Le plan à la première personne. Technologie et subjectivité dans le paysage postcinematographique

The article focus on the new forms of the subjective image in audiovisual media, defining the "first person shot" as a new kind of post-media semiotic figure. The first-person shot appears on different occasions throughout different media, from combat videos recorded with helmet cams and distributed via the Internet to video-surveillance footage re-used in art installations, and from video clips of live events taken with video cell phones and broadcasted by television news to first-person video games, to cite just a few examples. The core of my paper is devoted to reconstructing the first-person shot’s technological and stylistic genealogy. I argue that although firmly a part of contemporary cinema, it constitutes a radically intermedial and post-cinematographic technique, since it stems from a network of “remediations” and “deep-remixes” involving different media agencies and players – from mainstream cinema to independent television and video producers, from the video-game industry to military and surveillance uses of audiovisuals. In my conclusions, I rapidly sketch two questions related to the first-person shot. First, I ask whether the first-person shot should or not be considered not just as an audio-visual technique but also as a well-defined semiotic figure. My answer is positive; moreover, I argue that a formal assessment of the first-person shot entails a new systematization of point-of-view issue within the semiotics of audiovisual media. The second question concerns the cultural foundation of the first-person shot. In this regard, I propose to consider it as a kind of “symbolic form”, implying a specific conception of the subject as a hybrid, dynamical and relational entity – an idea of the subject and sub-jectivity chiming with contemporary conceptions of phenomenological neuroscience.