Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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same space: the eye of the viewer, the lens of the camera and the eye of the
character within the film. 1
The dynamic of two sets of eyes, one real, one imagined,
conjoined by the camera leads me to alter the term slightly according to my
definition and perception. Therefore, instead of referring to this device as the “I”-
Camera, I will refer to it as the “eye/camera,” to reflect the model described.
The element of the eye/camera diagram that is least reliable and subject to
uncertain variation is that of the character eye. While the perception and personal
experience of the viewer is prone to change, the composition of the image as
captured by the camera lens is constant. The camera codes the eye/camera
composition, and the audience viewer decodes these elements to perceive a firstperson
point of view. The character eye is subject to character perspective, which
creates distinctive differences in eye/camera coding from film to film. To simplify,
the term “eye/camera” can be defined as a cinematic device whereby the camera
inhabits the specific positioning of a character eye. How this is represented visually
is subject to small changes, particularly as the cinematic coding of these shots has
evolved since the origins of cinema.
1 A similar concept has recently been used by Jarkko Toikkanen in his essay “Between the Sky and
the Bestial Floor: Monstrosity in W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Magi’ (1916)”, presented at The Monster Inside
Us, The Monsters Around Us: Monstrosity and Humanity conference at De Montfort University. He
refers to “space sharing”, wherein the writer evokes the experience of a storyteller present within the
fictional universe, which is intended to create a similar sense of experience within the reader. In a
personal communication, he attributes the origin of this idea to “Kant and his notion of ‘subjective
universality’ -- the idea that each aesthetic judgment is made in such a way that calls for universal
recognition...” (J Toikkanen 2011, pers. comm., 30 Nov) He specifically directs me to Kant’s
Critique of the Power of Judgement, Chapter 7 of the Introduction entitled “On the aesthetic
representation of the purposiveness of nature”, as well as the section entitled “Second Moment of the
judgement of taste, concerning its quantity” in the First Book of the First Section, which is called
“Analytic of the Beautiful”. This is using the 2000 Guyer and Matthews translation. Toikkanen is
using a slightly more abstract philosophical application to his approach, but agrees that it shares the
same essence as my model of three compressed visual planes.