When you’re watching a film, and I mean really watching it, not scrolling through your phone while Netflix drones on in the background, that glass eye of the camera? It becomes your eye. It’s a kind of beautiful con job, really. The director, the auteur, whatever pretentious film school dropout term you want to use, they’re essentially building a consciousness for you. They’re constructing how you see, what you notice, where you linger. Your gaze becomes their gaze. You’re not watching the actors and the scenery from some objective perch in the dark. You’re seeing them as images filtered through someone else’s very particular way of looking at the world.
Take Kubrick. The guy was obsessed with this idea, literally obsessed. Started as a photographer for Look magazine, where he learned that the lens wasn’t just a tool but a way of thinking. He owned his lenses, didn’t rent them like other directors. He knew every piece of glass intimately, what it could do, what it couldn’t. For Barry Lyndon, he tracked down this Zeiss lens that NASA had designed to photograph the darkness of space, a 50mm f/0.7 monster that could shoot by candlelight alone. Just the flicker of a flame in an 18th-century dining room. Because Kubrick understood something fundamental: the lens doesn’t just capture reality, it creates a version of consciousness. His eye became the camera’s eye became your eye sitting there in the dark, watching those candles burn.
And here’s where it gets interesting: that perception, that way of seeing, it solidifies when you’re sitting there in the theater, popcorn grease on your fingers, completely absorbed. The director’s eye becomes the camera’s eye becomes your eye. It’s a kind of possession, if you want to be dramatic about it. A willing possession.
What this does, and this is the part that made cinema feel so goddamn revolutionary, so modern, is it creates this intensified, concentrated image of subjectivity. It’s not just showing you the world; it’s showing you someone’s experience of the world, their inner life projected outward, and making you live inside it for ninety minutes or two hours. That heightened, almost narcotic sense of being inside someone else’s head? That’s what made cinema the art form of modernism, the medium that best captured what it felt like to be alive and conscious in the twentieth century.
But then things started getting weird. Someone like Chris Burden comes along in 1970s Los Angeles and he’s not just making films, he’s making himself into the film. He’s turning the streets of Venice Beach into his set, his body into the actor, and the witness into the camera. He had a friend shoot him with a rifle. He nailed his hands to the roof of a Volkswagen. He fired a pistol at a 747 taking off from LAX. These weren’t metaphors, they were actual events that existed somewhere between performance, documentation, and this strange new territory where the line between representation and reality started to blur like heat coming off the pavement.
Burden understood what Kubrick understood but from a different angle: that the act of witnessing, of being seen, was itself a kind of violence. The camera doesn’t just observe, it transforms. It takes your body, your pain, your existence, and turns it into images that other people consume. He used television the way other artists used paint. Bought airtime on LA stations to broadcast his financial disclosures, his face next to an American flag like some post-Watergate politician. Made himself famous by listing himself after Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, van Gogh, and Picasso in a paid TV spot.
The guy was mapping a social geography where the camera was everywhere and nowhere, where your body could be nailed to a car on Speedway Avenue but your image could be broadcast into ten thousand living rooms simultaneously.
Now, of course, things got complicated. Film and video started trading techniques back and forth like street vendors swapping recipes. A little of this, a little of that, each learning from the other in this ongoing conversation of images. So this neat little theoretical box we like to put things in (film equals modernist, video equals postmodernist) only works if you squint at it from a distance. Up close? It falls apart. It’s a framework, a sketch, a rough map of territories that are actually a lot messier and more interesting than any map can show.
Because by the time Burden was shooting at airplanes and Kubrick was lighting scenes with NASA lenses, the whole project of cinema as modernist consciousness had already started to eat itself. The medium that was supposed to capture subjectivity had become the thing that dissolved it. You couldn’t tell anymore where the eye ended and the lens began, where the performance stopped and the documentation started, where reality ended and its image took over.
But that’s okay. Good art, like consciousness itself, doesn’t sit still to be categorized. It moves, it changes, it steals, it evolves. It adapts to the technologies and terrors of its time.
Anyway, that’s the theory. Or part of it, at least. The rest is just light hitting film, hitting tape, hitting retinas, hitting consciousness, all the way down.