Remediating the presence. First person Shot and post cinema subjectivity

The paper applies the concept of "remediation" to a particular audio-visual figure: the first person shot (FPS). The FPS expresses the immediate and dynamical presence of the subject of the perception and / or shooting within the diegetic world; indeed, it is found in a large number of contemporary media production, from combat videos to video-surveillance footage, from video clips of live events taken with video cell phones to first-person video games, to cite just a few examples. At first glance, the FPS seems to derive directly from the cinematic point-of-view or subjective shooting. However, my presentation intends to demonstrate that its genealogy is more complex and less linear. Indeed, I argue that FPS constitutes a radically inter-medial and post-cinematographic figure, since it stems from a network of remediations 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. On the basis of this description, my paper opens two perspectives. On the one hand, I claim that the spread of FPS forces us to reconsider entirely a typology of film shots, intended as a mapping of different types of subjects responsible for the perceptual constitution of the diegetic world (or “world indirectly perceived”). On the other hand, I propose to consider the first-person shot as a kind of “symbolic form”, translating a phenomenological, relational and dynamic idea of subjectivity into audio-visual forms.