THE DEATH OF THE CAMERA

Abstract

In this paper I examine how Edward Branigan, in his new book Projecting a Camera: Language‐Games in Film Theory (2006), uses Wittgenstein's later philosophy to describe the multiple, contradictory, literal and metaphorical meanings of fundamental concepts in film theory—such as ‘movement’, ‘point of view’, ‘camera’, ‘frame’ and ‘causality’. Towards the end of the paper I rationally reconstruct Branigan's main arguments in chapter 3, ‘What Is a Camera?’ I use Rudolf Botha's philosophical study into the conduct of inquiry to analyze the way Branigan formulates conceptual and empirical problems, and how he solves them.

Notes

1. All subsequent references to Projecting a Camera will be prefaced with the acronym ‘PAC’.

2. In chapter 2 Branigan also discusses what is missing from these 11 theories of point of view—a theory of a ‘deep’ subjectivity, which produces an ‘oblique’ point of view. He finds this theory articulated in Slavoj Žižek's study of the ‘blot’ in Hitchcock's films (see PAC, pp. 42–52).

3. Branigan defines these terms as follows:

• Bottom‐up perception is stimulus driven. It is involuntary, serial, rapid, atomistic, computational, highly specialized, and inaccessible to memory and consciousness. Bottom‐up perception operates directly upon the visible and audible data of film by organizing it automatically into such features as aural pitch, loudness, timbre, edge, slant, corner, depth, volume, orientation, motion, speed, direction, size, shape, surface, color, and texture. By contrast, top‐down perception is task driven and alert to situational factors. It enables one to perceive narrative patterns in novels and films, and to construct a cognitive map of a locale on the basis of seeing a few shots or reading a few sentences. Top‐down perception is based on acquired knowledge, memory, predisposition, inference, practical postulates, and schemata and, hence, is ‘context‐sensitive’. Top‐down perception is not constrained stimulus time and operates indirectly, often abductively, on the visible and audible data of film using a spectator's expectations and goals as principles by which to organize knowledge and, especially, to project hypotheses.

     (PAC, p. 283, n. 52)

• Basic‐level categories reflect phenomena that are experienced as concrete and ‘real’ … One may easily visualize such basic‐level categories as ‘chair’ and ‘car’, but not the superordinate categories, ‘furniture’ and ‘vehicle’.

     (PAC, p. 117)

4. Jean‐Pierre Oudart's original formulation of the concept is to be found in his essay ‘La suture’ (1969), translated as ‘Cinema and Suture’ (Oudart 1977/78).

5. For a critique of Richard Rorty's relativism, see Richard Wolin, The Terms of Cultural Criticism (1992).

6. I have previously used Botha's work to analyze the formation of problems in film theory (see Buckland 1999, 2001a, b, 2004, 2006a).

7. As well as the eight theoretical conceptions of the camera described in chapter 3, the index lists 32 general conceptions of the camera. In total, the index for the word ‘camera’ and all its variations runs six pages, and offers a detailed conceptual map of the nuances behind this term.