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3 - From Cinematographic to Cinematic Apparatus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 December 2020

Paula Albuquerque
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Summary

Abstract

I have analysed the traditional cinematographic apparatus to delineate by comparison the webcams’ potential as contemporary cinematic media, and to demystify the “aura” of the objectivity ascribed to these cameras. I have identified an intensification of daily cinematic encounters caused by pervasive contemporary forms of networked audiovisual production and distribution, including webcams and the affected footage they generate. As webcams incorporate both the principles of panopticism and cinematography, but also display an affective dimension that lies beyond the fictionalization of reality imposed by the dispositif, the “cinematic” stands for a condition of contemporaneity that affects everyone.

Keywords: cinematic, cinematographic apparatus, objectivity, encounters

The present chapter analyses the notion of the apparatus beyond Agamben's study of Foucault's terminology as discussed in the previous chapter. The notion of the apparatus now applies to the dispositif of the film medium. This theoretical approach changes focus from the surveillance apparatus of the Panopticon, in Foucaldian terms, to the structure of the classical cinematographic apparatus as defined by French film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry in “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus”. Baudry's theories will serve as a basis to compare the influence on subjectification by classical forms of film production and my conceptualization of the emerging cinematic apparatus of the webcams. What follows is a technical analysis of traditional cinema and the medium-specific characteristics I have identified when making films with webcams.

The Classical Cinematographic Apparatus

According to Jean-Louis Baudry, a film's meaning is constructed independently of the narrative content being projected and viewed. Instead, it is predetermined by the cinema machine, i.e. the mechanisms of the cinematographic apparatus. Involving more active elements than the actual materials, equipment, or tools in place to create a film, the machine encompasses the whole process and context of production. Baudry calls this the hidden process of the work:

Between “objective reality” and the camera, site of inscription, and between the inscription and the projection are situated certain operations, a work which has as its result a finished product. To the extent that it is cut off from the raw material (“objective reality”) this product does not allow us to see the transformation which has taken place.

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The Webcam as an Emerging Cinematic Medium , pp. 91 - 126
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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