Narrative, Point of View, and Cinematic Identification

Jean-Louis Baudry's "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," first published in the French journal Cinéthique in 1970 and translated into English in Film Quarterly (1974–75), inaugurated what came to be called "apparatus theory": Baudry argued that the camera's monocular lens replicates the fixed, single-point vanishing perspective codified in Renaissance painting — associated with Filippo Brunelleschi's fifteenth-century experiments and Leon Battista Alberti's treatise Della Pittura (1435) — and thereby positions the film viewer as a unified, disembodied, transcendental subject, structurally analogous to the Cartesian cogito. On Baudry's account, this apparatus produces an ideological effect by naturalizing a specifically bourgeois, individualist model of subjectivity as though it were simply how perception itself works.