Where are we?: camera movements and the problem of point of view

Abstract

This essay explores several types of camera movements that involve perceptual play with point of view, arguing that such shots pose challenges to the theories that ought to be able to explain them. I argue that theories of both cinematic point of view and camera movement mistakenly take the epistemic relation between viewer and camera, and between camera and world, to have interpretive priority, and that this focus obscures what camera movements do. Working through a variety of examples, I offer an alternate approach: the viewer’s apparent position(s) within the world of the film is not determined by the logic of the camera, however construed, but is an expressive effect of the formal construction of the shot. Ultimately, I argue that theoretical claims about a set relation between viewer and film world are best understood as epistemological fantasies, fantasies which can be – and often are – exploited in and by camera movements for various ends.

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