Fantasy Apparatus
In this collection titled Apparatus, edited by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, are two important essays in cinematic spectatorship by Jean-Louis Baudry. His Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus and The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema are both seminal works in spectatorship/apparatus theory. Essential to Baudry’s notion of film spectatorship is the notion of the “cinematographic apparatus.”
For Baudry film functions as a cinematic and institutional apparatus; a literal and figurative machine consisting of standardized arrangement of parts and interlocking functions. Film is a representational system with specific subject positions that arise from the nature of the cinematic apparatus, the formal structure of its narratives and the viewing situation it generally involves. The cinematic apparatus creates a ready-made subject position for the film spectator.
One way in which the cinematic apparatus structures the film viewer is through the very process of the projection situation. For Baudry, the cinema produces a psychological and ideological position for the film viewer through the very mechanisms of cinematic representation; i.e. the camera/projector, editing, the immobile spectator, the screen in a darkened room, the conventions of “Hollywood realism”. These aspects of the cinematic apparatus produce a fundamental form of identification in the film viewer. This identification consists of the spectator’s identification with the very mechanism of projection, with the pleasure in perceiving. The spectator identifies with the pure act of perception. The eye/I of the spectator merges with and transforms into the film projector. This mode of identification exists prior to and makes possible other forms of filmic identification such as identification with characters and their actions.
Baudry sees the cinematic apparatus as a perfected technological realization of Plato’s metaphor of the cave thus adding to its ideological power. Just as the shackled denizens of Plato’s cave mistook the shadows on the cave wall for reality, so does the film audience misapprehend the projector’s play of light and shadow for real life. This “reality effect” of the cinematic apparatus is regressive because it creates in the viewer a perception of reality that is illusory much as the dreamer regresses to a more primordial state of thinking when he or she misperceives his or her dreams for reality. Furthermore, for Baudry, this subject effect is ideological because the cinematic apparatus creates a sense of reality or belief in a cinematic world that proves to be illusory or constructed. This cinematic experience mirrors and supports the manner in which ideology operates beyond the walls of the theater.
