On-screen Cameras: Mirrors of Cinematic Practice - Text 10
This brief journey through the ways in which cameras are depicted in fiction films makes it possible to remark that the movie camera, as a vision machine, often plays the role of a “body” with a point of view. It can be shown to us this way from the outset, configuring a kind of ploy, or after the fact, following a shot-reverse shot structure around the gaze. What is “seen” is thus shown full-frame in the form of an image from the film as such, or as the vision of the person behind the camera, with the addition of visual markers such as the crosshairs of a viewfinder. An object in the scene, the camera becomes a kind of interface, both for the individual whose gaze enters into the world, or for the person who is the object of this gaze. In the first case, the filmmaker, director of photography and others who handle the equipment are responsible for a kind of image production which can interfere in the film we are watching. In the second case, the persons being filmed appear to oscillate between repulsion – the Peeping Tom’s victims – and attraction – Charlie Chaplin, or Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950). In either case, the presence of a filming device on screen is always an event: “the cameras have arrived,” Max solemnly announces to Norma at the very end of Wilder’s film, marking the apotheosis of the protagonist’s narcissistic desire as she advances towards us, in the glare of the spotlights.
