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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - Cinematic interfaces: retheorizing apparatus, image, subjectivity
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Projects & Abstracts
2011-10-01
2022-12-11
2011-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Seung-hoon Jeong
2011/10/01
Yale University 
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Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - Cinematic interfaces: retheorizing apparatus, image, subjectivity
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CINEMATIC INTERFACES: RETHEORIZING APPARATUS, IMAGE, SUBJECTIVITY
Seung-hoon Jeong / Ph.D. Thesis Abstract1
Yale University




   Since the digital revolution, media studies has repositioned celluloid in media archaeology while
drawing attention to new media, new visuality, and new spectatorship. We could then conceive
“what is/was cinema?” by “re-placing” rather than replacing such film theory concepts as appara-
tus, image, and subjectivity in a feedback circuit between past and present. In this context, the new
media term interface seems inspiring; its notion of contact surface between humans and/or
machines has evolved in various ways to redefine cinema, screen, and body. But I find interfacial
elements or aspects to be inherent in film (studies), given the term’s specificity (compared to
“apparatus”), flexibility (applicable to “sur/face”), universality (implying “relationality”), and
intermediality (promoting “interdisciplinarity”). A creative adaptation of interface could then serve
to discover and invent a synthetic, multi-faceted notion of interfaciality that seems to underlie both
image and subjectivity. For this project, I rearticulate a variety of film and interdisciplinary theo-
ries such as ontology of image, narratology of material, psychoanalysis of the real, phenomenology
of body, cognitivism of mind, ethics of the other, aesthetics of appearance, and sociology of the
digital. Ultimately, I propose to remap film studies through the prism of this interface theory.
   I introduce cinematic interface as any contact surface mediating two sides through spatial difference
(object/medium/subject) and temporal deferment (recording/editing/projection). Then, the cinematic
apparatus appears as a conveyer belt of interfaces from the single surface (object) through the triple
medium-interface (camera/film/screen) to the double body-interface (eye/mind). This model allows us
to combine Sigmund Freud’s and Henri Bergson’s still resonating ideas on perception and memory by
way of reshaping the former theories of apparatus, ideological or analytical.
   Drawing on a wide range of films, five chapters then investigate the interfaces on screen: (1)
the direct appearance of a camera/filmstrip/screen, (2) the character’s bodily contact with such a
medium-interface, (3) the object’s surface and (4) the subject’s face as “quasi-interfaces,” and (5)
image and subjectivity as such. In each chapter, interfaciality leads us beyond its basic notion of
neutral mediation or transparent communication toward the inherent disequilibrium, intrinsic
dialectics, inhuman dimension, and implosive dynamics between two sides of an interface,
between object and subject. I elaborate on these inner qualities in terms of “asymmetrical mutu-
ality,” “ambivalent tactility,” “immanent virtuality,” “multiple directionality,” and “para-
index”/”indexivity” – five keywords correspondent to five crucial concepts in film theory: suture,
embodiment, illusion, signification, and indexicality, which I continue to reframe through differ-
ent methodologies, unearthing hidden niches and latent constellations between them.
   Opening with Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005), Chapter 1 (The Medium-Interface) not only
argues that its video-interface “desutures” classical seamless narrative, but also locates the mul-
tiple suture/desuture dialectics in semiotic suture theory, renewed psychoanalysis, enunciation

CINÉMA & CIE, vol. XI, no. 16-17, Spring-Fall 2011                                                  163
SEUNG-HOON JEONG

theory, narratography, etc. This process then leads to interfaciality not just before, but also imma-
nent in the eye asymmetrically related to the inhuman Gaze in matter, while moving from the
Lacanian to Deleuzian ontology of perception. Likewise, Chapter 2 (The Body-Interface) takes
Rossellini’s Virginity (Illibatezza, in Ro.Go.Pa.G., 1962) as a springboard for rethinking the
touch of the screen in the history of spectatorship theory: from psychoanalysis through early Rube
film study to phenomenology of embodiment. Ambivalently tactile, embodied interfaciality is
here found in the skin in terms of “screen as body” and “body as screen.”
   Chapter 3 (The Surface of the Object) examines how the surface of an object can appear like a
pseudo-camera, a virtual filmstrip, and a flat/fluid/fluorescent screen, as suggested in Apichatpong
Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century (Sang sattawat, 2006). Questioning the aesthetics of
illusion, I here shed light on illusion of interfaciality immanent in the world, the cognitive effect
of “as if it is becoming interface.” On the opposite side, after looking at Kim Ki-duk’s Time (Shi
gan 2006), Chapter 4 (The Face of the Subject) analyzes how the face can function as a multi-direc-
tional interface: a “readerly window” to the character, a “writerly mirror” for the viewer, a
“machinic simulacrum” of a subjectivity, and an “uncanny icon” toward otherness. I accordingly
trace the notion of signification from semiotics to phenomenology to ontology to ethics.
   In the final chapter (Image and Subjectivity) I readdress indexicality in two ways: the image as
“para-index” that only partially, impossibly indicates the absent but immanent Real, and subjec-
tivity as “indexical activity,” the act of indication for information or participation through our dig-
its’ tactile experience of digital interfaces. In this way, my upward trajectory from the infrastruc-
ture of apparatus through the superstructure of onscreen images to the apex of image itself goes
back down to the actual ground of interface, geared up to our new media world. In so doing I sug-
gest that interface might serve for a general theory of image and subjectivity through a meta-crit-
ical reengagement with film theory.

Chap. Theme               Content                  Concept                  Theory                    Approach
Intro Apparatus           Object (image), medium   Apparatus,               Physiology, psychology    Medialogy
                          (camera/film/screen),    interface
                          subject (eye/mind)
1        Medium           Medium-interfaces        Suture,                  Semiotics, psychoanalysis, Hermeneutics
         (camera, film,                            asymmetrical             photogrammatology,
         screen)                                   mutuality                ontology
2        Body (skin)      Screen-body,             Embodiment,              Psychoanalysis,
                          body-screen              ambivalent               phenomenology,
                                                   tactility                historicism, technesis
3        Object           Quasi-interfaces         Illusion, immanent       Phenomenology,
         (surface)                                 virtuality               ontology, aesthetics
4        Subject (face)   Face-character,          Signification,           Semiotics, phenomenology,
                          face-viewer,             multiple                 ontology, ethics
                          face-faciality,          directionality
                          face-otherness
5        Image,           Object-(image-           Indexicality,            Ontology, epistemology,   Philosophy
         subjectivity     interface)-subject       para-index, indexivity   sociology




1     Ph.D. dissertation in Film Studies & Comparative Literature at Yale University (May 2011), supervised
      by Dudley Andrew and Thomas Elsaesser. For information: seunghoon.jeong@nyu.edu.

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