1. This attack was made twice by directors of photography during the "New Perspectives" seminar sponsored by the American Society of Cinematographers and Eastman Kodak Worldwide Student Program at the University of Southern California on February 18, 1995. Although the charge might have been exaggerated for the sake of effect, no one on the panel bothered to soften it. [BACK]

2. Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," trans. William Lovitt, in Basic Writings , ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper-Collins, 1977), pp. 283-317. [BACK]

3. Heidegger, p. 294. [BACK]

4. Andrew Feenberg, The Critical Theory of Technology (New York: Oxford University Press), p. v. [BACK]

5. Herbert Marcuse, Negations , trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 224. [BACK]

6. I am very grateful to Wesley Lambert, who showed me his marvelous collection of antique cameras and spent much time pointing out the different viewing devices in use. [BACK]

7. Gib., "Close-Ups: Guy Bennett: Operative Cameraman," International Photographer , vol. 11, no. 3 (April 1939), p. 5. [BACK]

8. The effect I am describing in this essay is unique to cameras equipped with a mirrored shutter. The look through the lens is certainly less fascinating when shooting with a camera designed with a partial mirror that splits the light before it reaches the shutter, thus providing an uninterrupted flow to the operator.

As for operators shooting with their other eye closed, an informal survey with camera instructors at USC (Woody Omens and John Morrill, among others) revealed an operating difference between fiction and documentary work. Most operators prefer to shoot narratives with the other eye shut so as to concentrate on the scene in the viewfinder with, from time to time, a quick check toward an actor about to enter the frame, a car that may be getting too close, or the bustling of the focus puller. In documentaries, however, the consensus is that an operator should keep the other eye open so as to be aware of what is happening in the field at all times. [BACK]

9. Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 134. [BACK]

10. Ron G. Williams and James W. Boyd, Ritual Art and Knowledge: Aesthetic Theory and Zoroastrian Ritual (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), p. 70. [BACK]

11. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image , trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 7. [BACK]

12. In A. William Bluem, Documentary in American Television (New York: Hastings House, 1965), p. 194. [BACK]

13. For Heidegger's full argument, see "The Question Concerning Technology," in Basic Writings , pp. 287-317. [BACK]

14. In Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1962), chap. 4. [BACK]

15. For Emmanuel Levinas's ideas, check his Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority , trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969). [BACK]

16. See Stan Meredith, "The Electronic-Cam System," American Cinematographer , vol. 49, no. 4 (April 1968). [BACK]

17. In David Samuelson, "Electronic Aids to Film Making," American Cinematographer , vol. 50, no. 8 (August 1969). [BACK]

18. I am indebted to Lindsay Hill of Hill Production Services for information about his father and his research. [BACK]

19. I am truly grateful to Terry Clairmont of Clairmont Camera for sharing with me his knowledge of the industry's reaction to the introduction of video assist technology. [BACK]

20. Garrett Brown, "The Steadicam and The Shining," American Cinematographer , vol. 61, no. 8 (August 1980), p. 853. [BACK]

21. In James B. Brandt, "Video Assist: Past, Present and Future," American Cinematographer , vol. 72, no. 6 (June 1991). [BACK]

22. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the 17th Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 31. [BACK]

23. In Daniel A. Fink, "Vermeer's Use of the Camera Obscura—A Comparative Study," The Art Bulletin , vol. 53, no. 4 (December 1971), pp. 493-505. [BACK]

24. Vivian Sobchack, "The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic 'Presence,'" in Materialities of Communication , ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 100. [BACK]

25. Charles Eidsvik, "Machines of the Invisible: Changes in Film Technology in the Age of Video," Film Quarterly , vol. 42, no. 2 (Winter 1988-89), p. 21. [BACK]

26. See Milton J. Nadworny, Scientific Management and the Unions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), pp. 54 ff. [BACK]

27. Feenberg, p. 27. [BACK]

28. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 41. [BACK]

29. Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations , trans. Don Ihde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 236. [BACK]

30. William Barrett, The Illusion of Technology: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978), p. 191. [BACK]

31. Thomas Brown, "The Electronic Camera Experiment," in American Cinematographer , vol. 63, no. 1 (January 1982), p. 76. [BACK]

33. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception , trans. Carleton Dallery (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 181. [BACK]

34. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense , trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 48. [BACK]

35. The Portable Nietzsche , ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 519. [BACK]

36. David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 145. [BACK]

37. Eidsvik, p. 22. [BACK]

38. Eidsvik, p. 22. [BACK]

39. On the subject of the Steadicam, see my article "Visuality and Power: The Work of the Steadicam," Film Quarterly , vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 8-17. [BACK]

40. Feenberg, p. 14. [BACK]