The notion of “camera-consciousness” in the cinema is not, on the face of it, a terribly plausible idea. Apart from point-of-view shots, or extended experiments with the same, how can one reasonably impute sentience, let alone sapience, to the movements of the camera? Properly understood, though, the idea is — or anyway should be — of central importance. For it expresses not the doubtful notion that the camera must be treated as a sentient character, but rather the assumption, fundamental to so many a film, that the actions and events being presented are independent of the camera’s description. Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972) offers a famous example of this when the camera, after tracking a serial killer and potential victim as they walk up the stairs of an apartment building, declines to follow them inside and instead reverses direction, descending backwards down the stairs, coming out onto the street, and then rising up the building’s façade to the opaque window of the apartment seen from outside. While our perspective remains restricted to the exterior, the murder takes place inside. Camera-consciousness, then, is the camera’s capacity to express an awareness limited not by the physical movements it can follow or make, but by the mental connections that it can enter into. No camera-consciousness, no Hitchcockian suspense.
Presence, Steven Soderbergh’s latest experiment in filmmaking economy, offers a playful twist on what we might accordingly call the Frenzy principle. To this end, the film imposes a clear constraint: every sequence (with the exception of the last) will be a continuous shot confined entirely to the interior of an old mansion. In the film’s opening minutes, the camera glides around the empty house, floating weightlessly through the staircases and rooms, later observing as a realtor (Julia Fox) attempts to sell the place to an Asian American family of four. Through snatches of conversation, picked up by the selective peregrinations of the camera, we learn that neither the kids nor the parents are quite all right. Teen daughter Chloe (Calliana Liana) has been dealing with the recent and sudden death of her best friend, which has taken its toll on the entire family and is the main reason for the current move. But it’s clear that the tensions between her father (Chris Sullivan), mother (Lucy Liu), and brother (Eddy Maday) have their roots further back. In any case, Chloe is the only one who senses a supernatural presence in the house. She identifies this presence as the ghost of her best friend, but for us, the audience, the invisible presence seems to be nothing less than the camera itself.
Together with screenwriter David Koepp, Soderbergh conceived and developed Presence as a movie that unfolds from the point of view of the ghost, placing it in the tradition of such films as Lady of the Lake (1947), Dossier 51 (1978), and Enter the Void (2009). And to be sure, such a description stands to reason: the ghost’s existence is often conveyed in the manner of a conventional point-of-view shot, as when it rearranges Chloe’s books while she is in the shower, methodically stacking them on her desk. Nevertheless, if this characterization of the film does not quite capture its unique frisson, it’s because there remains a lingering question about extent to which the camera can truly be identified with the ghost, as opposed to, say, the generic causality of the story itself.
Ever since Hitchcock made it impossible to make a movie without considering audience expectation, filmmakers have confronted something like the genre equivalent of the Euthyphro dilemma: Is the camera present because things are bound to happen, or are things bound to happen because the camera is present? Claude Chabrol, for instance, demonstrates his awareness of this conundrum in his tendency to move the camera for purely dramatic effect, exploiting the way movement through space can create a sense of narrative expectation. In Presence, Soderbergh offers his own “solution” to this post-Hitchcockian situation by potentially identifying camera and ghost. Thus, when Chloe’s would-be boyfriend attempts to drug her by spiking a glass of orange juice, and the camera moves toward it, “causing” it to fall onto the floor, the event is equally attributable to both the ghost (i.e., it’s protecting Chloe) and the simple necessity of genre convention (i.e., the exigencies of story structure dictate that the drugging cannot occur yet). It’s this uncanny convergence of — and tension between — the camera-conscious direction and the ghostly entity that makes Presence more than just an extended point-of-view experiment with an invisible being.
The narrative beats to which this formal-conceptual conceit is wedded admittedly leave something to be desired. It’s not in itself a problem that Presence does not offer nuanced characterizations or plausible plot turns: one doesn’t go to Frenzy or Shadow of a Doubt (1943) for those things, either. More of an issue, ultimately, is that the film does not maintain a baseline naturalism of staging and performance that its conceit requires. All the same, Presence is an invigorating experiment — both a revealing foray into camera-conscious direction and an amusingly literal play on the ghost in the machine.
Published as part of TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 5.
