Friedberg

• Culmination point of a set of ongoing interventions into cinema studies
• Medium specificity of cinema
• Takes on the ideas in film studies that would suggest that film is in some way a unique and unchallenged, stable apparatus
• Keeps referencing cinema, while introducing new claims about shifting boundaries, about precursors to the things that are said about cinema, etc
• Has become a key voice in cinema studies – opening up the disc. to Media Studies
• Earlier work – 1993 – Window Shopping – similar ideas are being wrestled with, so this is a multi-decade address to the concerns of cinema and other disc, and realign the kind of work that is done with the media environment in which we live
• What is the book about? Writing about film as a special epistemological break with the world before motion pictures
• Part of that break has to do with the ways in which the celluloid apparatus allows for the malleability of the images brought before our eyes
• Revolution of vision introduced by cinema
• Change the way in which space looks, condense, composite, moving image access, something the eye can’t see, malleability of time, stretch and speed, the way in which the cinematic story unfolds
• Limited by the physical boundary if the frame – the cinematic frame as a container, in which the fracture world of time and space is held
• Post-cinematic, digital age, non necessity of celluloid to moving image, but for F, it’s primarily about “convergence”
• Boundaries b/w media – technological and industrial (web, dvd, etc) – the distinction between them a re becoming less distinct; F claims the distinction has vanished
• What happens when the frame changes? If its form is less distinct? The shape changes? What about multiple frames? What about frames inside frames?
• Techniques of the avant-garde now forms ordinary existence – representation
• Simultaneity of time is amped up with computers? What it means to break the illusion of the frame?
• All come back to the long standing claim about the fracturing of time and space in cinema, and the container’s changes must also be factored in to the equation about these changes
•

• vision/representation – the org. of vision
• focuses on inventions and innovations
• discourse(s) about windows
• virtuality as pre-computer, “immaterial proxy for the material”
• is virtuality liminal?
• Mediation b/w material and immaterial
• Is image the same as virtual? No, virtual is a trick of the eye
• Virtuality of experience
• Virtual as a representation/appearance?
• Relying on physics to understand the difference between real and virtual; immaterial and material mean very different things
• Mobility and immobility
• Virtual comes from memories (H. Bergson) – something simultaneously there and not there – virtual as b/w actual and possible
• Telepresence (Virilio)
• Immersion and sound (McLuhan) – you could write the same book about sound
• Does the virtual break down the reliance on binaries? Material, immaterial, presence non-presence, mobile, immobile, experience, etc.
• Disappearance of “the real” and into simulacra, or “virtual” – F’s argument in that there is a long history to the virtual – there is nothing special about the 20th century.. rather than Crary’s idea about the change in vision
• Less about the pomo argument about the world becoming image – though in the end we’re not sure
• 1980’s pomo – modes of id, cyberspace, etc??
• computer as break? New era?
• Style: she has core moments in the book but the overall structure is kind of like a pastiche work, assembling all sorts of ideas and approaches
• Unconventional style or argumentation
• Senior scholars can afford to be more playful – for a phd diss, you can think of it in terms of a bunch of essays instead
• Selectivity argument – always partial, motivation, appropriateness and coherence of selection; to make your case
• Begins and ends with N quotes – tech will solve problems of the world? – some see him as a philanthropist or someone involved in knowledge transfer/access
• Is she a technophile?
• See Martin Jay

Age of Windows
• chapter 3 – F outlines trajectory of screen as virtual window
• using secondary sources and primary sources on window making, histories of windows
• selective account
• linear account of the history of glass – 17th – 20th as Age of Windows
• from light to frame
• post history of view-framing windows, advent of virtual (to computer screen)
• hinges on coincidence and causality
• medium specificity vs. convergence
• cinema’s relationship to architecture – modernism, mobility,
• apparatus theory

Screens
• F traces habits and engagements with the virtual – use?
• Virtual image = cinema image
• Space = architecture; collective vs emergent viewing technologies (more individualized)
• Spectatorial paradox – 1) materiality of surroundings and immateriality of image, 2) immobility of spectator vs. movement on film
• Mobile, embodied spectator – redux of mobility paradox

virtual: "refers only to electronically mediated or digitally produced images and experiences" (7).
window (and "virtual" at times) is interrogated from material, metaphoric and methodological perspectives.

- there are theories about windows and theories that invoke windows as a metaphor. "It is important," Friedberg argues, "to 'out' the hidden rhetoric of metaphor because it is here, in the sliding signifiers of language, that they perform their sly discursive tricks: metaphors construct our cultural realities" (12).
- Friedberg does not present a chronological but a topical journey
- Descartes' Window
- Heidegger's Frame
- Bergson's Virtual
- Virilio's Screen

- "Alberti," she explained, "used the window predominantly as a metaphor for the frame -- the relation of a fixed viewer to a framed view -- and not as a 'transparent' 'window on the world,' as has been suggested widely by art historians and media theorists" (12).
- Descartes - "camera obscura" is an "analogy for the operation of the eye" (51).
- or Bergson, the photographic camera was "a grand metaphysical metaphor" (142), in which "the 'virtual' served as an ontological distinction between the possible and the actual" (141).

(http://rccs.usfca.edu/bookinfo.asp?BookID=383&ReviewID=523)

- Alberti’s metaphor of the window emphasized the frame of viewing, not a natural or mimetic view from out of an architectural window (35).
- According to Friedberg, the “frame was what mattered, not the view out the window” and it is that abiding function of the frame that she argues might continue to inform the “mobility and virtuality of… images seen through ‘virtual’ windows” such as those of film, television and new media (30, 32).
- Friedberg proposes how historic delight in the camera obscura depended not only on the verisimilitude of its images but also upon its “illusion of verisimilitude, the virtuality of the experience produced” (63).
- The “movement of elements within the frame, the movement of the camera, movement between frames, and between shots challenge[s] the fixed position of the single frame ‘window’ view”, she asserts (83, 93).
- “In the century-long history of film and the half-century long history of television, there are only limited examples of either multiple-screen display or multiple-screen composition within the single frame… That is, until recently”, she hastens to add (192). Spawned by the rise of digital imaging technologies and new modes of display that create multiple perspectives within a single-frame, Friedberg ends by suggesting that a somewhat new aesthetic or perspectival sensibility is now being fostered by the digital, so that even that longstanding bastion of cinema studies, the “very term ‘spectatorship’ has lost its theoretical pinions - as screens have changed, so have our relations to them”.
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http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/22/virtual-window.html