A Virtual Claude Glass?

No, "Claude Glass" is not my new online pseudonym: the Claude glass was a type of viewfinder for the eighteenth-century Grand Tourist, a must-have travel accessory named after the reknowned Picturesque artist Claude Genee/Lorraine (1604-1682). Its function was to help the spectator frame the landscape so that the appropriate artistic perspective could be attained. It was like an ezy-shot camera before the ezy-shot camera existed, except the view was exclusive to the observer, only available on location and non-recordible. Often, it was tinted a brown colour so that the view would take on the burnished look of a scene from classical antiquity - the perfect accompaniment to an Arcadian-looking perspective and a way for the Grand Tourist to switch his or her view from an ordinary to an extraordinary one.

While a lot has been written about the Claude glass pre-empting photography and the tourist postcard, there is still always a danger in simply saying "and then this became this..", because there are always alternate genealogies that may be overlooked from such determinism. Perhaps a lineage can be drawn too between tinted Claude glasses and sunglasses. Both offer the spectator darkened, framed, fashionable perspectives, but of course the major difference is that the pragmatic view from a pair of sunglasses quickly lapses into the invisible technology of everyday life. During a harsh summer in Melbourne, seeing the naked midday view is a much stranger experience than seeing the shaded one. Still, the aura of my first time remains with me: I still remember my excitement at the age of four when I got my first junior red pair and repeatedly took them on and off - Light! Dark! Light! Dark! - enjoying the swinging perspectival shift to a degree that would have pleased Freud. Eventually, I think I was told off for looking at the sun. I had a tendency then for taking new concepts literally, and thought that that was what sunglasses were for.

Now, twenty years later, I'm a Cultural Studies PhD research student working at the University of Melbourne. My project is based upon finding intersections between cinema and travel, particularly in studying the recent phenomenon of location-based film tourism. You can probably work out why I've chosen the title Virtual Claude Glass for my blog's title now. It resonates well with the subject matter of my thesis (art/cinema/tourism), plus it's one of the first technologies of the touristic gaze. You could say that the virtual Claude glass is a metaphor for cinema itself. Like the glass held up to the countryside, the screen of the cinema provides a certain view that can transform the landscape into an artistic and ideal one, peopled with heroes and mythology. Then, the knowledge that I gather as a postgrad becomes my own private virtual Claude glass: it provides me a gaze, but a tinted gaze at that. The challenge remains to to keep my gaze fresh and not let it become an everyday, regular perspective that turns me blind.

On this blog page, I'll share my thoughts and notes on cinema, tourism, space, theory, etymology, urban studies, mass media, literature and whatever else is bothering, interesting or alarming me. Probably most of what I say here will be the written equivalent of ezy-shots: touristic vignettes taken from a package tour off the beaten track of my dissertation. What's a relief writing here - you can tell this already - is that I don't necessarily need to posit an argument, or I can contradict myself, or remain ambivalent about particular issues. This is a luxury that I can't have when I turn to writing my thesis.