FILM AS VIRTUAL WINDOW

Abstract

In Virtual Window: from Alberti to Microsoft Anne Friedberg explores the nature of our perception and emphasizes the relationship between architecture, visual arts, film and digital media. Referring to window as metaphor for virtual vision, she analyzes connections between window as architectural element and virtual window of film, TV or computer screen. The author focuses on Descartes’ window, Heidegger‘s frame, Bergson’s virtual and Virilio’s screen, trying to establish main fields of her research. The starting point of her study is Alberti’s treatise on perspective and his approach to painting as an open window. This metaphor was used as leitmotif of Friedberg’s book; she starts her research in the theory of 15th century and ends her study in 21st century, trying to predict future of screen and our visions. Alberti’s metaphor of window for the frame emphasizes the fixed relation of viewer to a framed view. Looking at camera obscura as one of the key techonological inovations which led to new forms of vision (even moving pictures), Friedberg points out that this scientific instrument was used to translate a three-dimensional view from outside to a two-dimensional representation on the surface inside making a virtual window. Jonathan Crary goes even further and interpretes camera obscura as a model of 17th century perception, that underwent change in 18th and 19th century due to the development of science and construction of stereoscope. Camera obscura was a predecessor of kinetoscope of Thomas Edison and cinematographe of Lumière brothers. Before them, Marey and Maybridge captured movement with so-called chronophotography and their experimental works in the field of photography and sequential movement. With Lumière brothers new art and new screen emerged: film screen became a new form of framed picture, a new virtual window that introduced previously unimaginable possibilities. Following Heidegger, the author uses his concept of frame to stress that enframing is implicit not only in cinematic vision but also in modern thought and experience. In chapter three Friedberg focuses on the age of windows, analyzing two debates: the first between architects Auguste Peret and Le Corbusier on the size, shapes and function of the vertical and the horizontal architectural openings (known as the French window and panoramic horizontal window), and the second between Russian director S. M. Eisenstein and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science on the shape of the film screen. These debates indicate the tension between the material reality of architectural space and the dematerialized imaginary space of cinema, TV or computer representations. Friedberg points out that the screen negotiates the tension between mobility of pictures and immobility of viewers as well as the tension between materiality and immateriality in the architecture of spectatorship. Virilio understands screen as a temporal window and initiates discussion on effects of fracture of the screen into multiple windows. The last chapter is dedicated to multiple screens and split-screens often used in last three decades. Multiple and split-screen techniques are used in film and video art; their possibilities are exhausted in computer science and digital media. The author concludes that the future of window as an architectural element is unquestionable, but the future of screen as virtual window must be examined; in decades to come the screen may dissolve in new ways of uploading images and data, which exclude the optics of vision.