Chapter 3: The Models of Vision
Chapter 3: The Models of Vision

Summary/Abstract: Bergson’s investigation into the nature of attention and memory demonstrates that attentive and habitual, that is, creative and automated vision as well as involuntary memory and memorycontraction are two poles of the same process. In modernist art, automated behavior and language, e.g., conditioned perception and linguistic cliché, become transformed by the artist’s creative will. For Bergson, cinema is a highly automated phenomenon, which simulates motion, mechanically gluing together discrete immobile shots (Bergson 1910: 330–333). Bergson uses the cinematography model to describe habitual perception, which unifies fragmentary shots of reality as well. In Nabokov’s novels, optical shifts, polarized or confused vision and other visual disturbances disrupt a predictable course of events and unbalance automatic motion or pre-conditioned behavior of reified characters (see e.g. Burling 1983 on le trompe-l’oeil in Nabokov). The vast class of models of polarized vision includes, first and foremost, a vacillation between the two- and three-dimensionality typical of the film perception.

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