3 - The Body and the Camera

Summary

Emmanuel Levinas's ethics envisages a self that is characterised by its immersion in the spectacle of the visual field yet is also affected by its incapacity before the other to exhaust what it sees in terms of content for consciousness. According to his iconoclasm, the alterity of the other cannot stem from any visibility since the visible is what can be assimilated. The other does not appear within my horizon precisely because it is not, cannot become, an object. Levinas uses the face to describe this elusiveness but, as we have seen, he is indeed no less assertive in thinking the face away from the ordinary phenomenon that the self sees or perceives. The fact that the face, as a non-phenomenon, cannot be seen is rooted in its difficult relation to form – the face gives itself to my gaze without appearing to it as it defies every plastic form it leaves behind.

It is through the originary withdrawal of the other from every form that the non-frontal of ethical exposure is evoked within an otherwise frontal vision. The primary objective of this chapter is to propose that the non-frontal exists at the core of the cinematographic eye from the outset – a potential that the cinematic image can aesthetically earn through staging the withdrawal of the filmed body from the visual field. To substantiate this withdrawal, I take as my point of departure a reading of André Bazin's aesthetic theory of realism according to which there is an alterity inherent to fragments of reality that the camera automatically records. In Bazin's understanding of how the camera relates to the world and interacts with it, as I suggest, there is a decisive parallelism between a fragment of reality and the position of that fragment within the filmic structure as a whole. A film, however fictional or imaginary, is a documentary on the materials to be filmed and, by extension, a documentation of the filmed bodies. This parallelism places a certain withdrawal at the core of the filmic rendition of the body of the other, for the automatically affirmed body owes its cinematic presence to the camera, while preceding and remaining inexhaustible by narrative or signifying processes.