Jean Epstein 's Cinema of Immanence

The MIT Presshttp://www.jstor.org/stable/779069 .

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/779069?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

Jean Epstein's Cinema of Immanence: The Rehabilitation of the Corporeal Eye*

MALCOLM TURVEY

Shall we say, then, that we look out from the inside, that there is a third eye which sees the paintings and even the mental images, as we used to speak of a third ear which grasped messages from the outside through the noises they caused inside us? But how would this help us when the real problem is to understand how it happens that our fleshy eyes are already much more than receptors for light rays, colors, and lines?

-Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind" (1961)

I

Consider the following fragment from Epstein's oft-repeated paean to the cinema, written in 1921:

Although sight is already recognized by everyone as the most developed sense, and even though the viewpoint of our intellect and our mores is visual, there has nevertheless never been an emotive process so homo- geneously, so exclusively optical as the cinema. Truly, the cinema creates a particular system of consciousness limited to a single sense. 1

This definition, and indeed celebration, of cinema as a "process" that instantiates a purely visual mode of perception and consciousness is not peculiar to the film theory of Jean Epstein. Germaine Dulac, for example, writing in 1925 on the essence of cinema, also argues: "Should not cinema, which is an art of vision, as music is an art of hearing ... lead us toward the visual idea composed of movement and life, toward

* I would like to express my deep thanks to Annette Michelson for her editorial and critical assistance in the preparation of this text. I am also grateful to Richard Allen, Frances Guerin, Keisuke Kitano, and Mikhail Yampolsky for their comments on earlier versions. I have benefited considerably from Stuart Liebman's pioneering study of Jean Epstein's film theory; see Liebman, 'Jean Epstein's Early Film Theory, 1920-1922" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1980). 1. Jean Epstein, "Magnification," in French Film Theory and Criticism, A History/Anthology, Volume I: 1907-1929, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 240 (emphasis in the original).

OCTOBER 83, Winter 1998, pp. 25-50. ? 1998 Malcolm Turvey.

OCTOBER

the conception of an art of the eye?"2 And Stan Brakhage, writing some thirty-five years later, opens his first major theoretical work on the cinema by proclaiming that "there is a pursuit of knowledge foreign to language and founded upon visual communication, demanding a development of the optical mind, and dependent upon perception in the original and deepest sense of the word."3 Epstein, therefore, is neither original nor unique in the primacy he accords to visual perception in his film theory. Rather, the definition of cinema as an "art of vision" lies at the core of the ontological project of establishing the cinema's autonomy in much modernist film theory and practice. In the case of Brakhage, of course, it generates a voluminous oeuvre that is almost entirely silent.

How are we, today, to understand this fundamental visual axiom of modernist film theory, of which Epstein's film theory now stands as emblematic? How are we to comprehend the abundant faith placed in vision and its cinematic extension by modernist film theorists and artists when our own critical, theoretical, and artistic milieu is permeated by a pervasive skepticism about vision? Martin Jay has recently given the name of "antiocularcentrism" to this skepticism, which he defines as "a profound suspicion of vision and its hegemonic role in the modern era" that begins to emerge in France at the end of the nineteenth century and achieves ascendancy in postwar French philosophy.4 ForJay, antiocularcentrism consists of a denigration of the idealization of vision that is located at the very core of Western intellectual and artistic traditions. More specifically, it constitutes a broad and diverse reaction against a model of vision that he calls "Cartesian," a model that has putatively achieved "dominan[ce] in the modern world" due to its widespread implementation within key intellectual, artistic, and social practices.

Indeed, a cursory glance back at the statement by Epstein with which we began immediately suggests a certain consonance between Epstein's celebration of cinema as an "art of vision" and Jay's Cartesian model of vision. Most obviously, "sight," says Epstein, echoing Descartes's famous dictum, is "the most developed sense." More importantly, Epstein identifies both "our intellect and our mores" as "visual." In doing so he employs, at least in this provisional formulation, the foundational metaphor of the eye for the mind. For Jay, as for Richard Rorty, this metaphor instantiates an isomorphic relation between vision and consciousness and gives rise, in its Cartesian and various post-Cartesian guises, to a picture of the mind as some kind of "inner space in which both pains and clear and distinct ideas pass ... in review before a single Inner Eye."5 This metaphorical relation

2. Germaine Dulac, "The Essence of the Cinema: The Visual Idea," in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1987), p. 41. 3. Stan Brakhage, "Metaphors on Vision," ibid., p. 120. 4. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 14. 5. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 50. Various philosophers have argued that Rorty's understanding of Cartesian and post-Cartesian philosophy is deeply flawed. See, for example, John W. Yolton, Perceptual Acquaintance: From Descartes to Reid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

26

Jean Epstein 's Cinema of Immanence

between vision and consciousness is, however, a paradoxical one.6 On the one hand, vision as a physical, bodily sense is condemned by this metaphor as blind. Descartes, in formulating his causal theory of perception, denigrates visual perception as interminably susceptible to illusion, deception, error, and seduction. Physical, corporeal vision, along with sensory perception in general, is thus rejected as an inadequate ground for certain knowledge and truth, and the sup- posed unreliability of sensory knowledge is used to support skeptical conclusions about the possibility of knowledge of the external world by many philosophers within the skeptical tradition.7 On the other hand, in spite of this denigration, vision is nevertheless employed as the model for a picture of consciousness as a disembodied eye in an act of sublimation that constitutes the very discourse of ocularcentrism. The relation between physical and mental realms is therefore reconfigured by cleansing the corporeal eye of its bodily imperfections and placing it within the immaterial realm of the mental through the idealization of certain of its attributes.

As an interiorized, disembodied eye, the mind's nature or "substance" now constitutes a fundamentally different "world," to use Rorty's apt word, from the world of the body and matter.8 Conceived of as translucent and therefore unmediated by matter, the mind's transcendence over the epistemological limitations of bodily sight is figured by two primary topoi which recur in a variety of ways throughout ocularcentric discourse: first, the spatial topos of the pure reflective presence of consciousness to both itself and its representations, and second, the temporal topos of the instantaneity or timelessness of the mind's gaze. Combined within the central figure of the autonomous, disembodied eye, this spatial presence and temporal instantaneity constitute the very possibility of absolute certainty or indubitability within certain traditions of epistemology: the claim that "I can know my own experience immediately and incorrigibly."

In spite of this initial consonance between ocularcentrism with its ocular metaphors for the mind and a certain tradition of modernist film theory exemplified by the work of Epstein, the temptation to make a literal comparison between Epstein's theory andJay's "Cartesian scopic regime" must nevertheless be resisted. Such an exercise would be reductive and futile, since Epstein himself nowhere provides a logically coherent philosophy of mind or visual perception. Rather, his film theory is contradictory and often obscure, and the earlier quoted statement on the "exclusively optical" nature of cinema is characteristic in its tendentiousness and lack of any accompanying theoretical elaboration. To be clarified, it requires examination within the context of the larger argument in which it is contained.

It is clear, in this specific instance, that Epstein's appeal to sight as "the

6. For an analysis of this paradox as it emerges in Descartes, see Dalia Judovitz, "Vision, Representation, and Technology in Descartes," in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David M. Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 7. See Barry Stroud, The Philosophical Significance of Scepticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 8. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 52.

27

OCTOBER

most developed sense" as well as the "intellect" as "visual" functions as an explanation for the "particularly intense" nature of cinematic affect that he wishes to elucidate.9 It is not, for Epstein, that the film camera merely replicates or mimics visual perception or visual consciousness. Rather, by way of the size of the screen and other magnification techniques such as close-up framing, cinema intensifies and augments visual perception by capturing, directing, and, in a sense, engulfing sight. "The close-up," he argues, "is an intensifying agent because of its size alone." It

limits and directs the attention. ... This is cyclopean art, a unisensual art, an iconoscopic retina. All life and attention are in the eye.... Wrapped in darkness, ranged in cell-like seats, directed toward the source of emotion by their softer side, the sensibilities of the entire auditorium converge, as if in a funnel, toward the film. Everything else is barred, excluded, no longer valid. Even the music to which one is accustomed is nothing but additional anesthesia for whatever is not visual. It takes away our ears the way a Valda lozenge takes away our sense of taste.... One cannot listen and look at the same time. If there is a dispute, sight, as the most developed, the most specialized, and the most generally popular sense, always wins.10

Cinema, for Epstein as for other modernist film theorists such as Brakhage, augments visual perception by producing an exclusively optical experience in which the spectator's attention is focused totally in and through the eye. It is at this point in his argument that Epstein includes his earlier quoted remarks on sight as "the most developed sense" with which we began. Read in conjunction with the above passage on magnification, the implicit logic of these remarks becomes clear. Cinematic "feeling" or "emotion" is so "intense" because cinema, as a purely optical instrument, harnesses the spectator's most advanced mental and perceptual capacities which are a priori visual. The cinema, in other words, acts on, intensifies, and heightens what is already the spectator's pre-given visual nature. Here, therefore, Epstein appeals to broadly familiar ocularcentric notions of visual consciousness and the "nobility" of sight primarily to explain the specificity of cinematic affect, "the habit of strong sensations, which the cinema is above all capable of producing."ll

The general thesis that cinema augments visual perception, however, remains consistent throughout his writings. Elsewhere, he reflects on its implications for the spectator's cognitive relation to the phenomenal world as opposed to her purely emotive reaction to events and objects on the screen. In the following passage, Epstein tellingly places the cinema within a lineage of inventions that

9. Epstein, "Magnification," p. 240. 10. Ibid., pp. 239-40. 11. Ibid., p. 240.

28

Jean Epstein's Cinema of Immanence

includes the telescope and microscope, visual devices that, by augmenting visual perception, add to and improve upon the spectator's sensory knowledge of the world:

And needing to do more than see, man augmented the microscopic and telescopic apparatuses with the cinematic apparatus, creating something other than the eye. Thus to consider the cinema as merely a spectacle is to reduce navigation to yachting at Meulan. The cinema is a particular form of knowing, in that it represents the world in its continuous mobility.12

Here, therefore, a superior sensory knowledge of the phenomenal world is enabled by the film camera, which becomes, like its predecessors, a cognitive tool or instrument.13 Again, Epstein is certainly not alone in making this claim for the epistemological powers of the film camera. Richard Abel points out that French film theorists in general at this time share a preoccupation, to borrow Abel's words, with "the power of representation as a means to knowledge.... For French writings on the cinema, this cognitive power was located in the new apparatus of the camera and, by extension, the projector and screen."14 Louis Delluc, for example, writes in 1917 that "The cinema will make us all comprehend the things of this world as well as force us to recognize ourselves."15 Furthermore, Annette Michelson argues that this fascination with cinema "as a new and powerful cognitive instrument" is truly international in its reach during the 1920s, shared, among others, by Vertov and Eisenstein during the period of the elaboration in the Soviet Union of montage theory.16 For these filmmakers and theorists in general, the cinema, like other visual devices, is a scientific tool of enlightenment, penetrating and revealing the phenomenal world in new ways.

Nothing could be more different from the discourse of antiocularcentrism and its challenge to the "nobility" of sight that according to Jay is gaining momentum in France at the precise moment Epstein is writing. It is worth pausing to indicate the sheer extent to which this discourse diverges from Epstein's understanding of the cinema's impact upon sensory knowledge. Indeed, the arguments we find in recent histories of technology about the invention of cinema are diametrically opposed to Epstein's thesis of a union between human

12. Epstein, "The Cinema Continues," in French Film Theory and Criticism, A History/Anthology, Volume II: 1929-1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 64. 13. Epstein's comparison between the film camera and scientific devices such as the telescope can be understood as part of the general attempt within modernism to legitimize art as a "form of knowing," equal or superior in status to "scientific forms of knowing." See Paisley Livingston, Literary Knowledge: Humanistic Inquiry and the Philosophy of Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 16-29. 14. Richard Abel, "Photogenie and Company," in Abel, French Film Theory, p. 107. 15. Louis Delluc, "Beauty in the Cinema," in ibid., p. 137. 16. Annette Michelson, "The Wings of Hypothesis: On Montage and the Theory of the Interval," in Montage and Modern Life 1919-1942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), p. 62.

29

OCTOBER

being and machine in the form of augmented cinematic vision and cognition. For these histories, cinema certainly does not extend the capacities of the eye and enable human beings to achieve new and penetrating cognitive insights into the phenomenal world. Rather, cinema participates in the gradual sundering of visual perception from any direct correspondence with a referential world, thereby intensifying the antiocularcentric assault on the cognitive power of sight. Stephen Kern, for example, suggests that the cinema's ability to "manipulate space in many ways" plays a crucial role in the general breakdown of "uniform," "universal and homogeneous space" at the turn of the century. It contributes, therefore, to the relativist "proliferation of perspectives" that according to Kern occurs in different ways within physics, philosophy, painting, and literature.17 Similarly, Jonathan Crary explicitly challenges the argument that cinema, like photography, is part of a "continuous unfolding of a Renaissance-based mode of vision" grounded in the "perspectival space" of the camera obscura.18 Rather, for Crary both inventions are the product of an epistemological transformation in the early nineteenth century in which visual perception is newly conceptualized as the product of an observer's subjective mental and physiological capabilities. This transformation renders obsolete the "perspectivalist" model of visual perception and consciousness hitherto guaranteed by the analogy between visual perception and the camera obscura. The result, for Crary, is that vision becomes increasingly opaque, its authority as a source of knowledge about the external world irrevocably under- mined: "There is an irreversible clouding over of the transparency of the subject-as-observer. Vision, rather than a privileged form of knowing, becomes itself an object of knowledge."19 The eye is now the victim of technology, susceptible in its productivity to "techniques" of manipulation and deception by a burgeoning industry of visual machines and entertainments that will later include the cinema. Crary thus locates the cinema firmly within the logic of a "relentless abstraction of the visual" from the referential world, an abstraction that is apparently culminating in the "ubiquitous implantation of fabricated visual 'spaces"' by new technologies in recent years.20

Epstein's celebration of the cognitive power of the cinema obviously contrasts dramatically with these histories of vision and technology. However, it is worth noting that it also seems to differ markedly from the project and aspirations of the radical avant-garde that are coming to fruition in France during the 1920s as Epstein is writing. These aspirations have recently been theorized by Rosalind Krauss. Again, as in Jay, central to her account is the rejection of a particular model of vision, this time as it is instantiated within the autonomy aesthetic of

17. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 142-43, 147-48. 18. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), p. 4. 19. Ibid., p. 70. 20. Ibid., pp. 1-3.

30


modernist abstract painting. The components of this model of vision are by now familiar to us from the pivotal figure of the disembodied eye. Modernist abstraction, argues Krauss, aims for "a higher, more formal order of vision" in which the very "structure of the visual field" is captured in the act of vision as cognition, "of vision in its reflexive form: the terms not just of seeing but of consciousness accounting for the fact of its seeing. It is the axis of a redoubled vision: of a seeing and a knowing that one sees, a kind of cogito of vision."21 As such, "the place of the Viewer" within this visual model becomes that of the "transcendental ego" in which "everything material falls away." Here again are the two ocularcentric topoi of temporal instantaneity and spatial presence-of "pure immediacy," "complete self-enclosure," and of absolute "presence" to self and representation.22 The "counterhistory" that Krauss then traces is one that works "against the grain" of this visual model from within, occupying a structural relation to modernist abstraction that is analogous to the relation of the unconscious to consciousness. The practices that Krauss analyzes and claims for this counterhistory take the form of an anti-aesthetic of desublimation in which the fundamental, interminable visual opacity and blindness of the corporeal eye that constitutes the sublimated ground of ocularcentrism re-emerges.23 These practices attempt to negate the visual model of modernist abstraction by inscribing temporality, desire, and the compulsive, libidinal body into perception. "The optical unconscious will claim for itself this dimension of opacity, of repetition, of time," writes Krauss. Thus, she reads Max Ernst's collages and readymades as challenging the transparency and synchrony of modernist abstraction through the inscription of a fundamental, structuring absence or "blind spot." This is "a rupture in the field of vision" that is the very condition for transparency, vision, and knowledge, "a point in the optical system where what is thought to be visible will never appear."24

Juxtaposing the visual opacity of antiocularcentrism, with its roots in Descartes's skeptical rejection of sensory knowledge, and Epstein's faith in the optical and cognitive powers of the cinema therefore seems to confront us with two historically contemporaneous yet radically incommensurable conceptions of vision and the cinema. Not only do Epstein's pronouncements seem to defy the logic of Crary's general abstraction of vision from a referential world and the consequent undermining of vision and visual consciousness as a source of reliable knowledge about the external world, but his film theory also seems to be at odds with the most radical movements and elements within the French avant-garde as theorized by Krauss. Thus, we are faced with a question. We must ask whether or not the abundant faith placed in the cinema as a new cognitive instrument by Epstein and others-a faith that mirrors, after all, Descartes's own celebration of

21. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 15, 19. 22. Ibid., pp. 19, 20. 23. Krauss, invoking Bataille, writes of "the foundations of modernism [as] mined by a thousand pockets of darkness, the blind, irrational space of the labyrinth" (ibid., p. 21). 24. Ibid., pp. 82-88.

31

OCTOBER

"inventions which serve to increase [the eye's] power [as] the most useful there can be" in the opening sentences of La Dioptrique-is simply a re-emergence or perpetuation of an increasingly anachronistic model of visual perception and consciousness that is simultaneously and obsessively being challenged by the most advanced currents within intellectual and artistic modernism. Is Epstein's cinematic epistemology-namely, his theory of the visual and cognitive powers of cinema-merely an instantiation of an outmoded "perspectivalist" or "Cartesian scopic regime" that has been attacked and denigrated by the discourse of antiocularcentrism in its various guises? Is Epstein's theory of the cinema's augmentation of vision and cognition simply part of a modernist paradigm that has receded into the past and is now irrelevant to us? Or is it something other, a conceptualization of cinematic vision and epistemology that somehow sidesteps the opposition between the disembodied, transparent, foundationalist eye of ocularcentrism and the corporeal, blind, skeptical eye of antiocularcentrism, thereby opening up a very different perspective?

II

The question of the cinematic instantiation-on the levels of ontology, narrative, and signification-of the disembodied eye of ocularcentrism has in many ways been the most powerful motor behind the last twenty-five years of Anglo-American film theory. In the seminal work of Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, and the writers grouped around the journal Screen, it is indeed argued that there is a fundamental homology between this disembodied eye and the film camera. In Baudry, we find the clearest statement of this argument in its ontological variant:

And if the eye which moves is no longer fettered by a body, by the laws of matter and time, if there are no more assignable limits to its displacement-conditions fulfilled by the possibilities of shooting and of film-the world will not only be constituted by this eye but for it. The movability of the camera seems to fulfill the most favorable conditions for the manifestation of the "transcendental subject".25

Baudry's argument has proved to be highly influential for contemporary film theory, generating a widespread theoretical investigation into the ideological and psychic effects on the spectator of her exposure to the camera as "transcendental subject." In recent years, this theoretical trajectory has to a large extent dissipated under the weight of internal and external challenges.26 However, as Annette Michelson

25. Jean-Louis Baudry, "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (Winter 1974-75), p. 43. 26. An example of a sympathetic challenge to this tradition of contemporary film theory can be found in David N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); an unsympathetic (and devastating) challenge can be found in Noel Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

32


has shown, a sustained preoccupation with the cinematic inscription of the disembodied, "transcendental" eye of ocularcentrism can be located in the American independent cinema of the 1960s and early 1970s, and especially in the film theory and practice of Michael Snow.

As Michelson demonstrates, Snow's theory and practice, located as it is within the context of Minimalism and its "systematic exploration of the modalities of perception,"27 is one that conceives of the cinema as a cognitive or analytic tool, albeit in a somewhat different way from Epstein and his generation. Moreover, the independent cinema of the late 1960s in general, according to Michelson, aims to give rise to a "cognitive viewer" in place of the "hallucinated viewer" of the preceding period of romantic expressionism, exemplified by the practice of Brakhage. However, and most importantly, the analytic film practice of Snow and others continues to share with its predecessor "an insistence on the primacy of vision" in spite of the pronounced shift from a "gaze of fascination" to one of "analytic inspection." As such, Snow's work, according to Michelson, critically perpetuates "the idealist primacy of vision" and the "status" of the viewer as "transcendental subject." And it is in La Region Centrale (1971) that Snow, through hyperbolization, magnificently "extends and intensifies the traditional concept of vision as the sense through which we know and master the universe."28 This hyperbolization is enacted by way of the film's uniquely varied and multiple camera movements, executed in an empty landscape, which instantiate the idealized "mobility" of the "transcendental" "eye-subject." However, in a film made, as Michelson points out, during a period of euphoria about space travel in general and the first ever "moon walk," it is ultimately the extremity of the deprivation of any "source or medium of corporeal grounding and identification"29 that truly fulfills the conditions of disembodiment. This deprivation enforces for the spectator a pure, Metzian identification with the camera that in its boundless mobility transcends the limitations of the body and, to use Baudry's words, "the laws of matter and time."

Michelson's analysis of Snow's theory and practice therefore reveals the same insistence on the primacy of vision that we have located in Epstein's film theory, as well as a conception of the cinema as a cognitive instrument that is not wholly unrelated to Epstein's. However, despite these similarities, Epstein's description of the spectator's phenomenal experience of cinema differs in several important and revealing respects from the production of the spectator as "transcendental subject" in the practice of Snow. Consider, for example, the following passage:

Through the window of a train or a ship's porthole, the world acquires a new, specifically cinematic vivacity. A road is a road but

27. Annette Michelson, "About Snow," October 8 (Spring 1979), p. 114. 28. Ibid., pp. 113-14, 122. 29. Ibid., pp. 121-23.

33

OCTOBER

the ground which flees under the four beating hearts of an automobile's belly transports me. The Oberland and Semmering tunnels swallow me up, and my head, bursting through the roof, hits against their vaults. Seasickness is decidedly pleasant. I'm on board the plummeting airplane. My knees bend. This area remains to be exploited. I yearn for a drama aboard a merry-go-round, or more modern still, on airplanes. The fair below and its surroundings would be progressively confounded. Centrifuged in this way, and adding vertigo and rotation to it, the tragedy would increase its photogenic quality ten-fold.30

Here, Epstein is attempting to envisage the precise nature of the spectator's experience of new forms of perception enabled by the mobility of the camera when placed in or on a modern machine such as an automobile, airplane, or merry-go-round. In direct contrast to the "euphoria" of the disembodied, "weight- less state" that, as Michelson has shown, is generated by the mobility and freedom of Snow's camera in La Region Centrale, for Epstein the effects of camera mobility on the spectator are unambiguously located in the corporeal density of the spectator's body. "Seasickness," "centrifuged," and "vertigo" are some of the terms used to specify the spectator's sensations, all of which describe the powerful effects of the action of forces on the body of the spectator as a result of the extremes of cinematic mobility. Indeed, camera mobility seems to be able to reproduce for Epstein both the actual physical forces that act on fast-moving bodies as well as their visceral impact, thus conveying a sense of weighted physical movement in space that is firmly subject to gravity, resistance, and other laws. This is very different from Baudry's or Snow's disembodied "eye-subject" transcending "the laws of matter and time." Throughout Epstein's writings, the strong, overwhelmingly physical nature of the sensations described in the above passage is a central component of his prototypical spectator's perceptual experience of the cinema. He often equates, for example, the intense pleasures of this experience with bodily penetra- tion and need, comparing the affect ("intermittent paroxysms") of close-ups with "needles," and the "extremely pleasant intellectual state" attained during viewing with "a sort of need, like tobacco or coffee."31 Such a striking characterization of spectatorship, with its emphasis on physical need, stimulation, and, more generally, the state of being acted on by physical forces unleashed by camera mobility, pulling and pushing the body as "projectile," is diametrically opposite to the disembodied transcendence of the physical world and body that is the central figure ofJay's "Cartesian scopic regime."

More significant for our purposes, however, is Epstein's general argument concerning the cinematic extension of vision and cognition within which these

30. Epstein, "Magnification," p. 237. 31. Ibid., pp. 236, 240.

34


remarks about the corporeal effects on the spectator are located. This argument is nowhere explicitly and logically formulated. Rather, it emerges within scattered, obscure, and often contradictory statements which together gradually reveal a logical form at work within Epstein's cinematic epistemology. Although often inconsistent, the logical form of this cinematic epistemology, I would suggest, differs from the visual model of ocularcentrism and its figure of the disembodied eye. If, for a theorist like Baudry, the cinema reproduces for the spectator the conditions of disembodied "transcendental subjectivity" above and beyond the physical world of matter and time, then for Epstein, I would argue, the cinema gives rise instead to a spectator who is embedded in the world and its material laws. In other words, in contrast to a cinema of transcendence, perpetuating and intensifying the familiar tradition of ocularcentrism, Epstein attempts to propose and envisage for us a cinema of immanence.

Consistent with this conception of a cinema of immanence is the extended analogy Epstein most often draws on to describe the perceptual relation between the spectator and the phenomenal world that is established by the film camera. This relation, he argues, is a profoundly "intimate" one, and as such he consistently likens it to the intimacy of bodily contact and ingestion:

The close-up modifies the drama by the impact of proximity. Pain is within reach. If I stretch out my arm I touch you, and that is intimacy. I can count the eyelashes of this suffering. I would be able to taste the tears. Never before has a face turned to mine in that way. Ever closer it presses against me, and I follow it face to face. It's not even true that there is air between us; I consume it. It is in me like a sacrament. Maximum visual acuity.32

The sensuous proximity to the world that is being articulated here contrasts sharply with the metaphors of "distance" and "autonomy" that are standardly employed to describe the disembodied viewpoint of the "Cartesian perspectivalist gaze." Epstein's valorization of the cinema's ability to induce a corporeal intimacy with the world reaches its apotheosis in his call for a form of subjective camera movement that places the spectator within the very body of a fictional character. "I would like to look through his eyes," Epstein fantasizes at one point in a passage that again remarkably echoes Brakhage, "and see his hand reach out from under me as if it were my own; interruptions of opaque film would imitate the blinking of our eyelids."33 Note that the emphasis here is resolutely on physical incarnation, and not simply on the camera's assumption of a character's cognitive or emotive viewpoint.

But it is ultimately, I would argue, the logical form of Epstein's cinematic epistemology that differs most profoundly from the "Cartesian" visual model of

32. Ibid., p. 239. 33. Ibid.

35

OCTOBER

Jay's ocularcentrism. In order to demonstrate this, a careful investigation into this cinematic epistemology is required. For at first sight, Epstein's epistemology-his theory of the film camera as a cognitive instrument that reveals the phenomenal world anew to the spectator-appears highly mystical, full of sweeping metaphysical claims. According to Epstein, what is revealed by the camera to the spectator is something he calls the "soul" of the world, a "soul" that is standardly hidden to the naked, corporeal eye:

The face of the world may seem changed since we, the fifteen hundred million who inhabit it, can see through eyes equally intoxicated by alcohol, love, joy, and woe, through lenses of all tempers, hate and tenderness; since we can see the clear thread of thoughts and dreams, what might or should have been, what was, what never was or could have been, feelings in their secret guise, the startling face of love and beauty, in a word, the soul.34

Here, in discussing the transformation of "the face of the world" effected by the film camera, Epstein insists that it is the "soul" of the "world" that is laid bare for the spectator's corporeal eye, and this is a claim that occurs repeatedly throughout his film theory. What, therefore, does Epstein mean by "soul"? What precisely is revealed to the spectator's bodily eye by the film camera?

III

Epstein's answer to this question is predictably multifarious, contradictory, and difficult to pin down conceptually. Sometimes, for example, he follows other film theorists of his generation in arguing that it is the essential "mobility" of the world that is revealed by the camera. Elsewhere, he suggests that the cinema gives rise to a perceptual experience of the fundamental formlessness and "chaos" of the universe, a "chaos" that is spuriously masked by rational knowledge. In tandem with these general claims, however, Epstein also isolates specific entities that are revealed to the spectator's bodily eye by the camera. Epstein returns to these entities again and again throughout the course of his film theory. When considered together, they gradually reveal a logical form at work in his cinematic epistemology that provides the conceptual foundation for his claim that the cinema reveals the "soul" of the "world" to the spectator.

The most prominent of these entities is time. For Epstein, cinema allows the spectator to perceptually experience events unfolding in time. More importantly, though, Epstein also claims that the cinema allows for the possibility of controlling time in a radically new way. Unlike human beings whose experience of time is a perpetual missed encounter with the present, the cinema is an instrument that can capture and therefore manipulate time:

34. Epstein, "On Certain Characteristics of Photogenie," in French Film Theory, Volume I, p. 318.

36


The fact is that there is no real present; today is a yesterday, perhaps already old, colliding with a possibly distant tomorrow. The present is an uneasy convention. In the flow of time it is an exception to time. It eludes the chronometer. You look at your watch; strictly speaking the present is no longer there; and strictly speaking it is there again, and always will be from one midnight to the next. I think, therefore I was. The future "I" is shed as "I" past; the present is merely this instantaneous and perpetual sloughing. The present is merely an encounter. The cinema is the only art capable of depicting this present as it is.35

Only the cinema, for Epstein, can capture the pure immediacy of time in the present tense, the "now" that is always missed during the spectator's standard perceptual experience of the phenomenal world. As Annette Michelson has pointed out, Epstein's film theory, in making this claim, bears a remarkable similarity to his contemporary in the Soviet Union, Dziga Vertov, who also argues that the cinema allows for an unprecedented control over time: "The mechanical eye, the camera . . . experiments, distending time, dissecting movement, or, in contrary fashion, absorbing time within itself, swallowing years, thus schematizing processes of long duration inaccessible to the normal eye."36 Vertov emphasizes the analytical power of the camera's control over time, its ability to distend, dissect, or swallow time and movement. Epstein, however, persistently points to the cinema's synthetic ability to halt or stop time, to congeal it in a moment of presence, rendering it palpable and latent within the image as a sensuous entity available to the spectator's gaze of inspection. In the following passage Epstein valorizes the close-up precisely because it arrests the flow of time and holds it in abeyance as pure potential:

Even more beautiful than a laugh is the face preparing for it. I must interrupt. I love the mouth which is about to speak and holds back, the gesture which hesitates between right and left, the recoil before the leap, and the moment before landing, the becoming, the hesitation, the taut spring, the prelude, and even more than all these, the piano being tuned before the overture.37

Here, time is something that becomes directly visible to the spectator, something that she can directly see congealed in the image in the latent form of a "recoil," "hesitation," or "becoming." And the result of this sensuous latency of time, for Epstein, is the production of a pregnant moment of presence that punctuates and interrupts the standard, continuous, linear flow of time. During such moments of presence, the linear organization of time into the discrete dimensions of past,

35. Epstein, "Art of Incidence," ibid., p. 413 (emphasis added). 36. See Annette Michelson, introduction to Kino-Eye, The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Michelson (London: Pluto Press, 1984), pp. xliii-vi; and Dziga Vertov, "The Council of Three," in Kino-Eye, p. 19. 37. Epstein, "Magnification," p. 236.

37

OCTOBER

present, and future is replaced by a fecund moment pregnant with time in which past and future collapse or coalesce into the present. Past and future in effect become visible to the spectator within the pure "now" of the present captured by the camera: "Fragments from several pasts take root in a single present. The future erupts through the memories."38 Hence, Epstein argues that narrative, with its linear flow of time from past to future, is antithetical to the true nature of cinematic temporality, and should therefore be rejected in favor of a "new dramaturgy" which he names an "art of incidences" or "situations." "There are no stories," he claims. "There have never been stories. There are only situations, having neither head nor tail; without beginning, middle, or end, no right side or wrong side; they can be looked at from all directions; right becomes left; without limits in past or future, they are present."39 Thus, for Epstein, time is a specific entity that the camera is capable of revealing to the spectator's bodily eye, "crystallizing" it in a sensuous, palpable form.

The second such entity that Epstein consistently points to is emotion. For Epstein, the cinema enables the spectator to see emotion:

The close-up is drama in high gear. A man says, "I love the faraway princess." Here the verbal gearing down is suppressed. I can see love. It half lowers its eyelids, raises the arc of the eyebrows laterally, inscribes itself on the taut forehead, swells the masseters, hardens the tuft of the chin, flickers on the mouth and at the edge of the nostrils.40

Here, Epstein argues that emotion is manifested on a character's face when filmed in close-up. The character's exteriority is punctured by the camera, allowing his interior passions to issue forth and saturate the surface details of his face, thereby producing a physiognomic knowledge. Because of this capacity, Epstein envisages the use of the camera as an analytical tool that will reveal to prospective lovers the true nature of their partner's intentions: "Possibilities are already appearing for the drama of the microscope, a hystophysiology of the passions, a classification of the amorous sentiments .... Young girls will consult them instead of the fortune teller."41 Epstein therefore sees the camera as an instrument for making visible the interior life of human beings that is standardly hidden to the naked eye behind the flesh and bone of the body. Now, this argument is also made by other film theorists during this period, including Vertov and Bela Balazs. However, Epstein's specific variant of this argument is unique because he extends it beyond the realm of the human face and body into the realm of inanimate, material objects. For Epstein, not only does the camera reveal the interior life of human beings. It also makes visible the interior life of objects:

38. Epstein, "Art of Incidence," p. 413. 39. Epstein, "The Senses I (b)," in French Film Theory, Volume I, p. 242. 40. Epstein, "Magnification," p. 239. 41. Ibid., p. 238.

38


Jean Epstein. Cour Fidele. 1923.

39

OCTOBER

And a close-up of a revolver is no longer a revolver, it is the revolver- character, in other words the impulse towards or remorse for crime, failure, suicide. It is as dark as the temptations of the night, bright as the gleam of gold lusted after, taciturn as passion, squat, brutal, heavy, cold, wary, menacing. It has a temperament, habits, memories, a will, a soul.42

Here, the emotion associated with guns and crime is captured by the camera and transformed into a sensuous substance that inheres or subsists within the revolver. It is rendered present and palpable within the material qualities of the revolver itself, just as time is congealed within the pregnant moment of the "situation." Epstein refers to the emotional life of objects revealed by the camera as the "personality" of the object, and he argues that, like time, "personality" is made directly visible to the spectator's bodily eye: "Personality is the spirit visible in things and people, their heredity made evident, their past become unforgettable, their future already present."43 The result of this unmasking of "personality" is that objects seem to come alive for the spectator. The revelation of their latent emotional potential as a sensuous substance confers on them "life" and presence, and Epstein therefore labels the cinema "animistic." Indeed, so great is the power of the camera to reveal the "personality" of objects for Epstein that it can charge an entire environment with a palpable and almost overwhelming emotional vivacity:

True tragedy remains in abeyance. It threatens all the faces. It is in the curtain at the window and the handle of the door. Each drop of ink can make it bloom on the tip of the fountain pen. In the glass of water it dissolves. The whole room is saturated with every kind of drama. The cigar smoke is poised menacingly over the ashtray's throat. The dust is treacherous. The carpet emits venomous arabesques and the arms of the chair tremble.44

Thus emotion, like time, is an entity that becomes physically incarnated within the people and objects represented by the cinematic image. It therefore also becomes directly visible to the corporeal eye of the spectator.

Time and emotion are the two major entities revealed by the camera to which Epstein's film theory returns again and again. However, there is a third that Epstein only occasionally mentions, namely "family resemblance":

From oldest ancestor to youngest child, all the resemblances and differences delineated a single character. The family seemed to me like

42. Epstein, "On Certain Characteristics of Photogenie," p. 317. 43. Ibid. 44. Epstein, "The Senses I (b)," p. 242. In Epstein's film The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), the capacity of cinema to charge environments with a heightened emotional vivacity is wonderfully exploited to its fullest.

40


Jean Epstein. The Fall of the House of Usher. 1928.

an individual whose dissimilar members never disrupted the sense of unity and, on the contrary, proved necessary to its equilibrium.... Not a single person in the assembled group seemed to me free, neither in what they had been, nor in what they were, nor in what they would be. And what issued from the mouth of one or another was the family, which answered me with its singular voice, according to its singular character, with its set way of thinking and which carried on across many past, present, and future bodies.45

Here, Epstein characterizes the "single character" or "unity" of the family as a distinct synthetic entity that inheres in each family member and that reveals itself through the resemblances between them. However, it is only the cinema that

45. Epstein, "Photogenie and the Imponderable," p. 191.

41

OCTOBER

actually has the power to "capture" this strange entity, to abstract it from the individual members of the family and preserve it as a separate entity in its own right through the accumulation of images of the family across time:

Once cinematography will have reached the century mark of its exis- tence ... it will have been able to capture the startling and instructive appearances of this familial monster. Many other concepts await their personification through cinematography; among the closest are heredity, the affectations of the mind, diseases.46

Family resemblance, like time and emotion, is therefore an entity that can be revealed by the camera and "personified" in a sensuous form within the cinematic image for the spectator to see.

Although these three entities-time, emotion, and family resemblance- may seem somewhat curious companions when placed alongside each other, they nevertheless point toward a consistent logical form at work within Epstein's cinematic epistemology. This logical form may be described in the following way: quite simply, each is an immaterial entity that is, according to Epstein, given a sensuous, palpable incarnation within the people, objects, and events depicted by the cinematic image. Epstein's theory of cinema as a cognitive tool is therefore founded upon a logic of embodiment. According to this logic, time, emotion, and family resemblance are immaterial entities that are cognized by the spectator because she can see them with her corporeal eye. And she is able to do so because these entities enter into and become embodied within the people, objects, and events depicted by the cinematic image, due to the unique powers of the camera.

Having located this logic of embodiment at the core of Epstein's cinematic epistemology, it now appears obvious why Epstein characterizes the cognitive power of the cinema as a revelation of the "soul" of the "world" to the spectator. For the word "soul," like "spirit," refers to an immaterial substance or entity. If the cinema does have the power to reveal through embodiment the immaterial entities of time, emotion, and family resemblance, then it is indeed appropriate to claim that these entities constitute a "soul," one that is granted by the cinema an immanent presence in the faces, bodies, objects, environments, landscapes, and events that populate the phenomenal world as it is captured within the cinematic image.

IV

Even though it is, perhaps, now clearer what Epstein means by his claim that the "soul" of the "world" is revealed to the spectator by the film camera, his cinematic epistemology undoubtedly continues to appear mystical. The argument that immaterial entities such as time, emotion, and family resemblance become embodied and visible within the cinematic image due to the power of the camera

46. Ibid.

42


appears highly superstitious, an outrage to our modern, rational, scientific theories of the image and vision. Indeed, Epstein's film theory as a whole is usually dismissed from a theoretical and scientific perspective as a form of mystical idealism.47 If Epstein's theoretical claims are considered at all, they are usually simply viewed as grist for the mill of a psychological (usually psychoanalytical) explanation.48 There is, however, a philosopher who takes seriously the claim that a seemingly immaterial entity can be seen in an image, and who rejects any psychological or theoretical explanation of the beholder's putative ability to do so. This philosopher is Wittgenstein, and he calls this immaterial entity an "aspect."

For Wittgenstein, the beholder's claim to be able to directly see an aspect in an image arises most clearly and unambiguously during a unique visual experience that he calls "aspect-dawning." Although the duck-rabbit is the most famous example of this experience, Wittgenstein provides us with many others: "I suddenly see the solution of a picture puzzle. Before, there were branches there; now there is a human shape. My visual impression has changed and now I recognize that it has not only shape and color but also a quite particular 'organization'.-My visual impression has changed."49 For Wittgenstein, there is a paradox in the beholder's use of the verb "to see" to describe this curious visual experience. On the one hand, the image remains materially unchanged in this and all other examples of aspect-dawning. Nothing is physically added to or taken away from the "picture puzzle" to change its appearance. Yet, on the other, the words the beholder uses to describe the experience of aspect-dawning-words such as "see" and "object"- seem to indicate that this is precisely what has happened, that indeed the image does seem to have changed materially in front of the beholder's eyes during this experience. The beholder now seems to see it differently, as if something had been added to it. Wittgenstein elucidates this paradox by asking the beholder who has experienced aspect-dawning to represent the difference between her old and new perception of the picture puzzle using a drawing. The beholder is, of course, unable to do so. A drawing of the picture puzzle prior to the dawning of the aspect will be identical to a drawing of the puzzle once the aspect has dawned.

Thus, we are introduced to the ambiguous and mysterious concept of the aspect. On the one hand, the aspect of "the human shape" in the picture puzzle cannot be pointed to or represented directly using an image or verbal description of it, in the same way that the material properties of an object can be. The aspect belongs to a different dimension of visual experience than material properties such as color and shape, which can be pointed to, copied, and described with ease. It therefore seems to be something invisible, immaterial or abstract, some-

47. For an example of this type of argument, see David Bordwell, French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory, and Film Style (New York: Arno Press, 1980). 48. For an example of this type of argument, see Paul Willemen, "Photogenie and Epstein," in Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (London: BFI, 1994). 49. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), p. 196. Hereafter cited in the text as PI.

43

OCTOBER

thing beyond the perception of material properties and entities. Yet, on the other, the aspect nevertheless appears to be materially present within the image or object. It seems to presence itself, becoming materially incarnated in the image or object during the visual experience of aspect-dawning. The aspect is something that we appear to experience visually on a sensuous, perceptual level, even though we cannot in fact point to it or represent it, beyond the vague suggestion that it is a type of "organization." It is this strange ambiguity of an entity that is both present and absent, material and immaterial, visible and invisible, that prompts Wittgenstein's investigation into the curious experience of aspect-dawning.

For our purposes, the visual experience of aspect-dawning highlighted by Wittgenstein possesses the same logical form as Epstein's cinematic epistemology. In both, an immaterial entity seemingly enters into the image in question and is seen directly by the beholder. More remarkably, however, there is also a substantive similarity between aspect-dawning and Epstein's film theory. For Wittgenstein extends his concept of aspect-dawning beyond the mere perceptual recognition of objects within an image to include some of the same entities that Epstein singles out in his film theory. Indeed, Wittgenstein's very first example of an aspect is the resemblance between two faces, familiar to us from Epstein's "family resemblance" argument: "I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently" (PI, p. 193). Like "the human shape" in the picture puzzle, the "likeness" between two faces is an aspect because it is directly seen by the beholder even though it is not a material property of the faces in question. It cannot, therefore, be pointed to or copied using a drawing of the faces in question although, as Wittgenstein makes clear, it can be captured by an image: "The one man might make an accurate drawing of the two faces, and the other notice in the drawing the likeness which the former did not see" (PI, p. 193). Similarly, emotion is an entity that Wittgenstein repeatedly points to as an example of an aspect. "Friendliness," for instance, is an emotion that a beholder can see in a smile, but which cannot be described in terms of the material or spatial properties of the smile in question: "And this materialization is something spatial and it must be possible to describe it in purely spatial terms. For instance (if it is a face) it can smile; the concept of friendliness, however, has no place in an account of it, but is foreign to such an account (even though it may subserve it)" (PI, p. 199). For Wittgenstein, a person who cannot see aspects, who is "aspect-blind," is someone who cannot directly see an emotion manifested in another person's face.

Wittgenstein does not go so far as to argue that time is an entity that can be seen directly during aspect-dawning, however, he does describe the visual experience of aspect-dawning in general as one in which the beholder's experience of time is reconfigured in a manner very similar to Epstein's descriptions of cinematic temporality during a "situation." For Wittgenstein, aspect-dawning is always an interruption or rupture within the beholder's standard experience of time as a continuous flow. An aspect is always something that Wittgenstein describes as

44


"flashing" upon the beholder, erupting "suddenly" into her consciousness. Furthermore, once the aspect has dawned, it arrests the flow of time by occupying the beholder intensely for a pregnant moment which then fades. "'I observed the likeness between him and his father for a few minutes, and then no longer.'-One might say this if his face were changing and only looked like his father's for a short lime. But it can also mean that after a few minutes I stopped being struck by the likeness" (PI, p. 210). Finally, Wittgenstein also employs the language of "animism," so often used by Epstein, to describe a certain type of aspect-dawning experienced by the beholder while looking at a picture. According to this description, a picture may at times seem to possess a certain presence, as if it had come alive and was looking at the beholder:

I might say: a picture does not always live for me while I am seeing it. "Her picture smiles down on me from the wall." It need not always do so, whenever my glance lights on it. The duck-rabbit. One asks oneself: how can the eye-this dot-be looking in a direction?-"See, it is looking!" (And one "looks" oneself as one says this.) [PI, p. 205]

Here, Wittgenstein is using the language of "animism" to articulate precisely the type of visual experience of a picture that Epstein argues is characteristic of the spectator's visual experience of the cinematic image.

The logical and substantive similarities between Epstein's film theory and Wittgenstein's concept of aspect-dawning extend even further, however. For Epstein also provides an articulation of the grammar of this visual experience that anticipates Wittgenstein's own attempt to render the experience of aspect-dawning intelligible to his reader. Central to both their accounts is knowledge and cognition. What essentially constitutes the occurrent visual experience of aspect-dawning, for Wittgenstein, is the dawning of knowledge in the beholder. Aspect-dawning is the experience of a cognition. But it is the experience of a special type of cognition, namely a recognition. "The very expression," says Wittgenstein about the beholder's response to the duck-rabbit, "which is also a report of what is seen, is here a cry of recognition" (PI, p. 198). Thus, the visual experience of aspect-dawning is a sudden moment of recognition in which the image or object of the beholder's sight emerges for her in an unexpected but familiar light. In aspect-dawning, the beholder unexpectedly recognizes or alights upon a different way of seeing the image or object in question. What, however, is it precisely that is recognized and seen by the beholder during aspect-dawning? In what is perhaps his clearest definition of the aspect, Wittgenstein says, "but what I perceive in the dawning of an aspect is not a property of the object, but an internal relation between it and other objects" (PI, p. 212). When the beholder recognizes an object under a new aspect, she is not, therefore, cognizing a new "property" or attribute of the object. Aspect-dawning is not the cognition of a material property, and it is for this reason that the aspect is not akin to material concepts such as shape or color. Rather, during aspect-dawning, the beholder becomes aware of the image or object's

45

OCTOBER

"internal relation" with other objects. In other words, she becomes aware of the place of the image or object within a grammar or form of life-an extrinsic conceptual ground or field that she is already familiar with and knows how to find her way around. Aspect-dawning is the unexpected recognition of a fit or identity between the image and object in question and an extrinsic conceptual ground or field. In the case of the picture puzzle, for example, the sudden dawning of the aspect of "the human shape" consists of the beholder's recognition of a fit between the lines of the picture puzzle and the familiar conceptual field of human shapes. Aspect-dawning is therefore a recognition of the identity of the image or object in question, of the kind of object that it can be seen as, a conscious experience that arises because the normally instantaneous recognition of the image or object during visual perception has been delayed.

However, the most important characteristic of aspect-dawning is that the recognition of the "internal relation" or conceptual field within which an image or object can be seen is not a purely mental event; it does not take place within the mind of the beholder. The extrinsic conceptual field is not something that the beholder's mind anticipates, supplies, or brings to the image or object. Rather, it is something that the beholder finds in the image or object using her corporeal eye. Her recognition of the new "internal relation" takes place within the realm of her sensuous perception of the image or object in question. This new "internal relation" or extrinsic conceptual ground is something that emerges and becomes embodied within the image or object in the sensuous, palpable form of the aspect as the beholder's eye alights upon it. It is because of this lack of mental agency that the dawning of an aspect is always a surprise to the beholder. It is something that she does not think of or expect. Instead, it is something she finds. It is also for this reason that the beholder ascribes agency to the image or object and speaks of it as if it had changed materially in front of her eyes, as if it were alive. For once the new conceptual field emerges within the image or object in question in the sensuous form of the aspect, the image or object looks different to the beholder because of her familiarity with the conceptual field that has dawned. The dawning of an aspect is essentially the dawning of a new way of relating to the image or object on the part of the beholder, a new attitude of familiarity that arises upon the basis of the sensuous recognition of a new "internal relation" within which the image or object can be seen. It is a new way of seeing and taking the image or object.50

If we return to Epstein's film theory, we find that Epstein provides a very similar articulation of the grammar of the visual experience of embodiment that is at the core of his cinematic epistemology:

50. It is no accident that Wittgenstein makes various remarks about aesthetic experience while investigating aspect-dawning; the experience of "seeing something new" in a work of art, of alighting upon a new way of seeing or understanding something in a work of art, is a standard form of aesthetic experience with its unique blend of sensuous perception and cognition. The ramifications for aesthetics of Wittgenstein's investigation of aspect-dawning have yet to be fully explored.

46


Each of us, I assume, must possess some object which he holds onto for personal reasons: for some it's a book; for some, perhaps, a very banal and somewhat ugly trinket; for someone else, perhaps, a piece of furniture with no value. We do not look at them as they really are. To tell the truth, we are incapable of seeing them as objects. What we see in them, through them, are the memories and emotions, the plans or regrets that we have attached to these things for a more or less lengthy period of time, sometimes forever. Now, this is the cinematographic mystery: an object such as this, with its personal character, that is to say, an object situated in a dramatic action that is equally photographic in character, reveals anew its moral character, its human and living expression when reproduced cinematographically.51

Here, Epstein quite clearly and lucidly argues that objects in the cinematic image appear to have an interior, emotional life because they come to embody, like personal objects, the form of life or extrinsic conceptual ground within which they are located, namely the emotional and dramatic context of the narrative or "dramatic situation." For Epstein, like Wittgenstein, the spectator can see this context, this form of life, within the objects represented on the screen. Thus, they seem to come to life for her, much like Wittgenstein's beholder who looks at the picture of the smiling woman. This picture comes alive for the beholder because it embodies in a palpable form all the personal associations of its subject for a short, pregnant moment of aspect-dawning.

Once these profound logical and substantive similarities between Wittgenstein's concept of aspect-dawning and Epstein's film theory are taken into consideration, Epstein's cinematic epistemology emerges in a new and remarkable light. From the strict perspective of science and theory, his claim that the cinema reveals the "soul" of the "world" to the spectator can only be condemned as a form of mystical idealism. It cannot be taken seriously. But from the perspective of Wittgenstein's philosophical grammar, this cinematic epistemology can be viewed as an imaginative and ingenious attempt to articulate the logical form of a visual and cognitive experience that Wittgenstein, some fifteen years following the formative period of Epstein's film theory, will call "aspect-dawning." To evaluate Epstein's writings about the cinema using the criteria of science, to search in them for a theory consisting of a coherent body of causal explanations for the spectator's perceptual and cognitive experience of the cinema, is to miss their lasting value. It is to miss Epstein's attempt-often contradictory and frustrating, deliberately mysterious, and replete with hyperbole-to articulate the contours of a unique visual experience.

51. Epstein, "For a New Avant-Garde," in French Film Theory, Volume I, p. 352.

47

OCTOBER

It is also, however, to miss the larger significance of this visual experience, and it is in considering this significance that we can now, finally, return to the question with which we began, namely the question of the relation between Epstein's celebration of cinema as an "art of vision" and antiocularcentrism. For as is well known, Wittgenstein's later philosophy constitutes, in its entirety, a rejection of the Cartesian picture of the mind and body and its accompanying theory of knowledge. This rejection consists, among many other things, of remapping the distinction between mind and body and redefining the nature of perception and knowledge.52 The importance of the visual experience of aspect- dawning in the context of these larger concerns is that it is a sensuous, physical experience. The aspect is something that is seen by the beholder's corporeal eye. It is not something that is intuited or inferred by her mind. Aspect-dawning also demonstrates that the beholder's perceptual knowledge of the phenomenal world-her recognition of the duck in the duck-rabbit, her certainty that a person's smile is a friendly smile, her ability to see the resemblance between two faces-is the product of her ability to become familiar with the form of life within which she encounters this phenomenal world. The beholder's capacity to experience aspect-dawning, to see an aspect dawn in an image, object, or person, is logically dependent on what Wittgenstein calls "the mastery of a technique," the beholder's ability to find her way around and navigate a form of life consisting of images, objects, people, and language: "It is only if someone can do, has learnt, is master of, such-and-such, that it makes sense to say he has had this experience" (PI, p. 209). For Wittgenstein in his later philosophy, knowledge and certainty are the product of a familiarity with the form of life or grammar bequeathed to us by ordinary language, a familiarity that is akin to knowing one's way around a city, to being familiar with its streets and alleyways. Knowledge and certainty are dependent upon a familiarity with a form of life that comes from use and experience, from being immersed within that form of life. They are not the product of a "transcendental subject," of a disembodied mental eye that can see itself seeing itself.

In-as-much as Epstein's film theory argues that the cinema gives rise to a sensuous form of perceptual knowledge that is logically and substantively almost identical to Wittgenstein's concept of aspect-dawning, we can therefore also view his film theory as part of the larger attempt to refute skepticism and to rethink and redefine vision and knowledge outside of the Cartesian picture of the mind and body, an attempt that in many ways constitutes one of the major ambitions of modern philosophy as well as certain types of artistic practices. Indeed, we only have to recall Epstein's claim that the cinema brings the spectator into a corporeal "intimacy" with the phenomenal world to realize just how close his film theory is

52. For an excellent account of this "remapping" in Wittgenstein's later philosophy of psychology, see PaulJohnston, Wittgenstein: Rethinking the Inner (London: Routledge, 1993). For a recent account of Wittgenstein's contribution to epistemology in his later philosophy, see Avrum Stroll, Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

48


to the spirit of Wittgenstein's later philosophy with its sense of immanence, immersion, and embeddedness in a form of life. Epstein and Wittgenstein are therefore clearly part of the general rejection of the Cartesian visual model that Jay terms ocularcentrism. However, unlike the antiocularcentric trajectory described byJay and the artistic practices examined by Krauss, their rejection is not a negation of this optical logic through the "denigration" of vision and the inscription of blindness and cognitive uncertainty.53 Neither are concerned with producing a "rupture in the field of vision," to use Krauss's words, or "a point in the optical system where what is thought to be visible will never appear."54 If the reemergence of the skeptical denigration of sense perception formalized by Descartes in his causal theory of perception-with its metaphors of blindness and cognitive uncertainty-is one response to the crisis of ocularcentrism within modernity, then Epstein and Wittgenstein present us with another. Instead of negating the visual model of ocularcentrism, they attempt to redefine vision and knowledge itself, and they do this by rehabilitating the corporeal eye-by salvaging it from its position of blindness within ocularcentrism and antiocularcentrism- and describing the possibility of a new, sensuous knowledge of the world that is not founded upon the idealized optical powers of consciousness. The true import of Epstein's film theory lies in its demonstration that the history of vision within modernity is much more complex than the antiocularcentric narrative of decline and fall. Antiocularcentrism-the turn to visual opacity and cognitive uncertainty- is only one response to the crisis of ocularcentrism within modernism in general and within the French avant-garde of the 1920s in particular.

Of course, the cinema plays absolutely no role in Wittgenstein's discussion of aspect-dawning and vision. The concept of aspect-dawning is one of a number of concepts within the grammar of "ordinary" visual experience. It is not a visual experience produced by the cinema or any other visual technology, although the image certainly plays a major role in Wittgenstein's description of it. To compare Epstein's cinematic epistemology to Wittgenstein's concept of aspect-dawning is therefore to reject as imaginative hyperbole Epstein's claim that only the cinema provides the perceptual conditions for such a visual experience. However, perhaps we can after all allow a little room for this claim by modifying it somewhat. Rather than producing a visual experience that is the sole domain of the cinema, perhaps we can, following Epstein, view the cinema as a machine that extends the spectator's cognitive and sensory capacity to see aspects, to "see" the "soul" of the "world," due to its ability to make the phenomenal world more familiar to us, to

53. I borrow the term "negation" from Jochen Schulte-Sasse, "Theory of Modernism versus Theory of the Avant-Garde," foreword to Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Schulte-Sasse uses the term to describe the operation that Jacques Derrida performs on the "subject of idealistic cognition theory," which is roughly equivalent to what we have here been calling the "transcendental subject" of ocularcentrism. Schulte-Sasse argues that Derrida's strategy of negation remains dependent upon the very transcendental object it is negating. The same could be said of artistic practices that fall underJay's general rubric of antiocularcentrism. 54. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, pp. 82-88.

49

50 OCTOBER

reveal it in its sensuous details and endless variety. Although the thought would have horrified Wittgenstein, with his distrust of technology and science, can we not now, thanks to Epstein, see the cinema as a genuine prosthesis for the corporeal, human eye, a visual machine for enlightening us, for making visible and familiar to us forms of life?

Documents

Jean Epstein 's Cinema of Immanence