Lure of the Image: Epistemic Fantasies of the Moving Camera

by Daniel Morgan

The Lure of the Image  shows how a close study of camera movement challenges key assumptions underlying a wide range of debates within cinema and media studies. Highlighting the shifting intersection of point of view and camera position, Daniel Morgan draws on a range of theoretical arguments and detailed analyses across cinemas to reimagine the relation between spectator and camera—and between camera and film world. With sustained accounts of how the camera moves in films by Fritz Lang, Guru Dutt, Max Ophuls, and Terrence Malick and in contemporary digital technologies,  The Lure of the Image  exposes the persistent fantasy that we move with the camera within the world of the film and examines the ways that filmmakers have exploited this fantasy. In so doing, Morgan provides a more flexible account of camera movement, one that enables a fuller understanding of the political and ethical stakes entailed by this key component of cinematic style.

Genres: Film

305 pages, Hardcover

Published August 17, 2021

Reviews

[Nat · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most memorable lectures I've ever sat through was Jim Conant talking about the incoherence of the idea of a "subjective shot" in film, using copious clips from the totally bonkers 1946 Robert Montgomery Lady in the Lake, which is all shot from a kind of "first person shooter" hardboiled detective point of view, so that when Marlowe gets water thrown in his face, the camera gets covered in water, etc. The overall effect is very weird and can make you motion-sick. Dan has a nice summary of Jim's philosophical interest in that film, but he goes way beyond Jim's basic point that there's no such thing as a "subjective shot" because there's nothing for it to contrast with, no "objective shot" or view from nowhere (p. 71); there's tons and tons of fascinating examples that make trouble for standard ways of thinking about point of view and the significance of camera movement, and some very cool readings of films, from Ophuls's The Earrings of Madame de... to a bunch of Malicks, to Godard's experiments with 3-D in his late work, that focus on the role that camera movement plays in constituting the content of the films.

This is a super-rich work, and I'll definitely be dipping back into it for examples of sophisticated, surprising aesthetic judgments.

[melancholinary · Rating 3 out of 5]

First (the history of moving camera, cinema of attraction, and phantom ride) and last (the digital implication of moving camera, chaos cinema (!)) chapters are worth reading, the rest are kind of theoretically draggy. Perhaps the scenes/films that are theorised are not strong enough to support the 'epistemic fantasies' brought forward in this book. I like a little nod to media archeology in the conclusion though.