Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture by Slavoj Žižek

Author:Slavoj Žižek [Žižek]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

to the zero degree of tracking (which moves from the overall view of reality to its real point of anamorphosis), we have at least three other variants in Hitchcock:

• The precipitous, "hystericized" tracking shot: see the example from The Birds analyzed above, in which the camera draws into the blot too quickly, through jump cuts.

• The reverse tracking shot, which begins at the uncanny detail and pulls back to the overall view of reality: witness the long shot in Shadow of a Doubt that starts with the hand of Teresa Wright holding the ring given her by her murdering uncle, and pulls back and up to the overall view of the library reading room in which she appears as nothing but a small dot in the center of the frame; or the famous reverse tracking shot in Frenzy. 8

• Lastly, the paradox of the "immobile tracking shot," in which the camera does not move: the shift from reality to the real is accomplished by the intrusion into the frame of a heterogeneous object. For an example, we can return to The Birds, in which such a shift is achieved during one long, fixed shot. A fire caused by a cigarette butt dropped into some gasoline breaks out in the small town threatened by the birds. After a series of short and "dynamic" close-ups and medium shots that draw us immediately into the action, the camera pulls back and up and we are given an overall shot of the entire town taken from high above. In the first instant we read this overall shot as an "objective," "epic" panorama shot, separating us from the immediate drama going on down below and enabling us to disengage ourselves from the action. This distancing at first produces a certain "pacifying" effect; it allows us to view the action from what might be called a "metalinguistic" distance. Then, suddenly, a bird enters the frame from the right, as if coming from behind the camera and thus from behind our own backs, and then three birds, and finally an entire flock. The same shot takes on a totally different aspect, it undergoes a radical subjectivization: the camera's elevated eye ceases to be that of a netural, "objective" onlooker gazing down upon a panoramic landscape and suddenly becomes the subjective and threatening gaze of the birds as they zero in on their prey. 9

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