Humans Becoming Animals

This chapter attempts to explain the fascination that animals have long exerted upon the motion picture medium. It explores some of the differences among the human gaze, the animal gaze, and the cinematic gaze. Utilizing examples ranging from the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jean-Paul Sartre to films by Edward Dmytryk, Jacques Tourneur, and Paul Schrader, the author explicates affect, identification, and the status of the face in cinematic representations of nonhuman species.

The Eisenstein Effect

This chapter analyzes the confluence in thinking about cinematic and architectural montage in the work of the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. It describes their encounter in Moscow in 1928 and their shared admiration for the French architectural historian Auguste Choisy, whose description of spatial passage through the Athenian Acropolis is a key point of reference in the accounts the filmmaker and the architect develop of the role of narrative, movement, and editing in the apprehension of space. Although Le Corbusier’s promenade architecturale is the manipulation of a body moving through actual space according to precise calculations of a visual sequence, the cinematic version, as staged by Corbusier and Chenal, faced the viewer with a surrogate or avatar body moving through space, but never presented the viewer with the scenes viewed by this body: an invisible, one might say ineffable merging of architecture with the image of an invisible architecture as a projection of a static viewer. Architecture in this sense achieves the status desired of the modernist machine universe, but in the process has been reduced to two dimensions, without perspective. Eisenstein, for his part, was in this sense able to “build” an architecture in film—not the imperfect static forms that one had to walk through or work hard to imagine their ecstatic movement, but through the moving image itself understood as the highest technological achievement of modernism, thus achieving the (ecstatic) dissolution, in image, of modernist architecture.

Nicholas Ray’s We Can’t Go Home Again

This chapter analyzes the film We Can’t Go Home Again (1972–1976), which the American director Nicholas Ray realized in collaboration with a class of students he taught at the State University of New York in Purchase. The film exemplifies the ability of cinema to provide access to an “elsewhere” and “elsewhen,” analyzed by Anne Friedberg in her book Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. This chapter claims that the film’s use of multiscreen projection can be illuminated through Friedberg’s notion of the virtual window, developed in The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Thanks to the collaboration on the film of video artist Nam June-Paik and the employment of techniques associated with the contemporaneous practice of “expanded cinema,” We Can’t Go Home Again is an important precursor to contemporary digital media.

Sites of Screening

This chapter investigates the recent trend toward installation of moving images in museums and art galleries. It considers the movement of the spectator through art venues and theorizes the nature of the screen and the haptic quality of the moving image in the work of such contemporary artists as Pierre Huyghe, Chantal Akerman, Janet Cardiff, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. The chapter develops an account of how the traditional theatrical projection of motion pictures has evolved into a new form of experiencing moving images with new affective and intellectual qualities.

The Open BoxAchille Castiglioni and the Architecture of Television

This chapter explores the exhibition design and architecture that Achille Castiglioni completed in the 1950s and 1960s for the Italian television network RAI. The author demonstrates how these projects adumbrate the elements of a design culture uniquely suited to the speed and rapid change of the television medium. She explicates the work of Castiglioni in relation to the contemporaneous discussion of media by semiotician Umberto Eco. Castiglioni’s television sets were just some of the many objects he designed to fill a well-appointed interior. Yet his way of working and thinking about design in the era of information also laid the foundation for developing a radically social and participatory understanding of the end user, one that ultimately made it possible to assign architecture new forms of value, even in the context of consumer society. The most acute transformations to architecture in the era of television did not result in a reconfigured window or facilitate the domestication of a new optical toy replete with reality effects, although both of those things certainly took place. Instead, television triggered a wave of thinking about the emergence of a communications environment that recalibrated the speed, recalculated the membership, and redefined the “nature” of architecture as a world space and an open work.

Psychoanalysis Discovers Film TheoryAnne Friedberg and Close Up

This chapter analyzes the contribution of Anne Friedberg to the rediscovery of the British journal Close Up, one of the first attempts to apply the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud to film theory. It explores the relationship of the Pool Group (Kenneth MacPherson, Winifred Bryher, and the poet H.D.), who edited the journal, to Freud’s ideas and to the literary and cinematic modernism of the 1920s, especially the German and Russian silent film traditions. The author presents the contribution of Anne Friedberg in introducing the psychoanalytic theorization of film in Close Up as a precursor to the later work of film scholar Christian Metz.

Introduction

This introduction presents the central concepts developed by film and media scholar Anne Friedberg (1952–2009) in her books Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern and The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. It argues that her notions of the moving virtual gaze and the virtual window prefigure subsequent discussions in the visual studies and mobility studies literature that emphasize the significance of vision in motion. It also explicates how the chapters in this volume investigate domains such as film, television, visual art, architecture, urbanism, and virtual reality. Finally, it indicates how each chapter extends Friedberg’s ideas to new areas and contributes to an ongoing investigation of cultural modernity in an age of rapid media change.

Windows on a Broken World

This chapter treats the famous incident of December 1976 in which artist Gordon Matta-Clark employed a BB gun to shoot out the windows of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City during the Idea as Model exhibition. Although his photographic piece Window Blow Out was to have been on display, the institute removed it after the shooting. The author analyzes the artist’s gesture as a political statement that reflects the complex relationship of Matta-Clark to architecture and urbanism. She suggests that it anticipates the turn in his career toward urban activism that was cut short by his untimely death.

Max Ophuls and Instant Messaging

This chapter explores the public character of film and is informed by the ideas of Jürgen Habermas, Alexander Kluge, and Oskar Negt about the public sphere, Öffentlichkeit in German. It takes as its prime example the 1932 film Liebelei, by the Austrian director Max Ophuls, whose opening scene it interprets as a paradigm of the visuality and relay of gazes made possible by classical cinema. The author argues for the necessity of reformulating the thesis of Walter Benjamin about the reproducibility of the artwork to account for the contemporary digital media environment. The chapter concludes with speculation about the future of film exhibition and its survival as a form of sponsored or niche culture.

Moving Through Friedberg’s Properly Adjusted Virtual Window

This chapter analyzes the theory of virtual reality developed by Anne Friedberg in The Virtual Window and argues that Friedberg confuses the notions of pictura and imago developed by Johannes Kepler in his theory of optics. The chapter untangles the meanings of these concepts and develops a notion of the virtual image that builds upon Friedberg’s work while eliminating some of the inconsistencies and limitations in her account. Gunning cautions against simply aligning the virtual with the immaterial or tying it too closely to the process of representation and claims the virtual optical images Friedberg invokes mark a revolution we might call virtual media. This does not simply involve a process of reproduction (although Walter Benjamin’s analysis of technical reproduction provides a founding text in defining the virtuality of modern media), but rather a process of discovery and transport. If we focus more broadly, as Friedberg invites us to do, on virtual media rather than a virtual image, our attention shifts from image to the apparatuses, or better, the technical processes, of virtualization.