Screening the Body

Abstract

In films such as Blade Runner, Total Recall and Strange Days it is memory which denotes humanity, which as an image is proof and support. The constitution of the subject in the field of vision - not only as the theme of Lacanian psychoanalysis or as a topic of film and media theory - can be traced historically. According to Jonathan Crary vision and subjectivity are inseparably intertwined. In the early 19th century the Camera Obscura model of the Renaissance had come under attack for the first time by a new notion of the body. This understanding of the bodily vision as a subjective vision, is now - at the end of the 20th century - again shifting substantially. The New Technologies with their new images raise anew the questions of subjectivity and identity, emphasizing the visual materiality of the subject.