J EAN-LOUIS BAUDRY, THE APPARATUS: METAPSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO THE IMPRESSION OF REALITY IN CINEMA

Baudry’s theory seems the closest to my general preoccupation. I entered the world of film and photography through Deleuze with his Cinema I and II and through Fussler, two other interesting theoreticians. Baudry’s view on film goes deep in the structures of the unconsciousness liking film heavily on Freud’s and Lacan’s psychoanalysis. The similitudes between Plato’s cave and the cinema apparatus talk about the use of a metaphor here. The apparatus itself is considered to create a metaphorical relationship between places, namely between truth and descriptions or illusions. This represents a return to the real where the subject experiences the freudian rupture between conscious and unconscious. Freud does not mention cinema in his psychoanalysis but it is considered the only art that makes possible a succession of images rapid enough to almost correspond to our faculty of perception, which means that there might be a link between the cinematographic technique and our ability to produce mental images. Plato’s cave stands here for the symbol of our direct contact with the real. The cave is a sort of cavernous underground which entrance is open to the light. In this place the general feeling is one of imprisonment and blindness. The whole description of the cave represents an idealization of the reality produced in the meeting of darkness and light. Plato chooses to offer not the actual image of the things on the projection wall of the shadows, but rather a simulacrum. He is pushing the real back and offers figures of men and animals that are suggestive of the objects seen in a studio where film seems to realize the same movement, the same creation, because here too, the reality becomes rather its image, its copy or simulacrum. But the relationship with the reality seems to talk about a hidden desire the same way the dream opens another scene through regression. In other words there is a tendency in the subject to produce mimicry, the apparatus stands of a simulation of no other than himself. The unconscious scene where the subject is situated talks about this desire of being represented by a subject he is again unaware of.