Field Reports Round 3: Journal

For the final journal blog post I will be writing on Alex Gerbaz’s selection Direct Address, Ethical Imagination, and Errol Morris’s Interrotron. This journal questions if the prevalence of screens (television, movies, internet, etc.) in the way we communicate has made it harder to communicate face-to-face or if they have extended our ability to communicate by presenting us with opportunities to perceive social views that without we would never be exposed to. His stance admits that screens can trouble communication because it is mediated, but he believes they overall benefit us because film still provides an ethical relationship. He provides two main points. His first is that film does in fact allow us to see different perspectives of the social world, and the second is that these different perspectives have an ethical relation. His biggest support for his first point comes in the form of direct address. He argues that by using direct address the viewer is put in the place of the subject that is being directed to in the film. We are literally subjected to that subject’s point of view. Gerbaz goes on to illustrate this point with Errol Morris’s Interrotron and the pieces he has filmed with it, namely Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999) and The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003). The interrotron is like a teleprompter that bounces the image of the interviewer’s face onto glass in front of the camera lens. This effect allows the camera to capture the eye contact between the interviewer and interviewee. Played back, it simulates eye contact between the screen and the viewer. He then moves onto his second point and uses these films to explain how this kind of direct address has an ethical relation to the viewer. He quotes Paul Schrader to begin his argument, “[direct address] inspires an ‘I-Thou’ devotional attitude between the viewer and work of art”. This is transcendent, and this transcendence creates the possibility for ethical relation. He goes on to mention the argument that images and images of faces cannot be ethical because by capturing them they are frozen as caricatures, but he counters this by saying that this cannot be applied to film because film can capture the movement and expression of faces. This then allows for social interaction with the film because it allows us to perceive an ethical consciousness of the film. Lastly he uses Levinas’s philosophy to explain the importance of the moving face. He says, “ethical experience occurs when we encounter a being or phenomenon which cannot be reduced to presence or contained within a field of pure knowledge”. When we look at a face we know we are encountering another being that cannot be fully known by merely looking at it. A face cannot be fully understood, but we understand its otherness. Therefore he argues that direct address is ethical. Although the face is objectified more than anything else in film it defies objectification because it can transcend beyond its form and we perceive subjectively. By extending this to multiple faces we are able to have ethical relations of multiple perspectives.
Gerbaz brings up a lot of interesting debates, in particular whether a face on film can be ethical or not. He suggests the comparison of direct address on film to that of statues and religious paintings. Statues and religious paintings have and ability to appear like they are looking right at you, sometimes it looks like their eyes follow you as you move around them. But he states the effect is much different than when a face on film appears to be looking right at you. And I agree with that statement. Those paintings and statues often creep me out and before I read this article I didn’t have words for why, just that it didn’t feel right. It makes sense that because these faces are frozen that they would feel weird looking at them, but know that he suggests a lack of ethical relation to the image I feel that is a better explanation. There is no social interaction with an image that I am use to interacting with. But because the face on film is able to capture the movement of expression the possibility for ethical relation exists. I think it’s kind of interesting though that because the possibility exists doesn’t necessitates it’s existence. I’d like to see a direct address on film that does not display an ethical relation. That would probably be really creepy.