Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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psychological and social implications of the device’s positioning within a film.
Clover responds to this negative critical stance, and provides an alternate reading,
while Dika ignores such criticism and seeks to understand why the eye/camera
predominates within the genre. While these approaches are each useful, as a whole
they display a preoccupation with understanding the overall complexity of the
eye/camera, and do not address the reductive base of the device. Following on from
Dika’s work, the essential question I seek to address is: why is the eye/camera used
so often within the slasher film? The simplest answer is that it is frightening by
showing precise proximity between victim and threat. When building upon this
proximity fear, it is important to understand the history of the eye/camera to see how
perspective is developed through this element which is essentially designed to create
suspense and fear, or at minimum, dramatic tension.
Early Cinema and the Evolution of the Eye/Camera
The eye/camera appeared quite early in the history of cinema, although the
modern visual coding does not firmly appear until the early 1940s, and the device
itself evolves along with cinematic technology development. Two films from
George Albert Smith provide the opportunity to examine the early history of the
eye/camera as they both house the camera within the theoretical position of a
character’s eye. Grandma’s Reading Glass (1900) assumes the point of view of a
child looking through a reading glass, highlighting this eye/camera shot through a
wide black iris. 2
This is also evidentiary of the establishment of early film language,
2 Stephen Bottomore, tracing the history of film editing, acknowledges that Grandma’s Reading Glass
is generally considered “the first film to divide a scene up into separate shots,” (1990; 108) although
he points out that this is inaccurate. Bottomore writes, “This idea, using the cut-ins as a kind of
‘stunt’, seems to have been taken from a lantern original.” (108) Lantern shows were a form of