Jean-Louis Baudry:
apparatus & dispositif
 Louis Althusser. “Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses.”
 Cinematic technology (appareil) has two
ideological objectives:
 A repression of the work of signification, giving the false
impression that films represent reality transparently, i.e.,
without transforming it.
 Positions the spectator as an ideal or transcendental
gaze, the master of a visually meaningful world.
 The arrangement (dispositif) of projector and
screen in a darkened auditorium as analogous to
psychological structures of reverie, hypnosis, or
dreaming.

Jean-Louis Baudry
“Ideological Effects of the Cinematographic
Apparatus”
 The “apparatus” (appareil) as:
 Machinery or technology
 A spectacle unfolding before the public
 As a conceptual or philosophical system
 Rather than a scientific instrument, the
cinema is a philosophical machine.

“The impression of reality”
 The primary function of the apparatus is not to
represent (physical reality); rather it produces a
subject or simulates a psychological conditioning.
 Baudry defines the medium not as a capacity for
representation, but as a (philosophical) system of
component parts wherein the spectator is
simultaneously a part of the machine and its
product—a subject-effect.
 Technological instruments are not neutral or value-
free. Rather, they are both socially conditioned
and socially conditioning.

Jean-Louis Baudry
“Ideological Effects of the Cinematographic
Apparatus”
 “Does the technical nature of optical
instruments, directly attached to scientific
practice, serve to conceal not only their use in
ideological products but also the ideological
effect which they may themselves provoke?”
 “Cinematographic specificity thus refers to a
work, that is, to a process of transformation.
The question becomes: is the work made
evident, does consumption of the product
bring about a “knowledge effect” [Althusser],
or is the work concealed?”

The “impression of reality”
 Framing
 Depth illusion
 Centered vision (monocular perspective)
 Continuity of movement
 Automated movement of a series of still
images
 “Rules” of continuity editing
 The “transcendental subject”

The “impression of reality”
 The “transcendental subject”
 The world as framed and made
intentionally meaningful for the spectator.
 Double identification
 Secondary identification with the characters
 Primary identification with the camera as a
transcendental or omniscient vision