“Film’s undoubted ancestor…is — architecture.” (Sergei M. Eisenstein)

“Space… exists in a social sense only for activity — for (and by virtue of) walking… or traveling.” (Henri Lefebvre)

“Geography includes inhabitants and vessels.” (Gertrude Stein)

Writing on the architectonics of the traveling eye/I, my opening title got misspelled. By mistake, “sightseeing” became “siteseeing.” As per its Latin root, an error implies a departure from a defined path. Error incorporates erring — the act of traveling and wandering about. By way of such error, I make a theoretical move. Siteseeing signals a shift in film theory away from its focus on sight towards constructing a theory of site — a cartography, that is, of film’s position in the terrain of spatial arts and practices. My erring is ultimately a movement from optic to haptic. The English language makes the transition from sight to site aurally seamless. Siteseeing is a “passage,” out of the theory of the gaze. Many aspects of the moving image — for example, the acts of inhabiting and traversing space — could not be explained within the framework of theories of the eye. Locked within a fixed gaze, the film spectator was turned into a voyeur. Speaking of siteseeing implies that, because of film’s spatio-corporeal kinetics, the…

-from Giuliana Bruno. “Site-seeing: Architecture and the Moving Image”. Wide Angle. 19:4 (1997), pp. 8-24.

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