Apparatus theory claims to study the “machineries” of the seventh art. Dealing not so much with cameras, projectors, film stock, the design of iPads, editing programs and applications than the relations that viewers sustain with the medium, it lays stress on psychic and social mechanisms that shape the experience of cinema. Considered in a broad sense, it accounts for the power that film holds in respect to the world in which it operates or is deployed. Adepts of apparatus theory consider how cinema is viewed, what it does to the imagination, and in what ways it gets consumed, remembered, classified and even forgotten. For enthusiasts of cinema trained in psychoanalysis, apparatus is understood as a complex process of libidinal exchange between the perceiving spectator and the various screens on which moving images are perceived and registered, which include both the surfaces on which films are projected and the psychic devices that sift the impressions we gather from the experience of viewing a film. For the sociologist and historian of the seventh art, apparatus can refer to a broadly defined economic sphere in which of film is construed to play a significant role in the construction, management and practice of everyday life, in short, as a mechanism having purchase on the lives and minds of collective groups of moviegoers. For those who would call themselves “ordinary” or gardenvariety viewers of cinema, apparatus theory deals with how enthusiasts and cinephiles control, mediate or even politicize their passion for film.

For the sake of brevity it can be said, grosso modo, that in its purview of the mental economies that drive the medium the theory gives rise, first, to a critical appreciation of cinema and, second, to a creative doubt prompting us to be aware of why and wherefore cinema functions in our sentient lives.

The contexts in which the idea of apparatus takes shape tell much about what it was, how it has evolved and, perhaps, where it is and how it works today. Officially born in France in the turmoil and conflict of May 1968, it reflected on the political and aesthetic virtues of theory — in other words, on how film, which otherwise belonged to the industry of capital, could be interpreted to acquire political and philosophical mettle enough to work contrary to consumerism.