Bionic Eye: The Resources and Limits of the Cinematic Apparatus

In 1926, Virginia Woolf, who had been reading and contemplating Henri Bergson's theory of memory and consciousness, wrote an article titled "The Movies and Reality." In it, she described film as an art of dream in which the past can be "unrolled" and "distances annihilated" (Woolf 309-10). Cinema itself made possible The Waves (1931) with its floating consciousness and several narrators crossfading in montage. Cinema also suggested narrative techniques to Joyce, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Dos Passos. Indeed, cinematic thinking has gotten thoroughly mixed up with literature, especially narrative fiction and biography To study narrative today means to confront a challenge to think cinematically. Conversely, to study cinema means also to reflect on the basic problem of narratology: how discrete elements, orfabula, become galvanized into a plot.