audiences. In this way, a critical analysis of the context in which cinema functions is not only attempted from beyond that context, but in direct psychological correlation with that very functional context.

Baudry’s Apparatus Theory and Duiker’s Cineac as Points of Critical Reference

In creating this work Graham could rely on a film theory that conceived of the projection screen in the cinema in terms of a «mirror» in a metapsychological sense. [6] In a departure from the semiological film theory of the 1970s, film was no longer treated as a text in itself, but rather as part of a cinematic situation that influences the observer more deeply than any individual film ever could. In his essay «The Ideological Effects of the Cinematographic Apparatus,» Jean Louis Baudry initiated this turn in film theory to metapsychology. [7] He adopted the concept of the apparatus from both Freud and Althusser, arguing that in the cinematic situation an effective linkage takes place between the apparatus of the human psyche and the ideological state apparatus.

Baudry’s argument becomes comprehensible against the backdrop of the phenomenological film theory of the 1950s. André Bazin described the film screen phenomenologically as a «window to the universe» and the reality impression in the cinema as a mystical epiphany. As Baudry explains, the plausibility of this film theory rests on the fact that the «conceptual apparatus of phenomenology» and the cinematic apparatus correspond to one another exactly. Both phenomenology and the cinema, the former theoretically, the latter practically, presume a subject as the passive observer and phenomenological center of an event in which the subject does not take part, for which however his or her perception alone is responsible. The cinematic apparatus lends the film spectator the position of a transcendental subject and at the same time blocks the insight that this position is something that is constructed. Baudry related the film-spectator’s self-misrecognition to Lacan’s theory of the so-called mirror phase: at an age when it experiences its own body as uncoordinated and fragmentary, the small child is provided with a visual impression of individual physical wholeness in the