Cinema vs. Photography (Subjectivity, Pleasure, and Trauma)

In “Technology’s Body”, Doane addresses a paradox of cinema: it is often seen as an enhanced, perfect, permanent kind of vision (as opposed to inferior human vision), but it actually achieves this illusion by taking advantage of subjectivity. Film may be seen as an improvement or extension of photography, but the term “moving pictures” is actually a misnomer, as cinema, of course, does not really move; it is merely comprised of a series of still images projected in succession to create the illusion of movement, an illusion aided by (and possibly exclusive to) imperfect human vision. In fact, the frames of a film are separated by moments of blackness when the film strip is moved in the projector, so that half of the time one is in a movie theater, one is actually sitting in perfect darkness. This is apt.

Doane explains that the forerunners of cinema, Marey and Muybridge, actually saw subjectivity as a “hurdle to be overcome”; they also saw cinema as “unscientific”. This is appropriate as cinema (and, more importantly, cinematic pleasure) is deeply entrenched in subjectivity. On the other hand, photography has never been seen as entertainment. It captures a single image and freezes it in a way that our vision is unable to do. Perhaps it might be said that photography captures reality in a way that cinema only pretends to do; cinema, like impressionist art, recreates the subjectivity of human vision. But because human vision is flawed, we often prefer film to photography in terms of capturing “reality” (for instance, you often hear people complaining that they aren’t “photogenic” or don’t “photograph well”).

However, cinema requires a lot of distortion to achieve the illusion of realism. For instance, a lot of makeup is necessary to make people look natural under studio lights. And a lot of times the real is seen as unrealistic; ask any visual effects expert or sound editor. Rain is often tinted to appear realistic on screen. And I remember hearing a story about Peter Jackson being forced, post-production, to put in the shing of metal-on-metal whenever someone in Lord of the Rings drew a sword from a leather scabbard because audiences responded negatively to not hearing the unrealistic sound they had been trained to expect.

Human vision is based on seeing the world through the lens of subjectivity. When that lens is taken away, we feel something lacking. The story with which Doane begins her article, of the woman who expresses fear that having her photograph take will hurt, is central to understanding the difference between photography and film. Mainstream cinema, as we have already discussed, is designed to be pleasurable (“popular art’s discourse of ‘sensations’ and ‘thrills’”), and this pleasure is maintained in perhaps no more important way than in the illusion of continuity. Continuity is also an essential part of human subjectivity. 18^th century philosopher David Hume (at least I think it was him, although I wouldn’t swear to it; I can’t seem to find my old textbook at the moment) theorized that a consistent identity is actually an illusion created in retrospect; that is to say, we look back on our actions and connect the dots to create the impression of a consistent “self”. I don’t know if the first psychoanalysts were at all influenced by Hume, but I do know that many in the psychological field share this view. Psychoanalysts, Doane explains, see trauma as a fragment of raw material that, for whatever reason, has been unable to be assimilated by the self into the linear formation of a whole. We might recall Caverero and the horror of dismemberment in addition to the woman’s fear that a photograph will “hurt” (like having a tooth removed) in order to see how the individual frame, separated from its illusory “whole” (a film), can itself be seen as a kind of trauma.