A New History of the Eye

One of the most original characteristics of everyday life in recent decades has been the desire for finding and recreating in life moments whose specific theatricality correspond to the physiognomy of cinema. For more than a century, dramas and musicals, westerns and thrillers, have offered spectators a manual for sensibility and emotions: definitive instructions on how to cry or laugh, how to behave in a wedding or how to mourn. Such a manual, existing as it does in the mind of audiences, has modified the public's humor and emotions, as well as its ways of loving or suffering. Everyday life has found in film not only a sentimental education, but also a true canon of emotion and perception. As a foreseeable result of such expressive autonomy of filmic representations, archetypal stories, images, and viewpoints characteristic of cinema have become a sort of dramatic, and narrative Gestalten that shape imitable models for everyday perception and daily conduct. Film not only allows the audience to live imaginary lives: it encourages them to live real lives inspired by the silver screen.

The interior monologues, the vertiginous edition of a persecution (when you follow someone physically), the circular shots of endless kisses, the extreme close ups that follow the trajectory of a tear, the reactions of the audience in the theater, the long shots of the hero walking towards the horizon, the journeys following a walk, the voice-over commentaries of the narrator, the jokes followed by a brief pause as if waiting for the prerecorded laughs or the induced clapping, the signal to look at the camera and wink to the spectators, the memory as a weak montage of evoked postcards, the apparent takes that open and close, going from the bedroom to the city to the galaxy or viceversa, inserting the characters in the dramatic evolution of the cosmos; all are ways in which life has taken form, mechanisms that personal imagination has acquired to represent itself.

In the literary sphere, the subject of life imitating art is not new: Don Quixote and Madame Bovary are two well known examples. However, in the moment in which the imitated object is transformed, when it is no longer strictly literary, but also cinematic, the nature of imitation is modified, as is the reality of the imitating subject. Emulating a cinematic story supposes the incorporation, in the perception and in conscience of the world, of others and of ourselves, the group of elements that constitute the particularity of film: its dynamic identity supported in writing by images and sounds in movement. The audio-visual synchronization, the temporal evolution of the tale, and the notable mobility of the camera found an unprecedented visual conception of facts and conscience, a life conceptualized as film that is not read, but rather watched, observed, scrutinized.

Departing from the mental reproduction of the narrative signs of a film in everyday life, we invent our own existence as a small super production seen by an invisible and omniscient audience that follows us everywhere; an audience that judges and approves our actions, celebrates our successes and thoughts, cries our misfortunes and becomes one with our conscience. The uncommon desire of being fatally followed by a lens that puts us in contact with a room full of spectators through a sense of the I emerges, then mediated by the camera, making us think not of a lone reader, but of an expectant multitude, an audience like a collective image of the conscience that attenuates solitude. It installs itself in the capacity of experimenting the reality of a mental vision of the camera that functions as a sensorial extension of the body, and as an emotive continuation of the mind: a symbolic instrument susceptible of being confused with the selfsame faculty of self-perception. In his or her role of unknown protagonist of the drama of modern world, the solitary individual in the middle of a crowd of people finds a new elaboration of him/herself: it returns to the mass of people that surrounds him or her as an agent of direction, moving it...