When you’re watching a film, and I mean really watching it, not thumbing your phone while Netflix mutters at you from across the room, the camera’s glass eye stops being glass and becomes yours. It’s a con job. A beautiful one. The director, the auteur, whatever term the film school dropouts are using this semester, is building a consciousness and then installing you inside it. He decides what you notice. He decides where you linger, how long, and what you’re permitted to want. You are not watching actors and scenery from some safe objective perch back there in the dark. You are seeing them the way one specific, peculiar, almost certainly difficult human being sees.
Take Kubrick. Obsessed doesn’t begin to cover it. He started out shooting for Look magazine, where he learned that a lens isn’t a tool, it’s an argument. He owned his glass instead of renting it like everybody else, knew every piece of it by its flaws, knew what it would give him and what it would refuse. For Barry Lyndon he ran down a Zeiss that NASA had built to photograph the dark of space, a 50mm f/0.7 monster, and pointed it at an 18th century room lit by nothing but candles. No fill, no cheat, just the flame doing its wobbling work. Because he understood twhat I’ve come to love about each of my precious lenses: a lens does not record reality, it manufactures a version of consciousness. His eye became the camera’s eye became your eye, sitting there in the dark with your elbow stuck to the armrest, watching wax burn down.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco built an entire show around the man, and it was spectacular, though maybe not for the reasons the curators had in mind. The cameras were there. The lenses were there, that Zeiss included, two of them in fact, laid out under glass like reliquary bones. And bent over the vitrines, noses an inch off the plexi, were the camera nerds. The geeks. Photographers and cinematographers who could tell you the stop on a shot you’d watched forty times without once even considering the mechanism that captured it let alone the mechanisms settings. They weren’t looking at art objects. They were looking at instruments, at the actual hardware that manufactured the way they see, trying to reverse engineer a miracle out of brass and ground glass. I loved that exhibit so much I bought the book on the way out, the big one, the kind you need both hands for and a shelf that can take the weight.
Now that transfer isn’t a figure of speech. It happens, physically, in the room. Call it possession if you want to be dramatic about it, and why not be dramatic about it. It’s a possession you bought a ticket for.
Here’s why it mattered, or still matters, why cinema felt so goddamn revolutionary for most of a century. It doesn’t show you the world, film shows you somebody’s experience of the world, an interior life turned inside out and blown up forty feet tall, and then it makes you live in there for two hours. That heightened, faintly narcotic sensation of being lodged in another skull is the whole trick. Beckettian, no? That’s what made film the art form of modernism, the one medium that got close to what it actually felt like to be awake and conscious in the twentieth century.
Then it starts coming apart. Chris Burden turns up in 1970s LA and he isn’t making films, he’s making himself into one. Video, technically. Venice Beach as the set, his own body as the actor, the witness as the camera. He had a friend shoot him in the arm with a rifle. He had his hands nailed to the roof of a Volkswagen. He fired a pistol at a 747 climbing out of LAX. None of it was a metaphor. These were events, and they lived in some new and unstable zone where performance, documentation, and the thing itself blur like heat coming off Speedway Avenue.
What Kubrick knew from behind the lens, Burden knew from in front of it: being watched is a form of violence. The camera doesn’t observe, it converts. It takes your body, your pain, your whole fucking existence and turns it into an image for other people to consume on their own schedule. How can that not be considered violent? So Burden used television the way another artist would use a brush. He bought airtime on LA TV stations and broadcast his financial disclosures, his face beside an American flag like some sweating post-Watergate congressman. He made himself famous by paying for a spot that listed him after Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, van Gogh, and Picasso. Thirty seconds, cash on the barrel, canon acquired.
He was charting a social geography in which the camera is everywhere and nowhere at once, where your hands can be nailed to a car on one specific street in one specific city while your image detonates simultaneously in ten thousand living rooms.
It got messier. Film and video started stealing from each other, a little of this, a little of that, an argument neither side ever won. So the tidy box (film equals modernist, video equals postmodernist) holds up fine from across the room and dissolves the second you walk toward it. It’s a sketch. A rough chart of country far weirder than any chart can hold.
Because by the time Burden was shooting at airplanes and Kubrick was lighting rooms with NASA glass, cinema had already begun eating itself. The medium built to capture subjectivity had become the solvent that dissolved it. Nobody could say anymore where the eye ended and the lens began, where the performance stopped and the record started, where the real thing handed off to its picture.
Which is fine. Good art, like consciousness, refuses to sit still long enough to be filed. It moves, it steals, it mutates to fit the technologies and the terrors it was born into.
Anyway. That’s the theory, or a piece of it. The rest is just light hitting film hitting tape hitting retina hitting whatever you want to call the thing behind the retina.