Movement, vision and subjectivity in the nineteenth century

Abstract

Based on extensive and ever expanding scholarship on nineteenth-century Western cultural practices and discourses, this chapter explores specific articulations of cinematic movement, mobile vision and subjectivity. It first considers how a linear, incremental and forward movement becomes a metaphor within scientific discourses and political practices of the period and then examines specific ‘technologies of vision’ (as evidenced in the railway journey, in the experience of the museum, in flânerie or in the Parisian arcades, for example) and the types of mobile vision that they enable. It also focuses on evaluations of such experiences as well as some of the prominent binaries (such as activity/passivity, order/disorder, certainty/uncertainty) that inform critical approaches. It analyses the genealogical ground of articulations of movement, vision and subjectivity in order to examine their reconfiguration in cinema from the late nineteenth century onwards. It discusses epistemic objects in flux and mobile observers, circulations (commodities, arcades, flâneurs and regulation), popular technologies of vision (museums, exhibitions and panoramas) and impressionism.