Introduction - Text 1
While painting can make a portrait of itself, literature can describe itself and theatre can stage itself, cinema is peculiar in that it can represent the actual functioning of the devices on which its technical system rests and, more broadly, of all the devices for capturing and disseminating images and sounds contemporaneous with it or which preceded it. Moreover, there has been no lack of such representations, as film history is full of characters shown in the process of carrying out a variety of observation or listening activities using equipment for this purpose; of recording images or sounds; and of projecting or disseminating them in both fiction and documentary contexts. On each occasion, to some degree a distorting mirror is inevitably held up to cinematic practice, which consists in capturing images and sounds and in fixing them on a variety of supports in order to then let them be seen and heard. Consequently, looking back to these films themselves to analyse the way these audio-vision machines are shown can enlighten us as to how the filmic forms and discourses they embody are conceived. In addition to informing us about these objects and the real or fictitious technologies which orient their real or imagined functions and uses, films can situate the objects at the heart of their narrative or even make them real dramaturgical tools. In this way, they invite us to see devices for capturing and disseminating images from a historical, technical or aesthetic perspective, just as many audiovisual works enable us to understand them; and, at the same time, to rethink the specificities or hybrid forms of cinematic representation in light of the presence of these machines on screen, at times sweeping up a number of practices associated with a range of devices and at other times focusing on a singular technical act.
Even before taking up the emblematic movie camera, we should consider two of the fundamental principles which guided its conception: forming a framed image and recording it. To do so, we must return to the optical instruments which were taken hold of by numerous avid observers of a given reality in several thrillers in a more or less direct line of descent from Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal set-up in Rear Window (1954). Although Hitchcock’s protagonist never clicks the shutter of his camera, characters playing photographers found throughout cinema oblige us to pass time in their darkroom, where they set to work developing this reality, even if it means retouching it.
Cinema, of course, also adds movement: that of the image, but also that of its frame; the movie camera, an instrument endowed with a clearly identifiable (and vaguely anthropomorphic when seen on its tripod) “silhouette,” has delighted in filming itself for more than a century – at first carried on the shoulder of a few agile camera operators before gaining greater presence atop a crane as it became more prominent under the studio spotlights. It is also because of the importance taken on by the sound recording associated with it, with its ever more numerous ears. For cinema also listens to these sounds, and especially these voices, the recording and transmission of which are often in the service of sharing emotions.
It was then up to the camera to break its chains to recover its drive and, thanks to greater synchronisation and miniaturisation, rub up closer against cinema’s filmed and filming bodies. But in the end another device, capable for its part of slipping into a pocket and whose history can be traced through a variety of representations on screen, would come to rival it on this turf: the telephone was deemed “smart” around when it became… a camera. At the same time, this camera became virtual, in that by capturing not forms but rather their spatio-temporal coordinates it became an increasingly elaborate means of depicting the real, even as its mystery was maintained by a “live-action” cinema at once fascinated and troubled.
