Previous literary studies revealed how the physical environment is deeply immersed in continuous narrative images and scenarios. The emphasis on the psychological form of a postmodern metropolitan life is greatly colored by two books: Georg Simmel’s ‘The Metropolis and the Mental Life’, and Hal Foster’s ‘Vision and Visuality’.
French sociologist Jean Baudrillard claimed in his book ‘America’ that if we take a look around, we will find cinema all around us. The physical surroundings are immersed deeply within continuous narrative images and scenarios. Although the book focused more on Baudrillard’s voyage to American Southwest deserts, considering the desert a place of serene emptiness, his description of crowded cities unfolded visual snapshots of cinema’s influential role in creating a gazed society, highly fascinated by moving images, calling them “a system of luxury prefabrication, brilliant synthesis of the stereotypes of life and love”.
This point is one of several time-lapsed points at which theories concerning cinematic images collided with the physical settings of the city, where the secret perceptive ingredient lies in the movement from the screen onto the city instead of the traditional other way around – an approach that began with our mental senses’ mechanization within a metropolitan modernistic environment. Using our senses allows us to discover more about ourselves and our vivid reflections upon a vast empty space rendered with a “transitory landscape, where new ruins continually pile up on each other”.
IT IS THE SAME FEELING YOU GET WHEN YOU STEP OUT OF AN ITALIAN OR A DUTCH GALLERY INTO A CITY THAT SEEMS THE VERY REFLECTION OF THE PAINTINGS YOU HAVE JUST SEEN, AS IF THE CITY HAD COME OUT OF THE PAINTINGS AND NOT THE OTHER WAY ABOUT - JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Georg Simmel & Hal Foster
Both Simmel's and Foster's books convey the new ruins – the postmodern city – which have rendered a series of speculative images that have isolated individuals’ participation within the city’s transformation processes leaving them as mere observers. Simmel's The Metropolis and Mental Life is concerned with post-modernity as the extent to which an individual’s mind is stimulated so much that it ceases to show any reaction to the disruptions and complexities of the modern city. Being within a metropolis, the rapid changing of images, the stark discontinuity of normal gazes, and the emergence of a series notion of unexpectedness, all create emotional imbalance and disturbance.
On the other end of the line, Foster’s Vision & Visuality preface includes the concept of seeing and the approach to the process of seeing. He identifies the physical operation of vision, and the social aspect of visuality – “a difference, many differences, among how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the unseen therein”. His book is a collection of different essays that seek to interpret the physiological underlining of vision, and to socialize its essence via emphasizing its contribution to the production of subjectivity. One of the chapters included entitled ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’ claims that the visual stimulus has become the most dominant aspect within the modern city, creating an era set “apart from its pre-modern predecessors and possibly its postmodern successor”.
This will take us to the concept - which will be explored in the upcoming post - of the gaze and Vertov's kino-glaz (film eye) theory presents life in its most realistic form via exploring “the chaos of visual phenomena that fills the world”.