It’s interesting when we try to recreate a human perspective with a camera – maybe we think too much about trying to make point of view shots that will never really work out the way we want…

The camera is an integral part of the filmmaking process. It is the machine for capturing. Sometimes we rely too heavily on it and thinking that it is the only, or the most important part of the process. True, without material there would be nothing to edit, nothing to project.

Stan Brakhage notes that the camera is simply a machine. One part in a three part process of image capture, image editing, and, finally image projection. Maybe we place too much emphasis on the role of the camera. The camera does not function as our eyes – it is machine, it is foreign and trying to appropriate it as a way of framing human gaze is perhaps limiting it’s capabilities.

We, as filmmakers, as photographers, as users of technology, see the camera as a way of framing our world – through our eyes. I think that perhaps we get too caught up in trying to ensure the frame makes sense by framing objects and people in ways that are similar to what we experience through our own two eyes. Is it possible to drop that preconception and see completely through the camera? Not rely on the way we think things should look?

It’s the same with drawing. With still life and with life drawing. We forget to look at the form and at the shape and the light – instead our hand, our nose, they become unreal because we are preoccupied with the way they are meant to look. A finger on that angle does not look like a finger, so I will draw what a finger really looks like. And then I end up with something that does not resemble what is in front of me. My frame for looking is skewed.
So I wonder if we can ever totally be in the moment?
What if a child was blindfolded for the entirety of their life and then asked to look through a camera? Or, what if they grew up looking through a camera?
But still that is a skewed vision – the camera does not necessarily need to act as one set of eyes. It could, perhaps, act as a totally unique instrument. Recording what is going on – not how any one person sees it, and not how any person understands it. But as the camera. It asks the viewer to make sense of what machine has captured…

“Nowhere in its mechanical process does the camera hold either mirror or candle to nature…Being machine, it has always been manufacturer of the medium…Essentially, it remains the fabricator of a visual language, no less a linguist then the typewriter. Yet, in the beginning, each of an audience thought himself the camera…”

(p20,Stan Brakhage, Essential Brakhage)

Camera is not reality (editing even less so). Nowhere in nature are still images captured except as imprints of movements, of bodies. But even those are impermanent. The camera, the machine does not need to exist in harmony with nature – in capturing material with this machine we ought to attempt to capture not what is natural, but what is beyond the natural. When I say this I don’t mean the unnatural, I mean that we should not use it as a tool to capture what we understand is normal – what use is that to us?

What the camera captures, what the camera creates is not realism shaped through our eyes. We should separate our eyes from the camera. They are not one and the same. Trying to replicate the point of view shot with a camera – trying to communicate the world through one’s eyes using a camera is an unattainable task. Should we even try? The medium lends itself to the thought process that what is captured must look the way we think it might look through our eyes – but the more accomplished cinematographers are able to distance themselves from that thought process. In those shots, the one’s that leave the hairs on the back of your neck standing up, the camera does not replicate the human eye. The wide angles, the extreme symmetry, the traveling crane, the close ups that could not be physically achieved naturally; these are the shots that stay in our (my) mind. They linger because they are not something I could see with my own two eyes. They are an entire new construct. Created by the machine that is the camera.