The Look at the Camera

Abstract

According to approaches, the look at the camera has a double effect: it foregrounds the enunciative instance of the filmic text and attacks the spectator's voyeurism by putting the space of the film and the space of the movie theater briefly in direct contact. In such a situation, it is supposed traditionally that the discursive form I/You comes to accentuate the relation of the two interlocutors in contrast to narrative cinema that would seem to have opted in general for the form he, which, according to Emile Benveniste, characterizes a narrated story [histoire racontee]. The look at the camera would be the major interdiction and the great repressed of narrative cinema. All of this would even seem confirmed by the very formula by which tradition speaks of the look at the camera as if this cinematic figure were homogeneous and unique. However, in a detailed and already fairly old study, Pascal Bonitzer distinguished two looks at the camera: the first would be the expression of a desire that would not endanger the traditional status of the fiction; the second (which refers to as close to abjection) would be Brechtian in that it would denounce fiction as a lure, a trap.2 And yet, other scholars have been able to locate numerous examples of the look at the camera in Hollywood films.3 Moreover, scholars have agreed that the look at the camera is a mark of enunciation that can be diegeticised.4 Finally, certain scholars have recently offered ways to refine our understanding of that relationship instituted in the triangular movement between an I, a you, and a he or she.5 These modifications, these rethinkings of older questions, these new precisions, are a proof that the issue of the look at the camera is still alive, either because it was poorly posed in its earlier forms or because it was poorly answered. But it may also be because we have rarely interrogated the terms of the question itself: What do we mean by look?; When can we speak of a look at the camera? The first of these questions is large in scope and goes greatly beyond the study of cinema alone because it also concerns interpersonal and social processes that have already been examined by philosophy (Merleau-Ponty, Sartre), by psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, Guy Rosolato.. .), and by perceptual psychology. I will not go into this larger question in any great detail; rather, I will refer, with the greatest prudence, to certain of the studies on it while asking the reader to keep in mind the complexity of the subject. The second of the questions (When can we speak of a look at the camera?)

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