Forty minutes into his incendiary final film The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), Fritz Lang invents a formal manoeuvre that has been imitated ever since: the camera, framing for a two-shot, pulls back to reveal that the initial image, far from being the product of an omniscient perspective, is actually the live feed of a surveillance monitor, a frame within a frame. By giving potential narrative motivation to the placement of the camera at any particular moment in the film, the German master makes us aware of the fact that assuming one position will necessarily preclude the possibility of viewing from another. What matters most in Thousand Eyes is not determining the veracity of an event—as one moment’s truth, seen from a particular vantage, will often be revealed to be mere illusion when viewed from another—but examining the position of the character who judges. One could ask, “What happened?” or “Who is telling the truth?” but these questions lead headlong into frustration, presupposing an all-seeing person at the centre of the world—someone with a thousand eyes.
When we see the monitor, our reaction should be to reinterpret everything we’ve previously seen inside the film’s world—call it a semiotics of seeing. Consider the film’s most exemplary sequence, a faked murder scene at a hotel involving a potential femme fatale, an industrialist who loves her, and the woman’s presumptive husband, which Lang breaks into three realms of perception: the man and woman, there is no single, neutral point of view from which all others can be judged Depending on what perch one views a particular scene from, it might very well be appropriate to find it risible or terrible, amusing or horrific, moral or immoral. Our responses are determined by our vantage, and our vantage is itself variable, always shifting.
