Reviewed by Bruce Isaacs

Francesco Casetti’s slim, though marvellously ambitious Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity offers a complex and nuanced reading of the “ontology of the film image”, to use Andre Bazin’s influential terminology. Indeed, placing Casetti’s work in a philosophical body of film theory recalls Bazin and his project to classify a film ontology. Casetti not only stands on the shoulders of giants, but in film theory circles, one of the greatest giants of them all. In the second half of his book, Casetti employs Bazin’s model in the development of his own reading of the cinematic real; at this point the book’s project achieves a recognisable form and trajectory.

What distinguishes Casetti’s approach from other philosophical inquiries into film is the meticulous research into film ontology, tracing the debate to several decades before Bazin’s work. Conceptually, the work extends a well-worked inquiry: connecting the eye of cinema to the eye of “modernity”. But Casetti does not merely equate cinema and modernity in ways of looking at the world, but in the complex experience of a twentieth-century mode of being. It is not enough to describe the orientation of the twentieth century gaze, but to consider its immersion in the history of a twentieth-century modern self. As such, his reading of sensory experience, or what some writers have broadly termed “affect”, is a particularly strong inclusion.

What further distinguishes Casetti’s inquiry is the range of cinema, and theories of cinema, employed. Certain seminal works should always appear in a theoretical text: Welles’s Citizen Kane (a brief, though subtle reading), Kurosawa’s Rashomon, which correctly takes its place as an ontological red-letter date in the history of cinema, and Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which has run the critical/theoretical gamut from philosophers of being to Second Wave feminists charting a “patriarchal gaze”; thankfully, Casetti resists this impulse.

But the stream of lesser-known cinematic works establish a broader, subtler, and ultimately authoritative reading of a cinematic century. If Casetti begins too centrally with a history of theory, he soon departs into interesting and inventive readings of cinema itself; Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is nicely treated here as reconfigured social mythology. Antonioni’s Blow Up supports Casetti’s thesis of a convergence of subjective/objective cinematic perception. While not an original approach to the film, the close reading of Antonioni’s use of images is refreshing and persuasive.

Casetti’s prose is at times stilted, reading like a survey of theoretical work, or a literature review of a topic; though I wonder if the constant signposting—which I found distracting and unnecessary—concerns an issue in translation. Occasionally, I felt the argument depart into tangential inquiries that were at best tenuously related to the central thesis. I also felt his very brief analysis of a new cinematic gaze—and Casetti himself acknowledges the anachronism of “film” in the digital era—presented a weakness in the approach to an ambitious inquiry. If one is to talk about the eye of cinema, while anchored in the twentieth-century, the transformation brought about by the digital image—reproducing “reality” with it, exhibiting it in a theatre, viewing it on a screen—offers a conspicuous intrusion into this theoretical reflection. Perhaps, however, Casetti may in time present a work engaging with the eye of a new century: new image-making forms, new mediated forums, new modes of experiencing the age ahead.

Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity
(2008)

by Francesco Casetti
Columbia University Press (distributed in Australia by Footprint)
ISBN: 978-0-231-13995-3
288pp AUD$42.95