http://www.metromagazine.com.au | © ATOM | Metro Magazine 195• 15Representing subjective experience
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on screen as characters sent and received them, placing
the audience within a subjective narrative space.
Film is fundamentally an observational medium and,
as such, has struggled to represent subjective experi
ence. Classical cinema seeks to bridge this distance
by encouraging audiences to identify vicariously with
characters’ experiences and emotions through the tech
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space. Montages, blurs, cuts and dissolves evoke states
of consciousness and perception: pondering, remem
bering, confusion, agitation, passing out or coming to.
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and tight tracking shots mimic what a character sees as
they move through a space.
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(POV) style incorporates the character’s own body into
the frame, creating a sense of solid, coherent corpore
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arms and hands intrude into the shot to handle props
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as if to the protagonist. Our familiarity with home mov
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has naturalised this approach, but the awkwardness of
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perspective^2 – should remind us that it’s a claustropho
bic, disciplining view.
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ment that circles actors within a space. Instead, what
we have in+@CX HM SGD +@JDand later works like it is a
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Christopher Campbell observes, the style is ‘a terrible
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back of the protagonist, without our own free will’.This
is cinematic code for incarceration. It’s used in the biopic
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the forced spectatorship of ‘the sunken place’, where
black people live out their days helplessly watching their
bodies being puppeteered by white people.
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audience uncomfortably complicit in racialised and
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terface between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ subjective experiences,
Bigelow asks the viewer to consider how embodied sub
jectivity might intersect with systemic power and political
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(2012)^4 and#DSQNHS(2017)have been strongly criticised.
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ceral subjectivity’ is much milder. He sketches bounda
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over the roles of capitalism and the state in determiningInOtherLife, Lucas’ use of what we could call ‘carceral subjectivity’ is much milder.
He sketches boundaries between feeling liberated and entrapped, and glosses over
the roles of capitalism and the state in determining freedom from constraint.