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The Place of the Observer
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2004-10-01
2022-11-20
2004-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Francesco Casetti
2004/10/01
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Milano
2036-461X
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The Place of the Observer
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/19048/16808
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THE PLACE OF THE OBSERVER1
Francesco Casetti, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano




In the Heart of Things

  “Sicily! The night was an eye full of gaze.” Le Cinématographe vu de l’Etna is one of
the most fascinating essays by Jean Epstein.2 It describes , in a sort of diptych, an ascent
and a descent. The ascent is the one to the volcano, “the great actor that explodes his
show two or three times a century” and of which Epstein came to film “the tragic fan-
tasy.” On this journey, at a time physical and moral, the filmmaker finds himself over-
stepping a threshold: the carabineers have set the road blocks, but the “coloured leaflet
of the aspirins’ bottle” has on them “more effect than the genuine signature of the pre-
fect of Catania,” and allows the troupe to penetrate the forbidden land. Hence in front
of their eyes a grand and terrible scenery burst open “the fire had covered up everything
in the same tintless colour, grey, opaque, livid. Every leaf on every tree, as far as the eye
could see, went through all the shades and crackles of the autumn, and, in the end,
twisted, burnt, fell to the breath of fire. And the tree, naked, black, stood up for an
instant in its burning winter.” The effect is one of an authentic revelation: things show
all at once a soul, indeed, they come to life, and they seem to talk to who is watching
them. “The earth had a human and stubborn face. We felt in the presence of someone
and awaiting for him.” Thus, Epstein is amidst a vivid landscape openly involving him;
this situation, made of surprise, closeness and complicity, brings us back to the very
core of cinema. Films also offer revelations: “to unexpectedly discover, as for the first
time, all things in their aspect divine, with their symbolic profile and their greatest
sense of analogy, with an air of individuality, this is the joy of cinema.” And also in films
landscapes come to life: “one of cinema’s greatest powers is its animism.” Objects have
their attitudes. Trees gesticulate. The mountains, as the Etna, signify. In the film theatre
reality is literally born again. For us, for our eyes. Up to the point that we are captured,
included in its world: “In the end, when man appears in its entirety, it is the first time
that he is seen through an eye that neither is human.”
  The descent, symmetric to the ascent, on the contrary takes place in an all closed
space. “Two days before, in the morning, I was leaving the hotel for that expedition and
the elevator was stuck since half past six between the third and fourth floors […]. To go
down I had to take the main staircase, still with no banisters, where some workmen
were singing insults against Mussolini. That huge spiral of steps gave me vertigo. All
the walls were covered in mirrors. I descended, surrounded by many myselves, by
reflections, by the images of my gestures, by the cinematographic projections.” It is
thus a descent that is as terrible and revealing as the ascent. Epstein, step by step, ends
up facing himself: “Those mirrors forced me to look at myself with their indifference,

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with their truth.” And he finds himself naked, with no superfetation left: “I thought
myself in a way and saw myself in another; that spectacle was destroying all the usual
lies I had been building around myself.” Naked and manifold at once: “I moved my head
and to the right I saw only a root of the gesture, while to the left that gesture was raised
to the fourth power. Looking at one side and then the other, I started to have a different
awareness of my prominence.” Manifold and ephemeral at once: “Each of these images
lived but an instant, just the time to grasp it and it was gone out of sight, different
already.” Naked, manifold, ephemeral, surrounded by its own reflection, and uncertain
of himself. Obviously a sense of authentic bewilderment takes over: “I saw myself void
of illusions, astonished, naked, eradicated, arid, veritable, net weight. I wanted to run
away from that spiral movement in which I felt I was swirling down towards a terrible
centre of my self. Such a lesson of egoism is merciless. An upbringing, an education, a
religion, had patiently consoled me of the fact of existing. Now everything had to be
started all over again.” In this initiation journey, what is emerging is drawing us to cin-
ema: more than a play of reflecting mirrors, “The cinématographe provokes such unex-
pected encounters with oneself.” The camera lens is “an eye provided of non-human
analytical abilities:” it displays the individuals in their bare truth, forces them to look
at themselves with no excuses; reveals to each person that oneself that was never met
before. From this, of course, comes a sense of unease: “The restlessness in front of one’s
own cinematic image is utter and sudden”; moreover “the first reaction to the cinemat-
ic reproduction of ourselves is a sort of horror.” To the point that who is filmed, quite
often does not recognize himself in his own portrait. What he sees is a stranger. One
moment after finding himself, he literally has lost it.
  Thus, an ascent and a descent. A going to the core of things, discovering them alive,
and participating in their existence. But also, almost as a consequence of the first move-
ment, to find oneself in the middle of the spectacle, to discover oneself as the object of
one’s own gaze, to perceive oneself as itself and as other, and thus feeling a sense of
bewilderment. In short, to plunge into what surrounds us, and to have it difficult to
find ourselves back. Cinema repeats this double movement: it does it in its practice,
and at the same time offers it to its spectator. The camera is indeed inevitably impli-
cated in what it is filming; in chasing things, it somehow shares their destiny; in
exchange, it cannot hide its presence; what is filmed shows itself for the very reason
that something or someone is framing it, therefore the camera acts as a co-protagonist
outside and into the scene; but its action, so laid bare by its object of interest, ends up
by being so to speak expropriated. A similar articulation applies also to the spectator.
Who is in front of the screen tends to adhere to what he is watching, he projects him-
self and at the same time identifies with the shown reality; he feels it as living and feels
as living it; but in the very moment that he achieves this intimacy, hence he finds him-
self suspended between different worlds, the one from which he is watching and the
one from which he is watched; the risk is to be uncertain of his position, indeed of his
identity.
  Such a situation refers straight to the new status that modernity seems to assign to
the observer-observed relationships. Instead of an opposition between two poles, what
emerges is a mutual interdependence: the observer partakes of the destiny of the
observed; he moves on its same ground; but intertwining his existence with the object
of his gaze, he also ends up losing his privileged position, up to the point of blurring
with what he is facing, or what surrounds him. Hans Blumenberg, going over the

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FRANCESCO CASETTI

metaphor of the shipwreck, from Lucretius to Neurath, shows quite well how this new
pattern is imposing itself. 3
   The starting point for this is a page from the De rerum natura, in which a person sees,
from the shore, a ship in the storm, and is well pleased of being onto solid ground. But
already with Pascal the situation changes: the ship took us on board somehow (“Vous
êtes embarqué”), and we share its struggle. From here on, the superposition of spectator
and spectacle goes further: there are no more safe places where to shelter, life itself is a
big tempest; he who thinks he is watching the sea’s surging waves, does it from the
midst of it. So we are wrecked, and we have always been. As much so that the only thing
we can do is to build ourselves a raft with the debris from earlier shipwrecks.4
   Away from the dry land: in the waves and winds, in the middle of the eruption. We are
cast away: recovering beams and ropes, rebuilding our self from the fragments that a
mirror or a screen are giving us back. At this point it is not difficult to seize a parallelism
between Epstein’s metaphors and the one explored by Blumenberg. In both cases there
is the idea that what modernity brings to light is an always closer intimacy with the sur-
rounding universe, and at the same time the progressive loss of all certainty. All dis-
tance is wiped out. Indissoluble complicities are created, and at the same time the co-
ordinates are lost. One enters an unstable world that makes him unstable as well. At
this point such is the observer: “Inside” the observed world, but also with no precise
place. Amidst things: in the sea, or on the mountain of fire. And at risk: exposed to
winds and waves, exposed to the lava, exposed to himself.
   So now the lesson of Le Cinématographe vu de l’Etna becomes clear: what Epstein
finds out along the paths of a volcano and along the mirrored staircase of a hotel is a
more general situation of which cinema can be an excellent witness, and to which, as
we will see, it can also acutely reply. It is a condition marked by an overlapping of pres-
ences, instead of a strict division of roles, and by an interweaving of gazes, instead of the
dominion of one amongst them. It is the condition of an observer with apparently no
safety net, that finds him immersed in the landscape he observes, compelled to share
his destiny with that of the object of his gaze, and to become at the same time, himself
the object of a gaze. This is the condition we finally have to come to terms with: maybe
with some embarrassment, but in the bare spirit of truth.


Immersion and Distance

  Three films give us the chance to put this picture to the test. Three among many, but
chosen for their ability to dig out the condition of the observer, and the spectators’ expe-
rience. Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (E. Porter, 1902) gives us an ironic illus-
tration of the attraction a film exercises on the viewer, and, as a consequence of the
sense of proximity and interaction that is established between who’s in the theatre and
what’s on the screen; the world that is represented is at hand, it offers itself directly, and
asks for participation; but the desire that lights up cannot find a full response. Uncle
Josh approaches the screen, tries to take part in the scene he is watching: but the screen
rips apart, and the projection comes to en end.
  The Crowd (K. Vidor, 1928) draws attention to another axis, that of the relationship
between the spectator and the audience around him. Also here it is a matter of creating
a whole from two terms: the spectator is called upon to be part of his environment, set-

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ting himself not only as a scopic subject, but also as a social subject. If this manoeuvre
works out, it is also because it posits itself as a compensation for the missed unity with
the fictive world: one plunges into the surrounding world also because one cannot
plunge completely into the represented world. The desire for a bond and for participa-
tion with the represented world then becomes a desire for a relation and participation
with the surrounding world: in the name of desire (and of the desire to desire) the sub-
ject-spectator becomes a member of a community.
   Blow Up (M. Antonioni, 1966) finally, seems to close the circle: one can “blend” with
the spectacle as much as with the environment, forasmuch as they are both territories
crossed by a web of gazes. Within this net the spectator experiences the fact of being a
subject, as well as the fact of becoming an object; he experiences the reification of his
own gaze: in the very moment when it looks as though he is assurging to a role of
absolute protagonist, hence he is lost on a ground of uncertain solidity. This closeness
with the spectacle and the environment, as a matter of fact, gets him lost. The main
character in the film, Thomas, a photographer, wants to immerse in the city he lives in
and finds himself involved in a murder he eventually took pictures of; in the end he will
not be able to distinguish effective from fictive reality, as well as he will not be able to
understand what his role and position have come to be.
   The three films here considered thus draw a sort of path, which follows the same pat-
tern we have seen in Epstein: approach, implication, the putting at stake of oneself,
sense of loss. Three stylistic devices that have to deal with these films, the close-up, the
crane and the semi-subjective view can ideally mark this path. The close-up (not pres-
ent in Uncle Josh, but evoked by the approaching of the spectator to the screen) conveys
the sense and the need of proximity. The crane that closes The Crowd is symptomatic
because of its ability to plunge the character into his environment. Finally the semi-
subjective view that marks the most significant moment of Blow Up, when Thomas
loses control over his own pictures, here we have a character that observes, but caught
in the same frame with the objects observed by him, and therefore reduced to their
same status, this character sees, but in his vision he also sees himself, and thus, reduced
to object, he is maybe even deprived of his own gaze.
   The complex situation that has come to emerge, and that precisely marks the experi-
ence of the spectator as well as the condition of the modern observer, leads us to some
considerations. It is first of all evident how this condition corresponds to a farewell to
that sort of “theatre of vision” that had long worked as a model for the scopic activity.
Such a “theatre” was based on the presence of a seeing subject and of an object seen, one
facing the other, well separated, with the first one catching and grasping the second,
enclosing it so to speak into his own look, and the second one entrusting itself to the
first, revealing all its aspects, in a direct and exclusive relationship. Blumenberg had,
with the shipwreck metaphor, given us the basic elements for such a model, as well as
the more general ways of its crises.
   Also following Jonathan Crary, who has dedicated a meaningful study to the ways in
which the idea of vision has evolved throughout the nineteenth century,5 we can here
recall some other passages. For example among the factors that strongly undermine
this model there is the awareness that things do not show themselves; reality becomes
a perceived reality only thanks to a series of mental processes that make it possible for
it to be grasped, but which inevitably also act as a filter. Crary goes through a reconsid-
eration of the studies of the physiologists from the first half of the eighteenth century,

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FRANCESCO CASETTI

with the discovery of phenomena such as the afterimage or the perceptive adaptation;
it is clear, though, that this orientation has its germinating moment in the Kantian rev-
olution.6 Parallel to this, there is also the awareness of the fact that the observer does
not operate innocently: he approaches reality with a burden at times heavy of mental
assumptions, almost forced orientations. For this matter, it will here do to recall Marx
and his notion of “ideology:” the complex of the social and productive relationships cre-
ates an “environment” where the social subject finds himself put in, and that deeply
conditions its thought processes. We could go on and on: the fact remains that, from
some point on, the relationship between the scopic subject and the object seen can no
longer present itself as a direct and exclusive face to face. It is not direct: there are medi-
ations that intervene on both sides. It is not exclusive: the context in which subject and
object find themselves also plays a decisive role. Most of all it is not a fronting: it is a
two-player game based on a common belonging, intertwined of mutual determina-
tions, and therefore sustained by some strong complicity. Along this line, to conceive
scopic activity as an action that leads to confrontation and immersion into what one
sees as well as into one’s environment, becomes a necessary step.
   Well then, cinema picks up this ongoing transformation and makes it its own. If, as
we are reminded by Crary, what I have here called the “theatre of vision” had found its
emblem in the 15th century’s Camera obscura, cinema, after the stereoscopic vision, can
posit itself as the emblem of this new pattern of vision. Its offering itself as a field of
cross-gazes that includes and embraces observer, observed and situation, is the seal to
such a candidacy. Yet… if it is true that cinema can intercept and put into form the issues
that agitate modernity, offering itself as an exemplar, it is also true that it does so nego-
tiating between innovation and resistance. There is like a subtle wariness that goes
together with its option for what is new: almost to allow what is old to leave a trace.
And so it happens that cinema incarnates the need for a fusive relationship between
subject, object and environment, but it does so offering a fusion that is partly imagi-
nary, and a fusion that is temporally delimited.
   An imaginary fusion. Uncle Josh already suggested how the relationship between
spectator and spectacle is basically built on an illusion. He who watches a film is con-
fronting not with reality itself, but with images that “look like” reality. This status
undoubtedly depends on their photographic nature; but it strengthens itself thanks to
the fact that the spectator re-elaborates and integrates perceptively the filmic stim-
uli,7 and at the same time he deliberately suspends his disbelief.8 We must add to this
the mechanism of projection and identification activated by the spectator towards the
represented world.9 If he who is watching a film partakes of the adventures taking
place on the screen, it is because he puts himself in the place of the hero (and of who
is watching him),10 and in this he finds himself living in first person what the char-
acter is living. In cinema, spectator and spectacle are tied together: but through a bond
that is essentially mental.
   A temporally limited fusion. When the lights in the theatre go on, the spectator inter-
rupts its relationship with the spectacle; and when the public starts leaving the theatre,
he interrupts his relationship with the audience. Sure, something remains sticking on
him: the lightness of an experience that brought him out of his world, to another one;
but also the viscosity of the closeness of the rest of the audience, the subtle thrill of hav-
ing fully been part of some collective body. Roland Barthes, in his “En sortant du ciné-
ma,”11 has wonderfully described the moment of leaving the theatre and the screen: the

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farewell to that darkness, that blackness, which is “the very matter of the reverie” and
at the same time “the colour of a shed eroticism,” the farewell to “that dancing cone
that cuts through darkness,” made of light, and whose “imperious jet borders our
head, grazes, from the back, the side, some hair, some face;” the farewell to “the filmic
image (including sound),” that seduced me, captured me and to which I am
“attached” (and it is this attachment that grounds the naturalness – the pseudo nature
– of the filmed scene). In a word, what the spectator is leaving is a representation and
what surrounds it (the image and its contouring: “The property of the sound, the the-
atre, the blackness, the dark mass of the other bodies, the rays of light, the entrance,
the exit”): both seduced him, yet precisely, he now leaves them. In a separation that
takes over unity; in a discretion (possible site of protracted pleasure) that reassembled
the indistinct.
  The viewer plunges into the spectacle and the environment: but in a partial and
momentary way. In this interplay the cinematic apparatus plays an important role: on
one side it lays the conditions for a fusive unity between subject and object and between
subject and environment, and, at the same time, it also lays the conditions for this
fusion never to be accomplished in full once and forever. The fulfilment of the illusion
of reality is aid by the peculiar condition of the spectator during the screening (there are
representations that can be taken for direct perceptions of the world;12 and there is a
suspension of the flow of life that permits the activation of belief); in the meanwhile,
due to the synchronism of reactions of the spectators to the film, a veritable communi-
ty is created where each can feel part of.13 On the other hand, the structure of the the-
atre, as it is being shaped from the nickelodeon on, arranges for a double segregation: he
who watches the film cannot physically touch the screen and what’s on it, neither can
he share his intimacy with the other spectators, for there is at least some sort of separa-
tion between spectators. In this sense the setting partially undoes the work of the
device. This ambiguity of the apparatus is not an innocent one: it is so done to keep a
practice alive which, as shown with Uncle Josh, would otherwise be interrupted; it is
but the preservation of an intangible boundary that permits the enjoyment of the show
by the spectator in his singularity. But this non-innocence goes even further. As a mat-
ter of fact, in keeping this boundary, the apparatus allows the spectator to keep believ-
ing that he has some sort of control upon what he is facing and upon what surrounds
him: we might say that this not only permits him to take part in the show and the envi-
ronment, but moreover of “dominating” them. It is on this basis that someone has made
the connection between cinema and Bentham’s panopticon:14 in both cases, we are
dealing with a situation in which a subject “surveys” all that is happening around him
from the centre of the scene. This observation has some interest: in fact, if the spectator
was to be completely immersed in the represented and surrounding world, he would
not be able of controlling anything at all; but even only the slightest distance from the
rest (a single seat) is enough for him to look at things “from the outside,” and thus to
seize and master them. In conclusion, the “centre” of the scene is the issue: if this means
to be at the mercy of winds and waves, then the spectator would be a wrecked person,
though a happy one (“And sweet to me is shipwreck in this sea:” Giacomo Leopardi, not
Blumenberg…); but if this centre was to be connected to bridges and ways out he would
be safe again; even more: he would go as far as to orchestrate the tempest…
  Thus, cinema is exactly this: an occasion to “con-fuse” with the spectacle and the envi-
ronment, but keeping some form of distance, at least a safety distance. Although… the

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FRANCESCO CASETTI

boundary is useful; indeed necessary. But the dream of its complete abolition remains
alive, and it has always haunted cinema. From Sherlock Jr. (B. Keaton, 1924) to The
Purple Rose of Cairo (W. Allen, 1985) the films that stage the dissolution of all bound-
aries and the perfect superposition of the time of the stage and the time of real life are
well numerous. Precisely, so that the immersion be no less than absolute. Come hell or
high water. Sweetness of the shipwreck.



1 This paper contains the opening and closing passages of a chapter in an ongoing work,
   L’occhio del Novecento (Milano: Bompiani, 2005), whose central topic is the way in which
   cinema has come to build a gaze that widely worked as a model for the gaze of the 20th cen-
   tury. In that text, the three films here mentioned in passing, are analyzed in detail, and are
   commented with a series of contemporary theoretical essays, in order to bring to the surface
   the issues they deal with.
2 Jean Epstein, Le Cinématographe vue de l’Etna (Paris: Les Ecrivains Réunis, 1926). For a recent
   study of the work of Jean Epstein, see Jacques Aumont (ed.), Jean Epstein, cinéaste, poète,
   philosophe (Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 1998). On this specific text, see Stuart Liebman,
   “Visiting of Awful Promise. The Cinema Seen from Etna,” in Richard Allen, Malcolm Turvey
   (eds.), Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida. Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson (Amsterdam:
   Amsterdam University Press, 2003).
3 Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence
   (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).
4 In this line of interpretation, see also the introduction by Bodey to Blumenberg
5 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
   Century (Cambridge-London: MIT Press, 1996).
6 Max Milner, La Phantasmagorie (Paris: PUF, 1982).
7 On the ability of the spectator to filter and integrate filmic data, see the classical observations
   by Hugo Münstenberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York: D. Appleton & C.,
   1916).
8 On the intentional suspension of disbelief and the building of belief from the freudian
   denegation, based on a structure such as “Yes, I know it is not true, but still…,” see at least
   Octave Mannoni, Clefs pour l’imaginaire (Paris: Seuil, 1969).
9 The mechanism of projection-identification, as a constituent of the spectator’s participation
   is already analyzed by Münstenberg in The Photoplay. This will be the topic of many filmo-
   logical studies in the 1950s, and finds its most effective analysis in Edgar Morin, Le Cinéma
   ou l’homme imaginaire. Essai d’anthropologie sociologique (Paris: Minuit, 1956).
   For a survey of filmological studies, see Francesco Casetti, Theories of Cinema. 1945-1995
   (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).
10 For the difference between secondary identification, with the character portrayed, and pri-
   mary identification, with the filmic gaze on the character, see Christian Metz, Le Signifiant
   imaginaire (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1977).
11 Roland Barthes, “En sortant du cinéma,” Communications, no. 23 (1975), pp. 104-107.
12 On this aspect of the device, see Jean-Louis Baudry, “Le Dispositif: approches métapsy-
   chologiques de l’impression de réalité,” Communications, no. 23 (1975), pp. 56-72; Jean-Louis
   Baudry, “Cinéma: effets idéologiques produit par l’appareil de base,” Cinéthique, no. 7-8
   (1970). For a continuation of Baudry, see Ch. Metz, op. cit.

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13 Regarding the relationship between cinema and the creation of communities, during the past
   years many contributions focused on the power of the cinematic medium to define and legit-
   imate the social identities of subcultures or ethnical and political minorities. It is not possi-
   ble in the present contribution to take them in the proper account; therefore, I would rather
   like to remember one of the first reflections about cinema socializing function: Emilie
   Altenloh, Zur Soziologie des Kinos. Die Kino-Unternehmung und die sozialen Schichten
   ihrer Besucher (Leipzig: Spamerschen Buchdruckerei, 1914); see also Emilie Altenloh, “A
   Sociology of the Cinema: the Audience,” Screen, Vol. 42, no. 3 (Autumn 2001), pp. 249-293.
14 This idea has recently been put forward especially by Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping:
   Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press,
   1993).




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