Jean-Louis Baudry
(1930 - )
Apparatus theorist who was among the first film theorists to suggest that the cinematic apparatus or technology has an ideological effect upon the spectator – replacing the eyes and ears for realistic images and sounds. Baudry claims that the masking of social contradiction and difference in cinema resembles the masking of our perception of still images by the illusion of movement.
Baudry states that critics of the ideological effects of film have focused on the effects that such films have as finished products, but the “technical bases on which these effects depend” has been ignored. “Between ‘objective reality’ and the camera, site of inscription, and between inscription and the projection are situated certain operations, a work which has as a result a finished product. (Baudry)” The problem is that this product, the film, hides the work that creates this transformation.
Seeing the viewing experience as akin to hypnosis or dreaming, in that it could repress the work of signifying by giving a false impression of indexicality. Baudry elaborates on the basic concept of apparent movement by drawing from Althusser’s idea that relations to real conditions which do not help us to realize how those relations were constructed are ipso facto ideological, because they lack the "knowledge effect" that a realization of their production would entail.
MOTIVATIONS / IDEAS
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Film’s technological characteristics, as well as the conditions of spectatorship (such as the darkness of movie theaters and the silence and motionlessness of theater audiences), have inherent ideological effects.
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Baudry posits that the cinema, based as it is on an illusion of movement that we mistake for actual movement, is based on a fundamentally ideological effect.
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Baudry borrows from Jacques Lacan to demonstrate that the ideological effect involves constituting the viewer as a transcendental subject or imaginary unity. The continuous unfurling of a universe before our eyes at the cinema confirms our own centrality: When our vision roams freely, liberated from the body, the world exists for it. Our sight is the world's point of origin and its source of coherence.
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Baudry summarizes Lacan's notion of the mirror-stage, likening it to viewer experience at the cinema, where we identify not only with characters but also with the camera as the surrogate for our desire for order, organization, and unity. We want a narrative that makes sense of disparate experiences, one that confirms the self as the transcendent, all-knowing center of the world.
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ideology of the subject and of subjectivity, which certainly underpins specific ideologies of class, gender, race, and nationality but which in isolation leads to an idealist conception of the subject or ego apart from specific historical conditions.
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The potential of cinema for the production of knowledge may be severely constrained by the nature of the apparatus.
RELATED STUDY TERMS
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Indexicality -- refers to the existential bond between copy and reality. It has been defined in terms of the camera producing a “footprint” of the profilmic event., whatever is placed before the camera is recorded and through a chemical process of registering light produces the resulting image.
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Ideology (in film) -- a body of ideas reflecting the social needs of an individual, group, class, and culture. In other words, ideologyrefers to a systematic "world view" which defines our concepts of self and the relations of the self to the state or any form of the collectivism.
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Apparatus theory – the cinematic apparatus purports to set before the eye and ear realistic images and sounds. However, the technology disguises how that reality is put together frame by frame. It also provides the illusion of perspectival space. This double illusion conceals the work that goes into the production of meaning and in so doing presents as natural what in fact is an ideological construction, that is, an idealistic reality.
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Conditions of spectatorship -- film’s technological characteristics, the darkness of movie theaters and the silence and motionlessness of theater audiences that have inherent ideological effects.