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The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of the Film Experience. Vivian Sobchack. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. xxi, 330 pages. $49.50 cloth. $18.95 paper.
Reviewed by Howard Harper
Vivian Sobchack, Professor of Theater Arts and Film and Dean of the Arts Division at Santa Cruz, is dissatisfied with film theory. She finds it too dominated by Lacanian psychoanalysis and neo-Mandsm. Their "seeming complementarity" has "promised a comprehensive - and dialectical - theory of cinematic representation that would subtend the gap between 'interiority' and 'exteriority,' between psychic and social formation and their expression." But that promise has not been fulfilled. So she would like to "begin again" to "interrogate" the nature of "vision." Her book aims "to describe and account for the origin and locus of cinematic signification and significance in the experience of vision as an embodied and meaningful existential activity."
Its opening epigraph comes from The Visible and the Invisible:
As soon as we see other seers . . . henceforth, through other eyes we are for ourselves fully visible. . . . For the first time, the seeing that I am is for me really visible; for the first time I appear to myself completely turned inside out under my own eyes.
Merleau-Ponty's words have marvelous implications for the cinema. Who among us is immune to its power to surprise and move us with some sudden new knowledge of ourselves? Isn't that risk of transformation at...