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Tony McKibbin

Film Worlds

The Ordering of Feeling

Although Dan Yacavones book is a fair attempt to explore and explain aspects of film
theory often half-ignored in the stampede for all things theoretically fashionable, if it
earns its keep as a work of significance it lies in the marrying of Nelson Goodmans
notion of worldmaking, with Mikel Dufrennes idea that there is an important
distinction to be made between the art work and the aesthetic object. It allows for a
combination of analytic concepts and phenomenological perceptions. If central to
Yacavones project is to escape from clear dividing lines between the story and its
surplus, and to question the assumptions of phenomenological cinematic experience
that gives too central a place to the immersive encounter, then Goodman and
Dufrenne are very useful thinkers to help him conceptualise a way out of these too
common postulations.
As Yacavone says, introducing Goodmans ideas about worldmaking: they can
improve not only our understanding of some of the processes that Mitry and Pasolini
identify, but also processes operating on relatively higher levels of film-world
creation and aesthetic significance. While writers like David Bordwell, Carl Plantinga,
Noel Carroll, Ed Tan and others cognitively put the story centre stage even if they are
astute (as Bordwell so often is) to the formal patterning of the work, Goodman and
Dufrenne offer a way of seeing film not as a pragmatic exercise in seeing patterns, but
in engaging with unique experiences. From Goodman Yacavone utilises five areas in
which worldmaking can generate the perceptually fresh rather than the conventionally
inclined.
The first is Composition and Decomposition. Yacavone notes that Goodman was a
committed nominalist and empiricist who regarded objects and things as largely the
creatures of the schemes of categories we accept or choose to apply in our sense
experience. In relation to art works this concerns the differences between
work-worlds with respect to what represented objects and properties they contain or
acknowledge the existence of. Most of the films we watch do not ask us to think of
their compositions partly because they do not at all acknowledge the possibility of
their decomposition. The shot is usually visually balanced to contain all the necessary
information, and if anything outside of the shot happens to be of importance, then the
filmmaker reframes or cuts to incorporate this new info. Yet great filmmakers are
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great partly because they dont only concern themselves with the limits of the frame,
but also acknowledge a cinematic space far greater than what the camera actually
captures. Whether it is Bresson, Antonioni or Godard or newer filmmakers including
Cristi Puiu, Lucrecia Martel or Philippe Grandrieux, the composition of the image also
contains the possibility of its decomposition. Yacavone gives as examples Bressons
Lancelot du Lac and Martels The Headless Woman. In a shot from Bressons film we
see two bodies on the left-to-centre of the frame and a figure in the distance on a
horse in the right of it. This is a deframing because we do not see the faces of the two
people sitting even though they are in the foreground; the image focuses much more
on their hands. Now of course if the hand had just gone to grab a sword, this wouldnt
be deframing unless the film refuses then to show us the face of the person grabbing
the weapon, and then refuses to show us the person he is wielding it against.
Deframing resides often in the partiality of perspective limiting our perceptual
demands. In The Headless Woman, Martel often films that little too close in on faces
so that the surrounding soundscape becomes vague and menacing, or she doesnt
quite pull back far enough so that consequently the tops of heads are lopped off by the
top of the frame. In each instance this is a properly decompositional cinema, one that
asks us to view the film with a constant awareness of the partiality of perspective.
The second aspect of world-making Yacavone takes from Goodman is filmic
weighting. This is where the film puts great emphasis on an aspect that in most films
would be given its due but not given undue priority. Yacavone notices the difference
between Bressons The Trial of Joan of Arc and Dreyers earlier The Passion of Joan of
Arc, where one weighs heavily upon the face (Dreyers) and the other offers a more
aloof position more concerned with hands and doors. Dreyers film very much
emphasises the passion; Bresson focuses much more on the trial. We can also see it at
work in films that are less obviously formalist in their approach, from Bergmans
emphasis on the close-up in many of his films, to Leones extreme close-ups used for
rather different effect in his spaghetti westerns. Bergmans close-ups often suggest
the complexity of the soul; Leones, we might say, the motives of the soulless.
Next up is Ordering in film worlds. Ordering pertains to how what is recognizably
present in a given world (according to its composition/decomposition) as stressed or
unstressed (through weighting) is patterned and positioned in comparison with other
worlds. In other words, it involves the spatiotemporal arrangement of parts.
Yacavone says that, as Goodman notes, many patterns of perception and meaning
alter with the different ordering of the same elements, such as when the same block of
time is divided up in different ways via different clocks or calendar systems, or when
the same geographical area is represented in a road map versus a contour map. This
can lead to no fixed meaning, or one that is difficult to discern because of the
differences in perspective. In a film such as Robbe-Grillets The Man Who Lies, the
plot is so achronological, and so untrustworthy partly because of its titular protagonist,
that coherent meaning becomes all but impossible. In Bad Timing meaning becomes
possible but certitude difficult. Who exactly is the monster in this relationship between
a university professor and a woman almost half his age? Has she been playing with his
mind; or has he been manipulating her thoughts? The films complex relationship with
time as the film moves between several different temporal periods makes evaluation
difficult, and is echoed by the difficulties Harvey Keitels detective has in investigating
the case after the womans suicide attempt, an attempt that more or less opens the
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film.
Of course numerous movies in recent years have created narrative novelty out of
ordering, from Memento to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; it isnt always a
mode of radical experimentation. Yet sometimes this ordering can be radical in
different, more formally rather than narrationally inclined ways. Yacavone quotes V. F.
Perkins saying Godards Vivre sa vie is a series of dialogues on which Godards
camera plays a suite of variations, offering both an actual mise en scene and a string
of suggestions as to how one might film a conversation. Sometimes it will be through
how a particular scene is ordered. In Jackie Brown, Tarantino instead of cross-cutting
between three different perspectives simultaneously, lays them out separately one
after the other. Alain Resnaiss Smoking/No Smoking lays out the whole film
separately and turns it into two works. In one film a central character takes a
cigarette and in the other she doesnt, and the films diverge accordingly. Equally,
ordering can be found in any film that adopts this type of contingent narrative
patterning: from Sliding Doors to Run Lola Run we see it in less challenging material.
The fourth category from Goodman is deletion and supplementation. In the arts,
Yacavone says, deletion frequently takes the form of fragmentation or abstraction.
He quotes Bressons remark: Dont show all sides of things and one does not create
by adding, but by taking away, noting the impressive approach to the joust in
Lancelot du Lac, where, though close-ups and matching cuts, a jousting tournament
is ruthlessly pared down to a repetitive and hypnotic series of close-up images of
banners, horses legs and splintering lances. In Ten, Abbas Kiarostami sets the
cameras on a car dashboard and they remain there throughout the film as the director
films a womans conversations with her son, her sister, a prostitute, a bride and
various others in long takes. These are clear examples of deletion. Supplementation
would include a Jacques Tati film like Playtime, with its numerous jokes going off in
various parts of the frame, and Robert Altmans work, with multi-track sound creating
a babble of conversation, a widescreen frame dense with information, and numerous
characters within the one film narrative (Nashville, Short Cuts).
The fifth grouping is Deformation, or distortion. This is where in Yacavones take a
film works from another and transforms it. Hou Hsiao-hsiens The Flight of the Red
Balloon plays up its relationship to the 1956 short The Red Balloon; Lars von Triers
The Five Obstructions gets the filmmaker of the Perfect Man, Jorgen Leth, to remake
the film in various ways, with von Trier forcing upon the older director a number of
obstructions. A filmmaker can of course distort his own earlier project, with 2046
playing on numerous elements of Wong Kar-wais earlier In the Mood for Love without
quite passing itself off as a sequel. We could also think of remakes that remain faithful
except chiefly in one detail (Gus van Sants remake of Psycho in colour), or a remake
far enough removed from the original to generate new shocks (Maria Bellos death in
the remake of Assault on Precinct 13).
What Goodmans notion of worldmaking provides, is an analytic account of image
creation. Few people will care to contradict the claims thus far made. Kiarostamis
film unequivocally seems more restricted in its formal choices than, say, Scorseses
The Departed or Finchers Fight Club. Run Lola Run has a less focused narrative than
Taxi Driver as it tells three variations of the same story in one film. Not much to argue
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with there. But what happens if a critic says that Ten is a very interesting film,
despite structural limitations that keep it from approaching greatness. This is a claim
made by Peter Howell in The Toronto Star where he doesnt just note the dimension of
deletion, but insists it is a parti pris too far that gets in the way of the films brilliance.
This is where Dufrenne helps us. By distinguishing between the artwork and the
aesthetic object, we can acknowledge the world unto itself that Goodmans work can
help us comprehend, but that doesnt quite get us out of a problem when someone
insists the device restricts the quality of the work. We could say Howell is missing the
point, and dismiss it as empty opinion, but it still wont solve the issue of the twofold
nature of the artwork that Goodmans approach doesnt quite entertain. Dufrennes
does as he sees that aesthetic objects and their associated worlds compel a more
affective and complete immersive engagement because they are fundamentally
dualistic.
The art work is there and we are here, but there is also unity in this disjunction. The
art work changes and yet remains the same, sustaining a kind of organic
development which does not change its essence, but that comes into contact with the
self that does change. We might watch a film like 1999s Fight Club in our early
twenties and see a film of energy and anger, and watch it fifteen years later seeing a
petulant immaturity and puerile self-absorption. We may see the film on its original
release and note that it is fascinated by emasculated masculinity, by white collar male
Americas inability to feel anything unless receiving a punch in the face. Watching it a
decade and a half later we instead notice the anxieties it predicts. The films
conclusion shows various financial institutions being blown up as the central
characters alter-ego wants to set the whole debt cycle back to zero. Who cannot see
the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001 and the economic collapse in 2008 in such
images? The film hasnt changed there has been no directors cut, no studio
tampering, no censorship at work but the perception of the work may have done.
If Goodmans analytic approach allows us to see the work and to make categorical
claims about it, Dufrennes phenomenological angle asks us to experience it. Looking
at the film nothing changes; experiencing the film many things might. When Dudley
Andrew looks at phenomenology and film in The Major Film Theories he quotes Andre
Bazin encapsulating the notion. We can coldly isolate patterns in music or logic in
dreams as does the psychoanalyst, but more warmly, we can begin to live the rhythm
of the music as an invitation to dance and to vibrate; and we can feel in it a sense, as
an unveiling of the world expressed in the epiphany of the sensible. Yacavone is very
keen to explore this experience of the film: he wants to see film experience as much
more than viewing the art work as if with either an empty or a calculating mind.
These are accusations that could be levelled at some contemporary phenomenological
criticism under the influence of Vivian Sobchack, on the one hand, and the anatomical
dissections sometimes practised by Bordwellians on the other. Yacavone instead
insists that we experience the work with a decidedly open mind: part analytic, part
perceptually engulfed. Where phenomenological film theory emphasises the bodily
immersion, Yacavone wants more remove. Sobchack says, for example, in an interview
with Scott Bukatman, Youre in the theater (or living room) and in your body and
your seat as much as you are in the film. And so one approaches the film on a slant
with a kind of oblique vision, watching it from the corners of your eyes or in your lap.
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Sound plays a huge part in cuing you as to when you can look up again. Youre aware
of being somehow trapped in your seat, insofar as you agree to sit there. Sobchack
adds, there is an intensity and viscerality to this experience for me, totally
unpleasurable. But thinking about this form of viewing led me to tease out, too, the
temporal as well as spatial structure of not only my experience but also of the films,
which themselves play with the occlusion of vision and then reveal something
horrible. (E-Media Studies)
The emphasis here is very much on the viewing experience and what the work is doing
to the viewer, namely Sobchack. Bordwells approach is surely the opposite when he
says of Boyhood: Although the jumps from year to year are somewhat disorienting,
Linklater helps us out. He draws upon the old device of having the haircuts of the
characters differ each time, even emphasizing this way of marking the passage of time
by showing Mason getting an unwanted buzz-cut onscreen. Yacavone wants to
acknowledge what the work is doing, but not to the detriment of what is on the screen,
nor requiring the most general of spectators in the auditorium.
Speaking of a work that would probably have Sobchack spending half the time behind
the couch, Trouble Every Day, Yacavone says, the film furnishes plenty of
opportunity for character and story-based identifications and engagement, as tied to
what I have called cognitive-diegetic expression (emotion). Yet within a still
recognizable horror-film framework, featuring the gruesome, graphic violencethese
features are, overall, secondary in importance to what the film most powerfully
foregrounds in affective and aesthetic terms: a world-feeling in the form of an
overriding mesmeric and uncanny atmosphere Think of the opening few minutes of
the film. Here a couple kiss in a car, with director Claire Denis camera nuzzling up
close like a possible third party. Black leader then leads us into the Seine shown at
night in close-up; at dawn in long shot. The first image complicitly brings us in close to
human feeling; the latter shots remove us from the intimacy of the human to the
contemplative dimension of the river. We have moved from Klimt to Claude Monet. If
we are a bit too immersed in the intensity of the image, where is the distance required
to acknowledge the sort of fundamentally aesthetic effect that might have us thinking
(however consciously or otherwise) of the image, and not only our feelings?
Yacavone offers three distinct categories to help us navigate the different tensions at
work in a film experience. The first is sensory-affective, the second, as we saw in the
above quote, cognitive-diegetic, the third formal-aesthetic. All three fall under the
local as Yacavone defines them, and these are then contained by the global, the
cine-asethetic expression, or world feeling. If for example semiotics has paid too
much attention to the cognitive-diegetic as it assumes the basis of cinema is that of
the narratively-driven, Sobchacks phenomenological approach too readily redressed
the balance and took it in the direction of the sensory-affective. In turn, much
formalist criticism (from such different places as V. F. Perkins and David Bordwell)
has emphasized more the formal-aesthetic. But arent these three working
simultaneously and producing cine-aesthetic expression? Understandably various
schools of thought want to emphasize their own particular concerns, but the art work
often gets lost in the skirmish.
If we look again at the opening sequence from Trouble Every Day, and include the
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immediate post-credit scene, we notice that all three of Yacavones areas of

experience are introduced. The kissing couple suggests the sensory-affective, the
shots of the Seine the formal-aesthetic, and then, after the credits when we see a
woman standing next to the van in the cold, we might believe this is the
cognitive-diegetic story kicking in. Containing all three by the end of the film we
wonder what we have experienced, how we can contain these responses in a meaning
that acknowledges the various categories but cannot quite be contained by them. As
an indecomposable, experiential unity, this strongly holistic expression eludes, almost
defies, any definitive list of such contributing factors. This is partly what can have us
going back to a film again and again, or at least returning to our thoughts about it.
Yacavone near the end of the book quotes Truffaut saying a successful film has
simultaneously to express an idea of the world and of cinema; La regle de jeu and
Citizen Kane correspond to this definition perfectly. He adds that Truffauts critical
maxim is more profound than its brevity may indicate at first blush. Its importance
for Yacavone lies in its encapsulation of the theory Yacavone has laid out, which insists
that cinema is of the world and a world: it utilises the pro-filmic space in front of the
camera, and the afilmic facts of the world, and offers them through editing, framing,
lens length etc. that shapes it into an art work. Though through film history many
critics have been drawn in a particular direction (with Kracauer and Bazin famously
realist; Arnheim and Eisenstein formalist) most writers have neither fallen clearly on
one side or the other. For all Bazins respect for the pro-filmic, few critics have been
more nuanced in their dissection of the images created. Tarkovsky may have attacked
Eisenstein for his emphasis on montage, but hardly anyone would claim that this made
Tarkovsky a realist. Yacavones book wouldnt be taking us very far if its main point
resided in saying film is neither one thing nor another. The point and purpose of Film
Worlds seems much more to say if it is both realist and formalist, both of the world
and a world, then what is the best way in which to couch this. This is where the notion
of an analytic perspective meets a phenomenological need, and where Yacavone
accepts the importance of film form contained by forms of feeling that belong as much
to the viewer as to the art work.
Yet we should also add that the dichotomy we offered between realism and formalism
(between superficially a film being of the world and a world) is to ignore various
distinctions Yacavone makes over the pro-filmic or flimic event, of the reality drawn
upon in most films. Even apart from the ways in which digital technologies and
processes may now call this dichotomy between physical reality and camera-given
images into question, it is deeply problematic. By focusing chiefly on the world of film
as an object unto itself and then as an experience (an art work and an aesthetic object
respectively in Dufrennes terms) the question of realism versus formalism is
recouched not as an issue of Cain and Abel rivalry between Melies and Lumiere, but
as a Siamese twin. It contains two inseparable aspects of the film experience: the
object made and the affects felt.
How significant Yacavones book is we cannot perhaps yet say. The last big attempt at
a new theory for cinema in the English language film world was Filmosophy by Daniel
Frampton, but it seems to have yielded little influence. When we look back at
important works of film analysis (from Mulveys Visual Pleasure and Narrative
cinema, Cavells The World Viewed, Deleuzes two books on cinema, Christian
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Metzs Film Language) we cannot deny their importance partly because we cannot
deny their use and usefulness. Comments on the back of the book by D. N. Rodowick
and Dudley Andrew may seem premature, with Rodowick insisting this brilliant and
original work will be of interest to philosophy and film scholars alike. Perhaps, but at
the very least it is an ambitious and impressive attempt to straddle traditions
(cognitive versus phenomenological) usually kept apart. The proof will reside partly in
application. As a work of essentially abstract film theory we can acknowledge the book
is well argued, but is an argument only as good as the insights it helps generate? That
is a debatable point but not an irrelevant one. We might even hope that Yacavone
himself will start practising what he preaches, and see how his work plays out in
analysis of individual films. But that is perhaps for another book, and this one is more
than enough to be getting on with for the moment.

Tony McKibbin

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