From interpassive to interactive cinema: A genealogy of the moving image of cynicism

Abstract

In his book, The Virtual Life of Film (2007), D. N. Rodowick is reluctant to accept Lev Manovich’s celebration of digital media for supposedly providing new freedoms to interact with the world through creating, controlling, and manipulating data. Taking his cue from Stanley Cavell, Rodowick claims that the true desire of the modern subject is not to achieve such mastery but its exact opposite: to reach the stillness of her psychic apparatus, to see a world that she is absent from, a world that is not her creation.1 Cavell’s argument turns around the old young-Hegelian narrative about the modern subject’s alienation from her productive essence, embodied externally as a deceiving mirror image in various ideological institutions, a phantasmagoria she misrecognizes as the natural state of things. In film studies, this argument was popular with Screen theorists who claimed that the spectator-voyeur mistakes the projections of the cinematic apparatus for the images of a complete and self-sufficient world, falling into an ideological slumber much like the slaves in Plato’s allegorical cave of illusions. In order to awaken from such a passive state, so their story goes, the subject needs to disidentify from the machine and actively, productively reappropriate what has been taken from her, lifting the veil of ignorance that blocked her access to the real as always already mediated, constructed by the spectator’s perspective. 2.