Jean-Louis Baudry: apparatus & dispositif

1. Jean-Louis Baudry: apparatus & dispositif • Louis Althusser. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” • Cinematic technology (appareil) has two ideological objectives: • A repression of the work of signification, giving the false impression that films represent reality transparently, i.e., without transforming it. • Positions the spectator as an ideal or transcendental gaze, the master of a visually meaningful world. • The arrangement (dispositif) of projector and screen in a darkened auditorium as analogous to psychological structures of reverie, hypnosis, or dreaming.

2. Jean-Louis Baudry“Ideological Effects of the Cinematographic Apparatus” • The “apparatus” (appareil) as: • Machinery or technology • A spectacle unfolding before the public • As a conceptual or philosophical system • Rather than a scientific instrument, the cinema is a philosophical machine.

3. “The impression of reality” • The primary function of the apparatus is not to represent (physical reality); rather it produces a subject or simulates a psychological conditioning. • Baudry defines the medium not as a capacity for representation, but as a (philosophical) system of component parts wherein the spectator is simultaneously a part of the machine and its product—a subject-effect. • Technological instruments are not neutral or value-free. Rather, they are both socially conditioned and socially conditioning.

4. Jean-Louis Baudry“Ideological Effects of the Cinematographic Apparatus” • “Does the technical nature of optical instruments, directly attached to scientific practice, serve to conceal not only their use in ideological products but also the ideological effect which they may themselves provoke?” • “Cinematographic specificity thus refers to a work, that is, to a process of transformation. The question becomes: is the work made evident, does consumption of the product bring about a “knowledge effect” [Althusser], or is the work concealed?”

5. The “impression of reality” • Framing • Depth illusion • Centered vision (monocular perspective) • Continuity of movement • Automated movement of a series of still images • “Rules” of continuity editing • The “transcendental subject”

11. The “impression of reality” • The “transcendental subject” • The world as framed and made intentionally meaningful for the spectator. • Double identification • Secondary identification with the characters • Primary identification with the camera as a transcendental or omniscient vision