Abstract

This paper utilizes two films, Hiroshima mon amour and Cache, to demonstrate how voice-over and the eye of the camera in narrative film capture those moments when the domains of private and public collapse. I argue that human condition is neither a public matter nor a private one. Rather, it is the result and emerges out of close interaction between the public and the private domains. It is often that, and as these two films demonstrate, the private and the every day are under constant surveillance of the public. These two domains are not as clear cut and separable as scientific knowledge tends to argue. Scientific knowledge defends the facts of numbers and of the quantifiable, which are the knowledge of the matter. Yet, we, the speaking subjects, are more than just a matter. It is the language of narrative film and the eye of the camera that reveals those moments, which escape the quantifiable and the numerical and reinstates the value of the Humanities.