Film is a photographic medium: a strip of still frames which, when projected at 24 frames per second, creates an impression of ‘reality’. We cannot speak, therefore, about film without addressing photography’s relationship to the recent history of representation. The story may commence with the Renaissance, since its reformulation of the classical tradition set the stage for the image of a unified transcendental subject at the centre of power and knowledge. Mathematical perspective constructed a harmonious, ideal and timeless space whose single vanishing point symbolically ordered the viewer at the centre of its depicted cosmos.

The ambitiousness of a painting like Raphael’s School of Athens (1510-11) rests in its function as a totalising, artificial memory system whose architectural spaces could contain allusions to the best of western classical and Renaissance knowledge. If the logic of mathematics provided the means to order the human subject and the natural world, it was light that gave it form and the inner eye that gave it truth. Since classical times, light had been a metaphor for a transcendental consciousness, reaching its most obvious expression in the court of Louis XIV: here was the solar monarchical eye/I whose authority not only illuminated the scene but also organised what was given to others to be seen according to its singular desire. With the Enlightenment, divine light gives way to the light of reason. But the process of social abstraction and industrialisation, organised according to the needs of production, led to a fragmentation of life, and a dispersal of the subject among different, autonomous and sometimes conflicting institutions. The concept of the unified, ideal subject invoked a non-ideal and temporal other, the biological self (and primitive other), giving rise to a conflict that modernism was to attempt to forestall by postulating an autonomous creative individual, symbolised by the artwork as a pure material sign governed by the inner logic of its medium.