Decasia and Doane: Index and The Gaze

In her article "The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity," Mary Ann Doane illustrates the dialectic relationship between trace and deixis in creating the indexical relation of the photograph to its referent (138, 140). She further emphasizes the frame in directing "the spectator to look here, now, while the trace reconfirms that something exists to be looked at" (140). And finally, on page 144, she discusses the little girl's disruption of the "fourth wall" and the separation between viewer and viewed in Decasia, asserting that "the disintegration of the look is fatal for the cinema. It is the reversal of the emergence of figuration from a stain on the shroud of Turin... What is indexed here is the historicity of a medium, a history inextricable from the materiality of its base."

The intersection of these assertions had a profound effect on me, and I began to elaborate on the secondary component of the index, the deixis, in extension of Doane's analysis of Decasia. The little girl's gaze, or any cinematic gaze for that matter, is an additional constituent of the photograph's and film's "pointing finger." The object within the photograph gazes outward, and in doing so, acknowledges a reality outside itself--a there and now that confirms the film's own now and there/here and formerly. The cinematic gaze is more than essential to the index of cinema as just an indexation of "the historicity of the medium" (144)--it is a confirmation of an external reality (in matching the spectator's gaze and confirming that spectator's existence, perception, and physical relation to the light that is projected on the screen and reflected off the viewer's eyes). In confirming an external reality, the filmic object's own indexical, material, and deictic relationship to the original object/reality re-presented is reinforced and textured.

Additionally, and perhaps tangential to Doane, this new relationship between the viewer and viewed's gazes generates a new and problematic space within the filmic apparatus. The chain of relations (between photograph and referent, photograph and spectator, photograph and photograph (film), film and spectator, spectator and referent) produces new spatialities for unique relations and complications of accepted forms of semiosis, subject-object associations, and indexicality. If the relationship between viewer's gaze and viewed's gaze (/the image of the viewed) is material due to the movement and reflection of light, if the relation between the (image on the) screen and projector is physical due to that movement of light, and if the relationship between film and referent is indexical due to that trajectory of light, then new forms of indexical relationality are produced and the cinema's reproduction of reality and potentiality for complex meaning-making are heightened.