This week’s lecture and reading revolves around the concept of thinking film – “how do you encode all the other elements of cinema [composition, mise-en-scene, music and colour] into the frame itself?” 

Daniel Binns talked about how when we frame, we essentially frame what we perceive the world to be. Using Dziga Vertov’s ‘The Man with a Movie  Camera‘ (1928) as an example, when the viewers watch the film, they can see what the director, and essentially the camera, saw. It’s like peeking through a keyhole – the audience only get a glimpse of what they can see through and within the frame.

However, Daniel Binns also bring in Daniel Frampton’s reading Film Minds in ‘Filmosophy‘ (2006), where he talks about how ‘”film offers us our first experience of another experience; a double phenomenology”. (p.1) Frampton states that when we perceive the world, when we look at it through the camera, we view it the way it is shown. The camera acts as an external piece to the human eye – we see what the camera sees.

Film is not OF the world – film IS the world.

Daniel Binns mentions that when we take a film or photograph with the camera, we tend to distance ourselves from the camera itself. “Film is not simply a reproduction of reality, it is its own world with its own intentions and creativities. Cinema is the projection, cinema, screening, showing of thoughts of the real”. (Frampton: 4-5)

“People separate themselves from the lens. They put the camera on a tripod and step back. They place it on a jib, a robotic arm, drone, satellite. As the distance from lens to operator increases, what happens in the space between?” – Zach Zamboni, ‘The Snake Charmer: Robots, Time, and The Future Camera. Zamboni has a point in this statement. People who isolate themselves from the camera do not get to experience what the camera experiences. There is a large amount of distance between the camera and the person when the camera is on a rig, or a tripod. The user has no control of the camera, thus not able to immerse themselves in the experience that the camera provides to the user.