21L.015 INTRODUCTION TO MEDIA STUDIES
The compulsion, especially when away from home, to reach the top of the highest feature on the landscape--be it a cathedral lantern, skyscraper, or mountain-top-and view the world from that giddy height, is something almost everyone experiences. It is not just vertigo that provides the thrill: it is the chance it gives one to distance oneself from the detail and appreciate the whole. The consciousness is extended in every direction--from the topography immediately below to the distant horizon. In the countryside there will be ranges of mountains, ridges, valleys with field-patterns, a river, and eventually the sea; in the city a confusion of allies, lanes, streets, churches, prisons, parks, docks, and then the suburbs. For a while the spectator has a God's-eye view of creation as modified by man. It is an exhilarating experience.
-- Ralph Hyde, Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the 'All-Embracing' View (London: Trefoil Publications in association with Barbican Art Gallery, 1988): 45.
Le cinéma ce n'est pas je vois c'est je vole [Cinema isn't I see, it's I fly.]
-- Paul Virilio, Guerre et cinéma I: logistique de la perception (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1991 [1984]): 15. Trans. War and Cinema.
Nadar's Balloon