Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses by Thomas Elsaesser & Malte Hagener

Author:Thomas Elsaesser & Malte Hagener [Elsaesser, Thomas & Hagener, Malte]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Media Studies, Social Science
ISBN: 9781135967062
Google: nF05g8ZU8tYC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-12-16T20:34:02+00:00

Paranoia thrillers, such as were popular in the 1970s (THREE DAYS OF THE CON DOR, US 1975, Sydney Pollack; THE PARALLAX VIEW, US 1971, Alan J. Pakula; KLUTE, US 1971, Alan J. Pakula) and have had a comeback with the TV series 24 (US 2001–2010, Fox) and Homeland (US 2011–, Showtime), and films such as FLIGHTPLAN (US 2005, Robert Schwentke), THE INTERPRETER (US 2005, Sydney Pollack), THE CONSTANT GARDENER (UK 2005, Fernando Meirelles), SYRIANA (US 2005, Stephen Gaghan), or EAGLE EYE (US 2008, D.J. Caruso) in the atmosphere of post-9/11 concerns with the state security apparatus and its reaches into all spheres of life, readily lend themselves to a mise-en-scène of the panoptic gaze, now no longer centralised but dispersed over a myriad of surveillance devices, of which, once again, not all have to be optical or concerned with vision. MINORITY REPORT (US 2002, Steven Spielberg) is a state-of-the-art showcase for all kinds of surveillance and monitoring devices, even including an actual panopticon, as if to provide its own ‘archive’ of obsolete technologies.

If one were to use Foucault’s notions of discipline and control in order to deconstruct the acts of seeing and looking in a film, one would have to search not only for gender-specific imbalances and asymmetries but also for the way that vision and knowledge are asymmetric in relation to each other: to see is no longer to know, and ocular verification is no guarantee of truth. Likewise, the structures of political or economic power are rarely visible, and often too complex or volatile, for human beings to claim ‘knowledge’ in the sense of mastery. Gilles Deleuze once described Foucault’s concept of the gaze as his ‘folds of vision,’ in order to distinguish it from the ocular pyramid one associates with perspectival vision: “an ontological visibility, forever twisting itself into a self-seeing entity, on to a different dimension from that of the gaze and its objects.”53 The panoptical gaze of surveillance, despite the clear geometrical hierarchies that enable its functioning, is thus less tied to an eye than it signals a continuum from inner eye to external monitoring, implicating the gaze of someone who is looking but also the gaze emanating from an empty space, modelled both on power enforced by vision and power relayed by human conscience into ‘self-surveillance.’

Finally, Foucault and Lacan are not the only thinkers according to whom the (imagined) gaze of the Other upon the Self is constitutive of the development of subjectivity. In systems theory, Niklas Luhmann has also elaborated on the role of observation of first and second degree in the construction of identity:

Individuals are self-observers. They distinguish themselves through the fact that they observe their own act of observation. In today’s society they are no longer defined by their (more or less good) birth, nor by origin or traits that set them apart from all other individuals. Whether baptised or not, they are no longer ‘souls’ – in the sense of indivisible substances – that guarantee them eternal life. It is

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