends on the ways in which
                 the movie makes the viewer slip into the consciousness
                 of a character, articulating his or her seeing and feeling
                 through the “subjective shot”.
                               Film theory has always juxtaposed two forms
                 of the cinematic gaze: the so-called objective shot, corre-
                 sponding to the simulation of a world that is completely
                 independent from every perception, be this human, animal
                 or belonging to other living and non-living species, and
                 the subjective shot, the simulation of a perceived world,
                 thus filtered at a sensorial and cognitive level through a
                 specific fictional identity. The analysis of these two modes,
                 together with other more nuanced ones, are part of the
                 glorious problem of the point of view in the cinema, a pro-
                 tagonist of the semiotic-narratological debate of the Eight-
                 ies and Nineties, also discussed towards the end of the
                 season in Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology, which takes
                 up precisely Mitry’s contribution. The chapters about the
                 point of view in Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma are
                 indeed the best known and most discussed, even if, before

      34 Ibid.

BARBARA GRESPI                          30                            AN-ICON
                Sobchack, perhaps not fully understood. Sobchack’s The
                Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience
                (1992), was published only a year after Metz’s Impersonal
                Enunciation, or the Place of Film (1991),35 and thus criticiz-
                es the positions of the great semiologist, especially Metz
                reading Mitry;36 but in reality, Impersonal Enunciation is a
                point of encounter between the two authors.
                            Mitry is among the first to study in depth The
                Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1946), the film noir
                shot almost entirely in subjective mode. Here we spectators
                investigate in the shoes of the detective Philip Marlowe,
                who is framed frontally only at the beginning and at the end
                of the movie, while for the rest his eyes are our eyes and our
                body is disguised in his. Mitry knows how to wonderfully
                describe the way in which the spectators’ gaze follows the
                character’s gait from the inside, striving to consider his feet
                as their own, or the way in which they hold onto the railing
                with him, trying to see their own hands in Marlowe’s. But
                this attempt fails. They cannot recognize the image of their
                own body. Rather they imagine themselves accompanying
                the body of an Other, objectified, as all the rest is.

It is obviously not me climbing the stairs and acting like this, even
though I am feeling sensations similar to those I might feel if I were
climbing the stairs. I am, therefore, walking with someone, sharing
his impressions.37
                             Then when the famous sequence of the mir-
                ror arrives, during which the face of Marlowe is reflected
                (always from the character’s view), spectators are slight-
                ly disappointed, Mitry apparently suggests. They have to
                admit that the impressions that they tried to embody were
                not theirs. Or rather: this is true for all the viewers except
                for the director, because he, Robert Montgomery, played
                Marlowe; thus, for him, and for him only, the subjective shot

       35 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
       36 C. Metz, “Problèmes actuels de théorie du cinéma” (1967), in Essais sur la signification au
       cinéma, 2 vol. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972): 35-86.
       37 J. Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema: 210.

BARBARA GRESPI                                     31                                            AN-ICON
              works. Put another way, in the subjective shots, Montgom-
              ery would experience himself as another, by again embody-
              ing the sensorial phantasms of his previous experience;
              most of the time, he would live through an experience of
              partial mirroring: proprioceptive but not optical.38
                             Sobchack addresses this analysis on two lev-
              els. On one level, she expands Mitry’s critique by adding the
              argument of the difficulties of simulating a proprioceptive
              act. It is not just a matter of noticing the difference between
              the spectator’s hands and the actor’s, but also the fact of
              being forced to perceive differently from the way in which
              the character would probably do so in reality. Indeed, the
              subjective shots serve two simultaneous purposes: they
              show the clues necessary to solve the mystery and at the
              same time they show Marlowe’s perception in a believable
              fashion. However, the fictional Marlowe would be interested
              only in the inquiries, and not in his percipient self; for this
              reason, Sobchack speaks of a difference in the intentional
              focus that detaches the viewer from the character. In addi-
              tion, our way of directing attention consists in moving our
              eyes inside a visual field in which everything remains equally
              sharp, even what we are not focusing on; on the contrary,
              classical cinema deploys a marked in-focus and out-of-
              focus procedure, it constructs clear and blurred zones of
              visibility by regulating the focal point. So, the analogy be-
              tween cinema and mind in Münsterberg’s theory (movie
              techniques as metaphors of the processes of attention),
              becomes for Sobchack an element which unmasks the
              difference between man and machine. This is indeed the
              second and more radical level on which Sobchack’s line of
              argument is based, and it is so important that it overturns,
              at least formally, Mitry’s reasoning.
                             Building on a Merleau-Pontyan version of phe-
              nomenology, Sobchack challenged the semiotic distinction
              between subjective and objective gaze and introduced the

      38 I suggest something similar to the inspiring idea of the shot/counter-shot relationship in
      terms of specular reflection without a mirror, as proposed by A.C. Dalmasso, “Le plan subjectif
      réversible: Sur le point de vue au cinéma à partir des écrits de Merleau-Ponty”, Studia
      Phaenomenologica, XVI (2016): 135-162.

BARBARA GRESPI                                 32                                          AN-ICON
               concept of the film’s body, meaning “an intentional instru-
               ment able to perceive and express perception”.39 From this
               standpoint, the film’s materially nonhuman (but percipient)
               body presents the world subjectively to the spectator’s eye.
               Consequently, the movie camera sees a character and
               sees him/her seeing with the same degree of subjectivity
               (its own). It can disguise itself totally as them, by attributing
               to them a temporary responsibility for the visible percep-
               tion, but not without a great effort.40 This is indeed the true
               unbridgeable difference between bodies in the subjective
               structure of the gaze: not between the body of the spectator
               and the body of the character, but between the machine’s
               body (“the non-human embodied film”) and the actor’s, and
               even more so, the spectator’s body. On the surface, we
               are dealing with an inversion of perspective, but in reality,
               it is a convergence: the film’s gaze overwrites that of the
               character whether we define the machine as an object (but
               always from a phenomenological perspective: Mitry), or as
               a subject (a sentient body: Sobchack).
                              In the years between Mitry’s volume and Sob-
               chack’s, the supporters of the subjective gaze proliferated,
               with some epochal contributions;41 but when Metz closes
               that chapter with his Impersonal Enunciation, we come
               back, in a sense, to the beginning. Metz comes from his
               book on cinema and psychoanalysis, where he differentiat-
               ed a form of primary identification (with the camera) from a
               secondary one (with the character), so he is already inclined
               to elaborate on the reflexive role of the apparatus. But Im-
               personal Enunciation starts by arguing, exactly as Sobchak
               does, that the “semi-subjective shot” discovered by Mitry
              – an over-the-shoulder shot directed along an axis which
               more or less aligns with the character’s point of view – is
               the best form of subjectivity; firstly, because it also shows,
               even if partially, the body of the perceiver, a necessary


      39 V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: 247.
      40 Ibid.: 231.
      41 See the still indispensable F. Casetti, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator
      (1986) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

BARBARA GRESPI                                  33                                           AN-ICON
              factor to encourage identification,42 and secondly, because
              it makes you sense the presence of a second gaze that
              perceives the percipient. In conclusion, even leaving phe-
              nomenology and remaining in the sphere of semiotics, the
              point is this: the subjective shot is not an empty mould
              for the spectator’s gaze and body, it is rather a place for
              redoubling: it “performs above all a double doubling of
              the enunciative moment […] it doubles at a stroke the site
              [foyer] that shows via him, and the spectator, who sees
              via him […] subjective image is reflexive but not a mirror. It
              does not reflect itself; rather, it reflects the source and the
              spectator”.43
                             From this standpoint, the subjective shot be-
              comes a reproduction en abyme of the projection: we could
              probably rethink also the idea of the first person shot in VR
              (and XR) along this line; there the beholder’s body-gaze,
              apparently implied at every level, is rather to be construed
              in its radical coincidence with the machine of visibility.
                             In conclusion, when we talk about subjectivity
              in the image, we talk about a reflexive form in which the
              movie makes itself visible44 (through the character’s eye or
              through other stylistic strategies and non-human bodies,
              so-called “enunciating entities”). Still, exploiting a fictional
              identity not to access the physical world but some form of
              Phantasie, to re-use a Husserlian word, means to introduce
              a further enunciative level in which the character, unques-
              tionably, mediates the visible with its Self, that is to say,
              its own human and fictional subjectivity. This is what Mitry
              meant, probably, when he maintained that mental images
              plead the cause not so much of the mental but of subjectivity.
                             However, movies about people with supernatu-
              ral faculties offer a range of fictional representations of men-
              tal states more in tune with this idea of “impersonal subjec-
              tivity”; in those cases, indeed, the character’s altered states

      42 Mitry argued first that to adopt a gaze, one must have seen the body of this gaze; see the
      development of this idea in E. Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration
      and Subjectivity in Classical Film (Amsterdam-New York-Berlin: Mouton, 1984).
      43 C. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or The Place of Film: 106.
      44 Unless you think of the distribution of knowledge and the positioning of the narrator
      towards the diegetic universe (Genette’s focalization).

BARBARA GRESPI                                 34                                         AN-ICON
               are not to be explained through psychology, but through
               their function as human machines of vision (symmetrical
               to Sobchack’s cinematic machine as non-human body).




                                    Fig. 2. David Cronenberg, The Dead Zone, 1983. Screen capture.

                            In The Dead Zone (David Cronenberg, 1983) (Fig.
              2), the visions of John, who awakens from a coma lasting
              nearly five years, traverse his body and materialize around
              him. There is a physical support (an image-thing) where the
             “data” of the events that John is able to “hallucinate” are
              stored, and it is the body of the person who experienced
              them: each vision is generated by the contact between
              John’s hand and that of the subject, whose past or future
              is in question; the handshake produces tremors, signals
              travelling through the clairvoyant’s body and reaching his
              eyes, which at this point “project”45 the images (images-ob-
              jects) into the environment, and not without pain (the same
              consumption suffered by the protagonists of Until the End
              of the World). John becomes a visitor to these virtual spac-
              es, which he experiences with his body, while the specta-
              tors experience his hallucination as their own not by vir-
              tue of an unconditioned adhesion of gazes (the subjective
              shot), but rather by virtue of a plurality of subjectivisations

      45 See the idea of divination as projection in one of the figures who inspired Jean Mitry’s
      thinking, known as Dr. Allendy: “The fortune tellers […] do nothing but project on reality
      something which doesn’t possess in itself any determination, a latent image that is inscribed
      in it — and therefore we can understand all the techniques of divination as projection on reality
      of an inner and obscure sense” (our translation and emphasis). See Dr. Allendy [René Allendy],
     “La valeur psychologique de l’image”: 99-100.

BARBARA GRESPI                                  35                                           AN-ICON
              which renders the visible a place for the emergence of
              the gaze.46 In his first vision, John hallucinates the fire in
              which the daughter of his nurse could die: the hospital
              room is transformed into the child’s bedroom, including
              John’s bed, suddenly surrounded by toys, teddy bears and
              flames. The vision is subjectified in a complex and multiple
              fashion: a rightward gaze opens the imaginary field with
              a classic subjective shot, and a leftward gaze brings the
              field back to reality; however, between the two gestures,
              the camera starts to wander in a mental space-time until it
              includes John, whose eyes have ceased to bear the sight
              of the images, while his voice remained altered as it is in
              his state of hallucination. In the most memorable of the
              visions, which concerns the young victim of a serial killer,
              John’s subjective shot projects the imaginary gazebo in
              which the murder took place; but his close-up was already
             “subjectified” before his visions, because his face no longer
              immersed in the darkness of the night (the actual present),
              but surrounded by a diffused glow, the one that was there
              at the moment of the crime (the virtual past); this abrupt
              change of illumination intimates that John is already part
              of his hallucination. His entrance into the virtual world, his
              artificial presence on the scene of the crime, right behind
              the victim, but invisible, is a quintessential cinematic scene.
              John ends up in the image almost accidentally: a dolly starts
              moving slowly and brings into the frame his figure, almost
              by chance; it is thanks to a slightly excessive movement
              that we can see our vision together with its source. And
              it is precisely this ghostly, casual and plural presence that
              characterizes the cinematic experience; it is difficult to think
              that it could be replicated in immersive media, like VR,
              where there is, at least for the moment, no possibility of
              detaching the spectator’s gaze from the “projector”.




      46 See the idea of “plan subjective réversible” and of the film as a “visible surface cracked by
      different gazes” from the Merleau-Pontyan perspective adopted by A.C. Dalmasso, “Le plan
      subjectif réversible”: 140 (our translation).

BARBARA GRESPI                                  36                                          AN-ICON
AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON.
The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan.



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