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The second chapter is an attempt to read the cinematic apparatus as offering an affirmative response to biopower and mythic violence through the interplay of the visible and invisible. Beginning with a number of classic readings of the cinematic apparatus from Bazin, Heath, and Mulvey, among others, the possibility is explored that the cinematic apparatus can on occasion create generous forms of life that are able to give without requiring the mastery of what appears on screen. A techne of giving is found in the practice of generous attention, or what is referred to creative spectatorship.

This chapter illustrates how the discussion of cinematic apparatus was international and in many instances foundational for the establishment of film studies as a discipline. Apparatus offered a means to consider precisely the study of film as more than formal analysis of the projected image; it sought to arrive at a more comprehensive discussion of cinema. The production of the image was understood not simply as an industrial tale, but as a matter of signification, social relations, modes of production, methods of projection, space of reception, and subjective effects on spectators. In the 1960s, the discourse on the apparatus was connected to the quest for revolutionary forms. By the 1980s, the debates regarding apparatus theory became bogged down by considerations of ideology and an overwhelming focus on psychoanalytic models.

This concluding chapter explains how studies of “transnational” German, Japanese, or Brazilian literatures or cinemas create for themselves a conundrum that cannot be properly studied: if it is transnational, it cannot be assessed within national parameters. To recognize the relationship of the cinematic apparatus to the current social configuration unfolding in Europe and beyond, this book has necessitated a broad comparative and historical approach. At the same time, to invoke the term transnational here is itself misleading. The book set out to correct and revise the research on transnationalism by rejecting the neo-Hegelian assumption that informs much of the work on transnationalism in Europe.

This chapter analyzes how the German–Polish border became a new object of filmic representation and investigation. Subsequently, this space has become a regular region of cinematic exploration, and the contacts that began during this period have led to an expansion of Polish–German coproductions in general. The chapter argues that borders are first ideational before they are spatial geographical, demonstrating how the mobility of the apparatus is not simply a matter of technological indulgence. Rather, the liberated lens is an expansion of cinema's semiotic field. The cinematic apparatus provides a system whereby the imagination of spatial and geopolitical relationships comes together. As an aspect of the cinematic apparatus, the chapter considers how visual aesthetic strategies, technological innovations, and social policy result in images with particular angles and perspectives.

This chapter examines Gilles Deleuze's writings on cinema and his concept of repetition. It explains that the hypothesis that guides the movement of passage in the text is that the cinematic apparatus is a temporalising assemblage. Thus, a repetition therefore would be ‘fourth’ if it engendered a purely cinematic time: one that arrives for the first time with the cinema, and therefore necessarily intervenes both in history and in the history of time.