Supplementing Film Theory

Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory after New Media introduces an ambitious project. Jeong Seung-Hoon aims not only to locate, define, and defend interface as a key aspect of moving images, a topic that would have otherwise escaped film theory, but also to reconsider film theory as such by paying attention to the complexities revealed through interface in the larger fields of film and media studies of cinema. The book departs from an approach that considers interface as belonging exclusively to the mere technical and material dimension of film. Moving from the apparatus to the ontological problem of the image and subjectivity, Jeong addresses a wide range of topics, each of them depicting a different level of the book's interfacial approach: cinema as a medium whose components—camera, film, and screen—interface with each other; the body as skin and hence an interface; the surface of objects constituting what he calls "quasi-interfaces"; the face of the subject as interfacing with otherness; and finally a theory of images based on the concept of "para-indexicality."

Through its attention to specific issues taken up in contemporary continental philosophy, namely the work of Slavoj Žižek and Gilles Deleuze, Cinematic Interfaces provides crucial references to disciplinary incursions that may seem at first glance far from those that concern film studies. However, one of the main goals of the book is to pursue a "meta-critique of film studies and its history" (7). Although for Jeong this history is deeply interwoven with a set of distinct philosophical frameworks, the book's move toward philosophy is also related to the author's investment in "a general theory of image and subjectivity" (220). This investment can be read as positioning the choice of direction that visibly shapes the book, which constantly proceeds from concrete and even material analyses of the interface problem to more conceptual spheres. For instance, this progression is implied by Jeong's assertion that interface theory seems "to imply a certain direction: from instrument to symbol to organism; from informatics to aesthetics to philosophy" (6). It is also implied by the book's arrangement, since it moves from the interface as medium to the embodied interface and from the surface of the "quasi-interfaces" to the face of the subject. As a result, the conclusion of Cinematic Interfaces presents a conceptual map aiming to relocate film theories and practices according to the play of the interface between matter and camera, camera and film, film and screen, screen and eye, and eye and mind, respectively (223). The necessity of the direction is here more than suggested; it is clearly asserted. This can be seen to constitute both an ideal direction to which interface theory must conform and a certain form of ideality, either that of the theoretical discourse or that of an axiology that the book leaves unquestioned. It would have been helpful for the reader if the author had elaborated on this choice, particularly why the study of the book's main concept, interface, necessitates a movement from matter to mind.

If we pay more attention to the dimensions of meaning of the word "interface," we can better understand the direction implied by the book. The generalization of the concept of interface, as proposed by Jeong, gives the term an expansive ontological range, taking it far beyond the conventional sense of interface as the user-friendly face of a PC or other screen devices. As Jeong implicitly asserts, it would be better to talk about "interfaces" in the plural in order to define not only an array of objects or practices but also a series of structural operations on a wide range of levels, from the camera to the eye, from the eye to the mind. The book's concentration on a commonly used word may also illustrate a retroactive direction of Jeong's metacritical project: interfaces, which seem to saturate more and more our culture and bodies, allow us to rethink what cinema is and was...