If the world itself is cinematic, its inhabitants must play their part in creating as well as viewing cinema. Having accepted the cinematic quality of their surroundings, several 1930s writers figured consciousness itself as a camera or projector. These narratives take the cinematic as read and investigate the experience of living in a world whose subjects are absent actors mediated by the cinema screen. This is the darker side of 1930s cinematic writing; it is hard to be hopeful when you are not sure if you exist at all. It also offers a subjective alternative to the objectivity aspired to by documentary literature and film.

Isherwood would later gloss his infamous ‘I am a camera’ declaration in terms of feeling like a camera, rather than attaining a camera-like objectivity:

Camera consciousness here involves a subjective experience of passive, mechanised vision; Isherwood is more victim than witness. According to Stanley Cavell, cinema entered a world ‘whose ways of looking at itself … had already changed, as if in preparation for the screening and viewing of film’.