Turvey on Epstein

8/13/2019 Turvey on Epstein

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Jean Epstein's Cinema of Immanence: The Rehabilitation of the Corporeal EyeAuthor(s): Malcolm TurveySource: October, Vol. 83 (Winter, 1998), pp. 25-50Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/779069Accessed: 02/08/2010 12:55

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Jean Epstein's Cinema of Immanence:The Rehabilitation of the Corporeal Eye*

MALCOLM TURVEY

Shall we say, then, that we look out from the inside, that there is a third eyewhich sees the paintings and even the mental images, as we used to speak of athird ear which grasped messages from the outside through the noises theycaused inside us? But how would this help us when the real problem is to under-stand how it happens that our fleshy eyes are already much more than receptorsfor light rays, colors, and lines?

-Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind" (1961)

I

Consider the following fragment from Epstein's oft-repeated paean to thecinema, written in 1921:

Although sight is already recognized by everyone as the most developedsense, and even though the viewpoint of our intellect and our mores isvisual, there has nevertheless never been an emotive process so homo-

geneously, so exclusively optical as the cinema. Truly, the cinema createsa particular system of consciousness limited to a single sense. 1

This definition, and indeed celebration, of cinema as a "process" that instantiates a

purely visual mode of perception and consciousness is not peculiar to the film theoryof Jean Epstein. Germaine Dulac, for example, writing in 1925 on the essence ofcinema, also argues: "Should not cinema, which is an art of vision, as music is an artof hearing ... lead us toward the visual idea composed of movement and life, toward

* I would like to express my deep thanks to Annette Michelson for her editorial and criticalassistance in the preparation of this text. I am also grateful to Richard Allen, Frances Guerin, KeisukeKitano, and Mikhail Yampolsky for their comments on earlier versions. I have benefited considerablyfrom Stuart Liebman's pioneering study of Jean Epstein's film theory; see Liebman, 'Jean Epstein'sEarly Film Theory, 1920-1922" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1980).1. Jean Epstein, "Magnification," in French Film Theory and Criticism, A History/Anthology, Volume :

1907-1929,ed. Richard Abel

(Princeton:Princeton

University Press, 1988), p.240

(emphasisin the

original).

OCTOBER 3, Winter 1998, pp. 25-50. ? 1998 Malcolm Turvey.


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the conception of an art of the eye?"2 And Stan Brakhage, writing some thirty-five

years later, opens his first major theoretical work on the cinema by proclaimingthat "there is a pursuit of knowledge foreign to language and founded upon visualcommunication, demanding a development of the optical mind, and dependentupon perception in the original and deepest sense of the word."3 Epstein, there-fore, is neither original nor unique in the primacy he accords to visual perceptionin his film theory. Rather, the definition of cinema as an "art of vision" lies at thecore of the ontological project of establishing the cinema's autonomy in muchmodernist film theory and practice. In the case of Brakhage, of course, it generatesa voluminous oeuvre that is almost entirely silent.

How are we, today, to understand this fundamental visual axiom of modernist

film theory, of which Epstein's film theory now stands as emblematic? How are weto comprehend the abundant faith placed in vision and its cinematic extension bymodernist film theorists and artists when our own critical, theoretical, and artisticmilieu is permeated by a pervasive skepticism bout vision? Martin Jay has recentlygiven the name of "antiocularcentrism" to this skepticism, which he defines as "a

profound suspicion of vision and its hegemonic role in the modern era" that

begins to emerge in France at the end of the nineteenth century and achieves

ascendancy in postwar French philosophy.4 ForJay, antiocularcentrism consists ofa denigration of the idealization of vision that is located at the very core ofWestern intellectual and artistic traditions. More specifically, it constitutes a broad

and diverse reaction against a model of vision that he calls "Cartesian," a modelthat has putatively achieved "dominan[ce] in the modern world" due to its wide-

spread implementation within key intellectual, artistic, and social practices.Indeed, a cursory glance back at the statement by Epstein with which we

began immediately suggests a certain consonance between Epstein's celebrationof cinema as an "art of vision" and Jay's Cartesian model of vision. Most obviously,"sight," says Epstein, echoing Descartes's famous dictum, is "the most developedsense." More importantly, Epstein identifies both "our intellect and our mores" as"visual." In doing so he employs, at least in this provisional formulation, thefoundational metaphor of the eye for the mind. For Jay, as for Richard Rorty, this

metaphor instantiates an isomorphic relation between vision and consciousnessand gives rise, in its Cartesian and various post-Cartesian guises, to a picture of themind as some kind of "inner space in which both pains and clear and distinctideas pass ... in review before a single Inner Eye."5 This metaphorical relation

2. Germaine Dulac, "The Essence of the Cinema: The Visual Idea," in The Avant-Garde Film: AReader of Theory and Criticism, d. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1987), p. 41.3. Stan Brakhage, "Metaphors on Vision," ibid., p. 120.4. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century rench Thought (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1993), p. 14.5. Richard Rorty, Philosophy nd the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979),

p. 50. Various philosophers have argued that Rorty's understanding of Cartesian and post-Cartesianphilosophy is deeply flawed. See, for example, John W. Yolton, Perceptual Acquaintance: From Descartes oReid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

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Jean Epstein 's Cinema of Immanence

between vision and consciousness is, however, a paradoxical one.6 On the one

hand, vision as a physical, bodily sense is condemned by this metaphor as blind.Descartes, in formulating his causal theory of perception, denigrates visualperception as interminably susceptible to illusion, deception, error, and seduction.Physical, corporeal vision, along with sensory perception in general, is thus

rejected as an inadequate ground for certain knowledge and truth, and the sup-posed unreliability of sensory knowledge is used to support skeptical conclusionsabout the possibility of knowledge of the external world by many philosopherswithin the skeptical tradition.7 On the other hand, in spite of this denigration,vision is nevertheless employed as the model for a picture of consciousness as adisembodied eye in an act of sublimation that constitutes the very discourse ofocularcentrism. The relation between physical and mental realms is thereforereconfigured by cleansing he corporeal eye of its bodily imperfections and placingit within the immaterial realm of the mental through the idealization of certain ofits attributes.

As an interiorized, disembodied eye, the mind's nature or "substance" nowconstitutes a fundamentally different "world," to use Rorty's apt word, from theworld of the body and matter.8 Conceived of as translucent and thereforeunmediated by matter, the mind's transcendence over the epistemological limita-tions of bodily sight is figured by two primary topoi which recur in a variety ofways throughout ocularcentric discourse: first, the spatial topos of the purereflective presence of consciousness to both itself and its representations, andsecond, the temporal topos of the instantaneity or timelessness f the mind's gaze.Combined within the central figure of the autonomous, disembodied eye, thisspatial presence and temporal instantaneity constitute the very possibility ofabsolute certainty or indubitability within certain traditions of epistemology: theclaim that "I can know my own experience immediately and incorrigibly."

In spite of this initial consonance between ocularcentrism with its ocularmetaphors for the mind and a certain tradition of modernist film theory exempli-fied by the work of Epstein, the temptation to make a literal comparison between

Epstein's theory andJay's"Cartesian

scopic regime"must nevertheless be resisted.

Such an exercise would be reductive and futile, since Epstein himself nowhereprovides a logically coherent philosophy of mind or visual perception. Rather, hisfilm theory is contradictory and often obscure, and the earlier quoted statementon the "exclusively optical" nature of cinema is characteristic in its tendentiousnessand lack of any accompanying theoretical elaboration. To be clarified, it requiresexamination within the context of the larger argument in which it is contained.

It is clear, in this specific instance, that Epstein's appeal to sight as "the

6. For an analysis of this paradox as it emerges in Descartes, see Dalia Judovitz, "Vision,Representation, and Technology in Descartes," in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David M.Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).7. See Barry Stroud, The Philosophical ignificance f Scepticism Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).8. Rorty, Philosophy nd the Mirror of Nature, p. 52.

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most developed sense" as well as the "intellect" as "visual" functions as an

explanation for the "particularly intense" nature of cinematic affect that hewishes to elucidate.9 It is not, for Epstein, that the film camera merely replicatesor mimics visual perception or visual consciousness. Rather, by way of the size ofthe screen and other magnification techniques such as close-up framing, cinema

intensifies and augments visual perception by capturing, directing, and, in a sense,engulfing sight. "The close-up," he argues, "is an intensifying agent because of itssize alone." It

limits and directs the attention. ... This is cyclopean art, a unisensualart, an iconoscopic retina. All life and attention are in the eye....

Wrappedin darkness,

rangedin cell-like seats, directed toward the

source of emotion by their softer side, the sensibilities of the entireauditorium converge, as if in a funnel, toward the film. Everything elseis barred, excluded, no longer valid. Even the music to which one isaccustomed is nothing but additional anesthesia for whatever is notvisual. It takes away our ears the way a Valda lozenge takes away oursense of taste.... One cannot listen and look at the same time. If thereis a dispute, sight, as the most developed, the most specialized, and themost generally popular sense, always wins.10

Cinema, for Epstein as for other modernist film theorists such as Brakhage,augments visual perception by producing an exclusively optical experience inwhich the spectator's attention is focused totally in and through the eye. It is atthis point in his argument that Epstein includes his earlier quoted remarks on

sight as "the most developed sense" with which we began. Read in conjunctionwith the above passage on magnification, the implicit logic of these remarksbecomes clear. Cinematic "feeling" or "emotion" is so "intense" because cinema, asa purely optical instrument, harnesses the spectator's most advanced mental and

perceptual capacities which are a priori visual. The cinema, in other words, acts

on, intensifies, and heightens what is already the spectator's pre-given visualnature. Here, therefore, Epstein appeals to broadly familiar ocularcentric notionsof visual consciousness and the "nobility" of sight primarily to explain the specificityof cinematic affect, "the habit of strong sensations, which the cinema is above all

capable of producing."llThe general thesis that cinema augments visual perception, however,

remains consistent throughout his writings. Elsewhere, he reflects on its implicationsfor the spectator's cognitive relation to the phenomenal world as opposed to her

purely emotive reaction to events and objects on the screen. In the followingpassage, Epstein tellingly places the cinema within a lineage of inventions that

9. Epstein, "Magnification," p. 240.10. Ibid., pp. 239-40.11. Ibid., p. 240.

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Jean Epstein's Cinema of Immanence

includes the telescope and microscope, visual devices that, by augmenting visual

perception, add to and improve upon the spectator's sensory knowledge of theworld:

And needing to do more than see, man augmented the microscopicand telescopic apparatuses with the cinematic apparatus, creatingsomething other than the eye. Thus to consider the cinema as merely a

spectacle is to reduce navigation to yachting at Meulan. The cinema isa particular form of knowing, in that it represents the world in itscontinuous mobility.12

Here, therefore, a superior sensory knowledge of the phenomenal world isenabled by the film camera, which becomes, like its predecessors, a cognitive toolor instrument.13 Again, Epstein is certainly not alone in making this claim for theepistemological powers of the film camera. Richard Abel points out that Frenchfilm theorists in general at this time share a preoccupation, to borrow Abel'swords, with "the power of representation as a means to knowledge.... For Frenchwritings on the cinema, this cognitive power was located in the new apparatus ofthe camera and, by extension, the projector and screen."14 Louis Delluc, for example,writes in 1917 that "The cinema will make us all comprehend the things of thisworld as well as force us to recognize ourselves."15 Furthermore, AnnetteMichelson

arguesthat this fascination with cinema "as a new and

powerful cognitiveinstrument" is truly international in its reach during the 1920s, shared, amongothers, by Vertov and Eisenstein during the period of the elaboration in the SovietUnion of montage theory.16 For these filmmakers and theorists in general, thecinema, like other visual devices, is a scientific tool of enlightenment, penetratingand revealing the phenomenal world in new ways.

Nothing could be more different from the discourse of antiocularcentrismand its challenge to the "nobility" of sight that according to Jay is gainingmomentum in France at the precise moment Epstein is writing. It is worthpausing to indicate the sheer extent to which this discourse diverges from

Epstein's understandingof the cinema's

impact upon sensory knowledge. Indeed,the arguments we find in recent histories of technology about the invention ofcinema are diametrically opposed to Epstein's thesis of a union between human

12. Epstein, "The Cinema Continues," in French Film Theory and Criticism, A History/Anthology,Volume I: 1929-1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 64.13. Epstein's comparison between the film camera and scientific devices such as the telescope canbe understood as part of the general attempt within modernism to legitimize art as a "form of know-ing," equal or superior in status to "scientific forms of knowing." See Paisley Livingston, LiteraryKnowledge: Humanistic Inquiry and the Philosophy of Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp.16-29.14. Richard Abel, "Photogenie nd Company," n Abel, French Film Theory, p. 107.

15. Louis Delluc, "Beauty in the Cinema," in ibid., p. 137.16. Annette Michelson, "The Wings of Hypothesis: On Montage and the Theory of the Interval," inMontage and Modern Life 1919-1942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), p. 62.

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being and machine in the form of augmented cinematic vision and cognition. For

these histories, cinema certainly does not extend the capacities of the eye andenable human beings to achieve new and penetrating cognitive insights into the

phenomenal world. Rather, cinema participates in the gradual sundering of visualperception from any direct correspondence with a referential world, therebyintensifying the antiocularcentric assault on the cognitive power of sight. StephenKern, for example, suggests that the cinema's ability to "manipulate space in manyways" plays a crucial role in the general breakdown of "uniform," "universal and

homogeneous space" at the turn of the century. It contributes, therefore, to therelativist "proliferation of perspectives" that according to Kern occurs in different

ways within physics, philosophy, painting, and literature.17 Similarly, Jonathan

Crary explicitly challenges the argument that cinema, like photography, is part ofa "continuous unfolding of a Renaissance-based mode of vision" grounded in the

"perspectival space" of the camera obscura.18 Rather, for Crary both inventionsare the product of an epistemological transformation in the early nineteenth

century in which visual perception is newly conceptualized as the product of anobserver's subjective mental and physiological capabilities. This transformationrenders obsolete the "perspectivalist" model of visual perception and consciousnesshitherto guaranteed by the analogy between visual perception and the cameraobscura. The result, for Crary, is that vision becomes increasingly opaque, its

authority as a source of knowledge about the external world irrevocably under-

mined: "There is an irreversible clouding over of the transparency of thesubject-as-observer. Vision, rather than a privileged form of knowing, becomesitself an object of knowledge."19 The eye is now the victim of technology, susceptiblein its productivity to "techniques" of manipulation and deception by a burgeoningindustry of visual machines and entertainments that will later include the cinema.

Crary thus locates the cinema firmly within the logic of a "relentless abstractionof the visual" from the referential world, an abstraction that is apparentlyculminating in the "ubiquitous implantation of fabricated visual 'spaces"' by new

technologies in recent years.20Epstein's celebration of the cognitive power of the cinema obviously contrasts

dramatically with these histories of vision and technology. However, it is worthnoting that it also seems to differ markedly from the project and aspirations of theradical avant-garde that are coming to fruition in France during the 1920s as

Epstein is writing. These aspirations have recently been theorized by RosalindKrauss. Again, as in Jay, central to her account is the rejection of a particularmodel of vision, this time as it is instantiated within the autonomy aesthetic of

17. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1983), pp. 142-43, 147-48.18. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), p. 4.19. Ibid., p. 70.20. Ibid., pp. 1-3.

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modernist abstract painting. The components of this model of vision are by now

familiar to us from the pivotal figure of the disembodied eye. Modernist abstraction,argues Krauss, aims for "a higher, more formal order of vision" in which the very"structure of the visual field" is captured in the act of vision as cognition, "ofvision in its reflexive form: the terms not just of seeing but of consciousness

accounting for the fact of its seeing. It is the axis of a redoubled vision: of a seeingand a knowing that one sees, a kind of cogito of vision."21 As such, "the place of theViewer" within this visual model becomes that of the "transcendental ego" inwhich "everything material falls away." Here again are the two ocularcentric topoiof temporal instantaneity and spatial presence-of "pure immediacy," "completeself-enclosure," and of absolute "presence" to self and representation.22 The

"counterhistory" that Krauss then traces is one that works "against the grain" ofthis visual model from within, occupying a structural relation to modernistabstraction that is analogous to the relation of the unconscious to consciousness.The practices that Krauss analyzes and claims for this counterhistory take theform of an anti-aesthetic of desublimation in which the fundamental, interminablevisual opacity and blindness of the corporeal eye that constitutes the sublimated

ground of ocularcentrism re-emerges.23 These practices attempt to negate thevisual model of modernist abstraction by inscribing temporality, desire, and the

compulsive, libidinal body into perception. "The optical unconscious will claimfor itself this dimension of opacity, of repetition, of time," writes Krauss. Thus, shereads Max Ernst's collages and readymades as challenging the transparency andsynchrony of modernist abstraction through the inscription of a fundamental,structuring absence or "blind spot." This is "a rupture in the field of vision" that isthe very condition for transparency, vision, and knowledge, "a point in the opticalsystem where what is thought to be visible will never appear."24

Juxtaposing the visual opacity of antiocularcentrism, with its roots inDescartes's skeptical rejection of sensory knowledge, and Epstein's faith in the

optical and cognitive powers of the cinema therefore seems to confront us withtwo historically contemporaneous yet radically incommensurable conceptions ofvision and the cinema. Not only do Epstein's pronouncements seem to defy the

logic of Crary's general abstraction of vision from a referential world and the

consequent undermining of vision and visual consciousness as a source of reliable

knowledge about the external world, but his film theory also seems to be at oddswith the most radical movements and elements within the French avant-garde astheorized by Krauss. Thus, we are faced with a question. We must ask whether ornot the abundant faith placed in the cinema as a new cognitive instrument byEpstein and others-a faith that mirrors, after all, Descartes's own celebration of

21. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 15, 19.22. Ibid., pp. 19, 20.

23. Krauss, invoking Bataille, writes of "the foundations of modernism [as] mined by a thousandpockets of darkness, the blind, irrational space of the labyrinth" (ibid., p. 21).24. Ibid., pp. 82-88.

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"inventions which serve to increase [the eye's] power [as] the most useful there

can be" in the opening sentences of La Dioptrique-is simply a re-emergence orperpetuation of an increasingly anachronistic model of visual perception andconsciousness that is simultaneously and obsessively being challenged by themost advanced currents within intellectual and artistic modernism. Is Epstein'scinematic epistemology-namely, his theory of the visual and cognitive powersof cinema-merely an instantiation of an outmoded "perspectivalist" or"Cartesian scopic regime" that has been attacked and denigrated by the discourseof antiocularcentrism in its various guises? Is Epstein's theory of the cinema'saugmentation of vision and cognition simply part of a modernist paradigm thathas receded into the past and is now irrelevant to us? Or is it something other, a

conceptualization of cinematic vision and epistemology that somehow sidestepsthe opposition between the disembodied, transparent, foundationalist eye ofocularcentrism and the corporeal, blind, skeptical eye of antiocularcentrism,thereby opening up a very different perspective?

II

The question of the cinematic instantiation-on the levels of ontology, narra-tive, and signification-of the disembodied eye of ocularcentrism has in many waysbeen the most powerful motor behind the last twenty-five years of Anglo-American

film theory. In the seminal work of Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, and thewriters grouped around the journal Screen, t is indeed argued that there is a funda-mental homology between this disembodied eye and the film camera. In Baudry,we find the clearest statement of this argument in its ontological variant:

And if the eye which moves is no longer fettered by a body, by thelaws of matter and time, if there are no more assignable limits to itsdisplacement-conditions fulfilled by the possibilities of shooting andof film-the world will not only be constituted by this eye but for it.The movability of the camera seems to fulfill the most favorableconditions for the manifestation of the "transcendental

subject".25Baudry's argument has proved to be highly influential for contemporary film theory,generating a widespread theoretical investigation into the ideological and psychiceffects on the spectator of her exposure to the camera as "transcendental subject."In recent years, this theoretical trajectory has to a large extent dissipated underthe weight of internal and external challenges.26 However, as Annette Michelson

25. Jean-Louis Baudry, "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," Film Quarterly28, no. 2 (Winter 1974-75), p. 43.26. An example of a sympathetic challenge to this tradition of contemporary film theory can befound in David N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology n Contemporary ilm

Theory Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); an unsympathetic (and devastating) challenge canbe found in Noel Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies n Contemporary ilm Theory (New York:Columbia University Press, 1988).

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has shown, a sustained preoccupation with the cinematic inscription of the disem-

bodied, "transcendental" eye of ocularcentrism can be located in the Americanindependent cinema of the 1960s and early 1970s, and especially in the film theoryand practice of Michael Snow.

As Michelson demonstrates, Snow's theory and practice, located as it iswithin the context of Minimalism and its "systematic exploration of the modalitiesof perception,"27 is one that conceives of the cinema as a cognitive or analytictool, albeit in a somewhat different way from Epstein and his generation.Moreover, the independent cinema of the late 1960s in general, according to

Michelson, aims to give rise to a "cognitive viewer" in place of the "hallucinatedviewer" of the preceding period of romantic expressionism, exemplified by the

practice of Brakhage. However, and most importantly, the analytic film practice ofSnow and others continues to share with its predecessor "an insistence on the

primacy of vision" in spite of the pronounced shift from a "gaze of fascination" toone of "analytic inspection." As such, Snow's work, according to Michelson, criticallyperpetuates "the idealist primacy of vision" and the "status" of the viewer as"transcendental subject." And it is in La Region Centrale (1971) that Snow, throughhyperbolization, magnificently "extends and intensifies the traditional concept ofvision as the sense through which we know and master the universe."28 This

hyperbolization is enacted by way of the film's uniquely varied and multiplecamera movements, executed in an empty landscape, which instantiate theidealized "mobility" of the "transcendental" "eye-subject." However, in a filmmade, as Michelson points out, during a period of euphoria about space travel in

general and the first ever "moon walk," it is ultimately the extremity of the

deprivation of any "source or medium of corporeal grounding and identification"29that truly fulfills the conditions of disembodiment. This deprivation enforces for the

spectator a pure, Metzian identification with the camera that in its boundless

mobility transcends the limitations of the body and, to use Baudry's words, "thelaws of matter and time."

Michelson's analysis of Snow's theory and practice therefore reveals thesame insistence on the primacy of vision that we have located in Epstein's film

theory, as well as a conception of the cinema as a cognitive instrument that is not

wholly unrelated to Epstein's. However, despite these similarities, Epstein'sdescription of the spectator's phenomenal experience of cinema differs in several

important and revealing respects from the production of the spectator as "tran-scendental subject" in the practice of Snow. Consider, for example, the

following passage:

Through the window of a train or a ship's porthole, the world

acquires a new, specifically cinematic vivacity. A road is a road but

27. Annette Michelson, "About Snow," October (Spring 1979), p. 114.28. Ibid., pp. 113-14, 122.29. Ibid., pp. 121-23.

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remarks about the corporeal effects on the spectator are located. This argumentis nowhere explicitly and logically formulated. Rather, it emerges within scattered,obscure, and often contradictory statements which together gradually reveal a logicalform at work within Epstein's cinematic epistemology. Although often inconsistent,the logical form of this cinematic epistemology, I would suggest, differs from thevisual model of ocularcentrism and its figure of the disembodied eye. If, for atheorist like Baudry, the cinema reproduces for the spectator the conditions ofdisembodied "transcendental subjectivity" above and beyond the physical worldof matter and time, then for Epstein, I would argue, the cinema gives rise insteadto a spectator who is embedded n the world and its material laws. In other words, incontrast to a cinema of transcendence, perpetuating and intensifying the familiartradition of ocularcentrism, Epstein attempts to propose and envisage for us acinema of immanence.

Consistent with this conception of a cinema of immanence is the extendedanalogy Epstein most often draws on to describe the perceptual relation betweenthe spectator and the phenomenal world that is established by the film camera.This relation, he argues, is a profoundly "intimate" one, and as such he consistentlylikens it to the intimacy of bodily contact and ingestion:

The close-up modifies the drama by the impact of proximity. Pain iswithin reach. If I stretch out my arm I touch you, and that is intimacy. I

can count the eyelashes of this suffering. I would be able to taste thetears. Never before has a face turned to mine in that way. Ever closer itpresses against me, and I follow it face to face. It's not even true thatthere is air between us; I consume it. It is in me like a sacrament.Maximum visual acuity.32

The sensuous proximity to the world that is being articulated here contrastssharply with the metaphors of "distance" and "autonomy" that are standardlyemployed to describe the disembodied viewpoint of the "Cartesian perspectivalistgaze." Epstein's valorization of the cinema's ability to induce a corporeal intimacywith the world reaches its

apotheosisin

his call for a form of subjective cameramovement that places the spectator within the very body of a fictional character."I would like to look through his eyes," Epstein fantasizes at one point in a passagethat again remarkably echoes Brakhage, "and see his hand reach out from underme as if it were my own; interruptions of opaque film would imitate the blinkingof our eyelids."33 Note that the emphasis here is resolutely on physical incarnation,and not simply on the camera's assumption of a character's cognitive or emotiveviewpoint.

But it is ultimately, I would argue, the logical form of Epstein's cinematicepistemology that differs most profoundly from the "Cartesian" visual model of

32. Ibid., p. 239.33. Ibid.

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Jay's ocularcentrism. In order to demonstrate this, a careful investigation into this

cinematic epistemology is required. For at first sight, Epstein's epistemology-histheory of the film camera as a cognitive instrument that reveals the phenomenalworld anew to the spectator-appears highly mystical, full of sweeping metaphysicalclaims. According to Epstein, what is revealed by the camera to the spectator issomething he calls the "soul" of the world, a "soul" that is standardly hidden tothe naked, corporeal eye:

The face of the world may seem changed since we, the fifteen hundredmillion who inhabit it, can see through eyes equally intoxicated byalcohol, love, joy, and woe, through lenses of all tempers, hate andtenderness; since we can see the clear thread of

thoughtsand dreams,

what might or should have been, what was, what never was or couldhave been, feelings in their secret guise, the startling face of love andbeauty, in a word, the soul.34

Here, in discussing the transformation of "the face of the world" effected by thefilm camera, Epstein insists that it is the "soul" of the "world" hat is laid bare forthe spectator's corporeal eye, and this is a claim that occurs repeatedly throughouthis film theory. What, therefore, does Epstein mean by "soul"? What precisely isrevealed to the spectator's bodily eye by the film camera?

III

Epstein's answer to this question is predictably multifarious, contradictory,and difficult to pin down conceptually. Sometimes, for example, he follows otherfilm theorists of his generation in arguing that it is the essential "mobility" of theworld that is revealed by the camera. Elsewhere, he suggests that the cinema givesrise to a perceptual experience of the fundamental formlessness and "chaos" ofthe universe, a "chaos" that is spuriously masked by rational knowledge. In tandemwith these general claims, however, Epstein also isolates specific entities that arerevealed to the spectator's bodily eye by the camera. Epstein returns to these entities

again and again throughout the course of his film theory. When consideredtogether, they gradually reveal a logical form at work in his cinematic epistemologythat provides the conceptual foundation for his claim that the cinema reveals the"soul" of the "world" o the spectator.

The most prominent of these entities is time. For Epstein, cinema allows the

spectator to perceptually experience events unfolding in time. More importantly,though, Epstein also claims that the cinema allows for the possibility of controllingtime in a radically new way. Unlike human beings whose experience of time is a

perpetual missed encounter with the present, the cinema is an instrument thatcan capture nd therefore manipulate time:

34. Epstein, "On Certain Characteristics of Photogenie," n French Film Theory, Volume , p. 318.

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The fact is that there is no real present; today is a yesterday, perhapsalready old, colliding with a possibly distant tomorrow. The present isan uneasy convention. In the flow of time it is an exception to time. Iteludes the chronometer. You look at your watch; strictly speaking the

present is no longer there; and strictly speaking it is there again, and

always will be from one midnight to the next. I think, therefore I was.The future "I" s shed as "I" past; the present is merely this instantaneousand perpetual sloughing. The present is merely an encounter. Thecinema is the only art capable of depicting this present as it is.35

Only the cinema, for Epstein, can capture the pure immediacy of time in the

present tense, the "now" that is always missed during the spectator's standardperceptual experience of the phenomenal world. As Annette Michelson has

pointed out, Epstein's film theory, in making this claim, bears a remarkable similarityto his contemporary in the Soviet Union, Dziga Vertov, who also argues that thecinema allows for an unprecedented control over time: "The mechanical eye, thecamera . . . experiments, distending time, dissecting movement, or, in contraryfashion, absorbing time within itself, swallowing years, thus schematizingprocesses of long duration inaccessible to the normal eye."36 Vertov emphasizesthe analytical power of the camera's control over time, its ability to distend, dissect,or swallow time and movement. Epstein, however, persistently points to the

cinema's synthetic ability to halt or stop time, to congeal it in a moment of presence,rendering it palpable and latent within the image as a sensuous entity available tothe spectator's gaze of inspection. In the following passage Epstein valorizes the

close-up precisely because it arrests the flow of time and holds it in abeyance as

pure potential:

Even more beautiful than a laugh is the face preparing for it. I must

interrupt. I love the mouth which is about to speak and holds back, the

gesture which hesitates between right and left, the recoil before the

leap, and the moment before landing, the becoming, the hesitation,the taut

spring,the

prelude,and even more

than all these, the pianobeing tuned before the overture.37

Here, time is something that becomes directly visible to the spectator, somethingthat she can directly see congealed in the image in the latent form of a "recoil,""hesitation," or "becoming." And the result of this sensuous latency of time, for

Epstein, is the production of a pregnant moment of presence that punctuates and

interrupts the standard, continuous, linear flow of time. During such moments of

presence, the linear organization of time into the discrete dimensions of past,

35. Epstein, "Art of Incidence," ibid., p. 413 (emphasis added).36. See Annette Michelson, introduction to Kino-Eye, The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Michelson(London: Pluto Press, 1984), pp. xliii-vi; and Dziga Vertov, "The Council of Three," in Kino-Eye, . 19.37. Epstein, "Magnification," p. 236.

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Jean Epstein. Cour Fidele. 1923.

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And a close-up of a revolver is no longer a revolver, it is the revolver-

character, in other words the impulse towards or remorse for crime,failure, suicide. It is as dark as the temptations of the night, bright asthe gleam of gold lusted after, taciturn as passion, squat, brutal, heavy,cold, wary, menacing. It has a temperament, habits, memories, a will, asoul.42

Here, the emotion associated with guns and crime is captured by the camera andtransformed into a sensuous substance that inheres or subsists within the revolver.It is rendered present and palpable within the material qualities of the revolveritself, just as time is congealed within the pregnant moment of the "situation."

Epsteinrefers to the emotional life of

objectsrevealed

bythe camera as the

"personality" of the object, and he argues that, like time, "personality" is made

directly visible to the spectator's bodily eye: "Personality is the spirit visible in

things and people, their heredity made evident, their past become unforgettable,their future already present."43 The result of this unmasking of "personality" isthat objects seem to come alive for the spectator. The revelation of their latentemotional potential as a sensuous substance confers on them "life" and presence,and Epstein therefore labels the cinema "animistic." Indeed, so great is the powerof the camera to reveal the "personality" of objects for Epstein that it can chargean entire environment with a palpable and almost overwhelming emotional vivacity:

True tragedy remains in abeyance. It threatens all the faces. It is in thecurtain at the window and the handle of the door. Each drop of ink canmake it bloom on the tip of the fountain pen. In the glass of water itdissolves. The whole room is saturated with every kind of drama. The

cigar smoke is poised menacingly over the ashtray's throat. The dust istreacherous. The carpet emits venomous arabesques and the arms ofthe chair tremble.44

Thus emotion, like time, is an entity that becomes physically incarnated withinthe people and objects represented by the cinematic image. It therefore also

becomes directly visible to the corporeal eye of the spectator.Time and emotion are the two major entities revealed by the camera to

which Epstein's film theory returns again and again. However, there is a third that

Epstein only occasionally mentions, namely "family resemblance":

From oldest ancestor to youngest child, all the resemblances anddifferences delineated a single character. The family seemed to me like

42. Epstein, "On Certain Characteristics of Photogenie," . 317.43. Ibid.

44. Epstein, "The Senses I (b)," p. 242. In Epstein's film The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), thecapacity of cinema to charge environments with a heightened emotional vivacity is wonderfullyexploited to its fullest.

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Jean Epstein. he Fall of the House of Usher. 1928.

an individual whose dissimilar members never disrupted the sense of

unity and, on the contrary, proved necessary to its equilibrium.... Nota single person in the assembled group seemed to me free, neither inwhat they had been, nor in what they were, nor in what they would be.And what issued from the mouth of one or another was the family,which answered me with its singular voice, according to its singularcharacter, with its set way of thinking and which carried on acrossmany past, present, and future bodies.45

Here, Epstein characterizes the "single character" or "unity" of the family as adistinct synthetic entity that inheres in each family member and that reveals itself

throughthe resemblances between them. However, it is

onlythe cinema that

45. Epstein, "Photogenie nd the Imponderable," p. 191.

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actually has the power to "capture" this strange entity, to abstract it from the

individual members of the family and preserve it as a separate entity in its ownright through the accumulation of images of the family across time:

Once cinematography will have reached the century mark of its exis-tence ... it will have been able to capture the startling and instructive

appearances of this familial monster. Many other concepts await their

personification through cinematography; among the closest are heredity,the affectations of the mind, diseases.46

Family resemblance, like time and emotion, is therefore an entity that can berevealed by the camera and "personified" in a sensuous form within the cinematic

image for the spectator to see.Although these three entities-time, emotion, and family resemblance-

may seem somewhat curious companions when placed alongside each other, theynevertheless point toward a consistent logical form at work within Epstein'scinematic epistemology. This logical form may be described in the following way:quite simply, each is an immaterial entity that is, according to Epstein, given a

sensuous, palpable incarnation within the people, objects, and events depicted bythe cinematic image. Epstein's theory of cinema as a cognitive tool is thereforefounded upon a logic of embodiment. According to this logic, time, emotion, and

family resemblance are immaterial entities that are cognized by the spectatorbecause she can see them with her corporeal eye. And she is able to do so becausethese entities enter into and become embodied within the people, objects, andevents depicted by the cinematic image, due to the unique powers of the camera.

Having located this logic of embodiment at the core of Epstein's cinematic

epistemology, it now appears obvious why Epstein characterizes the cognitivepower of the cinema as a revelation of the "soul" of the "world" to the spectator.For the word "soul," like "spirit," refers to an immaterial substance or entity. If thecinema does have the power to reveal through embodiment the immaterial entitiesof time, emotion, and family resemblance, then it is indeed appropriate to claimthat these entities constitute a "soul," one that is granted by the cinema an immanent

presence in the faces, bodies, objects, environments, landscapes, and events that

populate the phenomenal world as it is captured within the cinematic image.

IV

Even though it is, perhaps, now clearer what Epstein means by his claim thatthe "soul" of the "world" is revealed to the spectator by the film camera, hiscinematic epistemology undoubtedly continues to appear mystical. The argumentthat immaterial entities such as time, emotion, and family resemblance becomeembodied and visible within the cinematic image due to the power of the camera

46. Ibid.

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appears highly superstitious, an outrage to our modern, rational, scientific theories

of the image and vision. Indeed, Epstein's film theory as a whole is usually dismissedfrom a theoretical and scientific perspective as a form of mystical idealism.47 If

Epstein's theoretical claims are considered at all, they are usually simply viewed as

grist for the mill of a psychological (usually psychoanalytical) explanation.48There is, however, a philosopher who takes seriously the claim that a seeminglyimmaterial entity can be seen in an image, and who rejects any psychological ortheoretical explanation of the beholder's putative ability to do so. This philosopheris Wittgenstein, and he calls this immaterial entity an "aspect."

For Wittgenstein, the beholder's claim to be able to directly see an aspect inan image arises most clearly and unambiguously during a unique visual experiencethat he calls "aspect-dawning." Although the duck-rabbit s the most famous exampleof this experience, Wittgenstein provides us with many others: "I suddenly see thesolution of a picture puzzle. Before, there were branches there; now there is ahuman shape. My visual impression has changed and now I recognize that it hasnot only shape and color but also a quite particular 'organization'.-My visual

impression has changed."49 For Wittgenstein, there is a paradox in the beholder'suse of the verb "to see" to describe this curious visual experience. On the onehand, the image remains materially unchanged in this and all other examples ofaspect-dawning. Nothing is physically added to or taken away from the "picturepuzzle" to change its appearance. Yet, on the other, the words the beholder usesto describe the experience of aspect-dawning-words such as "see" and "object"-seem to indicate that this is precisely what has happened, that indeed the imagedoes seem to have changed materially in front of the beholder's eyes during thisexperience. The beholder now seems to see it differently, as if something hadbeen added to it. Wittgenstein elucidates this paradox by asking the beholder whohas experienced aspect-dawning to represent the difference between her old andnew perception of the picture puzzle using a drawing. The beholder is, of course,unable to do so. A drawing of the picture puzzle prior to the dawning of theaspect will be identical to a drawing of the puzzle once the aspect has dawned.

Thus, we are introduced to theambiguous

andmysterious concept

of theaspect. On the one hand, the aspect of "the human shape" in the picture puzzlecannot be pointed to or represented directly using an image or verbal descriptionof it, in the same way that the material properties of an object can be. The aspectbelongs to a different dimension of visual experience than material propertiessuch as color and shape, which can be pointed to, copied, and described withease. It therefore seems to be something invisible, immaterial or abstract, some-

47. For an example of this type of argument, see David Bordwell, French Impressionist Cinema: FilmCulture, Film Theory, and Film Style (New York: Arno Press, 1980).48. For an example of this type of argument, see Paul Willemen, "Photogenie and Epstein," in Looksand Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory London: BFI, 1994).49. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical nvestigations, rans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell,1968), p. 196. Hereafter cited in the text as PI.

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thing beyond the perception of material properties and entities. Yet, on the other,

the aspect nevertheless appears to be materially present within the image orobject. It seems to presence itself, becoming materially incarnated in the image or

object during the visual experience of aspect-dawning. The aspect is somethingthat we appear to experience visually on a sensuous, perceptual level, even thoughwe cannot in fact point to it or represent it, beyond the vague suggestion that it isa type of "organization." It is this strange ambiguity of an entity that is both presentand absent, material and immaterial, visible and invisible, that promptsWittgenstein's investigation into the curious experience of aspect-dawning.

For our purposes, the visual experience of aspect-dawning highlighted byWittgenstein possesses the same logical form as Epstein's cinematic epistemology.

In both, an immaterial entity seemingly enters into the image in question and isseen directly by the beholder. More remarkably, however, there is also a substantive

similarity between aspect-dawning and Epstein's film theory. For Wittgensteinextends his concept of aspect-dawning beyond the mere perceptual recognition of

objects within an image to include some of the same entities that Epstein singlesout in his film theory. Indeed, Wittgenstein's very first example of an aspect is theresemblance between two faces, familiar to us from Epstein's "family resemblance"

argument: "I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another.I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently" (PI, p. 193). Like "thehuman shape" in the picture puzzle, the "likeness" between two faces is an aspectbecause it is directly seen by the beholder even though it is not a materialproperty of the faces in question. It cannot, therefore, be pointed to or copiedusing a drawing of the faces in question although, as Wittgenstein makes clear, itcan be captured by an image: "The one man might make an accurate drawing ofthe two faces, and the other notice in the drawing the likeness which the formerdid not see" (PI, p. 193). Similarly, emotion is an entity that Wittgenstein repeatedlypoints to as an example of an aspect. "Friendliness," for instance, is an emotionthat a beholder can see in a smile, but which cannot be described in terms of thematerial or spatial properties of the smile in question: "And this materialization is

something spatial and it must be possible to describe it in purely spatial terms. For

instance (if it is a face) it can smile; the concept of friendliness, however, has no

place in an account of it, but is foreign to such an account (even though it maysubserve it)" (PI, p. 199). For Wittgenstein, a person who cannot see aspects, whois "aspect-blind," is someone who cannot directly see an emotion manifested inanother person's face.

Wittgenstein does not go so far as to argue that time is an entity that can beseen directly during aspect-dawning, however, he does describe the visual experienceof aspect-dawning in general as one in which the beholder's experience of time is

reconfigured in a manner very similar to Epstein's descriptions of cinematic

temporality during a "situation." For Wittgenstein, aspect-dawning is always an

interruption or rupture within the beholder's standard experience of time as acontinuous flow. An aspect is always something that Wittgenstein describes as

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"flashing" upon the beholder, erupting "suddenly" into her consciousness.

Furthermore, once the aspect has dawned, it arrests the flow of time by occupyingthe beholder intensely for a pregnant moment which then fades. "'I observed thelikeness between him and his father for a few minutes, and then no longer.'-Onemight say this if his face were changing and only looked like his father's for ashort lime. But it can also mean that after a few minutes I stopped being struck bythe likeness" (PI, p. 210). Finally, Wittgenstein also employs the language of

"animism," so often used by Epstein, to describe a certain type of aspect-dawningexperienced by the beholder while looking at a picture. According to this

description, a picture may at times seem to possess a certain presence, as if it hadcome alive and was looking at the beholder:

I might say: a picture does not always live for me while I am seeing it."Her picture smiles down on me from the wall." It need not always do

so, whenever my glance lights on it. The duck-rabbit. One asks oneself:how can the eye-this dot-be looking in a direction?-"See, it is

looking " (And one "looks" oneself as one says this.) [PI, p. 205]

Here, Wittgenstein is using the language of "animism" to articulate precisely the

type of visual experience of a picture that Epstein argues is characteristic of the

spectator's visual experience of the cinematic image.The logical and substantive similarities between Epstein's film theory and

Wittgenstein's concept of aspect-dawning extend even further, however. For

Epstein also provides an articulation of the grammar of this visual experience that

anticipates Wittgenstein's own attempt to render the experience of aspect-dawningintelligible to his reader. Central to both their accounts is knowledge and cognition.What essentially constitutes the occurrent visual experience of aspect-dawning,for Wittgenstein, is the dawning of knowledge in the beholder. Aspect-dawning isthe experience of a cognition. But it is the experience of a special type of cognition,namely a recognition. "The very expression," says Wittgenstein about the beholder's

response to the duck-rabbit, "which is also a report of what is seen, is here a cry of

recognition" (PI, p. 198). Thus, the visual experience of aspect-dawning is a suddenmoment of recognition in which the image or object of the beholder's sightemerges for her in an unexpected but familiar light. In aspect-dawning, thebeholder unexpectedly recognizes or alights upon a different way of seeing the

image or object in question. What, however, is it precisely that is recognized andseen by the beholder during aspect-dawning? In what is perhaps his clearestdefinition of the aspect, Wittgenstein says, "but what I perceive in the dawning ofan aspect is not a property of the object, but an internal relation between it andother objects" (PI, p. 212). When the beholder recognizes an object under a new

aspect, she is not, therefore, cognizing a new "property" or attribute of the object.Aspect-dawning is not the cognition of a material property, and it is for this reasonthat the aspect is not akin to material concepts such as shape or color. Rather,during aspect-dawning, the beholder becomes aware of the image or object's

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"internal relation" with other objects. In other words, she becomes aware of the

place of the image or object within a grammar or form of life-an extrinsicconceptual ground or field that she is already familiar with and knows how to findher way around. Aspect-dawning is the unexpected recognition of a fit or identitybetween the image and object in question and an extrinsic conceptual ground orfield. In the case of the picture puzzle, for example, the sudden dawning of theaspect of "the human shape" consists of the beholder's recognition of a fitbetween the lines of the picture puzzle and the familiar conceptual field ofhuman shapes. Aspect-dawning is therefore a recognition of the identity of theimage or object in question, of the kind of object that it can be seen as, a consciousexperience that arises because the normally instantaneous recognition of the

image or object during visual perception has been delayed.However, the most important characteristic of aspect-dawning is that the

recognition of the "internal relation" or conceptual field within which an imageor object can be seen is not a purely mental event; it does not take place withinthe mind of the beholder. The extrinsic conceptual field is not something thatthe beholder's mind anticipates, supplies, or brings to the image or object.Rather, it is something that the beholder finds in the image or object using hercorporeal ye.Her recognition of the new "internal relation" takes place within therealm of her sensuous perception of the image or object in question. This new"internal relation" or extrinsic conceptual ground is something that emerges and

becomes embodied within the image or object in the sensuous, palpable form ofthe aspect as the beholder's eye alights upon it. It is because of this lack of mentalagency that the dawning of an aspect is always a surprise to the beholder. It is

something that she does not think of or expect. Instead, it is something she finds.It is also for this reason that the beholder ascribes agency to the image or objectand speaks of it as if it had changed materially in front of her eyes, as if it werealive. For once the new conceptual field emerges within the image or object in

question in the sensuous form of the aspect, the image or object looks different tothe beholder because of her familiarity with the conceptual field that hasdawned. The dawning of an aspect is essentially the dawning of a new way of

relating to the image or object on the part of the beholder, a new attitude offamiliarity that arises upon the basis of the sensuous recognition of a new "internalrelation" within which the image or object can be seen. It is a new way of seeingand taking the image or object.50

If we return to Epstein's film theory, we find that Epstein provides a very similararticulation of the grammar of the visual experience of embodiment that is at thecore of his cinematic epistemology:

50. It is no accident that Wittgenstein makes various remarks about aesthetic experience whileinvestigating aspect-dawning; the experience of "seeing something new" in a work of art, of alightingupon a new way of seeing or understanding something in a work of art, is a standard form of aestheticexperience with its unique blend of sensuous perception and cognition. The ramifications for aestheticsof Wittgenstein's investigation of aspect-dawning have yet to be fully explored.

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Each of us, I assume, must possess some object which he holds onto for

personal reasons: for some it's a book; for some, perhaps, a very banaland somewhat ugly trinket; for someone else, perhaps, a piece offurniture with no value. We do not look at them as they really are. Totell the truth, we are incapable of seeing them as objects. What we seein them, through them, are the memories and emotions, the plans or

regrets that we have attached to these things for a more or less lengthyperiod of time, sometimes forever. Now, this is the cinematographicmystery: an object such as this, with its personal character, that is to

say, an object situated in a dramatic action that is equally photographicin character, reveals anew its moral character, its human and livingexpression when reproduced cinematographically.51

Here, Epstein quite clearly and lucidly argues that objects in the cinematic imageappear to have an interior, emotional life because they come to embody, like

personal objects, the form of life or extrinsic conceptual ground within which

they are located, namely the emotional and dramatic context of the narrative or"dramatic situation." For Epstein, like Wittgenstein, the spectator can see thiscontext, this form of life, within the objects represented on the screen. Thus, theyseem to come to life for her, much like Wittgenstein's beholder who looks at the

picture of the smiling woman. This picture comes alive for the beholder because it

embodies in a palpable form all the personal associations of its subject for a short,pregnant moment of aspect-dawning.

Once these profound logical and substantive similarities between

Wittgenstein's concept of aspect-dawning and Epstein's film theory are taken intoconsideration, Epstein's cinematic epistemology emerges in a new and remarkable

light. From the strict perspective of science and theory, his claim that the cinemareveals the "soul" of the "world" to the spectator can only be condemned as a form of

mystical idealism. It cannot be taken seriously. But from the perspective ofWittgenstein's philosophical grammar, this cinematic epistemology can be viewed asan imaginative and ingenious attempt to articulate the logical form of a visual and

cognitive experience that Wittgenstein, some fifteen years following the formative

period of Epstein's film theory, will call "aspect-dawning." To evaluate Epstein's writ-

ings about the cinema using the criteria of science, to search in them for a theoryconsisting of a coherent body of causal explanations for the spectator's perceptualand cognitive experience of the cinema, is to miss their lasting value. It is to miss

Epstein's attempt-often contradictory and frustrating, deliberately mysterious, and

replete with hyperbole-to articulate the contours of a unique visual experience.

51. Epstein, "For a New Avant-Garde," n French Film Theory, Volume , p. 352.

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to the spirit of Wittgenstein's later philosophy with its sense of immanence,

immersion, and embeddedness in a form of life. Epstein and Wittgenstein aretherefore clearly part of the general rejection of the Cartesian visual model thatJay terms ocularcentrism. However, unlike the antiocularcentric trajectorydescribed byJay and the artistic practices examined by Krauss, their rejection isnot a negation of this optical logic through the "denigration" of vision and theinscription of blindness and cognitive uncertainty.53 Neither are concerned withproducing a "rupture in the field of vision," to use Krauss's words, or "a point inthe optical system where what is thought to be visible will never appear."54 f thereemergence of the skeptical denigration of sense perception formalized byDescartes in his causal theory of perception-with its metaphors of blindness and

cognitive uncertainty-is one response to the crisis of ocularcentrism withinmodernity, then Epstein and Wittgenstein present us with another. Instead ofnegating the visual model of ocularcentrism, they attempt to redefine vision andknowledge itself, and they do this by rehabilitating he corporeal eye-by salvagingit from its position of blindness within ocularcentrism and antiocularcentrism-and describing the possibility of a new, sensuous knowledge of the world that isnot founded upon the idealized optical powers of consciousness. The true importof Epstein's film theory lies in its demonstration that the history of vision withinmodernity is much more complex than the antiocularcentric narrative of declineand fall. Antiocularcentrism-the turn to visual opacity and cognitive uncertainty-is only one response to the crisis of ocularcentrism within modernism in generaland within the French avant-garde of the 1920s in particular.

Of course, the cinema plays absolutely no role in Wittgenstein's discussionof aspect-dawning and vision. The concept of aspect-dawning is one of a numberof concepts within the grammar of "ordinary" visual experience. It is not a visualexperience produced by the cinema or any other visual technology, although theimage certainly plays a major role in Wittgenstein's description of it. To compareEpstein's cinematic epistemology to Wittgenstein's concept of aspect-dawning istherefore to reject as imaginative hyperbole Epstein's claim that only the cinemaprovides the perceptual conditions for such a visual experience. However, perhapswe can after all allow a little room for this claim by modifying it somewhat.Rather than producing a visual experience that is the sole domain of the cinema,perhaps we can, following Epstein, view the cinema as a machine that extends thespectator's cognitive and sensory capacity to see aspects, to "see" the "soul" of the"world," due to its ability to make the phenomenal world more familiar to us, to

53. I borrow the term "negation" from Jochen Schulte-Sasse, "Theory of Modernism versus Theoryof the Avant-Garde," foreword to Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1984). Schulte-Sasse uses the term to describe the operation that Jacques Derridaperforms on the "subject of idealistic cognition theory," which is roughly equivalent to what we havehere been calling the "transcendental subject" of ocularcentrism. Schulte-Sasse argues that Derrida's

strategy of negation remains dependent upon the very transcendental object it is negating. The samecould be said of artistic practices that fall underJay's general rubric of antiocularcentrism.54. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, p. 82-88.

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reveal it in its sensuous details and endless variety. Although the thought would

have horrified Wittgenstein, with his distrust of technology and science, can wenot now, thanks to Epstein, see the cinema as a genuine prosthesis for the corporeal,human eye, a visual machine for enlightening us, for making visible and familiarto us forms of life?

Documents

Turvey on Epstein