of Sensations
The Cinema
of Sensations
Edited by
gnes Peth
The Cinema of Sensations
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
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Avoid Contact with the Eyes and Skin, May Cause Irritation:
Agns Vardas La Pointe Courte (1954) ................................................... 55
Francesca Minnie Hardy
Affective Realism and the Brand New Brazilian Cinema ....................... 257
Ramayana Lira
GNES PETH
Cinema has always had a profound experiential quality: images not only
move, but they move us and engage all our senses. Whenever we go to the
movies we not only see the film, and the world of the screen not only
communicates a message to us, but we also get to be immersed in a unique
environment that stimulates our senses and our minds on different levels
of consciousness and perception. In the past decades the incredible
multiplication of the technologies through which moving images can be
produced, distributed or received has produced new formats, new genres
and new contexts for coming into contact with images that move, as well
as an expansion of the cinematic experience itself that can no longer be
connected exclusively to films seen at the cinema, but can also be found in
video installations, new media art, or in a variety of vernacular forms
enabled by these new, accessible digital technologies. Reflecting on this
process a series of new theories emerged to describe both the
interconnectivity between different kinds of audio-visual media and our
interaction with them, yet, paradoxically, despite having to deal with the
diversification of moving images and their new environments, in most of
these approaches there has been a marked emphasis on the unifying effect
of digital media, and on a general blurring of traditional media boundaries
and medium specificities in what has been termed as the post-media
condition. Nevertheless, we might argue that, in the most general sense,
new forms always entail new experiences, and the sensuous encounter
with the medium (in its most basic meaning, as the concrete palpable
form) still matters, perhaps more than ever now that moving images have
moved out of the movie theatre to compete with traditional arts in the
museums and exhibition halls, or have become ubiquitous in our daily
lives, being permanently within our reach, providing us with diverse forms
of entertainment and self-expression.
Some of the latest trends in art cinema have not only registered, but
also made use of and reflected upon these changes by specifically moving
2 Introduction: Possible Questions in Sensual Film Studies
debates, and publishes a selection of articles that have been written for this
conference,1 alongside essays written afterwards within the framework of
a subsequent research project2 focusing on questions of intermediality in
the cinema of Eastern Europe, and which has also been premised on the
sensuous nature of the complex medial experience of film.
In proposing the topic we knew we could already rely on a large array
of theoretical sources that potential participants might draw inspiration
from. Among others Thomas Elsaessers and Malte Hageners handbook
Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (2009) had already made
its way into the curriculum of many universities, and as such had already
proved to be a good starting point for junior researchers interested in
theorizing the sensory experience of cinema. There was also the vast
literature on the phenomenology of moving pictures from Vivian Sobchack
(e.g. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, 2004) to
Martine Beugnet (Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of
Transgression, 2007). We explicitly referenced in our conference call
Laura U. Markss landmark books discussing haptic images and their
connections to representations of cultural difference (The Skin of the Film:
Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, 2000; Touch: Sensuous
Theory and Multisensory Media, 2002) and also invited her as a keynote
speaker to give us a glimpse into her latest work. In the field of philosophy
the spectrum of theoretical approaches to the role of bodily sensations and
the interpretation of sensuous forms in art and cinema included, among
others, Gilles Deleuzes ideas on the logic of sensation, or Jacques
Rancires philosophical investigations into the politics of aesthetics and
the distribution of the sensible (i.e. The Politics of Aesthetics, 2006, The
Future of the Image, 2007). Approaches in visual anthropology in the
wake of Hans Beltings ideas on the connection between image, body and
medium, or Paul Stollers sensuous scholarship (e.g. David
MacDougalls The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses,
2005) could also yield theoretical foundation for researches into the
manifestations of the cinema of sensations.
We encouraged our authors to address a set of questions either from a
theoretical point of view or through concrete analyses of films. The
1
Most of these essays have been published in the journal, Acta Universitatis
Sapientiae: Film and Media Studies (Vol. 7 and 8, 2013), and have been revised
for this volume.
2
The title of this research project is Re-mediated Images as Figurations of
Intermediality and Post-mediality in Central and East European Cinema. (For
more information see: http://film.sapientia.ro/en/research-programs/cncs-uefiscdi-
pce-idei-research-program, last accessed 27. 11. 2014.)
4 Introduction: Possible Questions in Sensual Film Studies
that gets out of a human perspective and into the perspective of a point.
Yvonne Spielmann was also a keynote speaker at the conference that
occasioned the writing of these articles, and brought a valuable
contribution to the theoretical investigations of experimental cinema and
video art. In her text, Seeing to Believe Sensing to Know. From Film
Form to Perceptual Environment, she surveys in a wider, historical and
theoretical view over the cinematic medium in its expanded sense, how
sensory perception and the cognitive knowledge of the underlying
constructedness of moving images have been subject to various
experiments with moving images. The study encompasses examples
ranging from early cinema to structural films of the seventies, to the most
recent experiments in video art making use of an intricate interplay of
conventional film forms with human-machine interaction, or to even more
complex perceptual environments that use computers.
The two introductory articles, both with a wide arch in theory and in
their perspective over visual culture are followed by three articles dealing
with different approaches to haptic visuality in cinema. The first is Lszl
Tarnays essay titled Learning and Re-learning Haptic Visuality which
proposes a re-assessment of haptic visuality, distinguishing indeterminate
vision as a lack of things to see from what may be regarded as multimodal
sensibility. Arguably, the first is evoked by highly textural images with
scarce or no figuration like many of Stan Brakhages films which call for
the other senses, synaesthesia, to induce even if in the imagination the
identification of the perceived object. In contrast multimodal sensibility is
enhanced by real life and simulated situations when associations come
naturally to the embodied subject. Vision is haptic but not indeterminate
because it operates in tandem with other senses. The distinction can be
projected onto the contrast between analogue (representation) and digital
images (simulation). The author also argues that the possibility of re-
learning the sensorium including haptic vision is offered as a conscious
reversal of, or indexical regression from, figurative vision. Francesca
Minnie Hardys article, Avoid Contact with the Eyes and Skin, May Cause
Irritation: Agns Vardas La Pointe courte (1954), as the title indicates,
takes a closer look at Agns Vardas first feature film criticized by some
of contemporary commentators as hampered by defects, blunders, and
follies. The author proposes a more material, rather than, intellectual
engagement with the film and its sensual imagery, and in doing so, draws
on the thoughts of contemporary French thinker Jean-Luc Nancy, and
examines a look mobilized thanks to the contact it makes with woods
textured, internal ornament, and which, she contends, may undo the
material myopia by which the films existing critical landscape has itself
6 Introduction: Possible Questions in Sensual Film Studies
been hampered. The next article, Haptic Vision and the Experience of
Difference in Agns Vardas Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), also deals
with the art of the French director. Romain Chareyron investigates how, in
her famous documentary on gleaners and gleaning, Agns Varda relies on
the establishment of haptic vision in order to merge the experience of her
own body with the representation of people living at the margins of
society. In so doing, the article posits that Varda turns to a sensuous
depiction based on the textural properties of the image to deter any form of
instrumental vision regarding the representation of the body and its
connections to pre-determined norms of conduct. The author shows that, in
its portrayal of a socially and economically alienated group of people, as
well as in the rendering of her aging body, Vardas mise-en-scne brings
forth a tactile form of knowledge that calls for a humanistic approach, thus
defusing any form of mastery of the gaze over the image.
The last two articles in this first part offer meta-theoretical incursions
into two other important areas of sensuous film studies: the perception
of the body in film and the cognitive-sensory aspect of film music. Daniel
Fernndez Pitarch publishes his findings regarding the geography of the
body: Jean Epsteins poetics and conceptualization of the body in his
unpublished writings. The author selects from the unpublished corpus of
Epsteins oeuvre three books: Ganymde (a book on male homosexual
ethics), Contre-penses (a compilation of short essays on a wide variety of
topics) and Lautre ciel (a literary work) in an attempt to better understand
a major motif in Epsteins thought: the human body. He finds that these
writings show Epsteins emphasis on the material side of any psychology,
identity or thought, and that they address the topic of artificiality and
humanity in a unique way by claiming that what is specifically human is to
evolve through specialization and reification, even if it were contre-
nature. And thirdly, the analysis also discloses the inherent sensuality of
some Epstein texts (as demonstrated, for instance, by his descriptions of
clos- ups).
Concluding this first part of the book, Steven Willemsen and Mikls
Kiss engage in the research of film music in their essay titled Unsettling
Melodies: a Cognitive Approach to Incongruent Film Music. As they
explain, the notion of incongruent film music may refer to a soundtrack,
either diegetic or non-diegetic, which expresses qualities that stand in
contrast to the emotions evoked by the events seen. The article aims at
covering two interconnected areas; the first is comprised of a critical
recapitulation of available theoretical accounts of incongruent film music,
whilst the second part of the paper offers an alternative, embodied-
cognitive explanation of the audio-visual conflict which arises from this
The Cinema of Sensations 7
figures of the sick, dying, or intoxicated body, and that trigger sensations
associated with fear of death and physical decline. In the presence of these
suffering figures, the viewer feels discomfort in his or her own body
through an empathetic response. The viewers strongly dysphoric bodily
sensations come to signal his or her empathetic bond with others a bond
that he or she may accept or reject when it provokes dysphoric sensations.
She argues here, as she did in her recent book Linsistance du regard sur
le corps prouv. Pathos et contre-pathos (2013), that these film and video
works act as spaces for the viewer to negotiate and exercise empathy and
the accompanying dysphoric sensations.
In the penultimate article in this part, Visuality and Narration in
Monsters, Inc., Jens Schrter raises the issue how the overblown rhetoric
concerning the digital revolution conceals deep continuities between
traditional and new forms. He uses the example of the animated film,
Monsters, Inc. (2001) to demonstrate how established forms of narration
can be used together with new forms of computer generated image, and
describes the complexities of this constellation by a detailed analysis of
sequences from the film. The article is followed by Jos Manuel B.
Martinss essay, Crows vs. Avatar, or: 3D vs. Total-Dimension Immersion
in which he joins the debate on 3D versus classical cinema. He contends
that 2D, traditional cinema already provides the accomplished fourth wall
effect, enclosing the beholder behind his back within a space that no
longer belongs to the screen (nor to reality) as such, and therefore is no
longer illusorily two-dimensional. This kind of totally absorbing,
dream-like space, metaphorical for both painting and cinema, is
illustrated by the episode, Crows in Kurosawas Dreams (1990). Through
an analysis of crucial aspects in Avatar (2009) the author shows how the
formal and technically advanced component of those 3D-depth films
impairs, on the contrary, their apparent conceptual purpose on the level of
contents, and we will assume, drawing on Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze,
that this technological mistake is due to a lack of recognition of the nature
of perception and sensation in relation to space and human experience.
The third part of the book deals with Sensation of Time, Reality and
Fantasy and contains two articles that dissect the phenomenon of realism
occurring in some of the new trends in world cinema both as
unconventional sensual imprints of contemporaneous times and as
something performed through the images. Three articles revolve around
the sensation of time and mortality experienced both through the
mediation of the transient body and of the material vulnerability of the
analogue film made visible in the film; and one article completes the
survey of temporality, reality and imagination with theorizing the palpable
10 Introduction: Possible Questions in Sensual Film Studies
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank all the participants in our conference for making
it such an inspiring and unforgettable event, and all the authors of this
volume who revised their previously published articles for the purposes of
this volume. I would especially like to thank Hajnal Kirly, Judit Pieldner,
and Katalin Sndor, members of my research team, for their invaluable
help with the last round of editing and proofreading as the chapters
acquired their final shape in the layout.
The editing of the volume was finalized with the support of a grant of
the Romanian Ministry of National Education, CNCS UEFISCDI,
project number PN-II-ID-PCE-2012-4-0573.
PART I.
LAURA U. MARKS1
I have been slowly returning to cinema from a long visit to Islamic art
and philosophy: Enfoldment and Infinity (2010). There I learned: once you
suspend figurative image making, a world of creativity opens up. Large-
scale forms, such as figures and narrative, cramp the creative energy of the
lines and colors that compose them. But as you know, Islamic art is often
aniconic. Freed from representing figures, its lines and forms take on a life
of their own. Figures are molar, but life is molecular. So I propose
thinking like a carpet as a way to release the life contained by figures.
Is it possible to release the energy contained in small units, instead of
making them conform to human-scale forms? What would it be to inhabit
the point of view of a point?
Thinking like a carpet can be a way to start at any point and connect to
the universe. A way to unleash creative energy thats not available when
we start at a larger scale. What Im after is not only the thoughts and hands
of weavers as they produce these astonishing patterns. Its not only the
material of wool and silk, or for that matter of pixels and silicon in new
carpet-like media. Its the way the carpet itself thinks, pulling forces from
the weavers, the yarns, the matrix, the algorithm and producing something
new: the carpet as a force of individuation.
In my book, Enfoldment and Infinity, I compared the media art of our
time to the religious art of Islam. I was inspired by Islamic art and Islamic
thought because, in avoiding a direct representation of God, they create
powerful abstractions that indicate the divine presence/absence, are pulled
toward it, demonstrate and perform it, but do not show it. This power of
non-representation created the conditions of a kind of nonorganic life in
Islamic art.
1
A similar but divergent essay appears in Entautomatisierung [Deautomatization],
eds. Annette Brauerhoch, Norbert Otto Eke, Renate Wieser, and Anke Zechner
(Paderborn: University of Paderborn Press, 2013).
16 Thinking Like a Carpet
Aniconism
There are many reasons why Islamic religious art tends to be aniconic.
Islam came about at a time when the other religions of the book, Judaism
and Christianity, were iconoclastic. Aniconism helped distinguish Islam
from other religions visually. The Quran cautions humans not to compete
with God by trying to make living forms, and that it is impossible to
conceive of God. God, being beyond comprehension, is also beyond
representation. A branch of rationalist philosophers of ninth-century Iraq,
called the Mutazili, argued that since God is indivisible, He has no
attributes (such as sitting on a throne). Thus any attempt to identify the
properties of God in art risks blasphemy (see Khalidi 1985, 84). Theirs
was not the only view, and I must note that in the eastern Muslim world,
dominated by Shiite Islam, there exist many figurative images of
Muhammad and other saintly people images that would be cause for
persecution in the western, largely Sunni, Muslim world. Still, Islamic art
for religious reasons almost always avoids depicting anything with a face,
anything with a body, and even sometimes anything with an outline. It is
an abstract religious art that shifts your attention away from the human
scale and both out toward the infinitely large and in toward the very small.
Hassan Ibn al-Haytham (b. Basra 965, d. Cairo 1039), known in the West
as Alhazen. Ibn al-Haytham introduced the intromission theory of vision
in his Kitab al-Manazir or Treatise on Optics around 1000. Consulted in
Arabic, and translated into Latin in 1200 by Gerard of Cremona (see
Ahmad 1969, 37), the Optics remained the major work on optics until
Kepler in the seventeenth century (see Lindberg 1976, 5860). In it Ibn al-
Haytham described a contemplative mode of perception. He argued that
we do not automatically perceive form; form is a psychological concept,
not a given in nature. This means that contemplation is necessary for the
recognition of form, for it requires us to use our internal faculties, such as
memory, comparison, imagination, and judgment. Ascertainment can only
be relative, to the limits of sense perception (see Sabra 1994, 170171). So
form is produced in an oscillation between what we see and mental
operations: it is created in time, in the embodied mind.
In Enfoldment and Infinity I noted the remarkable similarity between
al-Haythams theory of perception and that of Henri Bergson, 900 years
later. Bergsons concept of the subject as a center of indetermination
influenced Gilles Deleuzes Leibnizian idea that perception does not
reproduce the world but unfolds it from its particular point of view. We
humans, like other creatures, tend to act on our perceptions (we see food,
smell danger, etc.). But, as Bergson argued, the wider the interval between
perception and action the more time you absorb the perceived world
from your given perspective the more of the universe you can perceive.
The longer you look, the more you see (hear, smell, taste, etc.). Widening
the interval requires undermining our creatural habits of perception-action.
The wild boar seems to be attacking you, and instead of throwing your
spear you take time to contemplate its fur, its tusks. We might observe
that widening the interval is in a certain way anti-human, for our basic
human needs demand us to act decisively in order to preserve and sustain
ourselves. Yet Ibn al-Haythams conception of perception, like Bergsons,
proposed that human beings have a necessary leisure to contemplate what
we perceive before we can act on it.
By shifting activity to a smaller scale, aniconic art (and aniconic ways
of perceiving) widens the interval. Aniconism liberates the molecular from
the molar, another paired term from Deleuze and Guattari that reflects the
scientific proportion 1 mole = 1023 units. While the molar scale deals with
large-scale happenings and general states, the molecular scale deals with
tiny events, bursts of energy that we dont experience when we are acting
at the molecular level.
18 Thinking Like a Carpet
2
Smooth space refers to space that is heterogeneous and intensively organized;
striated space refers to territory that is homogeneous and subject to general laws
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 474500).
Laura U. Marks 19
an unfolding way, we can say those algorithms in turn index their weavers,
designers, and programmers. Looking at them we see the expression of the
instructions for their making, a communication between the designer and
the weaver.
Algorithms are created by humans, of course, so far from being a cold
impersonal medium, algorithmic works like carpets indicate all kinds of
decision-making, reflection, even emotion and of course error. For
example, a carpet in the collection that Joseph McMullan amassed in the
early decades of the twentieth century and donated to the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York, allows us both to image the model (the
algorithm) that the weaver followed and to intuit the decisions she made
that deviate from themodel in executing it. It is a funny-looking carpet
with asymmetrical touches of color. The collector described it this way:
This is a very close but hilarious descendant of no. 97 [another carpet in
the collection].... The design is basically faithful.... But there is no
comparison between the sloppy drawing in this rug and the sophistication
of its model, while the use, or misuse, of colour, particularly blue in the
central medallion, is strange indeed, without system or sense. Again green
is used in the corner pieces at one end only. It is all a refreshing reminder
that the human spirit can, and does, produce wonderful effects impossible
to the trained and sophisticated mind. (Joseph McMullan 1972, 52.)
Algorithmic media, when executed by hand, permits all kinds of
decisions, felicities, and mistakes to occur. But what about algorithmic
media executed by machines, such as computers? I shall return to this
question.
A set of Turkish carpet designs from Ottoman times, such as the Ushak
carpets, consist of medallions (symmetrical radiating shapes) inside
medallions in contrasting colors, each with a complex, intertwining
pattern, set against a ground whose pattern is similarly complex. These
carpets depict a mise-en-abme of worlds within worlds. Carpet scholars
sometimes suggest that the center or the deepest layer represents heaven;
often the motifs become increasingly refined as they approach the divine
center. A mystical view could see these carpets as lessons that all of reality
is illusory, but that the universe has an underlying Structure.
Another group of carpets begin to set their patterns free from central
organization and permit independence to their individual motifs. These are
Caucasian carpets, woven in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in
the Caucasus (a region at the time loosely politically organized but with
basic allegiance to Iran). In Caucasian carpets life seems to begin not from
a Center but from the smallest point, from any point whatever: it self-
organizes, mutates. The oddness and particularity of the forms in
Caucasian carpets suggests they each evolved in their own way. In the
final chapter of Enfoldment and Infinity I compare Caucasian carpets to
generative algorithms, algorithms that respond to new information and
come up with results that could not be prefigured in the algorithms initial
state.
example, the variable undulations and torsions of the fibers guiding the
operation of splitting wood, together with variable intensive effects, such
as porosity and resistance (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 408409). A
carpet, arising from the meeting of ideas (designs, algorithms) and matter
in the hands of the weaver, is a machinic phylum: materiality, natural or
artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in
variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities (Deleuze and Guattari
1987, 409).3 The weavers have to follow the material and let its
singularities guide their hands; yet they are also introducing (not
imposing) ideas to material, and rolling matter and idea together in forms
that will be slightly different each time.
Embodied Response
What does contemplating these patterns do to our bodies? On the one
hand, it enlarges us. We are wired to perceive pattern, for pattern makes
order out of a chaotic universe. Our brains look for patterns in images with
low information content.4 Our brains are constituted to seek order; they
create order out of chaos. Our brains protect us from meaninglessness.
So it seems that the patterns of carpets confirm the certainty of
embodied subjectivity, by giving us pattern where we look for it. A
phenomenological view suggests that engaging with a carpet enlarges our
capacity for perception.
I suggest all carpets appeal to an embodied response at levels from the
molar to the molecular. Some carpets invite an identification with figure
and narrative, just as movies do. Some Safavid Persian carpets take
advantage of extremely high thread counts (or pixels) to depict delightful
scenes borrowed from paintings of people hunting, playing music, and
relaxing in gardens, as well as all kinds of animals. As much as a Douglas
Sirk film, these carpets invite a narrative identification with figures, which
operates on a molar level.
Some carpets even command an acknowledgment of social hierarchy:
we see this in carpets with heraldic symbols woven by Muslims in Spain
3
In The Fold Deleuze characterizes Leibnizs third order of infinity as an intensive
series of qualities that are possible but not necessary, which constitute the real in
matter: texture of a substance, timbre of a sound, malleability of gold, etc. (1993,
47). If the world is included in the soul, the monad, it is creased in matter (1993,
102).
4
Patricia Pisters 2009, 224240. Pisters refers to C. Bach and M. Poloschek,
Optical Illusions, Advances in Clinical Neuroscience and Rehabilitation 6: 2
(2006): 2021.
Laura U. Marks 25
in the fifteenth century for Castilian nobility. Yet these carpets undermine
hierarchy by imbuing the fields of floral and geometric motifs under the
heraldic shields with subtle liveliness and framing the whole with quasi-
Arabic writing.
Carpets can also invite us to identify with the riotous, fecund life of
plants, as in the so-called vase carpets of Safavid Persia.5
Moving from a molar to a more molecular level, below figurative
and symbolic images, we encouter carpets that appear entirely abstract,
populated by lines that curve languidly and twist together smartly, by
jagged, energetic lines, and by oscillating relationships of figure and
ground. Feeling along with these forms we (I, anyway) find that the
abstract pattern of a carpet itself appeals to shared embodiment. We could
call this relationship empathy, in the term of turn-of-20th-century theorists
Theodor Lipps and Wilhelm Worringer for an enjoyment of the self
projected into a body or form: suggesting that people empathize with
abstract forms insofar as those forms undergo experiences that we too
might undergo (cf. Morgan 1996, 317341). We can relate to a line, feel
the way a line feels. Thus thinking like a carpet invites experiments in
corporeal perception. Where figuration invites identification through the
comparison of the body beheld with ones own body, ornament appeals to
a different kind of embodied relationship. We can even feel along with the
expressive rhythms of line in space, as in the wonderfully independent
carpet from the Ulu Mosque discussed above.
The above is a phenomenological view, which I like a lot. It argues that
abstract pattern appeals to our bodies: perhaps to confirm the embodiment
that we already have, but also, I think, to gently expand it and invite us to
take on new kinds of embodiment. However, as we shift from a molar to a
molecular level, we may also find that pattern does not confirm what we
already are; rather it undoes our bodies usual ways of being. This is
especially so because pattern appeals to rhythm. Rhythm unmakes and
remakes the body as in Written on the Wind (1956), when the bad
daughter Marylee dances with such energy that she causes her father to
fall to his death on the stairs.
Here I look to Deleuze again, on rhythm. Deleuze argues in Francis
Bacon: The Logic of Sensation that representation speaks to cognition,
confirming what we already know. But the kind of image he calls the
Figural bypasses the mind to appeal directly to the nervous system.
Deleuze holds out for the nervous system as the one site in our body that is
not colonized by clichs. Perception itself is already informed by habit and
5
I describe these at length in Chapter Ten of Enfoldment and Infinity (2010).
26 Thinking Like a Carpet
6
Chapters Three and Four of Enfoldment and Infinity (2010) examine in detail this
invasion of Islamic aesthetics into Western art from the thirteenth to the
nineteenth centuries.
Laura U. Marks 27
Conclusion
Might thinking like a carpet offer a model of ethical being? If so, it
would be a mode of being that keeps on changing, powered by a force that,
while coming from within, exceeds the bounds of the individual. This is
what Deleuze was after in his final writing, A Life. Is it too much of a leap
to hold up this process of perpetual individuation as a model of political
organization? John Rajchman writes, We should judge political regimes
(including democratic ones) in terms of the space they allow for
multiplicities and their individuations for the time of a life (2000,
82). Modestly I would like to suggest that thinking like a carpet may help
us model, with our thoughts and our bodies, the relationships between
points and the universe; and it may give us some courage for the
tranformations that being open to the universe will bring.
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Thoughts on Film Theory and Neuroscience. In Deleuze and New
Technology, eds. Mark Poster and David Savat, 224240. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Rajchman, John. 2000. Deleuze Connections. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sabra, A. I. 1994. Optics, Astronomy, and Logic: Studies in Arabic
Science and Philosophy. Aldershot, UK: Variorum.
Soderman, Braxton. 2007. The Index and the Algorithm. Differences vol.
18 no. 1: 153186.
SEEING TO BELIEVE SENSING TO KNOW:
FROM FILM FORM TO PERCEPTUAL
ENVIRONMENT
YVONNE SPIELMANN
it. Throughout the history of vision in modernity both aspects, the sensing
and the knowing have been subject to various experiments within and out
of cinematic performance of moving images.
One
In modernity, we can roughly identify two major conceptual frameworks
that have been guiding the discourses about visual recognition. They are
grounded in emotional and sensational response, on one end and in
thought processes on the other. The first operates as a belief and witness
system where you believe what you see, because you are culturally and
socially trained to accept visual representation as representation of visual
facts. Herby, we adapt to the presumption that any representational form
of an image, be it in film, television or new media, bears a referential
connection to the unfolding of the represented events in real time and
space. The second discourse is based upon intellectual engagement and
expert knowledge. We reflect mixed, multisensory experiences, and our
own physical presence in relation to both the cognitive viewing condition
and the functions of the media. On these grounds we make sense of what
we perceive at a specific moment in time and space.
For a long time, the two ways of visual recognition had been attributed
to diverse aesthetic concepts and schools. While subjective, sensual, and
emotional feelings guide the primary accent of seeing and believing, the
other, the objectifying, scientific, and measurable accentuations of sense
data foster the knowledge based appropriation of visual and furthermore
multimodal stimuli. The divergent tendencies get highlighted in different
approaches of modern painting, most prominently executed in the
paradigms to paint what you know and to paint what you feel, notably
referring to the conceptual understanding of painting as science or
imagination.
In a historical view, it is English landscape painter John Constable
(17761837) who in the first decades of the 19th century in a series of
lectures on landscape painting had proposed to paint after nature in an
almost scientific way. He understood painting as a scientific production of
art and not as a composition out of imagination. Constable, concerned
about The decline and revival of landscape, wrote: Painting is science,
and should be pursued as in inquiry into the laws of nature. [...] In such an
age as this, painting should be understood, not looked on with blind
wonder, not considered only as a poetic aspiration, but as a pursuit,
legitimate, scientific, and mechanical. (Beckett 1970, 69.)
Yvonne Spielmann 31
Soon thereafter photography and its technique of the variable eye that
can take many shots of the same event in succession (serial
photography) had succeeded as a new art form. The expression of a
variety of shots which have equal value and correspond to a variety of
visual impressions meant a formidable challenge to the ruling idea of
exactness in the depiction of nature in the painterly image. As a result, we
recognise a shift in painting that departs from objectifying science and
moves towards subjective impression. This conceptual transformation
strikes especially the genre of landscape painting. By the end of the 19th
century, what counts is the elusiveness and liveliness of the moment or
many moments. The image concept that represents variability in sight is
driven by the artists expression of an immediate impression.
The most prominent examples are Claude Monets impressionist
paintings. The philosophy of his time to express ones own perception is
best highlighted in the series paintings of Haystacks (189091) and
Rouen Cathedral (18921894). Monet painted the same subject from
variable points of view and under varying light and weather conditions,
depending on the time of the day. These paintings in series not only refer
to the cut in time as introduced with the interval in photography and film.
More important, they ascertain sensual experience and subjective views of
an eye-witness who describes respectively paints natural phenomena the
way he/she experiences them sensorially at a certain moment in time and
space. Clearly, there is a plenitude of such moments. This 19th century
approach toward seeing and vision is led by the convincement that visual
representation of development in time has to follow the concept of
compound image. This concept, then, is essentially exposed with the
techniques of photography and film in the 20th century. The compound
image has not only manifested a new and futuristic vision in the
paintings of Russian Constructivism, German Expressionism, and Italian
Futurism, it later becomes the standard of contemporary digital image
compositing in the 21st century.
Because of the composite and variable nature of modern imagery, it
comes as no surprise, when the togetherness of the two above discussed
concepts, scientific, and sensual, was prominently conceptualised in film
theory based on montage. Sergei M. Eisenstein in his reflections on the
organisational principle of montage in formalist film praxis and theory
understands the formal composition of diverse facts as a way to visibly
construct difference and antagonism in film. In this, difference within the
shot which is the smallest unit of montage, between the shots, and in-
between the sequences has a dual meaning: it mediates and separates
between contrasting, conflictuous, and heterogeneous views of reality. The
32 Seeing to Believe Sensing to Know
Two
Since the early days of filmic attractions, it was felt that film
experience should attract senses and emotions via closeness and directness
of the presented events. At the same time the cinematic experience was
such that mental engagement relied on the physical distance to the screen
so that audiences felt close to the presented scenery on the one hand and
would reflect the viewing process of the cinematic presentation on the
other. The former describes an expansive and intentionally immersive
media strategy. It was step by step improved by filmmakers and producers
with the aim to establish film as a dynamic medium bigger than life that
supersedes neighbouring art forms and media. The latter aspect of
distancing the viewer from the identification with the presented spectacle
to some degree goes hand in hand with the before described strategy of
emotional overpowering. When both are not balanced, audiences may
become too scared about plunging into presented events. For example,
when physical distance and reality border between us, the viewers, and
them, characters and action on screen gets too much conflated in todays
applications of Augmented Reality, this will have destabilizing and
resultantly dangerous effects on our reality awareness. Differently, the
duality of seeing and knowing is rather enforced in the regular film
viewing situation. By experience we have learnt to know that things from
Yvonne Spielmann 33
the screen that approach us much too big, too near and too fast cannot
reach out across the media border, not even in immersive cinematic 3D.
In cinema, the fixed spatial distance to over-life-size screens; the
temporal fixity of events that unfold in the course of the film or nowadays
digital projection of film form; plus the reassuring certainty that we can
leave the movie theatre any time, in short our knowledge about the
constructedness of the presented illusion constitutes an uncircumventable
condition. It is safeguarding our joyful embeddedness into foreign, strange
worlds of viewing. This construction has proved to guarantee the stability
of the cinematic institution. The interplay distance and nearness combines
two components: knowing that what we are seeing and hearing are media
effects while we sensorially enjoy the constructed perceptual environment
as if in real life. With the latter diversification of film beyond cinema, such
as in multiple projections, expanded screen installations, and the
incorporation of filmic projecting into interactive and participatory
environments, we have entered the realm of digital computers. Here, the
previously distinguishable parameters are heavily conflated and
remediated. They not only appear in novel constellations, they also to
serve different needs.
Nowadays we need to discuss how technological novelties are
dynamically embedded into cultural imaginations about perceptual
experiences, be it in film, in virtual reality, augmented reality, and all
kinds of human-machine interactions that stress embodiment and active
participation more than before. In view of media evolution from film to
expanded media, we learn from research into convergence and
remediation, that media development does not mean inventing the new,
but rather refashioning an existing network inclusive of physical, social,
aesthetic, and economic components. As Bolter and Grusin put it: For
this reason, we can say that media technologies are agents in our culture
without falling into the trap of technological determinism. New digital
media are not external agents that come to disrupt an unsuspecting culture.
They emerge from within cultural contexts, and they refashion other media
which are embedded in the same or similar contexts. (Bolter and Grusin
1999, 19.)
In many fields of film practice, we find artistic examples that refashion
respectively readdress filmic principles in other media forms. They
purposefully expand the viewing experience beyond the formal constraints
of cinema. From an intramedial perspective, experimental film practices of
the sixties and seventies appear to be particularly fruitful in further
contextualising matters of seeing and sensing. They shed new light on the
issues as they were articulated in painting and cinema before. In
34 Seeing to Believe Sensing to Know
Three
Following, I wish to point out positions in contemporary creative arts
that rework the convergence of the two spheres of recognition, seeing, and
sensing from the perspective of computer media and digital simulation.
The questioning of visual recognition is an important factor in creative
practices that investigate participation and action in multisensory and
digitally modulated environments. In view of densely networked media
environments as they determine our contemporaneity and conflate the
36 Seeing to Believe Sensing to Know
experience of present, past, and future, visual cognition as such has come
under critique, particularly in multisensory experiments. A shift takes
place in the key parameters of seeing and knowing when digital media
render the familiar strange and question the objectification of subjective
experience in essence. The necessity of cognitive understanding when
faced with a virtualreal simulated reality is demonstrated symptomatically
in the well-known science fiction film The Matrix (directed by Andy and
Lana Wachowski, 1999). To remind: the central character, Neo, can only
intervene as a force for renewal in the elastic transitions from virtuality to
reality filmically shown via computer graphics, green screen, and motion
control techniques because he understands the binary code behind the
digital reality as columns of numbers, because he doesnt believe what he
sees and perceives, but acts on what he knows from critical analysis.
Visual, sensual understanding gives way to cognitive knowledge.
The task of critique of visuality is further sharpened in multimedia arts.
Post-cinematic, multimedial, and large screen presentations examine the
motivation of medical and military-industrial faculties to envelope
simulated environments more and more seamlessly. They can show
aesthetically, how feeling and seeing intentionally converge with the
employment of augmented tools respectively composite viewing
technologies, and also demonstrate inasmuch one-sided upgrade of sense
perception rather cuts off our curiosity to get to know what is going behind
the scenes, in the real reality devoid of the screens. My examples are: Gina
Czarneckis shifts of scale, Seiko Mikamis bodily encounter with
machine behaviour, and Masaki Fujihatas advocacy to maintain
difference and distance in sensing as well as in knowing as the basic
condition for a living interaction.
While technical qualities of computer simulation and control have
introduced the possibility of simultaneously virtualizing various processes
at various places, in actual fact and without bothering about physical
boundaries, British based media artist Gina Czarnecki researches the
sectors of medicine and biology, where the intention is to undertake
scientific interventions in the human body and the living environment. She
focuses on the question of the normative scale applied to body shapes,
mutations, infections, and viruses, and to this end she presents filmic
installations with projected images of digitally simulated deviations and
variations of physicality. Universal scaling for categorizing information
concerning the human body, identity, and person dominate in biology,
medicine, and genetics but also in aesthetics, and Czarnecki retranslates
them from the general (global) scale back into the individual (local) scale.
Yvonne Spielmann 37
images and we take them as authentic, but so many of them are artificially
constructed. And art can present fact but its always perceived as fiction.
Medicine has been developing imaging technologies to prove the existence
of something scanning, the ultrasound, the infrared. I was on a train
journey in the UK and I sat opposite a gulf war engineer and he said that
of course we kill people but we see them as little green dots on the screen
and we just zap them. (Czarnecki in Brannigan, 2006.)
In this context, an aesthetic-poetic work, like Czarneckis visualization
of disembodiment, can count as a sharp critique of such linking of seeing
and knowing in operations that use augmented reality to produce scientific
knowledge devoid of any sensitivity. The technological feasibility
dominates in employing augmented reality for military and medical goals,
and the dimension of the personal-subjective is suppressed in telerobotic
perceptual contact.
The outside projection Spine, first installed in public space in Newcastle
upon Tyne in 2006 and measuring 25 by 17 meters, works in the opposite
direction. In it, the personalsubjective aspect specifically corresponds to
the location, resembles a model, and shifts into a dimension appropriate to
exhibiting and viewing in the public sphere. With the use of the filmic
material from Nascent, the digitally manipulated dancers here also occupy
the foreground like masses of cells and are moving around naked. As a
result, the medial presentation of Spine shows the personal aspect as an
example of the shifting of boundaries from the intersubjective into the
supposedly objective public sphere of activity, where the representation is
cut off from familiarity and emotional responses. This discrepancy
between representation and what is represented refers to the way computer
technologies have invaded all areas of the media like a virus and are
dominating our sense perception.
Another example is given by Seiko Mikami with her large-scale spatial
installation Desire of Codes (Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, 2010,
also exhibited at InterCommunicationCenter, Tokyo, 2011), which
addresses our sense and sensibility in computer environments. It equally
poses the question of what sort of inherent behavior the computer codes
might have, particularly when their capacity to measure and move takes on
an organic character.
On the wall of the installation space, Mikami mounted ninety devices
that are equipped with search arms that have small LED pointers and with
cameras and sensors to detect movement and sound of the visitors when
they approach the wall. The whole structure is targeting us as if the
technical apparatuses and the humans were different species entering into
dialogue with each other. As the lights and the cameras follow the visitors
Yvonne Spielmann 39
movements in space, the resulting effect is that the devices, which are
driven by audible motors, move their arms searching for individual
visitors like a buzzing swarm of mosquitoes. Various measuring sensor
data (light, ultrasonic, and infrared sensors) are combined to create the
responsive effect.
Each of the combined sensors and the cameras do capture and measure
independently, but they are networked together in a computer system and
attuned to each other in a sort of group behavior. The audience for this
industrial invention not only acts as an interface and has the difference
but also the similarity between themselves and the machine to be
presented to its eyes and ears via extremely miniaturized interfaces.
Because the devices resemble the size of toys, they become almost
flattering interfaces, which appear harmless and handsome, and not like
control and surveillance apparatuses. Notable is the cultural aspect of
reference to miniaturized computers, electronic toys, and gadgets, which
have spread like insects through the private and public sectors in Japan and
South-East Asia. In her work, Mikami makes us aware of a close and
personal relationship between the human perception in general and the
individual senses and how they are affected, on the other hand. She also
draws our awareness to the humanoid behavior of increasingly small and
smart robots and further machine devices that are equipped with sensory
instruments to detect us, target our behavior, and go after us. It is precisely
the kind of interface that is built by Mikami herself and not using
standardized mechanism, which evokes the experience of in-betweenness
and makes us aware of our modes of perception in relation to the
surrounding that is machine driven and operates by a chain of codes.
Mikami in the other two parts of the installation further explores her
view of the desire of codes seen as a chain of behavior and response in
correspondence to social behavior. Once we move away from the
Wriggling Wall [Fig. 3] with its 90 units targeting at us, we find ourselves
surrounded and equally targeted by huge, over-live-size six robot search
arms that hang from the ceiling and reach into the space. The robot arms
follow the task to express desire of codes by way of following and
recording movements of the visitors. The arms are equipped with cameras
and projectors, and simultaneously project the recorded footage onto the
floor where we move. In the third part of the installation, the Compound
Eye [Fig. 4], Mikami further focuses the anthropocentric effect of the
miniature mechanical arms of the Wriggling Wall with their LEDs trained
on us like searchlights.
40 Seeing to Believe Sensing to Know
Figures 34. Seiko Mikamis Desire of Codes: Wriggling Wall, Compound Eye
(2010, 2011), Figure 5. Masaki Fujihata: Orchisoid (20012007).
the other is not. The plants are, in addition, tested for their sensitivity like
bio-robots, lifted onto a hydraulic platform and driven in all directions at
high speed, while projected images of a botanical garden run past them
and imitate a real environment for the plants. The project was developed
in collaboration with the botanist Yuji Dogane, and Fujihata sees it as
standing at the juncture of robotics and nature: In Botanical Ambulation
Training footage filmed while walking through a botanical garden is being
projected onto a wall. Orchids (mainly Cattleya) can see these projections
from the baskets they are planted in. The aspects of tremor (acceleration,
geomagnetism, inclination) in the images are being translated into
impulses that shake the platform the flower baskets are sitting on, so that
the flower baskets move perfectly in sync with the trembling of the images
on the wall. Therefore, from the perspective of the orchids it must feel as if
they were being carried in the hand (that actually holds the camera) around
the garden. [...] What in the world could it be that the orchids are thinking
while swaying gently on their metal pistons, watching pictures of a
shaking greenhouse, and devoting themselves to reproduction
activities? (Fujihata and Dogane 2007.)
This new sort of experimental arrangement would be misread as a
simple critique of technology; it rather advocates dialogue that is based on
difference and distance as the condition for real interaction. That is
because, when the sensory contact becomes too close and too strong, the
vitality in dialog is put at risk. To that extent, this demonstration with
plants sensitive to contact has a component criticizing the media by
focusing on the ostensibly desirable removal of any distance and
difference in all versions of touch media, something that here does not,
however, appear as a goal or a way to more communication. On the
contrary, Fujihata is in accord with Mikami and Czarnecki to provoke
dialog across difference in aesthetically constructed perceptual
environments so that in the interplay between sensation and knowledge
something new and something different can arise.
References
Beckett, Ronald Brymer, ed. 1970. John Constables Discourses. Ipswich:
Suffolk.
Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation. Understanding
New Media. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Brannigan, Erin. Gina Czarnecki Interview. September 2006.
http://www.ginaczarnecki.com/storage/press/erin_b_contagion_01-09-
2006.pdf. Last accessed 28. 10. 2014.
42 Seeing to Believe Sensing to Know
LSZL TARNAY
1
The present paper is a report of an ongoing longer work on the interrelations of
the phenomenology of film vision, texture and haptic visuality, and contemporary
digital aesthetics.
44 Learning and Re-learning Haptic Visuality
Geometric elements are still there but they are integrated into the figural
representations as accompanying objects like reins, bridles of the horse,
feathers, postures of the body in trance, etc.
Now let us try to reverse the process of the three stages. If we do that,
we end up with indexical regressing so dear to the modern art theorist. I
take Gambonis idea of regressing from the scene to the visual surface as a
case when noise is rendered informative by the viewer. Although from
the evolutionary perspective regressing from the scene to the textural
structure had it been an option would have turned out to be very costly
and even fatal, the history of art and now it seems, even anthropology,
make room for textural analysis. Seeing dots and lines in a painted scene
can be the reversed alternative to seeing the scene in the surface, the kind
of seeing that Richard Wollheim considered appropriate to pictorial
representation.
There are occasions when seeing the surface is pertinent. For
instance, the expertise of indexical analysis of brush-strokes or the use of
other painting tools like knife, nail or finger can be necessary for telling
originals from forgeries; Paleolithic and Neolithic rock engravings show
that cracks and fissures within rock surfaces were utilized by the ancient
artists in depicting forms;2 last but not least, the viewer of abstract and
experimental films may find it more than challenging to be confronted
with textured vision, the mottled skin of the film rather than clear-cut
images of objects. Regressing is not subject in the same way to cultural
constraints as Laura U. Marks says of, and against, Brakhage. It is true that
sense organs are the site where culture crosses the body (Marks 2000,
201), but to see the material indices (of the body) as informative and not
as noise requires a kind of recoiling from culture that one has learnt.
Taberham speaks about the un- and retutoring of the brain as a conscious
effort on the part of the viewer. It requires more schemata and eye
training for engaging with the world, and is in this sense radically top-
down. Although in deep disagreement otherwise about the structure of
vision both Gombrich and Gibson agree that attending to the visual field
requires a special effort. Engaging with the visual field, like draftsmen do,
is a radically top-down activity, while the new-born baby and the 13 year-
old boy who had his cataracts removed engaged with their visual fields
radically from the bottom-up. While the new born baby and the painter
2
The properties of the rock including its concave or convex surface, bumps, cracks
and fissures in its structure are thought to be integrated within the engraved
representations. Note how closely the ancient engraver seems to follow Leonardos
advice to his disciples that they should first study the forms and patterns (vein-
stones and marbles) in Nature in order to become great artists.
46 Learning and Re-learning Haptic Visuality
3
To be true to Marks, she is arguing from the perspective of haptic images which
may or may not but definitely can resolve into discernible figures and are in a
dialectical relationship with the optical. (Marks 2002, 20.) I am arguing here from
the perspective of hyperrealistic images which definitely can become indiscernible
but then they ruin the immersive effect on the viewer/player who is interacting
with the visible world not in her sensual body but with her optical vision. In
Sobchacks terms, the viewer/player leaves her existential body here (i.e. before
the screen) for the optical world there on the screen. Embodied vision is given up
for the simulation of being.
48 Learning and Re-learning Haptic Visuality
Marks expanded on that idea. What they may not have made sufficiently
clear is that synaesthesia does not exclude per se narrativization although
many avant-garde authors from the first wave in the 1920s opposed to it.
They thought that formal and textural qualities of a film can win the
audiences attention only if it does not aim at telling a story. With the
arrival of digital visuality, however, it is impossible to deny that the
simulation of normal perception is based upon, and also implies,
synaesthesia. To quote again Markss example of the magnolia, it is
impossible not to touch and smell the magnolia even though, or
precisely because, the image of it has been digitally generated.
Here I think the connection between haptic vision and synaesthesia
needs to be reconsidered. It seems that one sensory experience activates or
recalls another sensory modality only if it is felt to be insufficient in
providing a full picture of the perceived object. A pleasant scent urges us
to know more about its source. Smelling activates touch because we want
to live the thing, the magnolia or other odorous object, in its entirety or
integrity. And we know unconsciously that the odour is not all of the
sensible object. And conversely, caressing a sable dress or a sensual skin
can ignite one to deeper desires. Identifying someone by only touching
him or her is like a case of synaesthesia: we need to recall other visual or
aural properties of the person. This is why Marks needs the idea of the
lack of things to see. It is the visual lack that prompts us to look closer,
touch and smell, or maybe even taste. She refers to the unity of perception
because one percept, sight, is united with other possible percepts, smell
and touch, of the same object, magnolia. They come together precisely to
identify that object, to cover up the lack of things in vision. It is the failure
of one sense modality to identify the object of the image that calls forth
other modalities to complete its identification. However, in film viewing it
is not so much the object that is rendered synesthetically but the image
itself. This is why we call the latter textural.
Let us formulate the following principle:
Consider the still image taken from Bahman Ghobadis film Rhino
Season (Fasle kargadan, 2012): Fig. 1. Two things stand out: the texture
of the scorched land, the searing, and the almost dot-like small figure far
on the horizon. As I see it the indented land evokes a very strong sense of
touch (an urge to step on it and feel the hardened, bumpy surface).
Lszl Tarnay 49
Figures 12. The last shots of Bahman Ghobadis Rhino Season (2012).
The other thing to notice is the small dot-like figure whom we identify
as a man but he seems too insignificant to render any meaning to it. But
look now at the image that follows it. [Fig. 2.] Here we see the towering
silhouette of another man easily identifiable in the foreground. I think we
immediately connect the two figures as one following the other and
50 Learning and Re-learning Haptic Visuality
two human figures. We switch to seeing the surface in the scenic image if
we cannot grasp the scene. Principle A in a way reduces or returns the
filmic experience to the experience of painting.
The crucial question however is whether the digitalization of the image
could still induce synaesthesia or haptic visuality in the viewers. I think
digital simulation brings synaesthesia to perfection in the direction where
Principle A left it. In real life we feel invited to use as many senses as
possible every time we are in a situation without a precise object of
perception. By this I mean a kind of reverse situation of oriental
meditation when our contemplation turns outward, rather than inward, but
without a proper object, a lack of things to focus on perceptually. In
modern French philosophy it corresponds to a kind of intransitive
relationship toward the world and other people. It is mainly the so-called
primal elements, earth, air, fire and water, which can induce an intransitive
relation in man in the first place. They are uncountable and unconfinable
masses which we can plunge into or feed upon. They are the prototypically
textural materials like the rippling water surface, the sandy dunes, the
cloudy sky or the flickering flames. Foliage or camouflaging texture also
belongs here as long as it lacks any definable form. Looking at the rippling
water surface is like watching a typical Brakhage film like Mothlight
(1963) or Eye Myth (1972). The titles are especially telling. The
experience is indeed haptic, or more precisely, it is like caressing for
caressing normally lacks a definable and confinable object; it is
intransitive.4
Intransitive perception, in my mind, is where synaesthesia begins in its
pure form. The other senses are activated for a lack of things to perceive.
Simulation is where synaesthesia ends in perfection. They are the two
extremes of synaesthesia. When Ramachandran and Hubbard (2002) start
to explain to an audience that everybody is born with synaesthesia they
show a design of round shape and a design of ragged shape and ask the
audience to associate the language terms bubu and kiki with them. It
is obvious somehow that round shape is bubu and raggedness is kiki.
Neither carries any explicit or known meaning. But would or should we
call a round apple as something like boom, let alone bubu? I do not
think so. We need non-definability as a condition for pure synaesthesia.
4
No wonder that the caress became one of the key terms for Emmanuel Lvinas
in describing the asymmetric ethical relation of the ego toward the Other: by
caressing one cannot objectify and appropriate the caressed. Marks (2002)
mentions Lvinass idea of the caress in that I can lose myself as a subject for
the other who cannot be known and is thus absent from the perception itself.
52 Learning and Re-learning Haptic Visuality
References
Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari. 1994. What Is Philosophy? New York:
Columbia University Press.
Gamboni, Dario. 2002. Potential Images. Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in
Modern Art. London: Reaktion Books.
Lewis-Williams, I. David. 1988. Reality and Non-reality in San Rock Art.
Johannesburg: Witwaterstrand University Press.
Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema,
Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham and London: Duke University
Press.
. 2002. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Ramachandran V. S. and E. M. Hubbard 2003. The Phenomenology of
Synaesthesia. Journal of Consciousness Studies Vol. 10 No. 8: 4957.
Sobchack, Vivian. 1992. The Address of the Eye: a Phenomenology of
Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Taberham, Paul. 2013. Bottom-up Processing, Entoptic Vision and the
Innocent Eye in the Work of Stan Brakhage. Manuscript.
AVOID CONTACT WITH THE EYES AND SKIN,
MAY CAUSE IRRITATION:
AGNS VARDAS LA POINTE COURTE (1954)
1
Please note that throughout the article all translations are my own. Original
French reads: Il faut dire ici que le bois est un des matriaux-cl dAgns Varda,
lune des images leitmotive de ses films.
56 Avoid Contact with the Eyes and Skin, May Cause Irritation
Figures 12. The anonymous and exposed wood grain of The Pointe Courtes
opening moments that initially greets the spectators eyes.
Figures 34. Loie Fullers mesmerising skirt dances. Her luminous textile swirls
filling our eyes with tiny arabesques.
Francesca Minnie Hardy 57
textile swirls filling our eyes with tiny arabesques and often begging the
question: What are we looking at? Just as the exposed grain of wood of
The Pointe Courte does when a spectator first lays her eyes upon it. A
brief survey of Vardas body of work also reveals such enigmatic florid
bursts. Sunflowers feature prominently in the opening sequence of
Happiness (Le Bonheur, 1965) [Fig. 5], uncannily and unblinkingly
looking out at an audience, as the corny spectators look on to them. In
her two-hour voyage through Paris in Cleo from 5 to 7 (Clo de 5 7,
1962), the sight of a tree hints at its arboreal permanence, as if today, 50
years since its conception a spectator could visit that very spot and take in
its now greater majesty. Most intriguing of all, however, at least for
myself, are the closing moments of Opera Mouffe (Lopra-mouffe, 1958)
during which a young, pregnant woman a potential doppelganger for
Varda who was pregnant with her first child at the time of its production
heartily consumes a bunch of flowers. [Fig. 6.]
Figures 56. A brief survey of the enigmatic florid bursts across Vardas oeuvre.
In his essay on the uncanny, Freud noted how the represented double
can operate as the uncanny harbinger of death (Freud 1989 [1919], 142),
yet here the double is invested with fecundity, not simply in its depiction
of pregnancy, but also in light of its correspondences with this wider
bucolic web. For like the spatiotemporal interconnection that the exchanged
look between sunflower and spectator, and the sight of Cleos tree, trigger,
her consumption of the flower gestures towards an interrelation between
the body and the flower. As I watch these petals become pulp I am always
reminded of Gilles Deleuzes adage-like sentiment that: It is through the
body (and no longer through the intermediary of the body) that cinema
forms its alliance with the spirit, with thought (Deleuze 1989, 189); a
position that resonates with a major shift in film theory, and what I have
identified as Film Studies fleshy turn.
58 Avoid Contact with the Eyes and Skin, May Cause Irritation
This fleshy turn has seen modes of spectatorship that strive for more
bodily readings of film emerge, for instance, through appeals to tactility,
the olfactory, or sapidity. In a recent article on the state of film theory in
France, Sarah Cooper too highlights the measure of importance
Deleuzes two volumes on cinema enjoy beyond the French context and
among the proponents of this fleshy turn (Cooper 2012, 381); noting his
particular influence on cultural theorist Laura U. Markss own highly
influential work on touch and the haptic. Very broadly, Markss thesis
centres on haptic looking and its tendency to move over the surface of
its object rather than to plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish
form so much as to discern texture. It is more inclined to move than to
focus, more inclined to graze than to gaze (Marks 2000, 162). In other
words, it is a modality of seeing which declines being pulled into
narrative (Marks 2000, 163) in favour of a more contemplative
relationship with the image as a whole. For our purposes here though we
are interested in the interstices between the French context and this ever-
growing cinema of the senses. Rather fittingly, Cooper refers to what we
could call, following my own taxonomy, the French fleshy turn, casting
Jean-Luc Nancy as a leading figure in the abiding interest in film
(Cooper 2012, 379) Frances philosophical intelligentsia continues to
show. The author of one volume on the cinema of Iranian filmmaker
Abbas Kiarostami, of numerous articles on individual films, and an
occasional embodied filmic agent, putting his own self at stake by entering
the body of film and appearing on-screen, Nancy is likewise part of one of
Frances modern-day cinematic power couples thanks to his intermittent
dialogue with the work of Claire Denis (Cooper 2012, 379). A dialogue
in no way restricted to his critical, textual interventions on her work for
Denis has responded cinematically to Nancys writings through the 2004
feature film The Intruder (LIntrus). Very loosely narrating a heart
transplant transacted on the black market, the film consists of blocks of
sensations (Beugnet 2007, 168), instead of observing a more
conventional narrative logic, a structure which works to prise the seat of
cinematic perception from vision alone as per the objectives of Film
Studies fleshy turn. This coincidence of concerns, however, is not the
whole story of Nancys suitability for adoption by the fleshy turn, for
careful analysis of his most dedicated study of the medium, The Evidence
of Film (2001) characterises his cinema as an undoubted cinema of the
look; the number of mentions of the word regard attesting to this very
proposition.2 Yet it is also undoubtedly a very particular kind of look
2
Regard is most frequently rendered as look or gaze in English.
Francesca Minnie Hardy 59
given that the impetus of Nancys most extensive engagement with film is
to witness a mobilized way of looking (Nancy 2001, 26) emerge, the
nature of which cannot be understood by considering his work on film in
isolation, for any specificity of his discourses on cinema are caught up
with his wider contribution to the canon of aesthetic thinking. Therefore to
speak of a Nancean ontology of film we must bear in mind his ontology of
the image because one reciprocally informs the other, a contact which
itself, as I will show here, not only places his thought into contact with
Film Studies fleshy turn, but likewise into contact with that intertexual
(and intermedial) traveller, the flower.
3
Original French reads: toute image est fleur, ou est une fleur.
60 Avoid Contact with the Eyes and Skin, May Cause Irritation
4
Original French reads: La fleur, cest la partie la plus fine, la surface, ce qui
reste devant et quon effleure seulement.
5
Definitions of efflorescence derive from effloresce, v. cf. OED Online.
September 2012. Oxford University Press.
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/59763?redirectedFrom=effloresce (accessed at
October 10, 2012).
Francesca Minnie Hardy 61
flowering image thus oscillates the sensory reception of the image between
both vision and touch, between a gaze and a graze, bridging the entire
visuality spectrum that Marks wishes to see acknowledged by ontologies
of the image, and in turn placing a spectator onto the edges of these
sensations too, meaning that our look effectively, and quite literally,
mobilizes thanks to this oscillation. If wood, then, is Vardas filmic
material par excellence, the flower could almost be thought of as the
sensuous image par excellence; a little living piece of material cinema in
the palm of your hand.
6
Original French reads: [1] le film termin nest jamais le seul film imaginable,
[2] Chaque film est riche dautres films.
7
Original French reads: [1] il reste certainement chaque fois des possibilits que
le montage final carte. [2] si du moins on ne parle que de ltat fini du film,
autour duquel et aprs lequel continue flotter une aura de possibles qui sont
autant dinterprtations imaginables.
8
[1] Literally I say a flower. Original French reads: [2] ce mouvement du
crochet dans la maille qui enchane dj dire fleur.
64 Avoid Contact with the Eyes and Skin, May Cause Irritation
9
Original French reads: dire parler, chanter, voquer et fleur
parfum, ptale, fleuron, fltrir, flore ou flamme. The mechanics of the
phenomenon could be said to have a direct analogue in a visual context through
Roland Barthess elucidation of the photographic studium and punctum. Cf.
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. 1981. New York: Hill and Wang.
10
Varda herself embarks on such an exercise in Ulysse (1982) wherein she revisits
the three chief constitutive elements of a photograph she had taken decades earlier:
a boy, now a man; a man, now an old man; and a dead goat; still dead. Creatively
and discursively engaging with these three pillars of the original composition
each component of the imagecome[s] alive and gain[s] a corporeal dimension
in not merely one, but several possible alternative realities (Peth 2010, 84);
arguably by means of the floating aura of meanings that ectoplasmically haloes the
then of the photograph being threadlessly woven into the now of the film.
11
Nancys flowering image, and its corresponding phenomena, could almost be
thought of as the obverse of Vardas cincriture, a term conceived by Varda which
addresses the choices she makes when shooting a film. In essence, what she
decides to write into the cinema she authors. Nancys flowering images et al. could
be thought the opposing, yet complementary, processes for they treat, or indeed
attempt to coax out, what emanates from this cincriture.
Francesca Minnie Hardy 65
12
Interestingly, Alison Smith, in what remains the only book-length English
language study exclusively dedicated to Vardas oeuvre, suggests that the film
commences with a tracking shot down the main street of the village (Smith 1998,
64), rather than with the exposed and anonymous block of wood explored above;
essentially deferring the start of the film until after all of the credits have rolled. In
doing so Smith also risks overlooking the sense of this exposed wood grain, and
the bounty of the image, which continues throughout The Pointe Courte. Similarly,
Ginette Vincendeau highlights the role of this tracking shot within the films
opening minutes although she does recognise its timber preface. However, her
suggestion that as the camera moves on from this first wooden pane that a section
of a tree trunk is revealed wraps things up a little too readily. For I would suggest
that Vincendeaus trunk is in fact a bench which we later catch a glimpse of
through the grain-like coils the film realises in its exposition of the diegetic space;
circularly swooping from one corner of The Pointe Courte to another.
66 Avoid Contact with the Eyes and Skin, May Cause Irritation
Figures 78. A sense of the exposed wood grain remains throughout The Pointe
Courte thanks to the many circles and straight lines that fill its material surrounds.
Ever present are the simple circles and straight lines that plainly deck
out the films material surrounds, but, like the opening moments of the
film, in these moments these shapes transcend these material surrounds
and enter the body of the film itself. Deftly demonstrating the intelligent
interplay between form and content that film can accomplish, these
instances once again consider the image a polymorphous entity ripe with
far more than a predominant visual track. One of the most striking uses of
Francesca Minnie Hardy 67
this occurs shortly after Elle, the unnamed lead female protagonist of the
purely fictional tale the film recounts, has arrived in The Pointe Courte to
visit the birthplace of her husband for the first time. As they journey to the
shack that will be their residence during their stay, their walk is interrupted
by the approach of a slow moving train and standing perpendicular to its
passage they, and the spectator, are obliged to endure its cumbersome and
metallic presence which comes to dominate the films visual and aural
tracks as it edges past them; a static camera recording the trains steady
screech towards the edge of the screen until its cab fills its entire surface
area. Transporting a spectators view to the other side of the tracks, the
body of the film refocuses on the trials of the couple quickly cutting to a
slightly obliquely angled mid-shot. Whilst holding them here the camera
then winds around them before stopping once again to permit them the
space to walk off into the unknown distance. Contemplated alongside each
other, and with eyes sensible to the swirled knots and smooth contours of
woods internal ornament, the kinetic content of the image, here expressed
by the trains slow forward motion, and the kinetic quality of the filmic
body itself, here realised by the cameras semi-circular movement around
the protagonists, work in mutual operation and threadlessly weave the
woody texture back into the film, causing an efflorescence of woods
lignin fibres on the surface of the filmic body in defiance of the visual
tracks relinquishing them. [Figs. 910.]
Figures 910.
The reciprocal play of the straight lines of the trains heavy movements
and of the curvilinear motion of the camera can be witnessed at work
again, but in a very different form, at a number of points during the film.
Likewise concerned with shot choice, and consequently operating at the
level of the filmic body, the fleshy touches that inflect the films imagery,
here the faces of the protagonists captured in close-up, act as the circles
68 Avoid Contact with the Eyes and Skin, May Cause Irritation
Figures 1112. The juxtaposition of narrow vistas and close-ups of faces shunts
the wood grain back onto the surface of the filmic body.
A more lyrical example takes place later in the trip as the couple
wander along the shoreline. Initially filmed in long shot, as the couple near
the waters edge, a cut quickly installs the camera behind an abandoned,
broken basket lying on the sand; its woven, circular form providing a
diegetic although highly stylised frame to the couples movements. As
they pass in front of this wicker frame, its shape obviously reminiscent of
the knot in the anonymous grain of wood, the camera dives through its
cylindrical body so that we do not lose sight of the couple although we are
denied a view of their bodies and must simply make do with their feet.
Charting their walk at this ground level, a linear travelling shot remains
focussed on their feet until a star-like shape, which we infer to be the base
of the broken basket appears in the foreground of the image; its spiked
Francesca Minnie Hardy 69
circular form stalling the cameras sideways movement and again recalling
the knot of the films timber preface. [Figs. 1314.] In completing this
motion, this beach debris also completes the final stitch in the threadless
weaving which sews the now absent lignin fibres of the opening wooden
plane back into the onscreen space of the beach. The warp and weft of its
immaterial tapestry gathering filaments as soon as the image acquires its
wicker frame; these filaments bolstered by the travelling shots mimicry of
woods striations; the sight of the baskets formerly missing base likewise
forming the base of the purely sensible tree trunk that our mobilised look
could be said to carve out through the sequences visual and kinetic material.
Figures 1314. Our mobilised look could be said to carve out a purely sensible
tree trunk through the sequences visual and kinetic material.
I should perhaps pause here for a moment because it could be said that
this discussion privileges the couples narrative too much at too great an
expense of the villagers tale. But this is somewhat of a wilful neglect,
motivated not by disrespect, but by a desire to dispel, or at the very least to
challenge the material dichotomy promoted by the prevailing canon of
criticism surrounding the film. Whereas these two halves are supposedly
narratively, thematically, and stylistically distinct, the film as a whole has
been well and widely documented as delight[ing] in contrasts [] and
parallels (Vincendeau 2008). Yet this pleasure it delights in draws up
materially opposing territories, such as light and shadow (Varda), iron and
wood (Truffaut, Flitterman-Lewis), black and white (Deleuze) which co-
exist, but do not necessarily confer. These material schisms are largely
gendered and the most significant for our purposes here is undeniably the
opposition of wood and steel (Flitterman-Lewis 1996, 221). Visually
articulated by the artefacts fashioned from these materials and scattered
about the diegetic landscape, and aurally by means of these materials
being worked by or as tools, Il is aligned with wood and Elle is associated
70 Avoid Contact with the Eyes and Skin, May Cause Irritation
13
Following the terms set out by gnes Peth in her intervention on intermediality
as metalepsis in Vardas cincriture, this transcendence could perhaps be annexed
to the threefold taxonomy she identifies as operative across Vardas oeuvre as a
sensory metalepsis that effects a jump between diegetic and non-diegetic worlds
(Peth 2010).
Francesca Minnie Hardy 71
Figures 1516. The Pointe Courte: iron lines and wooden shell.
The couple prepare to leave The Pointe Courte for Paris, together. The
village celebrates, together. As the celebration gets into full swing
woodwind music fills the air and our ears evoking a sense of the wood
grain which here occasions a diegetic and an extra-diegetic oscillation: the
villagers jostle on the dance floor, whilst a spectator jostles with the very
opening moments of the film when this music was heard for the first time.
Through this aural material the film itself becomes a knot in the grain of
cinema encased within itself, effectively enacting a final coil which
materially returns us to the opening moments of the film. Yet The Pointe
Courte does not leave us with any sense of being wrapped up for we do
not know if the couple will remain together upon their return to Paris, nor
whether any of the kittens will be saved from drowning following a childs
request in its closing moments. Our final impression of the film thus splits
according to Nancys forked films theory, like the playground game of
plucking petals from a flower: a kitten drowns, a kitten lives, she loves
him, she loves him not.
References
Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New
York: Hill and Wang.
Beugnet, Martine. 2007. Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art
of Transgression. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Cooper, Sarah. 2012. Film Theory in France. French Studies vol. 66 no. 3
(July): 376382.
Curot, Frank. 1991. Lcriture de La Pointe Courte [The Writing of The
Pointe Courte]. In Agns Varda, ed. Michel Estve, 8599. Paris:
Lettres Modernes-Minard.
72 Avoid Contact with the Eyes and Skin, May Cause Irritation
ROMAIN CHAREYRON
It is with the advent of the DV camera that Agns Varda had the idea
for her acclaimed documentary The Gleaners and I.1 When it appeared in
the mid-nineties, this type of handheld camera represented a new approach
to filmmaking altogether, since its size and its technology allowed for a
greater freedom on the directors part. Freed from the constraints of the
traditional cinematic apparatus, the filmmaker could experience an
unprecedented closeness to his or her subject as well as immediacy
between themselves and the world they were recording on camera. These
elements proved to be of the utmost interest for Varda, whose background
in the still image and the theater has always driven her to explore the
narrative and visual possibilities offered by the filmic medium.2 She then
decided to embark on a journey across France in order to illustrate the
1
Varda herself explains that the discovery of the digital camera was of paramount
importance in her creative process and her desire to tackle the topic of gleaning:
There were three things [that interested her in filming the gleaners]. The first one
was noticing the motion of these people bending in the open market. The second
one was a program on TV. The third reason which pushed me to begin and
continue this film was the discovery of the digital camera []. With the new
digital camera, I felt I could find myself, get involved as a filmmaker. (Anderson
2001, 24.)
2
Varda first studied art history before shifting to photography, and she landed her
first job as an official photographer for the Thtre National Populaire (TNP) in
Paris. She had little knowledge of film techniques and was quite inexperienced
when she directed her first feature film, La Pointe Courte, in 1955. Richard
Neupert points to this fact when he writes: Her background in art, literature, and
theater was much stronger than her knowledge of film history or techniques [].
Varda initially began filmmaking from a rather nave perspective. (Neupert 2002,
57.)
74 Haptic Vision in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse
deter any kind of hierarchy between the different social groups she records
on camera. By choosing to shine a light on what is usually deemed as
improper or debasing the aging body or the act of gleaning Varda
favors fluidity, as her narrative is built around scenes that echo each other
and call for an all-encompassing approach that bypasses socio-economic
considerations. As Claude Murcia notes: the mosaic structure and the
absence of hierarchy it creates work to include marginalized and deprecated
people within an egalitarian and democratic patchwork: various types of
outcasts stand alongside each other and are united by the film as being part
of one large community defined by the act of gleaning (Murcia 2009, 44
my translation). From a visual perspective our main point of focus
the intimacy and proximity felt by the spectator, when confronted to the
different bodily scenarios instated by Varda, redefine the scope of the
traditional documentary film,4 as these images give rise to a form of
knowledge that cannot be put into words, but only conveyed through a
heightening of our senses by way of the textural properties of the image.5
Vardas filmic approach thus understands the act of gleaning as a social,
political and aesthetic gesture. In so doing, she privileges a visual regimen
where the relationship between the spectator and the images is based on a
tactile mode of apprehension rather than on the mastery of the gaze. By
resorting to the mute significance of images to convey a sense of contact
between the spectator and the representation, Vardas mise-en-scne
unearths the multi-layered meanings connected to the objects and bodies
recorded on film in order to express their non-reducible qualities.
By showing what gleaning stands for in different social and
historical contexts, Vardas initial will was to unveil the various meanings
attached to this ancestral practice. What lies at the root of this undertaking
is the acknowledgment that if in the past gleaning was a collaborative
work that gathered people together, nowadays it is mostly endowed with
negative connotations and stands for the dark side of capitalism and
consumerist society. This contrast is made clear at the beginning of the
documentary, through the iconography associated with the representation
4
The questions of truthfulness and objectivity are the defining aspects of the
documentary films. As William Guynn notes: Documentary asserts the realism
of its discourse as against the imaginary world of fiction. The documentary film
manifests the inherent relationship between cinematographic technology and the
real; it assumes its natural function in relation to its natural object. (Guynn
1990, 19.)
5
To borrow from Claude Murcia, we could say that the documentarys reliance on
non-verbal cues to generate meaning opens up a form of knowledge that exists
outside of language (en-de du langage et du sens). (Murcia 2009, 46.)
76 Haptic Vision in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse
for the people interviewed: for some, it represents an essential part of their
diet, as gleaning provides them with their main source of food [Fig. 1]. For
the people who work in a factory in charge of packaging potatoes, these
vegetables constitute an item that has to be evaluated according to very
specific criteria: if the potatoes do not correspond to the right caliber, or if
they are green or damaged during the harvest, they are considered
improper for retail and are then brought back to the fields to rot or be
picked up by gleaners [Fig. 2]. Then, for Varda, the discovery of heart-
shaped potatoes offers the possibility to explore their textural qualities, as
we see her gleaning potatoes and then filming them in a close-up that
reveals the minute details of their cracked and dirty surface [Fig. 3, Fig. 4].
these objects and make it the heart of the narrative. From this perspective,
the social undertaking of Les Glaneurs echoes Laura U. Markss
concept of intercultural cinema, when she writes that intercultural
cinema moves through space, gathering up histories and memories that are
lost or covered in the movement of displacement, and producing new
knowledges out of the condition of being between cultures (Marks 2000,
78). For Marks, intercultural films strive to expose the qualities that have
been repressed or hidden in specific objects by the dominant culture. The
aim of intercultural cinema is thus to unleash these qualities or
radioactivity and make them the official discourse of the narrative:
they [intercultural films] may show how the meaning of an object changes
as it circulates in new contexts. They may restore the radioactivity of an
object that has been sanitized or rendered inert through international trade.
They may depict the object in such a way that it is protected from the
fetishizing or commodifying gaze (Marks 2000, 79).
This brings us back to the example of the potatoes; this humble food
appears re-endowed with history (Marks 2000, 99) as the documentary
focuses on the different values it acquires, moving from one cultural group
to another. When Varda decides to film the heart-shaped potatoes in a
close-up, not only does she attempt to bring forth a sense of touch within
the narrative, she also wishes to focus on the different layers of
significance and memories attached to this vegetable. The purpose of the
DV camera is paramount in this sequence, as it allows Varda to create a
specific kind of relationship between her and the objects which, in turn,
enables the viewer to see and almost touch these objects in a way that a
more traditional cinematic apparatus would not have made possible. It is
by considering the body of the spectator as a complex surface with which
the filmic image can interact, that Varda has created a documentary whose
meaning does not so much arise from what is being shown as from how it
is being shown, focusing on the complex and multi-layered realities
encapsulated by the objects on screen. It does so by acknowledging the
various identities that trivial objects can conceal but also, as we are going
to observe now, by resorting to a particular form of contact between the
spectator and the images.
Vardas wish to question perception and pre-established conceptions
does not only apply to the objects being gleaned. Indeed, the director is
seen shooting her wrinkled hands in a series of close-ups, and even
extreme close-ups [Fig. 5], and we also see her combing her greying hair
[Fig. 6], or lying on a couch. The questions that emerge from these scenes
concern the meaning that we ought to give these images as well as their
larger significance within the documentary. At first sight, it seems quite
Romain Chareyron 79
Figures 56. The DV camera and the emergence of haptic vision. Blurring the
social and the personal: documenting the aging body.
and memories stored in his or her senses, which the images activate by
enhancing the textural qualities of the objects present on screen.6 In so
doing, the film disrupts any attempt of a fetishizing look, as the viewer can
only rely on his or her physical involvement to literally make sense of the
images.
It is this unpredictability between the film and the viewer that rules
Vardas mise-en-scne when we see her filming her own body, or as she
reenacts the act of gleaning. Whenever the camera is letting our gaze
linger on the spotted surface of her wrinkled hands or on the rough texture
of potatoes being gleaned, the ideological barrier between the viewer and
the cinematic space starts to waver. We are never put at a distance from
the potatoes or from Vardas body, but are instead pulled towards them, as
the evocative power of haptic vision asks us to emotionally invest the
representation with the memories stored in our own sensations. Vardas
mise-en-scne engages with the viewer on a deeply intimate level, as its
emphasis on surfaces echoes personal and subjective experiences on the
spectators part. This closeness between the spectator and the images,
combined with his or her physical and emotional involvement, make for an
apprehension of the onscreen world that is removed from any external
considerations. Haptic vision reaches for autonomic reactions manifested
in the skin, thus opening new means of understanding and renewing
cinemas pledge to go beyond culturally prescribed limits and glimpse the
possibility of being more than we are (MacDougall 2005, 16).
In Vardas documentary, the physical involvement that is required by
haptic vision also serves as a unifying device between the different
discourses that constitute the narrative. Vardas documenting of her own
body as well as of modern-day gleaning come together when analyzed
through the concept of haptic vision, as they offer a counter-discourse
regarding utilitarian doctrines surrounding aging, poverty and mass
consumption. We must now observe this more political statement through
the films tactile reenactment in order to understand how [] characters
or the camera or the viewer perform particular kinds of touch, and what
6
As Laura U. Marks aptly points out, the focus on tactility, that emerges whenever
haptic vision becomes the modus operandi of the mise-en-scne, does not
necessarily aim at one specific organ on the viewers body. Tactility can then
generate bodily responses that are connected to other senses, thus triggering
powerful memories stored in our sense of smell, our hearing or our vision: Touch
need not be linked explicitly to a single organ such as the skin but is enacted and
felt throughout the body []. As a material mode of perception and expression,
then, cinematic tactility occurs not only at the skin or the screen, but traverses all
the organs of the spectators body and the films body (Marks 2009, 2).
Romain Chareyron 81
Figures 78. Reproducing the act of gleaning, and the filmic image as a means of
self-discovery.
For this contact to happen between the viewer and the film, an
ideological shift needs to take place, where the projection screen is no
longer perceived as a barrier between the spectator and the images, but
rather as a membrane that allows interaction and reciprocity. If viewer and
82 Haptic Vision in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse
and photographs. The shooting scale she uses whenever she films other
people gleaning mostly medium or long shots no longer prevails when
she is the one reenacting it. In a camera movement that mimics the gesture
of the gleaner bending to pick up food, we see her hand reaching for
potatoes and putting them into her satchel. Once again, the use of the
subjective camera creates a higher degree of adherence between the
spectator and the image so that we are no longer in a position to simply
observe the onscreen world. We are physically engaged in the act of
gleaning and the use of haptic vision, which allows us to feel the
roughness of the potatoes skin, conveys a sense of touch that takes
precedence over any form of understanding. This tactile form of
knowledge brings us back to what we discussed in the first part of our
analysis; by filming herself gleaning potatoes and by emphasizing their
textural qualities, Varda offers a social discourse that is not conveyed
through words, but through the expression of the memories encoded in this
vegetable. It is through haptic vision, and its ability to translate
experiences that cannot be put into words, that the documentary becomes a
repository of individual knowledge and defuses any form of instrumental
vision. Gleaning is thus not perceived as a socially alienating act, since we
are invited to experience it. Consequently, the images of gleaning are not
just standing before our eyes, but are also moving us through a process by
which the viewers skin extends beyond his or her own body; it reaches
towards the film as the film reaches towards it (Barker 2009, 33).
As this article tried to put forward, by choosing to make haptic vision
the privileged mode of perception in specific sequences of the narrative,
Varda makes her documentary a living and breathing entity, whose
meaning is never set and well-defined, but evolves according to the
symbiosis that takes place between the audience and the images. This
relationship between viewer and film is conveyed by the nature of the
images that unfold on the screen, and the bodily investment they require
on the spectators part. Vardas desire to reveal the multi-layered
significance of the world she records on camera aims at offering a vision
unencumbered with social and economic considerations. Her mise-en-
scne asks us to engage in the fabric of the film and to experience the
world it presents before our eyes. We enter the documentary the same way
we would enter a dimly lit place: unsure of what lies ahead and relying on
our senses to guide us through the unknown.
Vardas experimentations with the visual and narrative possibilities
offered by the DV camera in Les Glaneurs are in keeping with the
unceasing desire to venture into uncharted filmic territories that influenced
her entire career as a filmmaker. As Richard Neupert recalls: Varda even
84 Haptic Vision in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse
coined the term cincriture for her brand of filmmaking, which features
carefully constructed image-to-sound textual relations (Neupert 2002,
56). A pioneer of the French New Wave, Varda has always challenged
traditional film techniques, and the documentaries she directed are no
exception to the rule7. Whether it be with LOpra-Mouffe (Diary of a
Pregnant Woman, 1958), Documenteur (Mockumentary, 1982), Jane B.
par Agns V. (Jane B. by Agns V., 1988) or, today, Les Glaneurs, she
has always considered the filmic image as a discursive tool whose
meaning arises from the interaction between the filmmaker, the viewer,
and the onscreen world. This led her to come up with the term subjective
documentary (Bluher 2009, 177) to define the particular relationship her
works have with the concepts of truth and reality that traditionally
shape our understanding of the genre.
When discussing nonfiction cinema, Marie-Jo Pierron-Moinel uses the
concept of cinma du regard (cinema of the gaze) to define a type of
documentary whose significance mainly arises from a sensitive and highly
subjective appropriation of the onscreen world by the viewer. A similar
kind of relationship between the audience and the representation is at work
in Les Glaneurs, as Vardas mise-en-scne creates an intimate bond
between the director, the viewer and the filmic image, making the
documentary a journey of self-discovery rather than the neutral appraisal
of social and economic realities. According to Pierron-Moinel, modern
documentary is best understood as a way of experiencing the world [that]
sets itself up as a means of producing knowledge by combining sensations
with understanding through ones gaze (Pierron-Moinel 2010, 223 my
translation). By questioning our ritualized ways of experiencing the world,
Varda asks us to reconsider our position as citizens but, more importantly,
as living, breathing and feeling human beings. By creating a space where
subjectivity and difference can be expressed freely, she points out to a
form of knowledge that is not rooted in our intellect, but deep within our-
selves.
7
By some aspects, the works of Agns Varda are reminiscent of the aesthetic and
narrative concerns of cinma vrit in the way they both tackle the question of
reality in film. An offspring of the New Wave when it appeared in France in
the early 60s, cinma vrits main concern was to use film techniques to offer a
representation that was a close as possible to life itself: Cinma vrit to its
practitioners is a process of discovery discovery of the truth []. In true cinema
vrit filming, there is no formal plot, no preconceived dialogue, and, with few
exceptions, no questions are either posed or answered by the filmmaker (Issari
and Paul 1979, 15).
Romain Chareyron 85
References
Anderson, Melissa. 2001. The Modest Gesture of the Filmmaker. An
Interview with Agns Varda. Cinaste vol. 26 no. 4 (September):
2427.
Barker, Jennifer M. 2009. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic
Experience. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Beugnet, Martine. 2007. Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art
of Transgression. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Bluher, Dominique. 2009. La Miroitire. propos de quelques films et
installations dAgns Varda [About a Few Films and Installations of
Agns Varda]. In Agns Varda: le cinema et au-del [Agns Varda: the
Cinema and Beyond], eds. Antony Fiant et ric Thouvenel, 177185.
Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes.
Bonner, Virginia. 2007. Beautiful Trash: Agns Vardas Les Glaneurs et la
glaneuse. Senses of Cinema. Issue 45 (November).
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2007/feature-articles/glaneurs-et-
glaneuse/. Last accessed 12.11.2014.
Buck-Morss, Susan. 1998. The Cinema Screen as Prosthesis of Perception:
A Historical Account. In The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as
Material Culture in Modernity, ed. C. Nadia Seremetakis, 4562.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Guynn, William. 1990. A Cinema of Nonfiction. London and Toronto:
Associated University Presses.
Issari, M. Ali and Doris, A. Paul. 1979. What is Cinma Vrit?
Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press.
MacDougall, David. 2006. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and
the Senses. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema,
Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham and London: Duke University
Press.
Murcia, Claude. 2009. Soi et lautre (Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse) [Self
and Others (The Gleaners and I)]. In Agns Varda: le cinema et au-
del [Agns Varda: the Cinema and Beyond], eds. Antony Fiant et ric
Thouvenel, 4348. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes.
Neupert, Richard. 2002. A History of the French New Wave Cinema.
Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Peth, gnes. 2009. (Re)Mediating the Real. Paradoxes of an Intermedial
Cinema of Intimacy. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media
Studies no. 1: 4768.
86 Haptic Vision in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse
Jean Epsteins work is varied, complex and hard to catch in too literal a
sense (it is a matter of libraries and archives more than of bookshops and
DVDs, even if in 2013 things are stirring up). Descending that mirrored
staircase in a hotel near Mount Etna, Epstein saw himself multiplied many
more times than in a three-sided mirror. Each reflection revealed something
different and unknown about himself, and the sum of reflections revealed
the multiplicity, elusiveness, and illusory nature of identity itself (Epstein,
1926). If those mirrors represented his work, and not his person as they
did, we could say that there are still many more reflections awaiting. Some
of these beautiful and carefully polished surfaces are not out of print but
unpublished, luckily not lost for us but preserved in the Fonds Jean et
Marie Epstein at Cinmathque Franaise.1 Far from being reprises of
published writings they constitute truly a dark side of his oeuvre; not
dealing with cinema directly but constructing a corpus of thought and
literature on multiple themes.
In this paper I will approach some of his unpublished writings focusing
on one major motif of his work and thought: the human body. As these
texts are unpublished and therefore not quite known, Im obliged to try
and develop an exegesis of them, even if in a restrained scope which no
doubt will reduce their richness. The reason for studying these books is
first of all because they are of interest in themselves, but secondly because
they help to disclose or at least to make more complex meanings and
motifs in Epsteins film writing and film practice.
1
I thank all the staff at Bibliothque du Film (Cinmathque Franaise) for their
knowledge, good work, and kindness. And the institution itself for preserving and
making available to researchers those documents.
88 Geography of the Body
since that demanding nervous experience is something they all know very
well from their everyday life. But the importance of the body in Bonjour
Cinma is not only related to a nervous experience but also to a carnal
experience in a manner akin to the metaphors of tactile reception. The
experience of seeing a face in close-up is described as surpassing even
tactile limits: It is not even true that there is air between us; I eat it. It is
inside me like a sacrament (Epstein 1921b, 104). Spectatorship is
conceived then but not only in his first approach to cinema as bodily
reactions.
In his major theoretical film writings books like LIntelligence dune
machine (The Intelligence of a Machine, 1946) or Esprit de cinma (The
Spirit of Cinema, 1955) this importance of the body is reduced. The
main feature is to understand cinema as an alien thinking that smashes up
anthropocentrism. Cinema sees the world differently and this alterity is its
secret propaganda to which the masses are exposed. Spectatorship is
conceived more in psychological than in physiological terms. However,
the body is still important: it is one of the privileged subjects of cinemas
experimentations. Slow motion reveals that the human body can have
reptile qualities or even be like a stone. The close-up penetrates inside the
face, revealing its thoughts. The montage of different bodies reveals
superhuman identities like familiar resemblances or illness. So the body is
in front of the movie camera and is again and again scrutinized, by a
camera that reveals unknown truths about it.
6
For an approach to a physiological aesthetics in fin-de-sicle France and its
relation to some popular culture see, for instance, Rae Beth Gordon Dances with
Darwin, 18751910. Vernacular Modernity in France (2009), particularly chapter
three: What is Ugly?
90 Geography of the Body
2.2 Contre-penses
Contre-penses is a work composed of 239 short texts on a wide
variety of topics and in a style close to the essay. Full of acute
observations and wit, the text does not follow a straight argument like
Ganymde, but develops a kind of personal dictionary of thoughts,
arranged alphabetically in the book. It is a text open to interpretation
with ironic fragments and ambiguous propositions with some recurrent
motifs. One of the various motifs in Contre-penses is, once again, the
organism and the body.
10
See for instance Ganymdes last chapter entitled Le present et lavenir de
lhomosexualit (The Present and Future of Homosexuality).
94 Geography of the Body
that must be undertaken, but falls unfortunately outside the extent of this
essay. What is explicitly present in Epsteins film writings is the
conception of cinema as an intelligence (as expressed in the title itself of
his book Lintelligence dune machine [The Intelligence of a Machine,
1946]). Contre-penses makes even more clear, as I have already said, that
this is not a metaphor for Epstein but something literal: any complex
materiality creates an intelligence and a psychology.
16
The sacred was a very important concept in Epsteins thought, influenced by
Daniel Pitarch Fernndez 99
Jean links both ideas to cinema. Its role is then to teach and show us our
mystery, discovering it first in our body. The erotic, inebriating and
revolutionary role of detailed and close viewing in desire, contaminates
one of Epsteins major themes in his film writing: the close-up. Lautre
ciel fully discloses the inherent eroticism of his theorization and film
practice.
3. Conclusions
The three unpublished works of Jean Epstein discussed here are of
significant importance for our understanding of his work. One can see that
his early interest in physiology and the organism was not lost but remained
very important in his entire lifetime, and this knowledge makes possible a
new reading of his books on film. A second conclusion regards the
importance of artificiality for humanity. Cinema is sometimes described by
Epstein as a prosthetic organ and as having a spirit (as this is an immaterial
function of related material fragments). In that sense it is, as homosexuality
may be, an artificial human creation (something at the core of humanity
itself and something approaching us from the future). Thirdly, the
sensuous resonances of some fragments of his film writings (its
description of human bodies seen through cinema) or of his films can be
fully illuminated. After having read Lautre ciel, the lovers gaze echoes
the films gaze. And finally, Epsteins unpublished writings give us many
reflections on the organism and the self, and a celebration of the body in
all its aspects that forms a corpus of work of interest in itself, even if he
were not the important filmmaker and film theorist that he is.
References
Epstein, Jean. 191820. Caritas Vitae. Paris: Fonds Jean et Marie Epstein,
Bibliothque du film, EPSTEIN284-B88. [unpublished]
. 1921a. La Posie daujourdhui, un nouvel tat dintelligence [The
Poetry of Today, a New State of Intelligence]. Paris: ditions de la
Sirne.
readings such as Mircea Eliade. Chiara Tognolottis dissertation (2003) traces a
path through Epstein thought, using his notes de lecture preserved as well at
Cinmathque Franaise, and the idea of the sacred turns to be the final conclusion
in her narrative of Epstein writings and even filmography (referring to Le
Tempestaire). The sacred, as Lautre ciel shows, is not only what the word recalls
in common language but includes in an explicit way all that is forbidden, all that is
rejected and low like bodily excretions.
100 Geography of the Body
1
By focusing on classical narrative film, we mean to exclude not only
documentaries, but also, more importantly, other traditions of non-classical, artistic
filmmaking. Experimental film, art cinema and other avant-gardes have long since
experimented with a broad range of incongruent elements, including sound and
image. The reason for exclusion is that such films lack the mimetically evoked
immersion and emotions that classical narrative films exploit, making them
different objects of study that are (for now) outside of the scope of this paper.
Steven Willemsen and Mikls Kiss 105
scenes in the films of Stanley Kubrick (e.g. Vera Lynns Well Meet Again
in the final scene of Dr. Strangelove [1964], Malcolm McDowells sadistic
rendition of Singing in the Rain in A Clockwork Orange [1971]), or the
violent climax of the baptism scene in Francis Ford Coppolas The
Godfather [1972], when the church organ accompanies the assassinations).
The practice can moreover be found recurrently in classical Hollywood
movie scenes as a means of ironic comment. Musical-emotional
incongruences also recur in more explorative narrative cinema, like in the
films of David Lynch (such as the song In Heaven, performed by the lady
in the radiator [Laurel Near/Peter Ivers] in Eraserhead [1977] or the
playing of Roy Orbisons In Dreams in Blue Velvet [1986], which outrages
Dennis Hoppers Frank Booth character), or the shockingly unexpected,
and seemingly unmotivated, appearance of Naked Citys Bonehead in the
exposition of Michael Hanekes Funny Games (1997 and also 2007), to
name just a few.
Yet, as we will prove shortly, traditional film music theory uncritically
and persistently builds on assumptions of how, in order to be emotionally
effective, classical narrative cinemas film music should remain congruent
and subordinated to the images and the story. This is in accordance with
the view that film techniques, such as editing, supposedly should remain
invisible and subordinated to narrative action, and in this way, film
musics role has been constrained to be that of an unnoticed emotive
manipulator. According to this somewhat uncritical view, film music
should remain at all times unobtrusive to be heard only on a
subconscious level. Conflicting music then, as these studies assume, could
point directly to a films artificiality and its manipulative intentions a
simple explanation which foregrounds non-diegetic musics fundamentally
unnatural role in any storyworld.
One of the theoretical works that most enduringly represents this view
is Claudia Gorbmans eloquently entitled Unheard Melodies (1987).
Gorbmans widely acclaimed book is firmly rooted in the 1970s and 80s
paradigm of psychoanalytical film theory and its reliance on conceptions
of film viewing as a suspension of disbelief. Jeff Smith, in his 1996
article Unheard Melodies? A Critique of Psychoanalytic Theories of Film
Music, aptly shows how the idea of unobtrusiveness in film scoring has
fundamentally shaped psychoanalytic film theorys accounts of film
music. For Gorbman, film music has a crucial role in strengthening
viewers immersion and attaching them emotionally to the visually
presented fiction. Crucially, she argues for a central position of the
unheardness in film musics affective capabilities. According to
Gorbman, the double functions of film music are to semiotically prevent
106 Unsettling Melodies: A Cognitive Approach to Incongruent Film Music
2
Multiple accounts exist of viewers walking out of the first Reservoir Dogs
screenings in 1992 because of this specific scene see John Hartles illustrative
article in the Seattle Times (Hartle 1992).
108 Unsettling Melodies: A Cognitive Approach to Incongruent Film Music
The first key question is how can we be, at the same time, aware of
musical incongruence, as well as being emotionally affected and
manipulated by it? Although audio-visual incongruence can surely create
a sense of confusion or disturbance, we argue that it does so within our
immersive experience of the narrative world, and not by wholly disrupting
it in some Brechtian fashion. As noted, much of the problematic points in
psychoanalytic approaches to film music emerged from the discrepancy
between the musics ability to give clear cues and bits of narrative
information, on the one hand, and notions of its supposed inaudibility to
avoid a rupture in the immersion, on the other (Smith 1996). We agree
with Smith that an appropriate theory should not reduce the viewer to a
passive receiver who treats all the presented emotions as its own, but
acknowledge a dynamic relation between musical information and the
viewer. In his article Movie Music As Moving Music (1999), Jeff Smith
provided approaches to film music from a cognitive perspective,
attempting to theorize the relation between film music and emotion while
overcoming some of the problems of psychoanalytical methods (Smith
1999, 148). Drawing from the work of Smith, who builds on Peter Kivy,
Joseph D. Anderson, and Annabel J. Cohen, our proposed framework
brings together the findings of key researches in the field of film, music
and cognition. This will enable us to study film music on the fundamental
levels of perception, cognition, and emotion, thereby bypassing the
untenable theory that discards incongruence in psychoanalytic approaches.
According to Smith it is too often overlooked that all emotions are
composed of both affective and cognitive components (Smith 1999, 155).
Following Peter Kivys division between music as expression and music
being expressive of (Kivy 1989, 1226), i.e. between primary feeling and
recognizing emotions in music, the distinction is between emotions that
are evoked by a scene and its accompanying music (e.g. creating empathy,
offering the spectator emotional arousal), and emotional components that
are communicated by film music (e.g. indicating a characters emotional
state, thus influencing the viewers judgement). Affect and judgement
each may take precedence over the other at different moments to produce
a range of possible responses (Smith 1999, 156). Because of its reliance
on psychological immersion, psychoanalytic theory tends to overlook
these dynamics of communication, presuming that viewers claim all
associated emotions as their own. We can note that in the case of radical
audio-visual incongruence, music never seems to directly arouse the
emotions expressed through its own musical qualities. What is more,
cheerful music accompanying visual brutalities does not make us feel more
cheerful (on the contrary).
Steven Willemsen and Mikls Kiss 109
3
Synchrony alone is sufficient for the human processing system in linking the
auditory and visual elements as one event. Multiple researches show a fixed
tendency or even necessity of recognizing and attributing synchrony that is already
present in very low-level, bottom-up, processes of multi-modal perception (Spelke
1979, Hummel & Biederman 1990, Revonsuo 1999).
110 Unsettling Melodies: A Cognitive Approach to Incongruent Film Music
4
Presumably, it can only be on the basis of such traits and flaws in human
cognition that film music has been able to gain its status as an almost unquestioned
realistic effect in the cinema, despite its lack of mimetic abilities that we would
objectively consider realistic.
5
See, for example, the recurrently interrupted extra-diegetic music in Pierrot le
Fou (1965) or the temporal disjunctions of sound and image in La Chinoise (1967),
Weekend (1967), and Passion (1980).
Steven Willemsen and Mikls Kiss 111
of the sounds and/or music with the event unfolding on the screen, perhaps
the very emotion of the music confirming or denying the validity of the
viewers response to what is seen (Anderson 1998, 87). For incongruent
film music, this emotional response becomes the most significant, bringing
about the question: how does incongruent music influence and impact
viewers visual perception and emotional evaluation?
There is no need for theoretical explanations to realize that it is always
the music that exerts a great deal of influence over the emotional qualities
of an image, whereas the visual content is hardly able to alter the
emotional affect in the music. Musics emotive meaning is thus constant;
that of the visual track is relatively unstable and changeable. This insight
is at the core of the two cognitive processes, affective congruence and
polarization, that Jeff Smith (1999) distinguishes as the two overarching
affective functions of film music. In the process of affective congruence
the music emotionally matches the visual and narrative events, thereby
heightening the viewers emotional experience. When the emotional and
semantic qualities of the visual and narrative events are largely similar to
those expressed by the music, they reinforce each other, possibly leading
to a stronger arousal of emotions in the viewer. During polarization, on
the other hand, the emotive qualities of music and the visual are not
unambiguously matched i.e. they do not express exactly the same
emotional meaning. This is not to be confused with the incongruence we
are concerned with in this article. As for polarization one should think of a
slight discrepancy, or perhaps an emotionally neutral image
accompanied by music that is expressive of some emotion. This audio-
visual constellation leads to an interaction in which the affective meaning
of music moves the content of the image towards the character of that
music (Smith 1999, 160). Annabel J. Cohen has conducted various
experiments on this process, for example, by testing the effects of different
accompanying music on the evaluation of short animated films presenting
moving geometric figures (Cohen & Marshall 1988, Cohen 1993). In these
cases the emotive qualities that viewers ascribed to the film were moved
towards the qualities expressed by the music. In this sense film music
functions as a semiotic signifier, guiding viewers judgements. Cohen
explains how the music guides us through the interpretation of an image,
directing viewers attention (since temporal congruencies tend to steer
viewers attention), consequently altering the perceived meaning. As Jeff
Smith concludes, auditory elements systematically shape the denotative
and affective meanings of the visual (Smith 1999, 161).
Incongruent cases seem to disregard this general rule. Even though
incongruent music may feel disorienting, unsettling, or ironical, when it
112 Unsettling Melodies: A Cognitive Approach to Incongruent Film Music
stands in clear conflict with the visual, music does not move the visually
perceived towards its own contrasting emotional qualities. It is likely that
whenever the audio-visual incongruence becomes radical, the natural
processes of congruency and its corresponding modes of affect are
suspended. Empirical findings back up this assumption. For example,
Annabel J. Cohen noted that when music and visuals are in clear conflict,
the musical affect is marginalized and the visual information tends to take
precedence over the audio (Cohen & Marshall 1988). Although this only
describes a tendency and not a fixed mechanism, it is assumable that when
primary, cognitively impenetrable, tests of audio-visual correlation fail,
viewers generally tend to rely on the visual information over the audio.6
This could be an underlying reason of why violent images are specifically
effective in creating and maintaining audio-visual incongruence: violent
images are viscerally strong and emotionally unambiguous hence capable
of resisting the interpretational polarization of the accompanying music.
The lack of these effects demonstrates that audio-visual incongruence is
different from Smiths category of polarization.
But what functions remain for the conflicting music then? Anderson
notes that [i]f musical and visual information are in conflict in any of
these instances [i.e. in synchrony, rhythm, or emotion], the conflict will
force the viewer to go back and re-evaluate earlier reactions, to reinterpret
the patterns and the significance of the filmic events (Anderson 1998,
87). Yet, re-evaluation does not seem to be at the core of incongruent film
music. While watching Oldboy, we do not re-evaluate or reinterpret the
whole film, nor the particular scene of torture because of the incongruent
music. Andersons statement seems to be directed more at the narrative
implications, rather than at any emotional effect. Marilyn G. Boltz (2004)
offers another suggestion, following empirical tests on film music and
cognition in terms of our interpretation, emotional affect and memory. The
results of Boltzs experiments with viewers watching short clips paired to
diverse musical soundtracks show that mood-congruent pairs of film and
music are jointly encoded, leading to an integrated memory code. This
encoding underlines our argument on how film and music tend to be
coupled strongly in cognition. A joint encoding, according to Boltz,
may be more likely to occur in cases of mood congruency in which
6
In cases of narrative films, on the one hand, the primacy of visual information
over the audio could include, even be reinforced by, viewers narrative interest.
On the other, ecological point of view, visual informations dominance could be
easily justified from an evolutionary perspective, as it could refer to survival skills,
which dodge those very rare situations, when natures voices arent reliable to the
dangers of the seen environment.
Steven Willemsen and Mikls Kiss 113
musical affect can direct viewers attending toward those aspects of a film
with a similar connotative meaning and thereby integrate music and film
into one coherent framework (Boltz 2004, 1196). As for cases of
incongruence, Boltzs findings suggest that viewers tend to perceive
conflicting film music as separated from the visuals. After all, the
emotive meaning of [incongruent] music conflicts with that of the film, so
that it is not always clear where attending should be directed or how the
conflict of information can be resolved within one interpretative
framework. Given that music and film seem relatively dissociated from
each other in this situation, each may be encoded independently of the
other (Boltz 2004, 1196). However, we are bound by justice to say that
this finding refers only to a tendency measured in short clips viewed under
rather unnatural circumstances. Even Boltz herself notes that in an
immersive, full-length narrative fiction film, the outcomes may be
different: On an experiential level, the use of ironic contrast often seems
to result in a vivid memory of the film information. For example,
ironically contrasted scenes from A Clockwork Orange are very
memorable, perhaps even more so than they would be if they had
originally been accompanied by mood-congruent music (Boltz 2004,
1203).
Concluding the above, it is not some separate encoding or a disjunction
in memory representation that makes incongruent film music an
emotionally powerful audio-visual strategy. Nevertheless, there is a key
notion in Boltzs statement that, when film music remains highly
incongruent, it is not clear for viewers where to direct their attention or
how to solve the emotional problems within a single interpretative
framework. In relation to Boltzs conclusion, Andersons remark,
originally concerning silent films, may be applicable to incongruence too:
Consider the possibility that the absence of the opportunity to confirm
our perceptions cross-modally might account for our discomfort in
viewing a silent film without accompaniment. If we are programmed by
evolution to check and cross-check our perceptions multi-modally, the
inability to do so might well make us fundamentally, vaguely uneasy
(Anderson 1998, 87).
Crucially, the cognitive accounts of film music whether it is Smiths
affective congruence and polarization, Cohens and Boltzs experiments or
Andersons ecological considerations on multi-modality all point to the
same processes of viewers seeking to interpret in favour of congruence.
Essentially, these processes are nothing but economically driven attempts
to bridge the gap of multimodal information in order to create a single,
clear, cognitively consonant meaning. With incongruent film music
114 Unsettling Melodies: A Cognitive Approach to Incongruent Film Music
Conclusion
This preliminary explanation is only a first attempt to connect all the
different modes of incongruence and the cognitive-emotional responses
they evoke. We can conclude that although psychoanalytic theorists were
right in claiming that incongruent film music creates uncertainty, they
fell short in explaining the exact nature as well as the emotional
consequences of such a complex audio-visual stimulus. A mere conflict
between inconsistent semiotic interpretations cannot fully explain why
incongruent film music recurrently invokes feelings of uneasiness. Rather
than regarding it as a phenomenon that works through disrupting
conventions, we stressed a perceptual-cognitive reason that ensures
incongruences emotional strangeness. The consequence of this conclusion
116 Unsettling Melodies: A Cognitive Approach to Incongruent Film Music
References
Anderson, Joseph D. 1998 [1996]. The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological
Approach to Cognitive Film Theory. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press.
Boltz, Marilyn G. 2004. The Cognitive Processing of Film and Musical
Soundtracks. Memory & Cognition Vol. 32 No. 7: 11941205.
Bordwell, David & Kristin Thompson. 2008. Film Art: an Introduction.
Boston: McGraw-Hill.
Chion, Michel 1994 [1990]. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screens. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Cohen, Annabel J. and Sandra K. Marshall 1988. Effects of Musical
Soundtrack on Attitudes toward Animated Geometric Figures. Music
Perception Vol. 6 No. 1: 95113.
Cohen, Annabel J. 1993. Associationism and Musical Soundtrack
Phenomena. Contemporary Music Review vol. 9: 163178.
. 2000. Film Music: Perspectives from the Cognitive Psychology. In
Music and Cinema, eds. J. Buhler, C. Flinn & D. Neumeyer, 360377.
Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.
. 2001. Music as a Source of Emotion in Film. In Music and Emotion:
Theory and Research, eds. P. N. Juslin and J. A. Sloboda, 249274.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
7
Further research on incongruence could apply this hypothesis to more specific
scenes, testing how it may give rise to different felt and understood types of
meaning. Other research may be directed to the question of whether immersion and
film musics naturalness are as unstable as psychoanalytical theory implies. It
seems that more severe disruptions are required to really break the audiences
absorption in the fiction. Furthermore, it could prove interesting to see whether the
differences between perceiving diegetic and non-diegetic music, related to their
incongruent use, are as different as assumed. Although the difference between the
two is very clear on an inferential level, they may just function differently while
underscoring incongruently, since we essentially deal with non-diegetic film
music, either perfectly congruent or highly conflicting, as an informative aspect of
the diegesis.
Steven Willemsen and Mikls Kiss 117
IVO BLOM
The spectators and in particular the women seeing the film shed
torrents of tears, and didnt see the film just once but twice, three times or
more. The world lived in happy times then, when the only preoccupation
was love. (Nicula 1995, 61.)1 This example of the emotional, even tactile
film experience stems from the Romanian collector Emil Constantinescu.
He refers to the success of the Italian silent film Odette (Giuseppe De
Liguoro, 1916), starring Italian diva Francesca Bertini. She was the most
popular Italian film actress of the 1910s and early 1920s, especially in
Romania, as Romanian film historian Dinu-Ioan Nicula has shown. Nicula
writes that though Transylvania could not see these films during the war,
as it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire then, the rest of Romania
could. And so they cherished the epic Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914),
adventure films with figures like Maciste, and the diva films with Bertini.
One particular aspect within the highly emotionally charged field of
Italian silent cinema is its relationship to the representation of art and
artists during cinemas transition from fairground amusements to
entertainments for middle-class audiences in fashionable movie palaces,
and from vaudeville style to one closer to theatre and painting. In
particular, Italian silent cinema was typical in its dynamic of explicitly
referring to and appropriating such former media as the theatre and visual
arts. Two main topics will be treated here, first the narrative conventions
around the representation of art and artists, and second, the relationship
between the off-screen, real art world and its visual representation in
film. I will treat both painting and sculpture here which, despite their
1
I owe thanks first to Giovanna Ginex, and then to Claudia Gianetto (Museo
Nazionale del Cinema, Torino), Mario Musumeci, Franca Farini (Cineteca
Nazionale, Roma), Anna Fiaccarini, Andrea Meneghelli (Cineteca di Bologna),
Livio Jacob (Cineteca del Friuli), Rommy Albers (EYE Film Institute,
Amsterdam), and gnes Peth (Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania).
122 Of Artists and Models
formal differences, are quite close in the ways that they are narratively
treated. How did Italian silent cinema represent art and artists? What does
this tell us about cinemas own perspective and problematization of art
versus the real? How are art objects treated as physical, touchable objects?
And how do these objects function as stand-ins for characters out of reach
(the Pygmalion effect), no longer alive (the ancestors portrait gallery), or
destined to die (Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray or Edgar Allan
Poes The Oval Portrait)? And secondly, what happens when we correlate
the filmic conventions of representation with art historical investigation?
As this territory is rather new for Italian silent cinema, it might be useful
to have a brief look at an area that has been thoroughly researched by
scholars: classical Hollywoods representation of artists and their works.
(See Sykora [2003], Felleman [2006], and Jacobs [2011].)
dreams without limitation and this may be more embarrassing when they
are not her choice.2 This was recently confirmed in Susan Fellemans
book, Art in the Cinematic Imagination (2006), where she takes a
gendered perspective of male necrophilic desire in classical Hollywood
cinema.
2
See in the same issue also Felleman (1992), who deals with American cinema of
the 1940s as well.
3
See my own article (Blom 1992).
4
The narrative convention of an artist going mad over a femme fatale was repeated
by Febo Mari in his film Il tormento (The Torment, 1917) with Helena Makowska
as the femme fatale and Mari himself as the artist. Makowska was often type-
124 Of Artists and Models
casted as femme fatale in the Italian cinema of those years. The press praised her
beauty but condemned her rather inexpressive acting. In real life she must have
been a kind of femme fatale as well. The Argentinian sculptor Csar Santiano,
collaborator of Bistolfi, made a daring, lascivious nude sculpture of her in 1916,
but in 1919 he committed suicide because of her (Audoli 2008, 2629).
Ivo Blom 125
5
The Salome attire seems to have been inspired by theatrical costumes of Salome
performances in the Belle poque, or at least by their depictions by painters such
as Vladislav Ismaylovich, Leopold von Schmutzler, and Clemens von Pausinger.
One is also reminded of an inter-filmic relationship with actresses wearing Salome
attire in earlier films such as Lyda Borelli in Ma lamor mio non muore (Love
Everlasting, Mario Caserini, 1913) and Rapsodia satanica (Satanic Rhapsody,
Nino Oxilia, 1917).
126 Of Artists and Models
naked woman holding a chalice, set on a pedestal, and falls in love with
the sculptor, who is also her protector [Fig. 3].6
6
I noticed that the statue was recycled one year after in the sculptors workshop in
Il processo Clemenceau (Alfredo De Antoni, 1917), shot at the Caesar Film studios
of Rome.
7
Another example of a model jealous of a newcomer is Amore sentimentale
(Sentimental Love, Cines, 1911).
Ivo Blom 127
8
The film has been restored by the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome.
9
While the style of the bust is quite general and even banal for late 19th-century
sculpture, Fiammas pose when she venerates the statue is more striking and is
reminiscent of paintings commissioned to commemorate lost relatives, such as
those by Francesco Hayez. It is also similar to late 19th-century funeral sculpture.
128 Of Artists and Models
falling, ruining her hands forever. This extreme sacrifice makes the
sculptor repent and return to her.10
10
Despite the opening of film archives around the globe, no print of the film has
yet been found, but extant original postcards provide a visual impression. I hold
many of these in my own collection.
Ivo Blom 129
11
This was a topos rather common in the cinema of the 1910s, also outside of
Italy. In the Russian silent film Umirayushchii lebed (The Dying Swan, Yevgeni
Bauer, 1917) an artist obsessed by death in art is inspired by a ballerina dancing
the Dying Swan. But when she is too cheerful as a model, he kills her, permitting
him to pose her correctly for his artwork.
12
A good example is La madre (The Mother, Giuseppe Sterni, 1917), starring
Vitalia Italiani. It was based on the play La madre by the Catalan writer Santiago
Rusiol, which Vitaliani had performed with great success all over Spain in 1907,
before having it adapted for the screen a decade later. Actually, Vitaliani had been
a regular performer of Rusiols plays around the 1900s, to great acclaim in Spain,
and in particular in Barcelona. The film La madre was rediscovered at the EYE
Filmmuseum not too long ago.
130 Of Artists and Models
his love [Fig. 6]. Then when the model returns to him a second time (in
torment over her conduct and desperately missing her child), he kills her
since he cannot cope with her behaviour and is unwilling to believe in her
moral contrition. Just like in Lidolo infranto, the man realizes afterwards
what he has done in blind rage. So the artist creates and destroys the
model, just like he creates and destroys the artwork.13
13
We see this narrative convention of the artist who creates and destroys his model
in the Italian silent film La chiamavano Cosetta (They Called Her Cosetta,
Eugenio Perego, 1917). Here a sculptor (Amleto Novelli) is devastated when he
discovers his femme fatale-like model (Soava Gallone) has caused his only son to
commit suicide over her, at the foot of the fathers statue representing her beauty.
The artist crushes his model under his own statue.
Ivo Blom 131
14
Examples are a.o. La signora Fricot gelosa (Ambrosio, 1913) and Robinet
geloso (Tweedledum is Jealous, Ambrosio, 1914).
15
It suffices to have a glance at modern digital shops like eBay and Delcampe to
notice the enormous divulgation of these postcards of late 19th-century and early
20th-century painting and sculpture.
132 Of Artists and Models
meaningful props would have been lost.16 To find the pictorial equivalents
of paintings or sculptures represented in the Italian cinema of the 1910s,
one has to look therefore at late 19th-century portraits or even at the
monumental sculpture in Italian graveyards, such as that by Giulio
Monteverde (Angel, 1882).
16
This goes both for short comedies like La signora Fricot gelosa and Robinet
geloso and dramatic features such as Il processo Clemenceau. The plot would fail
if recognition of the statue as a portrait of one of the characters was not possible.
Ivo Blom 133
Figures 910. Giuseppe Riva: Fauno (1917) (courtesy Armando Audoli), and the
sculpture in Il fauno (Febo Mari, 1917). Courtesy Museo nazionale del cinema,
Turin.
There is, however, a flipside to this. In the 1910s and early 1920s
several Italian artists collaborated with the Italian cinema industry, either
as set and costume designers (such as Duilio Cambellotti and Camillo
Innocenti), as poster designers, or as creators of the art works visible in
films. Thus, contemporary artists created art for film sets. While film
historical research has focused too narrowly on the infrequent
collaborations between the avant-garde of the Italian Futurists and the
professional film industry, this other, vaster territory has hardly been
explored. Let me provide two examples. For Il fauno (1917) by Febo Mari,
a kind of reversed Pygmalion story a woman falling in love with the
statue of a male faun the Piemontese sculptor Giuseppe Riva made the
statue, even in multiple versions (Audoli 2008, 1861) [Figs. 910].17 Riva
stood in a late 19th-century representational tradition of the Faun that was
present not only in Stphane Mallarms famous poem, but also in
sculptures in- and outside of Italy like Antonio Bezzolas The Idol (1891).
Thus, an iconography was already there, only the form was altered.
Finally, the bust of Francesca Bertinis character in Il processo
Clemenceau that was destroyed by its creator, was based on an identical
17
Actor turned director Febo Mari had often scripts about artists such as La gloria
(The Glory, 1916), in which a sculptor ruins his own statue, and Il tormento
(1917), see note 4.
134 Of Artists and Models
real bust of Bertini made by the Neapolitan sculptor Amleto Cataldi which
was published in the renowned Italian art journal Emporium in 1917, the
same year the film was released [Figs.1112]. (See Geraci [1917]. The
bust of Bertini is depicted on pages 166 and 170.)
Figures 1112. Amleto Cataldi: Francesca Bertini (1917), and a still from Il
processo Clemenceau (Alfredo De Antoni, 1917). Courtesy Cineteca di Bologna.
References
Audoli, Armando. 2008. Chimere. Miti, allegorie e simbolismi plastici da
Bistolfi a Martinazzi. [Chimeras. Myths, Allegories, and Painterly
Symbolism from Bistolfi to Martinazzi], Torino: Weber & Weber.
Bernardini, Aldo and Vittorio Martinelli. 19911996. Il cinema muto
italiano, 19051931. [The Italian Silent Cinema, 19051931], Rome:
Nuova ERI/CSC.
Blom, Ivo. 1992. Il Fuoco or the Fatal Portrait. The XIXth Century in the
Italian Silent Cinema. Le portrait peint au cinma. Iris no. 1415
(Autumn): 5566.
Elsaesser, Thomas. 1992. Mirror, Muse, Medusa: Experiment Perilous. Le
portrait peint au cinma. Iris no. 1415 (Autumn): 147159.
Felleman, Susan. 1992. The Moving Picture Gallery. Le portrait peint au
cinma. Iris no. 1415 (Autumn): 193200.
. 2006. Art in the Cinematic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas
Press.
Jacobs, Steven. 2011. Framing Pictures. Film and the Visual Arts.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Geraci, Francesco. 1917. Artisti contemporanei: Amleto Cataldi.
[Contemporary Artists: Amleto Cataldi], Emporium, vol. 267 no. 45
(March): 163175.
Nicula, Dinu-Ioan. 1995. Film italiani in Romania. Dagli anni 10 alla
Seconda Guerra Mondiale. [Italian Films in Romania. From the 1910s
to the Second World War], In Cinema italiano in Europa, 19071929,
II, ed. Francesco Bono, 5967. Rome: Associazione Italiana per le
Ricerche di Storia del Cinema.
Schrter, Jens. 1998. Intermedialitt. Facetten und Problemen eines
aktuellen medienwissenschaftlichen Begriffes. Montage a/v, vol. 7 no.
2: 129154.
Sykora, Katharina. 2003. As You Desire me. Das Bildnis im Film.
Cologne: Walther Knig.
Walker, Michael 2005. Hitchcocks Motifs. Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press.
Weisberg, Gabriel P., et.al. 2010. Illusions of Reality. Naturalist Painting,
Photography, Theatre and Cinema, 18751918. Brussels: Mercatorfonds.
THE BODY AS INTERSTITIAL SPACE
BETWEEN MEDIA IN LEONS DE TNBRES
BY VINCENT DIEUTRE
AND HISTOIRE DUN SECRET
BY MARIANA OTERO
MARLNE MONTEIRO
1
Vincent Dieutre, born in 1960, is a French filmmaker whose work is often
described as pertaining to Queer cinema. His films tend to be constructed like self-
fictions in which he intertwines stories about his homosexuality and his former
heroine addiction with images of often derelict urban settings. Leons de
tnbres (France, Les films de la croisade, 2000) is his second feature length film.
2
Mariana Otero, born in 1963, is a French documentary-maker. Unlike Dieutre,
whose work is almost entirely centred around his persona, Histoire dun secret
(France, Archipel 35, 2003) is Oteros only film so far focused on a personal issue.
138 The Body as Interstitial Space between Media
This essay seeks to explore, through these two case studies, the
significance of the paintings and the ways in which their presence in the
films contributes to emphasising the materiality of the medium. A
preliminary hypothesis is that this process takes place via the physicality
of the body. It thus not only enhances sensory affect and haptic vision, but
also underscores intermediality, which ultimately points to a reflection
upon cinema itself. If the comparison of these two films may come across
as rather eclectic, the juxtaposition of their differences and similarities
proves extremely useful. Indeed, despite and beyond their specific and
very different narratives as well as aesthetics, both films point to similar
questions about sensation in relation to cinema and art in general, while
showing how the body works as a conduit for sensory perception.
Bodily Presence
The Body in Pain
The paintings appearing in Dieutres film include pieces based on
biblical scenes, such as Guido Renis David with the Head of Goliath
(1605, Muse du Louvre, Paris); or on Greek mythology, such as Dirck
van Baburens Prometheus Being Chained by Vulcan (1623, Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam). Yet, not only do Christian scenes seem predominant, but the
religious connotation is also explicit for the films title, Tenebrae Lessons,
refers to the lessons based on the Old Testaments Book of Jeremiah which
are sung in Church during the Holy Week. To give a few examples, the
film opens on a close-up of Caravaggios Christ at the Column (ca. 1607,
Muse des Beaux-Arts, Rouen); later, we see a still, full screen shot of
Gerrit van Honthorsts Saint Sebastian (1623, National Gallery, London),
and one of Dirck van Baburens Crowning with Thorns (1623,
Catharijneconvent, Utrecht). But Vincents interest is not restricted to
painting: as he wanders in the Church of Saint Cecilia in Rome, the
camera also lingers on the statue of Saint Cecilias Martyrdom by Stefano
Maderno (15991600, Chiesa di Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome). In
other words, these works tend to focus on suffering and violence.
From a narrative point of view, this depiction of pain enhances
Dieutres expression of his own suffering and existential malaise as a
homosexual addicted to heroin and surrounded by friends dying of drug
overdose and/or AIDS during the early 1980s. As for Clotildes paintings
in Oteros film, it is hard not to see in the curvy nudes an implicit hint at
maternity and, by extension, an unwitting metaphor for her own undesired
pregnancy. As such, the paintings thus bear the hidden clues of her untold
Marlne Monteiro 139
pain and agony as a result of her failed abortion [Fig. 1]. The expression of
pain and suffering contributes to emphasising the presence and material
reality of the body. In keeping with this, Georges Canguilhem writes that
for the ill person the state of health is the unconsciousness in which the
subject is of his own body. Conversely, the consciousness of the body
arises from feeling the limits, the threats, the obstacles to health
(Canguilhem 1993, 52, my translation). Doleo ergo sum, as it were, I
suffer therefore I am, for pain asserts the reality of existence. This is
particularly significant for Dieutre and homosexuals at large as he
strives to assert his place in the world, having been hidden and invisible
(Dyer 2002, 15) for years: to stress suffering thus grounds him in the
reality of existence.
dead. In other words, it was as if Clotilde had not died but merely
vanished. Mariana thus feels the need to make her mothers life (and
death) real and visible and endeavours to bring her body back to the
surface metaphorically, that is. In this sense, the films final sequence
which stages a public exhibition of Clotildes paintings certainly acts as an
exhumation of her body in lieu of the mourning ritual that the daughters
were denied.
Erotic Bodies
Clotildes paintings convey stark erotic presence, which necessarily
points to the physicality and sensuality of the body. At one point in the
film, a conservationist examines the paintings and notes Clotildes
particular predilection for the representation of female flesh and pubic
hair, which constitutes a landscape in its own right, as she puts it. George
Bataille posits that the difference between a simple sexual activity which
consists of reproduction and eroticism is a psychological quest
independent of the natural goal (Bataille 1986, 11). In this sense, the
abortion that led to Clotildes death comes across as a marker or sign of
eroticism as prefatorily defined by Bataille, that is, as assenting to life up
to the point of death (1986, 11). This is also in keeping with Dieutres
representation of eroticism, which is necessarily envisaged from the angle
of his assumed, exposed and expressed homosexuality. In his film, the
intertwining of his personal story (narrated in voice over) with images of
Caravaggist painting presents eroticism as inherent to suffering.
Furthermore, the religious motifs painted by Caravaggio also contain
for Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit a certain degree of eroticism.
Commenting on his Calling of Saint Matthew (1600, Chiesa San Luigi dei
Francesi, Rome), they argue that the artist proposes continuities between
what we would ordinarily think of as vastly different categories of
experience: the erotic come-on and Christs summoning his future disciple
to follow him (Bersani and Dutoit 1998, 26). To put it differently,
Caravaggio introduced humanity in its most physiological and worldly
aspects into the religious motif. As far as Caravaggism is concerned, the
erotic charge is also manifested through the contrast between suffering and
pleasure, both located in the physicality of the body. Yet it also emanates
from the intrusive and insistent gaze of the cameras close-ups on body
parts in the paintings [Fig. 2]. Like images stolen at a glance, these close-
ups provide a fragmented representation of the body, thus evoking
sensation more vividly.
Marlne Monteiro 141
Chiaroscuro
Dieutre makes an interesting use of the Caravaggist chiaroscuro. The
film is almost entirely shot at night or indoors so that the light always
comes from an artificial source. Just after the opening sequence, Vincent
appears in a dark room or in what resembles a shooting studio; the only
source of light comes from a small light projector (held by a technician),
which hovers back and forth over and around his naked torso: light is thus
mobile. [Fig. 3.] The projectors movements are entangled with those of
the handheld camera. The chiaroscuro thereby created sculpts the body
and echoes Caravaggesque representations of the body, while enhancing
the haptic gaze. Similar sequences in which Vincent is filmed with another
man are dispersed throughout the film like extra-diegetic moments.
However, if light is often said to emanate from a divine source in
142 The Body as Interstitial Space between Media
3
Against all odds, finger and figure have a different etymological origin, despite
the apparent resemblance of the former with the Latin root (fingere) of the latter.
Finger stems from common Germanic and, while its pre-Germanic antecedent is
144 The Body as Interstitial Space between Media
Let us not forget either that Peirce defined the index in terms of
physical connexion and not mere analogy. Interestingly enough, Otero
shows seven black and white photographs of her mother in the film, which
follow one another in full screen mode and stand outside the diegetic
space, by contrast with a scene in which the characters would have held
them and looked at them. All are group photographs so that the viewer is
not even sure if Clotilde is present in them. As a result, their iconic and
indexical property is undermined and fails to satisfactorily evoke Clotilde
to Mariana who cannot remember her mother, not even what she looked
like. Hence the paramount significance of the paintings, for they are the
only physical link, through their tactility, with Clotilde. As a result, touch
establishes here a connexion, via the figure and the index, between
pictorial and filmic images, as well as between mother and daughter.4
uncertain, the word tends to be related to the root of the number five. See The
Oxford English Dictionary (1991, 932).
4
Of course, the paintings also point to artistic creation as another level of
connection between mother and daughter.
Marlne Monteiro 145
In-between Media
Intermediality as a Figure of Sensation
While the images of pierced bodies mentioned above certainly elicit
emotional and physical reactions, the endeavour of both filmmakers and
Dieutre perhaps more explicitly also denotes a fascination for the
medium and its materiality. In other words, it is not only the blood or the
erotic gaze in close-up which cause sensation, but also the passage from
one state to another, as well as from one form to another. Sketching a line
5
See for instance Caravaggios version, The Incredulity of St Thomas,
(16011602, Sanssouci, Potsdam), even if the painting does not appear in Leon de
tnbres.
146 The Body as Interstitial Space between Media
6
Deleuze in fact attributes this idea to Bacon himself who speaks of sensation as
among other things the passage from one order to another, from one level to
another, from one area to another. (Deleuze 2003, 36.)
7
See in this respect Laura Mulvey, Death 24 x a Second, (2006), especially
Chapter Eight: Delaying Cinema, 144160. Her point whereby new technologies
have redefined our modes of viewing is particularly pertinent here: when looking
at Leons de tnbres in fast forward mode, the contrast between the flowing of the
moving images and the pauses on the paintings and other picturesque shots
becomes particularly striking.
Marlne Monteiro 147
8
Vincent Dieutre, Interview with Pascal Bonenfant, in Leons de tnbres, bonus
track of the DVD release (2004).
148 The Body as Interstitial Space between Media
images a very distinctive dirty grain that echoes the canvas texture and
the patina of age characteristic of the 17th-century paintings. In fact, the
haptic sensation obtained in these sequences through chiaroscuro lighting
(as discussed above) is here reinforced by several factors: not only does it
enhance tactility through its image quality, but the very materiality of the
film strip draws attention to matter in general. In addition, because
originally designed as an amateur format, the Super 8 format tends to be
associated to handicraft. As for the scenes filmed on 35mm, they
correspond to the long static sequences of urban settings. The neat and
limpid image quality gives them the appearance of cinematic tableaux, as
it were. Moreover, the cameras immobility (notwithstanding the images
own movement) places such sequences at the same level, in narrative
terms, as the stills of paintings inserted in the film, for they similarly
arouse sensation and provide moments of contemplation. Through this
strategy of conspicuously alternating film formats, Dieutre subverts the
codes and conventions traditionally attached to each of them, but most
importantly, he also shows that their function and significance is not only
contextual, but also fully contingent to the historical moment. In other
words, the status of such formats shifts and evolves in time and in relation
to one another.
Mise en abyme
If the paintings provide a material and sensory dimension in Dieutres
and Oteros films, they also enable the directors/protagonists to stage a
mise en abyme of the viewing experience [Figs. 89]. Indeed, to watch
them looking at the paintings brings the viewers back to their own position
as spectators and thus emphasises the reflexive dimension in the art
experience in general and in cinema in particular. This is what Vincent
Dieutre also refers to when he explains his intention with this film. This is
not to posit that the mise en abyme of the spectator position takes place
through intermediality exclusively; in any case, cinema abounds in
counter-examples of characters watching films within the film and which
lead to similar effects. What the interplay with media allows is perhaps a
shift in the nature of the viewing experience: it is about questioning our
position as spectators in relation to art, but as feeling, rather than
understanding spectators, to paraphrase Philippe Dubois for whom the
Figural partakes more of seeing and sensing, than of perceiving and
understanding (Dubois 1999, 248).
gnes Peths application of ekphrasis to film is very appropriate here:
a film is ekphrastic when the embedded art form in this case the
150 The Body as Interstitial Space between Media
Figure 8: Mariana and her sister looking at one of their mothers paintings in
Histoire dun Secret.
Marlne Monteiro 151
Figure 9: Vincent and his partner in front of Jan van Bijlerts Calling of St
Matthew (16251630), Leons de tnbres.
2006, 62). In other words, the image is where the body comes to constitute
itself. Interestingly enough, Philippe Dubois also reminds us of the
paradoxical duality of the Figure which is simultaneously concrete (as
imprint, index, etc.) and abstract (as image and icon) (Dubois 1999). In the
films discussed here, the body is represented through paintings, it is
therefore always already a body as image. At the same time, many
elements work towards emphasising the carnal dimension of these bodies,
by way of the texture and tactility of the media. In other words, it
embodies, so to speak, the tension between abstraction and materiality,
which is exactly where cinema lies, that is to say, in the interface between
image and reality, between abstraction and concreteness.
References
Aumont, Jacques. 2010. Lattrait de la lumire [The Attraction of the
Light]. Paris: ditions Yellow Now.
Balzs, Bla. 2010. Early Film Theory The Visible Man and The Spirit
of Film. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Bataille, Georges. 1986 [1957]. Eroticism, Death & Sensuality. San
Francisco: City Lights Books.
Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit. 1998. Caravaggios Secrets. Cambridge,
MA, & London: The MIT Press.
Beugnet, Martine. 2007. Cinema and Sensation, French Film and the Art
of Transgression. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Canguilhem, Georges. 1993 [1966]. Le normal et le pathologique [The
Normal and the Pathological]. Paris: PUF. 4th edition.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2003 [1981]. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation.
London & New York: Continuum.
Dubois, Philippe. 1999. Lcriture figurale dans le cinma muet des
annes 20 [Figural Writing in the Silent Cinema of the 20s]. In Figure,
Figural, eds. Franois Aubral and Dominique Chteau, 245274. Paris:
LHarmattan.
Dyer, Richard. 2002. The Culture of Queers. London & New York:
Routledge.
Kristeva, Julia. 1982 [1980]. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of Film. Durham & London: Duke
University Press.
Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24 x a Second. London: Reaktion Books.
Otero, Mariana. 2006. Scnario dHistoire dun secret. In Le style dans le
cinma documentaire Rflexions sur le style, Entretiens et
Marlne Monteiro 153
GNES PETH
4
See Rino Stefano Tagliafierros animation of paintings in an experimental video
titled Beauty that was shown at several film festivals around the globe in 2014, and
which was also accompanied by the creation of an application that makes it
possible for its users, with the help of an available database of digital images, to
experiment with animated paintings on their own using their phones or tablets.
(See an excerpt of the video here: http://www.rinostefanotagliafierro.com/beauty
_video.html. Last accessed 1. 09. 2014.)
5
An allegorical use of paraphrases of paintings can also be observed in recent East
European cinema, in films that use the tableau vivant as a means to imply the
existence of a bigger picture, and revert to universal stories staging mythological
themes of genesis, apocalypse, the loss of Paradise, and sacrifice. See a theoretical
investigation of this in the films of Gyrgy Plfi, Benedek Fliegauf, Kornl
gnes Peth 157
Mundrucz, Bla Tarr and Andrei Zvyagintsev in my article titled The Tableau
Vivant as a Figure of Return in Contemporary East European Cinema (2014a).
158 Housing a Deleuzian Sensation
The story unfolds from the protagonists video recordings that we see after
the woman has already passed away, as the surviving young man
6
The Garden of Intermedial Delights. Cinematic Adaptations of Bosch from
Modernism to the Postmedia Age, forthcoming in Screen (Peth 2014b). Here I
summarize some of the ideas expressed in that article about the relationship
between images and bodies.
gnes Peth 159
7
With alterity relations technology becomes the other or quasi-other to which
one relates. See more about these relations in Ihdes Postphenomenology (1995).
8
The artists personal website (http://www.lechmajewski.com/) defines the film as
a unique digital tapestry, and although it can be considered a theatrical movie,
the film has often been shown in museum spaces around the world. In 2011 parts
of it were displayed as a moving image installation both in the Louvre and in
Venice as a part of the 54th Biennale.
9
In many ways Majewskis film constitutes an alternative to Alexander Sokurovs
Russian Ark (2002) in which the virtuoso camera, travelling through the rooms in
one continuous take throughout the film, achieves a sensation of the technological
sublime alongside the emphatic use of paintings, and the elaborate choreography
of bodies in motion.
160 Housing a Deleuzian Sensation
And while the space of the painting and the fictional context
(re)created in the film collapses into one cinematic spatial construct, the
time frames also overlap: we can see the painting both from the
gnes Peth 161
perspective of its coming into being (thus somehow from before it became
fixed and framed for eternity10) and also from considerable distance after
its completion, from the perspective of todays viewer already familiar with
Brueghels work. This duality corresponding to the vantage points of life
(the scenes captured by the painter played by Rutger Hauer in the film, the
scenes of the painting brought to life in the film) and of the image, the
painting as a finished artwork that we already know, which frames them
all. Life is framed by the act of painting and, the other way round, the
painting as an art object and representation is framed by the larger context
of all the lives of the multitude of little figures that we now see in it
together with that of the painter who painted them. On top of all this,
Majewskis work, the digital tapestry elegantly folds back upon itself,
showing us how cinema (and new digital media) can reframe them all.
Majewski emphasizes this latter viewpoint at the end of the film by
wrapping up the cinematic tableau in an even further reflexive frame as
the camera slowly backs away from the scene revealing the original
Brueghel picture hanging in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna
[Fig. 7]. The details of Brueghels painting itself are spread out into a series
of loosely connected vignettes in the film focusing on the activities of the
small figures at the foot of the Calvary. As the panorama breaks down into
the individual scenes that often display frames within frames acting as
small tableaux within the overall tableau [Fig. 8], the hybrid moving
image becomes a unique platform for a fusion between the sublime art of
painting, the tangibility of moving, bleeding bodies, and the technical
wonder of digital cinema.
The metaleptic loop between painter and his painting, furthermore,
between the painting in the film and the original in the museum that we
see in The Mill and the Cross, is also consistent with the current penchant
in cinema for tangled narrative hierarchies and stunning pictorial effects,
or for self-reflexive mise en abyme constructions in video art.
10
This may remind us of the complex relationship Pierre Klossowski describes
between life and art in the practice of the tableau vivant, in which the tableau can
be seen as both something that precedes the painting (as a model, an unfinished
gesture) being inscribed in the painting, and as something that may reproduce a
painting in search of the original gesture, as illustrated also by Raul Ruizs
Hypothesis of a Stolen Painting (LHypothse du tableau vol, 1978), based on
Klossowskis novel. The tableau vivant, according to Klossowski, is not simply
life imitating art [...]. The emotion sought after was that of life giving itself as a
spectacle to life; of life hanging in suspense (1969, 100).
162 Housing a Deleuzian Sensation
Figures 7-8. Lech Majewski: The Mill and the Cross (2011).
11
In another article I have also discussed Majewskis film as a palimpsest of
narratives and narrative modes (The Vertigo of the Single Image: From the Classic
Narrative Glitch to the Post-Cinematic Adaptations of Paintings, 2013).
12
See pictures and information at the artists website: http://www.lechmajewski.
com/html/blood_of_a_poet.html. (Last accessed 1. 09 2014.)
164 Housing a Deleuzian Sensation
Figures 916. The attraction between humans and objects, art and life in
Majewskis Glass Lips (2007).
13
These kinds of bizarre associations constitute a recurring motif in Majewskis
films, in the Roes Room (1997), which we will discuss later in this article, we see
grass growing inside a house, and pictures bleeding on the wall, in Gospel
according to Harry (1994) TV screens grow in the desert.
gnes Peth 165
14
The painting is exhibited in the Prado Museum in Madrid, but unlike Majewskis
The Mill and the Cross, the sequence deliberately avoids any reference to place
showing only the bare white walls surrounding it.
166 Housing a Deleuzian Sensation
Figures 1718. The re-enactment of Rogier van der Weydens painting, The
Descent from the Cross (c. 1435) in Majewskis Glass Lips.
15
See Erwin Panofskys remark on the painting: It may be said that the painted
tear, a shining pearl born of the strongest emotion, epitomizes that which Italian
gnes Peth 167
about the Biblical narrative but about the people performing it, and about
the events of this performance. Van der Weydens picture is reduced to
a mere backdrop to the action, while the group of people become the
mediums for a different image that dismembers the unified composition
of the painting into individual bodies, not only substituting the canvas and
the stroke of the painters brush with the surface of skin and the movement
of the camera gliding along the body, but also introducing a crucial
element: instead of the rich emotions depicted by the original painting
resonating with their potentially empathic spectator, we have the
impassible interaction of the fragmented body and the camera, as well as
the emergence of a specifically cinematic sensation through the close-up
of the trembling flesh. [Figs. 1923.] The palpable corporeality of such a
photo-filmic image released from both its original materiality and its
plastic figurativeness may bring to mind what Deleuze calls in his book on
Bacon the encounter with a body of sensation, uniting a sensation that
is transmitted directly, and avoids the detour and boredom of conveying a
story (2003, 36), something that is located not in the eye of the beholder,
or in the air, but directly in the body, with the body itself that can be
understood as a figure, not a structure (2003, 20), the body of
sensation being in this way the submission of the figurative to
sensation in the words of Elizabeth Grosz (2008, 88) interpreting
Deleuze.
Or the way Majewski gradually breaks down the scene from people
walking around and contemplating the artwork exhibited in the museum to
dressing up and assuming their poses to match the ones in van der
Weydens painting, to the camera zooming in on disconnected body parts,
the texture of skin and flesh, as well as the small movements observable
on the level of living tissue all of this might also remind us of Giorgio
Agambens (1993, 138) comment on Deleuze that it is gesture rather than
the image that is the essentially cinematic element in film. And although
some interpreters may see in this comment something that clearly sets
Deleuze and Agamben apart, rather than as a connection between their
theories (which is probably justified if we take into consideration
Deleuzes two books on cinema), in what follows, I will argue that
Deleuzes ideas, not on the type of cinematic images (i.e. the movement-
image or the time-image), but mostly on the type of painting practiced by
Francis Bacon, his notion of sensation can be seen in convergence with
Agambens notes on gestures in cinema.
most admired in Early Flemish painting: pictorial brilliance and sentiment (1953,
258).
168 Housing a Deleuzian Sensation
Figures 1923. The expression of grief, the shining pearls of tears on the faces
in the painting (E. Panofsky) versus an impassible choreography of cinematic
movements.
gnes Peth 169
16
We may compare them for example to Tsai Ming-Liangs Face (Visage, 2009)
which also consists of a loose string of vignettes. Ming-Liangs film (partially
funded by the Louvre Museum in Paris) uses the spaces in and around the Louvre
(its exhibition halls and its royal apartments) to create a dreamlike world
connecting in a similar way the inside with the outside, art and life, cinema and
painting.
170 Housing a Deleuzian Sensation
17
Majewski confesses in the same audio commentary to the DVD: The origin of
The Roes Room starts with my poems. I am basically a painter and a poet, adding
that the immediate source of the script/libretto was a cycle of poems he wrote at
the time he was in film school, and that was published with the title Home. The
Roes Room was originally written as an opera that was presented as such, as a
live, theatrical show in March 1996 at the Silesian Opera. Majewski made the
fiction film based on this opera a year later, which was subsequently also screened
at several art museums and galleries: Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art
(2000), Palagraziussi Venice (Venice Biennale, 2001), Museum of Modern Art,
New York (2002), Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris (2004), the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2007).
18
In the audio commentary to the DVD Majewski admits that having experienced
a series of contemporary opera works as torture, it was his deliberate goal to
write a kind of melodious, spiritually and emotionally uplifting music that he
admired in the old Romantic masters.
gnes Peth 171
Figures 2427. Lech Majewski: The Roes Room (1997), an opera in the form of a
video fresco.
172 Housing a Deleuzian Sensation
19
See the conversation about the film in Guillaume Coudrays documentary essay
on Bartass work, Sharunas Bartas: An Army of One (2010).
20
Although some reviewers speak of this as a metaphor for motherland,
interpreting the film (and the symbolism of the house) as Bartass allegoric way of
speaking about his country, isolated within a larger, controversial motherland
and unable to communicate with her, or nurturing highly ambivalent feelings
towards her, the film remains up to the end extremely stylized and abstract even
though some elements (like the reference to Ilya Repins painting of Ivan the
Terrible murdering his own son, the presence of the soldiers and menacing army
tanks closing in on the house at the end of the film, or the image of the sad, young
boy replacing Christ on the cross) may obviously be seen as references to a
troubled (though not necessarily contemporary) East European reality. Bartas
himself insists on the poetic, undigested quality of the film, something made of
primitive feelings (see Coudrays documentary).
21
Here are a few sentences from this monologue: Mother, often I wanted to talk
to you about everything, but I never did. But deep inside I was talking to you. [...]
In the future I am free. Free, because it doesnt yet exist. I dont understand the
present. The present moment is so fleeting. Im not really sure that it exists.
Mother, time has passed. And I am far from you. What is important, mother, for
me, is to believe that these things will not vanish. In Coudrays 2010
documentary mentioned in the previous footnotes Bartas speaks of the house in the
film being a space of the mind showing the images that we carry within us.
gnes Peth 173
22
Bartass next film, Freedom (2000), is conceived similarly as a string of
beautiful tableau compositions, this time, however, perhaps as a deliberate
antithesis, away from the framing structures provided by houses and rooms:
presenting its characters in vast open spaces, as figures in a landscape in sensuous
interconnection with the elements (water, wind, sand) as they escape to a
desolate land of picturesque nothingness.
23
He has also risen to some fame due to the fact that he is the author of the first art
exhibition ever to be held in space, as two small woodcut prints made by him were
taken by Russian cosmonauts on the Mir Space Station in 1993. (See:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnKcWWhj_hY. Last accessed 1. 09. 2014.)
24
See: http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/9/lasmeninas.shtml. (Last accessed 1.
09. 2014.)
174 Housing a Deleuzian Sensation
boy, and some appear as pure fantasy. The film is further hybridized by
the collaboration of the American music video director Dean Karr, who
directed a scene in the film which is in stark contrast to the dark greenish
tones of the images and the lethargic tempo of the rest of the film with its
abrupt editing style and bright colours (thus feels like a dream within a
dream).
In all three films many scenes are conceived on the thresholds between
cinematic movement and the still image, but also, between narrativity and
non-narrativity, as we see a kind of minimalist action taking place in these
frames, yet this amounts to in essence no more than a series of gestures
(laying the table, spooning the soup, mashing the Brussels sprouts on a
plate with a fork, holding a book, sitting silently at the edge of a bed,
watering plants, putting on a necklace or a dress, standing at a window,
examining stamps through a magnifying glass, arranging fruit in a bowl,
etc.). In fact, Las Meninas, perhaps even more than Majewskis and
Bartass films, is composed of a fixation on gestures, gestures revealed in
fragmented close-ups and repeated over and over again in a world in
which house, family, art, perception and memory, present and past become
parts of the same organic rhizomatic network. If cinema in the words of
Agamben leads images back to the homeland of gesture (2000, 56),
because, Agamben claims, in the cinema, a society that has lost its
gestures seeks to reappropriate what it has lost while simultaneously
recording that loss, (1993, 137) then post-cinema in such moving image
projects, only amplifies, feeds on this possibility, that we so often see
exploited in photo-filmic installation art, of oscillating between the
immobility of the pose and its slow dissolution into (often barely
perceptible) movement, of building tableau compositions around gestures
and gestures connected to objects.
In this sense, Podolchaks film, alongside Majewskis and Bartass
work, appears to be a perfect example for a cinematic or post-cinematic
dream of a gesture (Agamben 1993, 139) transporting the viewer into a
visibly subjective and surreal universe of enigmatic pictures, yet, at the
same time, bearing the nostalgic, gestural imprints of a long lost lifestyle
that we can recognize even in these stylized frames suggesting
timelessness from our own memories, from old photographs, literary
descriptions, paintings or poems. In Majewskis case it is the life in the
fifties or sixties of an urban family living in a typical two or three storey,
turn of the century townhouse somewhere in Eastern Europe where the old
architecture, reminiscent of more glamorous times, is like a communal,
extended family nest for its many inhabitants, who have most likely been
allotted rooms here replacing the original owners during communist times.
176 Housing a Deleuzian Sensation
25
See also Elisabeth Groszs interpretation of Deleuze: sensation requires no
mediation or translation. It is not representation, sign, symbol, but force, energy,
rhythm, resonance (2008, 73).
gnes Peth 177
the inhabitants of the villa in Las Meninas), the movement of the image is
absorbed by almost imperceptible movements at the level of skin and
texture. Accordingly, what we see in these films is haptic cinema at its
richest, a cinema of small gestures, of the flesh, of pulsations, energies,
and intensities, where organic and inorganic matter become almost
indistinguishable. It is a cinema that can perhaps best be described through
the conflicting notions of the Deleuzian figural and figuration. As
Elizabeth Grosz summarizes, the figural is, for Deleuze, the end of
figuration, the abandonment of art as representation, signification, narrative,
though it involves the retention of the body, planes, and colors, which it
extracts from the figurative (2008, 88). Relying on Deleuze, Martine
Beugnet describes such films in this way: between the cinema of
psychological situations and that of pure abstraction, the cinema of
sensation opens a space of becoming, a space where the human form is
less character and more figure, a figure caught [...] in the material reality
of the film as event (Beugnet 2007, 149, emphasis mine, . P.). She also
says: one way or another, the cinema of sensation is always drawn
towards the formless (linforme): where background and foreground
merge, and the subjective body appears to melt into matter (2007, 65).
Deleuze considers such a body a body without organs, mere flesh and
nerve taking on a spasmodic appearance, (2003, 45) as he writes in his
book on Bacon. He also mentions that there are two ways of going
beyond figuration [in art]: either toward the abstract form, or toward the
Figure, the sensation (2003, 34).
In an article that deals with similar issues focusing on the films of
Philippe Grandrieux mainly from the theoretical vantage points defined by
Pascal Bonitzer and Georges Didi-Huberman the authors, Fran Benavente
and Gloria Salvad, note that: there is an extensive trend in contemporary
film that focuses on this shift to the logic of sensation or, [] the ambition
to translate the invisible into a disfiguration process of the visible (2010,
131). What sets these films analyzed here apart from this trend is that the
logic of sensation applied here does not perform a disfiguration of the
visible, or at least not exclusively: both building the image around
gestures and foregrounding its intermedial qualities (i.e. its associations
with paintings) turn this process of disfiguration around, back to the
territory of figurativity and pictorial composition. [Figs. 3638.]
178 Housing a Deleuzian Sensation
Figures 3638. Ihor Podolchak: Las Meninas (2008): haptic images gravitating
towards the formless and images folding imageness back onto themselves.
gnes Peth 179
26
At the same time we have a loose reconnection with some kind of a narrative
frame, as if chaos would gravitate towards order both in image and narrative:
Majewski and Bartas use something similar to a stream of consciousness technique
with a clearly designated (alter-ego) protagonist whose visions we can directly
access, Podolchak frames the film with the image of a man and a woman
reminiscing about their past.
180 Housing a Deleuzian Sensation
the imageness back onto itself [Fig. 38], and this is what we see in the
instances in which the cinematic frame appears to be haunted by another
image, a photo, a painting,27 or a mere echo of pictorialism (as an in-
between of photography, painting and cinema28). [Figs. 3941.]
27
In the case of Las Meninas the title itself evokes an image that haunts the
entire film.
28
E.g. we have beautiful still-life compositions of fruit resembling 17th-century
baroque compositions in Las Meninas.
gnes Peth 181
29
This connection is only made self-reflexively palpable in the earlier example of
Majewskis Garden of Earthly Delights, where the camera also takes part in the
performance itself with its actual interaction with people.
182 Housing a Deleuzian Sensation
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. Infancy and History. The Destruction of
Experience. London, New York: Verso.
. 2000. Notes on Gesture. In Means without End, Notes on Politics, 49
63. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.
Belting, Hans. 2005. Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to
Iconology. Critical Inquiry, No. 31 (Winter): 302319.
Benavente, Fran and Gloria Salvad. 2010. From Figure to Figural. Body
and Incarnation in Contemporary Film. Akademisk kvarter/Academic
Quarter. Volume 01. Fall: 130138.
Beugnet, Martine. 2007. Cinema and Sensation. French Film and the Art
of Transgression. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2. 1989 [1985]. Cinema 2. The Time-Image.
London: The Athlone Press.
. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. London, New York:
Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. 2004 [1980]. Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum International
Publishing Group.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2008. Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of
the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ihde, Don. 1995. Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context.
Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
Klossowski, Pierre. 1969. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. New
York: Grove.
30
Using the example of dance movements Agamben defines gestures as pure
means without end, exhibiting the media character of corporal movements and
allowing the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings (2000, 58).
gnes Peth 183
HAJNAL KIRLY
1
This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of National
Education, CNCS UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-ID-PCE-2012-4-0573.
186 The Alienated Body
2
They are often blamed for providing a rather stereotypical image of this part of
Europe. See, for example, Mnika Dnl on the depiction of patriarchal
relationships and an archaic femininity (2013) and Mikls Sghy on images of
poverty as cultural export products (2013).
Hajnal Kirly 187
3
See the directors comments on the film on http://www.filmpressplus.com
/wpcontent/uploads/dl_docs/JustTheWind-Notes.pdf, and an interview with Andrs
Vgvlgyi and Zsuzsanna Debre on http://www. civiljutub.hu/play.php?
vid=9518#.VB80sfmSxFs. (Last accessed 21. 09. 2014.)
4
See on this Lszl Strauszs The Archeology of Flesh. History and Body-Memory
in Taxidermia (2011).
188 The Alienated Body
Figures 14. From body horror to body art: regimes of representation of the
body in Gyrgy Plfis Taxidermia.
But besides this visual figuration there is another sense strongly involved
in the figurative depiction of their relationship: smell. Described by Laura
Marks as a sense of closeness that requires a bodily contact with the
world (2000, 115), in Hungarian films smell, if referred to at all, is
repulsive, responsible for the distant relationship between bodies.
Hajnal Kirly 191
main character of which appears to embody the missing, ideal husband and
father, respectively.5 [Fig. 7.]
5
Ironically, the family of the main protagonist, a police inspector, is killed, so that
mother and daughter on the other side of the screen can easily picture themselves
as the missing part of his family.
Hajnal Kirly 193
Similarly, image and colour appears often in the film as a screen meant
to hide, or at least counterbalance odour. We see the mother
decorating her workplace, the public toilet, covering the walls all over
with red fabric, a symbol of her attractive femininity. [Fig. 8.] When, after
being attacked and transported to the hospital, the daughter is forced to
take up her job at the public toilet, she is surprised to find a cosy place that
bears the mothers trace in every detail. She also finds tens of air
fresheners of most varied brands in a cupboard, this is what Marks calls
the branding of olfactory associations (2002, 122) here meant to
signify ironically the striking discrepancy between the commodities of
194 The Alienated Body
western globalization and the local smells, that do not respect walls or
national borders: they drift and infuse and inhabit. (Marks 2000, 246.)
[Figs. 910.]
In another example of repulsive smells that alienate the body, the
odour of bodily excrements is evoked in Kocsiss Adrien Pl in a scene of
diaper changing for a patient in intensive care at the hospital. The beginner
nurse is having a violent reaction to the smell that, however, doesnt
provoke the full embodiment of the spectator, because, due to
camerawork, she identifies with the senseless, distant attitude of the
protagonist. In Fliegaufs Just the Wind the toilet odour becomes a
stereotypical motif of ethnic segregation and racism. It stands for the
prejudice that poverty smells, thus Roma smell, either because they live
in precarious circumstances, or because they are usually doing cleaning
jobs. The doorman identifies the Roma girl as the source of the unpleasant
smell and verbalizes his opinion, that is symptomatic (and metaphoric) of
a racist discourse blaming minorities as the cause of political, economical
troubles. Again, the allusion to the sense of smell doesnt trigger
spectatorial embodiment, because odour here is rather part of a
stereotypical, judgmental image of the untouchables of society.
The Untouchables
In Just the Wind the modern topos of alienated bodies is given a
cultural, interethnic dimension, where touch or its lack becomes
significant in depicting the majority-minority relationship. As it has been
observed, sometimes critically, Fliegauf tries to neutralize the implied
socio-political message of the film by introducing scenes in which
members of the Hungarian majority actually touch Romas, the
untouchables of the society, charged with the lowest range of works. The
group leader woman of the environmental cleaning team where Rig, the
mother works, actually kisses her, handing over a package with second
hand clothes. These clothes, bearing the memory of the body of the
majority population, are being displayed in the last scene, when the bodies
of the Roma family members killed in a racist attack are carefully, even
tenderly cleaned and dressed in the morgue. This scene can be also
interpreted as an ironical figuration of the assimilative tendency of the
majority: the minoritarian body is finally still, clean and dressed properly.
Even though Just the Wind was his first film inspired from actual
events, bringing a new vision into the Hungarian filmmaking, we can say
that all the previous films of Fliegauf show a certain sensitivity to social
issues, i.e. a preoccupation with the untouchables of society. Accordingly,
Hajnal Kirly 195
in all his films appears a concern to isolate visually the body from other
bodies. As he pointed out in his comments on Just the Wind, this approach
meant to subvert the stereotypical, unruly group-image of Gypsies,
showing instead the individual haunted by fears. Similarly, in Dealer, the
protagonist and his drug addict clients are all social outcasts, that is also
reflected in the peculiar framing of bodies and faces, as if pushed to the
edge of the frame. [Figs. 1112.] Moreover, sometimes their skin, the most
social of all the senses, that, according to Luce Irigaray should be the
model of a mutually implicating relationship of self and world, (quoted in
Marks 2000, 149) is damaged: either severely burned and bandaged all
over, like a mummy, or too sensitive to be exposed, thus covered with
black clothes, including the head (Dealers ex-sportsman friend). To the
category of social untouchables falls the clone boy in Womb, who is
avoided by his schoolmates due to his otherness. This inevitably leads to
an incestual closeness to his mother, displayed in scenes of explicit
touchy intimacy. Fliegaufs sci-fi doesnt conceive (human) clone as
something alien, unnatural, on the contrary, as a body too close. [Figs. 15
16.]
Figures 1314. The clone as a body too close, a fetish in Benedek Fliegaufs
Womb.
Set in a not so far future (as animal cloning has already been achieved,
stirring huge controversies about human cloning, on a moral, religious
basis), the rejection of the human clone by society here reveals the horror
196 The Alienated Body
6
In Katalin Sndors words, in one of these scenes the body is overwritten by
most heterogeneous cultural codes and fantasies of male sexuality and dominance.
The image of this body discloses the way the racial, the ethnic and the gendered
Other is represented and exoticized within the broader context of certain Western
patriarchal discourses and cultural practices: Mona is pictured as wild, tribal,
foreign, both European and other than European. (2014). On womens
stigmatized otherness and the films deconstruction of male and cultural
superiority see also Dnl (2013, 267) and on Monas self-created, colonized
Western image, Pieldner (2013, 103).
Hajnal Kirly 197
suspend them outside of time, (2000, 85) while, we can add, imposing on
it a new gaze and narrative. In the Desdemona-scene, the alien female
body and Shakespeares drama meet in a fetishistic object-image, a figure
covered all over in black plastic stretchy clothes. Besides acting as an
artificial skin that excludes all authentic social communication between
the perpetrator-colonizer and his victim, the plastic cover works as an
attractive packaging that exposes her as a commodity, a common
capitalist currency. Moreover, the image of this morbidly sexy body
(recalling the Catwoman from the Batman films) appears on the poster of
the movie, becoming the official image of the film conceived as just
another Eastern European product, turned into a Western commodity.
7
See also Laura Markss comment on object-images (2000, 76).
8
In this scene the director joins them in front of the camera. Besides the
Hitchcockian signature, this gesture can be termed a metalepsis as the three of
them are a family in reality (see on this Sndor, 2014).
198 The Alienated Body
9
According to Drew Lederer certain degree of alienation from our bodies is
crucial, made possible by vision, the sense generally most separate from the body
in its ability to perceive over distances (see in Marks 2000, 132). The most
eloquent example of this absent body we can find in the scene of the first visit of
the protagonist on the island: his contemplative gaze is detached from the body and
makes a full, panoramic circle around it, recalling, at the same time, the circular
camera movements of Mikls Jancs.
Hajnal Kirly 199
A few pages later, in the chapter Body, Meat and Spirit, Becoming an
Animal, he completes Bacons statement with the sentence that has been
quoted as a Deleuzian aphorism: the shadow escapes from the body like
an animal we have been sheltering (2003, 21). The shadow as an
animalic, instinctual presence returns in Johanna, in another game of
shadows that reveals the sexual body healing terminally ill patients in a
hospital. [Fig. 18.] The sense of touch subverts the observing, controlling
clinical gaze that characterizes the film and is responsible for the
200 The Alienated Body
Figures 1922. The body of the protagonist captured in medical imaging and
painterly compositions in Mundruczs Johanna (2005)
Hajnal Kirly 201
10
In Shirin Neshats film Women without Men (2009) she is playing a maltreated
prostitute in an Iranian brothel during the 1953 revolution, who finds solace, with
other fugitive women, in a house in the middle of an orchard. Similarly, in Ricky
Rijnekes recent The Silent Ones (2013) she is a young girl assaulted by a self-
proclaimed businessman, ending up in a hallucinatory trip between life and death.
11
On the intertwining of these discourses in a post-colonial theoretical context see
Lisa Cartwrights Screening the Body. Tracing Medicines Visual Culture (1995).
202 The Alienated Body
12
See Kirly: Playing Dead. Pictorial Figurations of Melancholia in
Contemporary Hungarian Cinema. Manuscript. Forthcoming in Studies in Eastern
European Cinema.
Hajnal Kirly 203
Figures 2930. The Panopticon, the ultimate diagram of power relations and social
supervision, a figuration of the clinical gaze in Kocsiss Adrienn Pl.
204 The Alienated Body
Conclusion
In the foreword to the English edition of her Profane Mythology,
Yvette Br claims the necessity of a new approach to cinema emphasizing
its mythologizing tendency, against a still prevailing realist theory of the
medium. The book proposes visual thinking as a common ground for film
analysis, related to the spectatorial ability to read symbolic, metaphoric
and metonimic visual writing. I argued that this line of thought,
confirmed by a wider philosophical preoccupation with the reinstauration
of the aesthetic distance between art and reality (see Lyotard, Rancire and
Rodowick), finds a close implementation in the cinema of a new
generation of Hungarian filmmakers.13 The films that I chose for analysis
share the conviction that beyond modernist paradigms, so easily worn out
by popular genres, there is another way to appropriate human
13
These filmmakers are probably familiar with the book of Br, whose work is
part of the theoretical training at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in
Budapest, Hungary.
Hajnal Kirly 205
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. The Man without Content. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
. 2006. The Praise of Profanations. In Profanations, 7392. New York:
Zone Books.
Br, Yvette. 1982. Prophane Mythology: The Savage Mind of Cinema.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Cartwright, Lisa. 1995. Screening the Body. Tracing Medicines Visual
Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dnl, Mnika. 2013. Surrogate Nature, Culture, Women: Transylvania/
Romania as Inner Colonies in Contemporary Hungarian Films. In
Discourses of Space, eds. Judit Pieldner, Zsuzsanna, Ajtony, 255283.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2003. Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation. London,
New York: Continuum.
Fliegauf, Benedek. Directors comments on Just the Wind.
http://www.filmpressplus.com/wpcontent/uploads/dl_docs/JustTheWin
d-Notes.pdf (Last accessed 21. 09. 014.)
. An interview with Andrs Vgvlgyi and Zsuzsa Debre about Just the
Wind. http://www.civiljutub.hu/play.php?vid=9518#.VB80sfmSxFs
206 The Alienated Body
LNE TREMBLAY
In this essay, I discuss films and video installations that present figures
of the sick, dying, or intoxicated body and that trigger sensations
associated with fear of death and physical decline. In the presence of these
suffering figures, the viewer feels discomfort in his or her own body
through an empathetic response. The viewers strongly dysphoric bodily
sensations come to signal his or her empathetic bond with others a bond
that he or she may accept or reject when it provokes dysphoric sensations.
I argue here, as I did in my recent book Linsistance du regard sur le corps
prouv. Pathos et contre-pathos (The Insistent Gaze upon the Afflicted
Body: Pathos and Counter-Pathos, Tremblay 2013a), that these film and
video works act as spaces for the viewer to negotiate and exercise empathy
and the accompanying dysphoric sensations.
In the artworks under examination here, the body appears pathemic,
failing, troubled, suffering, and weak in its postures, movements, and
appearance, allowing an empathetic contact with the viewers body. Using
the bonding power of the pathos conveyed by the suffering figure, along
with long observation strategies, these artists practise an art of the
encounter with the other represented, rather than an art of the narrative.
They do so through an attempt at reaching the bodies before the
discourses, as Deleuze puts it in his book The Time-Image (Deleuze
1989, 172).
Artists and filmmakers who use the figure of the suffering body
obviously want to provoke dysphoric sensations and empathetic responses,
but many of them today are reluctant to use such pathos-loaded figures
without questioning or disrupting their effect. Given that pathos is well
210 Sensations of Dysphoria in the Encounter of Failing Bodies
Karaoke
Karaoke1, by Donigan Cumming, a video loop presented as a larger-
than-life projection in a gallery, uses pathemic and counter-pathemic
strategies at two very distinct moments. The camera first lingers in a very
tight close-up at an intimate distance, as the anthropologist Edward T.
Hall (1966) would put it, or a haptic distance on the face of an old man
whose physical appearance leads us to believe that he is in agony. His eyes
appear opaque and blind, and he seems to breathe with difficulty through
an open mouth as he passes an atrophied tongue over his parched lips and
swallows painfully. In the background, we hear music, a simple and
joyous song, the lyrics of which are incomprehensible.
1
Karaoke is part of a video installation titled Moving Stills (1998), by
internationally renowned Canadian artist Donigan Cumming. For three minutes the
camera is focused on a dying old man lying on a bed, panning down and up his
body. This three-minute video is projected in a loop with two other videos, each of
which shows a character crying and displaying despair, also shot in close-up (Petit
Jesus and Four Storeys).
lne Tremblay 213
The camera begins a slow pan down the prostrate body, finally
revealing the mans foot as it beats in time to this strange music. Then, the
camera pans back up to the old mans face and we understand that this is
the same shot as the first, but reversed, as the music plays backwards. The
work is divided into two parts: in the first part, we identify strongly and
empathetically with the agony of the reclining body; in the second part, we
revisit our initial judgment as we discover the old mans foot expressing
his enjoyment of the music.
The use of the extreme close-up on the dying old mans body induces
haptic perception. The intimate distance into which the viewer is projected
allows him or her to capture the details of the skin its wrinkles and folds
the dryness of the mouth, the veil that covers the eyes and indicates that
vision is no longer possible. This intimate distance of the haptic perception
of a dying body is unusual and brutal for the viewer, who is drawn in and
cannot escape. As in an intimate relationship, personal boundaries come
into contact and intertwine. As Marks (2000, 188) has explained, The
haptic is a form of visuality that muddies intersubjective boundaries.
Such a perception, as induced by Cumming, is an imperative and invasive
prescription to see and recognize the Other.
Tactile epistemology involves thinking with our skin, or giving as
much significance to the physical presence of an other as to the mental
operations of symbolization. This is not a call to wilful regression but to
recognize the intelligence in the perceiving body. Haptic cinema, by
appearing to us as an object with which we interact rather than an illusion
into which we enter, calls upon this sort of embodied and mimetic
intelligence. In the dynamic movement between optical and haptic ways of
seeing, it is possible to compare different ways of knowing and interacting
with an other. (Marks 2000, 190.)
The forced encounter through haptic visuality makes the viewers body
react and engage in an empathetic relationship marked by dysphoria.
These dysphoric feelings that invade the viewers body make him or her
feel the strength of his or her sympathy, as well as the ambiguity of the
attraction-repulsion duality that characterizes it. The viewer, at first
overwhelmed by dysphoric emotion and expecting to share only pain and
discomfort with the man in the video, is later relieved to discover that the
man enjoys the music that is playing. Upon this realization and reversal,
the viewer is partially relieved of the automatic response of his or her
mirror neurons in front of the dying old man. That beating foot is a snub to
death and to the viewers propensity to pity and reduce the other. The
recumbent figure comes to life and indicates that life overcomes the
immobility of death. During the unfolding of Karaoke, dysphoria first
214 Sensations of Dysphoria in the Encounter of Failing Bodies
enters the viewers body through empathy with the dying body; then
phoria arises through cognition, pushing the dysphoria aside. Dysphoric
sensations are invasive, and the disruptive strategies employed by
Cumming can help to counter their powerful effect.
Last Days
Useful to our discussion is Deleuzes observation that the sensori-
motor schemas of characters bodies in postSecond World War films are
broken. The film character is no longer a hero with a purpose and a task in
a grand narrative but a figure wandering in a world from which he is
alienated, as the camera follows him. The character of Blake, inspired by
the tragic figure of Kurt Cobain, in Gus Van Sants Last Days is certainly
an example of that wandering figure. Last Days bears an aura of pathos in
its reference to the actual suicide of the well-known and beloved musician.
Blake appears to be unaware of himself and barely says a word
throughout the film. Obviously, communication here occurs not through
words but through the body. It is through the body that we perceive
Blakes mental state and his relationship or lack of relationship with
places, objects, and others. Falls, collapses, and losses of consciousness
punctuate his journey until his very last fall to his death at the end.
Figures 24. Screenshots from Last Days by Gus Van Sant, 2005.
lne Tremblay 215
after. We are witnessing Blakes slow slippage toward his own obliteration
and his being overpowered by the death instinct.
The figure of the suffering body of Christ is frequently evoked, Blake
appears particularly skinny: when he washes in the river, we can see his
bones through his skin. When, intoxicated, he goes to his bedroom with a
bowl of cereal, falls backward onto the bed, and then awkwardly raises his
head and upper body, it looks as if a soul is leaving a dead body. This
scene foreshadows the final scene of his death, when, through a
superimposition effect, we see his ghostly body emerging from his dead
body and rising. The reference to Christ is also openly made earlier in the
film, when Van Sant brings in two Jehovahs Witnesses who explain the
role of the sacrificial lamb which is, according to them, to take the place
of Jesus and then shows us Blake walking on all fours like a lamb.
Later, when Asia opens a door against which he has fallen asleep,
Blake falls again in a heap, making her fear that he is dead. The scene is
repeated from two different points of view: inside and outside the room.
Another repeated scene is the one of his arrival at the house from the
forest; the first time, he is wearing a white T-shirt, whereas the second
time, he is wearing a red-and-black striped sweater like the one that Kurt
Cobain wore on the day of his death. With these repetitions and variations,
Van Sant borrows radical strategies from experimental film and video art
to create a disrupted fictional time apart from action-image and the
conventional linear narrative. These strategies break up the naturalism of
linearism and suggest multiple points of view and interpretations. The
temporality that Van Sant creates throughout Last Days is one of slow
observation and pathemic time. As they follow Blake, viewers are left to
linger in pathos and witness his slow physical decline. This process is
expressed in the repeated and extended movement of the fall and by the
body losing its power and drive. The exaggerated duration of Van Sants
takes on the failing body bears a pathemic effect and acts as his
pathosformel.2
Some counter-pathemic elements can be observed in the absurd
apparition of the Yellow Pages salesman and the Jehovahs Witness
brothers, whose anachronistic presence makes us laugh. These characters
also play the role of a normative background against which the difference
of Blakes behaviour stands out.
2
Pathosformel is a German word used by art historian Aby Warburg to describe
the formulas of pathos in artworks. See discussion later in this text.
lne Tremblay 217
Drunk
Similarly to Van Sant with Last Days, British artist Gillian Wearing
slowly observes, in exaggerated duration, falling intoxicated bodies in her
video installation Drunk. She asked real alcoholics living in the street to
come in her studio to be filmed on a white background. The resulting films
are exhibited in galleries in a monumental three-channel video projection
that renders the subjects larger than life. They stagger, urinate, fight, and
fall asleep on the floor. Here, the failing motor skills of the bodies are
emphasized by isolating them against a white background. The viewer can
identify, beyond the identity of the persons depicted, with body failure as a
common, shared space experienced by everyone to different degrees.3
But the identity of the alcoholics, their clumsy bodies, can also
provoke counter-pathemic laughter and reduction to caricature. The
responsibility for the empathic link is thus returned to the viewer. If the
viewer identifies with the people on screen, the pathos in this work is
effective. Only the extended duration, the loop presentation, the bodies
magnified by monumental projection, the displacement of the drunks into
a studio, and the effect of the space of art mediation can offer a slight
distance: the drunks movements appear choreographed and almost
graceful as they exhibit disturbed bodies deserted by restraint and self-
control.
Pathemic Time
In these three works pathemic bodies are caught up in pathemic time
a doubling or tautological strategy that subjects both the viewer and the
represented figure to the long duration of dysphoric experiences. The
frozen repetitive time of this pathemic strategy afflicts the passive viewer
through the use of the long take in all of the works, the repetition of the
loop in the video installations, and the variations on the same scene
repeated in Last Days. Pathemic time does not unfold and cannot sustain
the development of a tragic, heroic narrative, but can only express a
passive enduring of time. The duration offered to pathos by the long take
and the video loop acts in the same way as the imposition of the pathemic
posture on the human figure: it slows things down to an almost stationary
3
Gillian Wearing, Drunk, three-channel video projection, black and white, with
sound, 23 minutes, 1999. In a larger-than-life projection, real drunk people stagger
and fall in a white studio. Wearing is a conceptual artist from Great Britain who
won the Turner Prize in 1997.
218 Sensations of Dysphoria in the Encounter of Failing Bodies
state, it stretches and repeats. Pathemic time bears insistence. It insists and
stares at the filmed figure and projects the viewer into a staring, attentive
position (Tremblay, 2013a).
In Karaoke, the recumbent figure of the emaciated, dying body evokes
the corpse to come as well as the image of the dead Christ lying wrapped
in his shroud. This image provokes fear of impotence and weakness and
fear of ones own death. According to art historian Aby Warburg, pathos,
by the strength of the emotions it stirs, has configured and modelled
representations throughout history. Emotions imprint matter, set it in
motion, in the emblematic sculpture of the Laocon. Warburg names this
phenomenon pathosformel, or pathos formula, an energy based on passion,
fear, and fascination that emerges not only in iconographic themes but in a
works formal and aesthetic qualities for example, in the movement of
the twists and folds of the clothes and draped fabric and in the tormented
bodies of the Laocon (Tremblay 2013a).
In the video and film works of Cumming, Wearing, and Van Sant, the
passion or fear derived from pathos does not imprint its movement on
matter as it did in the statues of antiquity, but is translated into the frozen,
fascinated gaze at the slow and repeated observation of emaciated,
failing bodies. A fascination with pathos ties the viewers gaze to this
image, as do the repetition of the looped presentation and the long take, all
of which enclose the subject in an endless temporality that could be
associated with purgatory. Repetition and the emphasis of the insistent
gaze embodied by the camera and the editing become figures of the
fascinated gaze. This slow, repetitive observation is the sign of a
temporality affected by pathos. One could say that in these time-based
artworks, Warburgs pathosformel gives shape to time rather than matter.
This shape or energy, as Warburg would put it carries the fear of
death and decay. Although, unlike the characters in Warburgs corpus of
study and the ancient portrayals, the characters depicted here are not tragic
heroes but resolutely modern anti-heroes whose fate and misfortune
provoke fascination. The meaning of their fate is not provided by a
narrative, but remains rather opaque in the long, slow observation time of
this insistent gaze.
The empathetic response engages the viewers entire body in a
relational dynamic. Empathy here is kinesthesic (through movement) and
thymic (through pain). Kinesthesic and thymic empathy trigger activity in
the areas of the viewers brain linked to the gestures, movements, and pain
that he or she witnesses. If a figure is slowly falling, the part of the
viewers brain linked to that movement reacts, just as one might yawn if
one watches a person who is yawning. As neuroscientist Tania Singer and
lne Tremblay 219
4
Our data suggest that empathizing with the pain of others does not involve the
activation of the whole pain matrix, but is based on activation of those second-
order re-representations containing the subjective affective dimension of pain.
(Singer and al. 2004, 1161.)
5
Consistent evidence shows that sharing the emotions of others is associated with
activation in neural structures that are also active during the first-hand experience
of that emotion. Part of the neural activation shared between self- and other-related
experiences seems to be rather automatically activated. However, recent studies
also show that empathy is a highly flexible phenomenon, and that vicarious
responses are malleable with respect to a number of factors such as contextual
appraisal, the interpersonal relationship between empathizer and other, or the
perspective adopted during observation of the other. (Singer and Lamm 2009, 81
96, 81.)
220 Sensations of Dysphoria in the Encounter of Failing Bodies
the viewer, do these artworks bring him or her to observe and reconsider
what has happened. Being touched and then distanced allows for cognition
with emotion and contact, away from simple cynicism and indifferent
distance. The awareness of the action of pathos and empathy in the
viewers perception is made possible first by bringing forward the body
figure and its powerful affects and then through repetition, variations, a
slow and long observation process, and ruptures of pathos with humorous
elements. Through this process, these works propose an encounter in
which the viewers empathy is revealed, tested, and becomes part of a
process of self-examination.
This experience of dysphoria and phoria, felt successively, in the
double movement toward and away from pathos observed in Karaoke
reveals ambivalence. This ambivalent position, which both binds us to and
frees us from the suffering of others represented, forms a new space for
deliberation and the negotiation of pathos along the axis of the empathetic
bond. The figure of the suffering body plays the role of an agora, a
common space, in which encounter, self-awareness, and empathy can be
tested in simulation and sensations experienced through empathy, with
their bonding role, and become the object of embodied sensitive
observation and ethical deliberation.
References
Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2002. Limage survivante: histoire de lart et
temps des fantmes selon Aby Warburg [The Surviving Picture:
History of Art and Time of Phantoms at Aby Warburg]. Paris: Les
ditions de Minuit.
Fontanille, Jacques. 2007. Le temps de la compassion. La diffusion
thymique et ses rgimes temporels [The Time of Compassion. The
Thymic Diffusion and its Temporal Regimes]. Le plaisir des sens.
Euphories et dysphories [The Pleasure of the Senses. Euphorias and
Dysphorias], ed. Louis Hbert, 2351. Quebec City: Les presses de
lUniversit Laval.
Hall, E. T. 1966. The Hidden Dimension. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Korichi, Meriam. 2000. Les passions. [The Passions] Paris: Flammarion.
Marks, Laura. U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema,
Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham and London: Duke University
Press.
222 Sensations of Dysphoria in the Encounter of Failing Bodies
JENS SCHRTER
basis for the following analyses. This leads to the second section, in which
I take a look at the narrative structure of Monsters, Inc., and to the third
section, which is concerned with the visual imagery of the film, and with
whether and how this relates to the narrative structure. This brings me,
finally, to the fourth section, in which I discuss the highly self-reflexive
nature of Monsters, Inc., something which seems to me to be far from
coincidental. It seems as though the film not only stands at the threshold
between traditional and new forms, but also that it draws attention to this
historical situation itself.
the audience. That may certainly play a part to begin with, but why should
one forego established forms later on? Would it not be nonsensical to
artificially restrict ones own creative options? And is this not even more
the case with digital technologies which by definition, due to their
programmability, have few specific forms of their own?
Another important transmedia form that can be used by very different
media is narrative structuring of audiovisual media in time. Thus, for
example, the narratologist Seymour Chatman (1981, 117, emphasis mine)
once noted: One of the most important observations to come out of
narratology is that narrative itself is a deep structure quite independent of
its medium. Admittedly this thesis has repeatedly been subjected to
critical discussion, but it does seem to have some validity at least: if it
were not so, there would be no film adaptations of literature. In section 2 I
will outline the transmedia structure of the narrative in Monsters, Inc..
Neoformalism seems a suitable theoretical framework for this; Bordwell
(1993, 51), writes, for example: As a distinction the fabula/syuzhet pair
cuts across the media. At a gross level, the same fabula could be inferred
from a novel, a film, a painting, or a play. Fabula is his expression for the
story, syuzhet his expression for the plot (more or less, in any case).
This does not mean, however, that all forms are transmedial, and
equally available to all media. Painting and drawing have always also
included modes of representation using parallel perspective, which have
no vanishing point and which are still preferred in technical drawing and
architectural drafting because they avoid changes in angle and relative
changes in length (cf. Beil/Schrter 2011). Photographic media cannot
represent such forms (they can only approximate them in the borderline
case of certain telephoto lenses), since they follow the behaviour of the
light, whether their mode of recording is chemical, electronic, analogue or
digital. Computer-generated images, on the other hand, since they can
represent anything which is computable within a reasonable time, can also
use forms based on parallel perspective. This means that it is necessary to
analyse precisely, in each specific case, which forms have been connected
with which other forms and in what way and to which media these forms
are available or unavailable.
There is, however, another point which must be considered when it
comes to digitally generated images: insofar as such images are based on
processes of computer simulation, they are not only able to pick up forms
which are already transmedial anyway; they can also, partially and
approximately, treat as form that element which has been considered, in
the analogue media, as the other side of form, i.e. the materiality of the
medium.
226 Visuality and Narration in Monsters, Inc.
virtual camera always remains on this side of the eyeline, i.e. it observes
the 180 degree rule; [Fig. 7] 7th shot: there is another long shot which
makes the spatial configuration absolutely clear again. In short: the
construction of the space is completely focused on consistency. The space
is intended to be the stable background for the development of the causal
chains of action by the protagonists and antagonists, and is not supposed to
confuse matters by intervening itself. This is typical of the classic
Hollywood film. Deviations from this, such as a conspicuously tilted line
of sight [Fig. 8], are only permissible because this is a still from a hectic
chase situation, Bordwell (1986, 27): Stylistic disorientation, in short, is
permissible when it conveys disorienting story situations.
In short: the film confirms the assertion that classical narration
quickly cues us to construct story logic (causality, parallelisms), time, and
space in ways that make the events before the camera our principal
source of information (Bordwell 1986, 24). But: in a computer-generated
film there actually is no before the camera (unless we count the virtual
space in front of the virtual camera, but thats quite metaphorically). It
is significant that, during the closing credits of the film, (very amusing)
bloopers are shown, constructing pre-film events with an ironic wink:
the clapper board, a microphone in the picture, and finally an out-of-
control machine which knocks over the camera. Here Monsters, Inc. is
of course ironizing its own mode of narration (and its production
culture, cf. Caldwell 2008) in one of the blooper scenes a monster
botches a dialogue, and is berated by his monster colleague: Youre
messin up this scene, were never gonna work in Hollywood again.
Precisely: classical Hollywood narration. In short, Monsters, Inc., although
completely digitally simulated, follows this classic narrative tradition.
work for is an industry for the production of terror and (at the end of the
film) laughter, so in this sense it is a reflection of the production of affect
by the film industry. All that can be added to this precise analysis is that
the motif of the door later expands into a massive archive of doors, a
database; this in turn, to paraphrase Lev Manovich, introduces a new
theme to the digital film: the logic of the database, which is typical of the
new media (see Manovich 2001, 212). Furthermore, in the chase at the end
of the film the doors function, as it were, as shortcuts through the diegetic
space, which is at the same time global space, and allow a sort of montage
within the image, which in turn displaces and reflects the forms of spatial
construction in classical Hollywood cinema. The motif of the door would
be worthy of a more detailed commentary.
I would like to finish, however, by discussing something much more
straightforward. Monsters, Inc. begins in a simulator. The sequence is
established with sounds off-camera, indicating that parents have put their
child to bed; in the establishing shot (which is in fact the third shot) we see
the child sleeping. The door that portal to the monsters world opens.
A monster has entered. It rears up to frighten the child, the child screams,
and what happens? The monster gets the most dreadful fright itself, trips
over a football, hurts itself: in short, messes everything up. Then the light
goes on. A technical voice off-camera repeats again and again:
Simulation terminated, and we learn that the child was only a machine.
And in a further doubling of the theme of the door to another world, one
wall of the apparent childs bedroom slides up and we see the trainer as
she tries to explain to the monster-in-training (and to the other monster
trainees who are watching) what he has done wrong, in the first instance,
this is an allusion to the diegetic 4th wall. More important still: it is a
simulator, just like those flight simulators which, in some respects at least,
stood at the beginning of the development of certain forms of
photorealistic computer graphics (see Schrter 2003). And one of the
reasons why the simulator is established here is because it appears again
later on. Sulley and Boo, on the run from the evil boss of the company
the classical evil capitalist of Hollywood cinema, later to be replaced by
Sulley as the good capitalist have apparently fled through a door into a
childs bedroom. The evil boss, who is also behind Randalls machinations,
wants to get hold of Boo, but when he reaches out to seize her from the
bed, it turns out that they are in the simulator. The evil boss is utterly
confused. But that is not important any more, because he has just revealed
his sinister plans to Sulley while in the simulator, thinking it was a childs
bedroom. However, Mike was controlling the simulator, and has recorded
the bosss crucial confession on a sort of video tape. This representation
Jens Schrter 235
not only reflects back to another pre-digital visual form, in that the
interlace lines are part of the simulation [Fig. 15]. More importantly, a
turning point in the narrative is explicitly connected with the theme of
simulation here. Here the interference between the narrative and the
simulative visual imagery in Monsters, Inc. is itself thematized
intradiegetically.
References
Beil, Benjamin and Jens Schrter. 2011. Die Parallelperspektive im
digitalen Bild [The Parallel Perspective in Digital Images]. Zeitschrift
fr Medienwissenschaft No. 4: 127138.
Bordwell, David. 1986. Classical Hollywood Cinema. Narrational
Principles and Procedures. In: Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Phil
Rosen, 1734. New York: Columbia University Press.
. 1993. Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Routledge.
Caldwell, John. 2008. Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and
Critical Practice in Film and Television. Durham/NC: Duke
University Press.
Chatman, Seymour. 1981. What Novels Can Do That Films Cant (and
Vice Versa). In On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, 117136.
Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.
Elsaesser, Thomas/Hagener, Malte. 2010. Film Theory. An Introduction
Through the Senses. New York: Routledge.
236 Visuality and Narration in Monsters, Inc.
digitalization of optical effects, so that all the Navi are indeed genuine
avatars and, their blue colour, a mere white projection. The cutting-edge
technology actually used to produce the film parallels the one displayed in
its fictional universe, and Sam Worthington animates from within his
filmic avatar much in the same way Jake Sully dresses his, in either case
feeling or acting through another body).
The fundamental mechanism of meaning developing in Avatar could
be outlined as follows:
record, the answer is yes, and the answer includes not only our
sympathetic condescendence of Occidentals, but also the more odd
manifestations of identification with the Alpha Centauri blue tribe on the
part of other more earthly tribes in our planet, out of an acknowledged
affinity, as described by Elsaesser. The first case could be explained in
terms of an incomplete critical stand as regards the unconscious
pervasiveness of ideology, failing to recognize the traditional ethnocentric
representation of the Other as a subsidiary partner of the white male
protagonist; while embracing the right cause at a superficial political level,
and thus failing to perceive that everybody and everything in the film
behaves according to the same invasive, avataresque pattern adopted by
the quintessential villain Colonel Quaritch, alias the Capitalist military-
industrial complex in person from the troops to the scientists
(respectively strip-mining and data-mining the planet [in Elsaessers
terms], not in opposition to each other but in a complementary, symbiotic
relation), from the redemptive hero to Camerons redemptive gesture
towards the movies historical crisis through the avatar/3D reciprocal
devices. In this case, ideology comes out not diminished, but reinforced
through this simulation of a progressive view, a mere gambit to keep its
true basis intact.1
1
And, as inevitably as with any other big, big production lets peep into this
page of the directors signed confession: Q. Have you gotten any criticism that the
film might be perceived as anti-American?
A. Its something that Ive anticipated the possibility of because people will
misinterpret things in certain ways. You can almost count on people
misinterpreting things. The film is definitely not anti-American. Its not anti-
human either. My perception of the film is that the Navi represent that sort of
aspirational part of ourselves that wants to be better, that wants to respect nature.
(Murphy 2009.) Q.e.d. Of course the film is not and could not be anti-American, of
course it had to be interpreted as politically correct (that is, as anti-American), of
course audiences are worldwide anti-American, of course the film subministers to
them the American way of being so (the poison and the antidote): namely by
crossing (literally: thats what the avatar fetiche is all about) the cult of our
paraplegic (anti-)hero and the cult of the Other (as a part of ourselves, of
course). And, of course, whos against nature? Unfortunately, the film is not about
respecting nature, but about the myth of respecting nature: it is about History.
Nature is the bait. Anticipating and accomodating opposed views under one single
perspective has been the politics of Western painting since the Renaissance. 3D
geometry goes one step further in this direction: hypercubic space is keen on
integrating overt contradiction. Access for all means that ideology no longer
veils: it complexifies.
Jos Manuel Martins 243
The second case is trickier: why the Heaven would young Palestinians
[] begin to dress up like the blue creatures, in order to protest?
(Elsaesser 2011.) Certainly not because they are young, besides being
Palestinians, nor while waiting for a Jewish Messiah who would convert to
their cause and spirit, fight back his own evil government and marry their
beauty queen (and without whom, according to the myth, the Palestinian
tribe will be unable, by its own efforts alone, to overcome servitude
liberation thus amounting, symbolically, to an implicit confession and
acceptance of minority status and ultimate mythical dependency), but due
to a reason also operating in the previous case, a reason that appears here
in reverse form: the 3D factor.
Our (and, for that matter, the Palestinians, etc.) first allegiance is to
the 3D myth (even before the identification with the blue tribe/white
saviour one). The greedy dominance of this vantage point takes possession
of filmic space like any other techno-industrial conqueror of foreign
territory: it relays to us (the conquered conquerors) the secret pleasure felt
in disposing of (and apparently magnifying, enhancing, and paying
homage to) the space of Pandoras seven wonders. Ours is Quaritchs and
Camerons will to power (and Sullys power to will). We are empowered,
all right: in our case, through this empowerment we identify with
ourselves; the Palestinians seemingly identify with the aggressor, whose
power they (being only too human, not enlightened Navi) secretly admire
and overtly envy: power over reality and power over nature, in the first
place: human power.
This primordial identification, prior to any other, provides the
regressive Procusts bed to any subsequent progressive identification: the
identification with the power over space is the a priori to any
identification with the space of things itself with territories, habitats,
places, planets; the identification with the power over nature (its not just
the same old boring nature, now, its a 3D brand new nature, in fact a
genuine hyperreal upgrade); the identification with the power over the
Navi (exerted by us, empowered occidental Navi, or by them,
empowered Indians, Chinese, or Aboriginal Navi) gives us (them) the
confidence to identify with their/our plea for freedom and dignity, and
with a common aspiration to sublime wisdom.
The question remains, though, whether there is a real power to rely
upon, or merely the phantomatic will to do it, the self-delusional
ideological concept of what 3D space is meant to be and would in fact
consist of were it not the formula for a typical nonobtainium (the
Camerons cousin of Hitchcocks MacGuffin), something that would be
perfect only if it would exist; or rather: only if it could be real, in the
244 Crows vs. Avatar, or: 3D vs. Total-Dimension Immersion
strong sense: if reality could really be like that. But real space is not 3D
nor even three-dimensional. Notwithstanding a choir of appraisals, where
we can surprisingly meet the voice of an authority such as Thomas
Elsaesser, what a rough phenomenological description of standard 3D
space would point out is that such a forcible construct would hardly be
able to involve me, to invade my body (Elsaesser 2011) and to provoke
an exquisite immersive experience: in fact, it begins and ends quite
graphically in front of me, keeping folding and unfolding its stereoscopic
layers and boxes at variable telescopic distance rates and inscribing itself
as an object (as a reified ostensive dimension) within my space, which it
partially overlaps and with which it disputes and divides scope and range,
the physical real space of the movie theatre where I am. Unlike the
invisible, non-thematic pure dimension which space is, 3D displays itself
as a limited frontal object-space I almost could touch as a soap bubble or a
visual toy, but could certainly not merge with (if for no other reason,
because of its telescopic instability, a sort of virtuoso peacock fan-tail an
instability not just due to the humorous choices of the Stereographer
concerning the Convergence Control, the amount of 3D in any given
shot, but due to the objective Depth Budget, the budgetary estimate
established beforehand for the whole production). 3D delineates and draws
itself as a self-represented space of strengthened iconic spatiality: a lethal
overdose of artificialism (space, plus notorious spatiality indexes) that
destroys any hope for reality.
But the last thing the moviegoer longs for is precisely that some kind
of technically improved cinema will come to match reality and the sense
of reality. And here we come upon the crucial point at the opening of the
whole discussion. The two related aspects generally stressed by 3D
devotees are barely compatible: namely, 3Ds ability to transpose the
spectator inside the palpable film reality, the dream of entering and
physically belonging to this new kind of proliferous onscreen/around the
screen image; and the ability to convert that reality (specifically the
filmic sense of reality/space/realm/world) into a real sense of reality
assuming 3D spatial architecture to qualitatively coincide with it, and
expecting the Negative Parallax effect (the invasion of real space by a
protruding fictional filmic 3D space) to ensure the connective overlap that
will allow us to trespass the films forbidden threshold while at the same
time accessing a realm of fully established real, solid 3D space; the
proof of its genuineness consisting of its materializing all over the place
alongside the very extension of perpendicular space available before me
over the front rows of the movie theatre, where there is plenty of room just
Jos Manuel Martins 245
2
Le mouvement dloignement dans lespace est en fait un mouvement circulaire
qui revient et qui, par le renversement de la perspective et du regard, transforme
finalement la relation du sujet et de lobject. (Le sujet se projetant, par degr, au
dehors; et le dehors devenant le paysage intrieur du sujet.) (My translation, J. M.
M.)
248 Crows vs. Avatar, or: 3D vs. Total-Dimension Immersion
the wall in front of him. How are we to interpret the metalepsis that
follows, when the planes of the beholder and of the painting overcome
their initial separateness (transcendence) and he finds himself within the
general plane of consistency of van Goghs world (encompassing this
latters being-in the natural setting and his general plane of pictorial
composition, as well as the complex process of reciprocal exchange
between the two)? Certainly not in a literal sense (either magical or
happening only in dreams), and neither as a mere metaphor, since the
point is not a fictional one, but the very transcending of the distinction
between reality and fiction such transcending precisely amounting
to pure immanence. What (Kurosawas) van Gogh says to his unexpected
guest about the reciprocal bodily assimilation gradually taking place
between the painter and the landscape3 (different from a mere distantial
3
The passage reads as follows: [van Gogh] Why arent you painting? To me this
scene is beyond belief. A scene that looks like a painting does not make a painting.
But [I] if you take the time and look closely, all the nature has its own beauty. And
when that natural beauty is there, [II] I just lose myself in it. And then, as if its in
a dream, [III] the scene just paints itself for me. Yes, [IV] I consume this natural
setting, I devour it completely and hold it. And when Im through, [V] the painting
paints itself for me completely. But its so difficult to hold it inside!
[Japanese] Then, what do you do?
[van Gogh] [VI] I work, I slave, I drive myself like a locomotive!
I numerate the successive stages in the process of painting; it will be noticed that
the actual application of paint on the canvas only begins at stage VI, which by no
means entails a separation between perception and action, rather, emphasizes the
fact that aesthetic perception is already invested by the artistic operation.
Kurosawas scenery including natural landscape vividly retouched in van
Goghs fashion, offers the visual equivalent to the concepts expressed. A whole
gamut of reciprocal overlapping features of nature and culture, subject and object
and of Deleuzian processes of becoming is displayed all over this ten-minute
masterpiece of Modernist artwork about the artwork and offers a significant
counterpart to the avataresque tour de force, rooting instead that phenomenon
deeply in natural and aesthetic (and specifically cinematic) perception rather than
in VR-like technology (the avatar/3D/motion-capture complex) ideologically
reverberated in Pandoras New-Age spiritualized nature, with all its neuro-
connexions between the Navi and the ikran (flying dragons) ultimately regulated
by the bio-neuro-cybernetics of the Tree of Souls. The Cartesian leitmotiv at stake
in the 3D controversy reappears as the mind/body duality, presupposed in the cases
of the (unequal) avatar transference and of the (unequal) ikran symbiosis (two
double-bind features responsible for generously fuelling drama and intrigue),
always doubled by its own characteristic hierarchical structure: and so, subduing
the ikran culminates in becoming a toruk makto, the mighty (makto, its avatar-
word) rider that is, the master of the toruk, much in the same way as playing
Jos Manuel Martins 249
the avatar game will culminate in becoming the Navi supreme hero, and once
again the duality of a minds eye outside a totalized and dominated world (the
perspective/Cartesian paradigm) translates into the vertical axis of masterhood,
fulfilling and profusely illustrating the double meaning of the expression vision de
survol.
250 Crows vs. Avatar, or: 3D vs. Total-Dimension Immersion
4
Ainsi avant dtre un spectacle objectif la qualit se laisse reconnatre par un
type de comportement qui la vise dans son essence et cest pourquoi ds que mon
corps adopte lattitude du bleu jobtiens une quasi-prsence du bleu. (My
translation, J. M. M.)
Jos Manuel Martins 251
5
The author uses the verbal infinitive (le sentir) as corresponding to a motor-
synesthetic gestalt whole, rather than the traditional concept of sensation
misleadingly pointing at an atomic and specific element in the composition of
perception. Being itself a gestalt whole, though, perception is not partible (into
sensations); yet, being an originary phenomenon, it is notwithstanding an
articulated (not mediated!) one (namely, by sensing). Its explanation is the
formidable task that is motivating the title.
6
Another worth-quoting dictum from the same interview: Avatar will be in 3-D.
Why did you choose that format? Its immersive. It wraps the movie around you.
Its not necessarily just for kids films either. It works in a dramatic sense because
it gives you a heightened sense of reality. (Winters Keegan 2007.) A brief
commentary: indeed, it becomes immersive in the exact proportion in which we
(are allowed to) forget about the 3D effect. We are not surrounded by the film: this
is plainly a false statement (already more than a pre-production 2007 wishful
thinking). As for the sense of reality, 3D and digital technology produce the same
petitive kind of self-delusion as Renaissance perspective does: it gives the sense,
and the pattern of reality that we are supposed to sense. An image in the obscurity
of the vanishing theatre compares magically with itself, not with reality; curiously
enough, neither do colour movies give us a sense of heightened reality, nor do
black and white films fail to. They are reality, and so were even the silent
movies.
252 Crows vs. Avatar, or: 3D vs. Total-Dimension Immersion
7
As regards the Deleuzian pair virtual/actual, there is nothing to fear from
Merleau-Pontys notion of the originary: ltre sauvage does not pre-define
anything, nor is it in itself defined. Perception is immediately a sort of open
stylization, or boundless virtuality. That should easily meet Deleuzes requests.
Jos Manuel Martins 253
References
Brooks, David. 2010. The Messiah Complex. New York Times 7. 1.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/opinion/08brooks.html (Last
accessed 12. 04. 2014.)
Cheng, Franois. 1991. Vide et plein: Le langage pictural chinois. [Empty
and Full: the Language of Chinese Painting.] Paris: Seuil.
Elsaesser, Thomas. 2011. James Camerons Avatar: access for all. New
Review of Film and Television Studies Vol. 9 No. 3: 247264.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17400309.2011.585854
(Last accessed 12. 04. 2014.)
Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema,
Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1945. Phnomnologie de la perception.
[Phenomenology of Perception.] Paris: Gallimard.
. 1960. Lil et lesprit. [The Eye and the Spirit.] Paris: Gallimard.
. 1969. Le langage indirect. [Indirect Language.] In La prose du monde
[The Prose of the World], 66161. Paris: Gallimard.
Murphy, Mekado. 2009. A Few Questions for James Cameron. The New
York Times 21. 12.
http://carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/a-few-questions-
for-james-cameron/ (Last accessed 02. 04. 2014.)
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1947. Franois Mauriac et la libert. [Franois Mauriac
and the Liberty.] In Situations I. 3657. Paris: Gallimard.
Shaviro, Steven. 1993. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Sobchack, Vivian. 1992. The Adress of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film
Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Winters Keegan, Rebecca. 2007. Q&A with James Cameron. Time
Magazine 11. 01. http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,15766
22,00.html#ixzz0a69HUhNB. (Last accessed 12. 04. 2014.)
iek, Slavoj. 2010. Avatar: un exercice didologie politiquement
correcte. [Avatar: a Politically Correct Exercise of Ideology.] Cahiers
du Cinma No. 654 (March): 6669.
254 Crows vs. Avatar, or: 3D vs. Total-Dimension Immersion
RAMAYANA LIRA
1
I wish to thank CAPES (Coordenao de Aperfeioamento de Pessoal de Nvel
Superior) and Unisul (Universidade do Sul de Santa Catarina) for granting me
funds and paid leave, respectively, for my postdoctoral research at the Centre for
World Cinemas (University of Leeds). This article is a partial result of this
research.
258 Affective Realism and the Brand New Brazilian Cinema
2
If we take the example of criticism about City of God (Cidade de Deus, directed
by Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund, 2002) in major periodic publications, we
will see that the idea of the films revelation of Brazilian society is present in
Bravo! (July 2008), Revista de Cinema (November 2003) and Veja (October 2002),
to name a few.
260 Affective Realism and the Brand New Brazilian Cinema
When society and its vicissitudes are portrayed in films like City of
God, Mango Yellow (Amarelo Manga, Claudio Assis, 2002), Carandiru
(Hector Babenco, 2003), Lower City (Cidade Baixa, Srgio Machado,
2005), and Elite Squad, and Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (Tropa de
Elite and Tropa de Elite 2 O Inimigo Agora Outro, Jos Padilha, 2007
and 2010) they are contained in the representation of the urban space as a
symptom of a naturalist impulse, an impulse that looks for legitimation by
bringing to fore the truth about the reality in Brazil. In this sense,
those films are reinforcing a consensus on the appropriate way to look at
a given reality.
We can, for a final example, refer to Fatima Toledos collaboration in
the preparation of actors for City of God, Lower City, Elite Squad, among
other contemporary films. In an interview to the Piau magazine entitled
How Not To Be An Actor, Toledo defends that actors should not prepare for
their roles according to Stanislavskis What if, which, according to
her, is based on the possibility of not being (Toledo 2009, 54). She does
not deny it that actor can not be, but she argues that being immediately
awakens the sensorial. Its real! Its like in life! (Toledo 2009, 54.) For
Toledo, people are becoming desensitized and the expression What if
serves as a sort of security device that prevents people from acting. This
search for the real is also present in her directorial debut, to come out in
2010, and which, according to the Piau article, is provisionally entitled
Sobre a Verdade [On Truth].
As we can see, there has a been a strong discourse in Brazilian film
culture that appeals to a real constructed as immediate, as if the
characters were directly denouncing reality. Such search for the real
that can also be perceived in the increasing production of documentaries
is, however, more often than not, coated with an aesthetic or narrative
varnish to prevent from a traumatic encounter. Realism becomes a way to
achieve a certain general truth about society, whose evils are artfully
denounced. The group of films I dub Brand New Brazilian Cinema has
taken a different approach towards realism, which is now associated with
the affective force of the image, renouncing the efforts to form a critical
image that explains society to the viewers.
In an upper middle-class Rio de Janeiro home, a delivery man and his
girlfriend, the housemaid, are caught red-handed by the owner of the
house as they were trying to steal from the family she works for. The
delivery man takes the man as a hostage. A police officer who happened to
be passing by invades the house in an attempt to stop the crime. His
rashness leads to the hostages death. This is how Eye of the Storm,
directed by Eduardo Valente in 2009, starts. The story, however, does not
262 Affective Realism and the Brand New Brazilian Cinema
movement, the paradoxical image that unfolds between the memory that
fades and the memory that resists.
Another paradoxical image can be seen in a film released shortly after
Eye of the Storm. In it, three lives look through a bus window. Three
affection-images of characters who roam through the city. We watch them
with apprehension, trying to find a scene, a narrative line that would
situate them. And we are denied that. What we are given are instants (once
again, glimmering) of lives embedded in subtle everyday plots. Their
lightness is unbearable. That is the burden of The Sky Above (O Cu Sobre
os Ombros, 2011), directed by Srgio Borges.
The Sky Above portrays the lives of three lower middle-class people a
transsexual prostitute and academic, a hare krishna telemarketing operator
who loves football, and a disillusioned writer from Congo, who has a
disabled child. The multilayered characters are not portrayed as
exotic/victimized others. In a way, Borgess films radicalize the
performative immanence of film as images and lives are completely
imbricated. The static shots with few re-framings leave a lot of space for
the subtle variations in gestures and speech. The film is not about giving
voice to the marginalized other; rather, it is concerned with the
presentation of the intensities that form the lives in question. There is
nothing programmatic, or critical in the sense of an impulse to explicate
some kind of social evil.
Elena del Rio comments about performance that in its fundamental
ontological sense, performance gives rise to the real. While representation
is mimetic, performance is creative and ontogenetic (del Rio 2008, 4). So
performances in the contemporary Brazilian cinema I am referring to are
not a matter of registering the ephemeral, but of creating something new,
new affects, new worlds. In The Sky Above the actors bodies are
extracting something new from the image in a process that Elena del Rio
summarizes as such: Thus the body simultaneously figures as a normative
structure regulated by binary power relations (on a molar plane of formed
subjects and identities) and as an excessive, destabilizing intensity
responsive to its own forces and capacities (on a molecular plane of
impersonal and unformed becomings) (del Rio 2008, 9). Del Rio also
dismisses the idea that the performative force of films would be restricted
to certain genres or filmic forms. She says: Rather than depending upon a
particular kind of film (a stabilizing condition inimical to the very
disruptive function of the affective-performative), the eruption of
affective-performative moments is a matter of a constantly fluctuating
distribution of degrees of intensity between two series of images: those
belonging to explainable narrative structures, and those that disorganize
Ramayana Lira 265
(the iconic nature of cinema). This potential would lie in the capacity of
film to defy the limitations of the intellect, drawing us not to a chain of
action and reaction, but to a zone of indeterminacy between perception and
action, one that leaves us with no straight forward response to the
images.
In this perspective, the body no longer reassures reality, identities or
self on the contrary, it is exposed to variations, fluxes and mutations.
This much more complex understanding of what a body can do surpasses
the widespread simplification that the body thinks. What this platitude
fails to perceive is that the variations and intensities that traverse the body
force us to think about something that, from its origins, belongs to the
sphere of the unthinkable. The body makes us think about that which is not
thinkable.
Affects emerge in the cinema I am talking about both in the creative
encounters in the filmmaking processes and in the reconfigurations of
relations between characters that suggest new models for being together.
And it is affect that is at stake when our response-ability (to use Marco
Abels terminology) is at stake as spectators. Cinema may thus become, as
Nicole Brenez puts it, that creature haunted by heterogeneity which, more
than knowing itself, prefers to verify that something else is still possible (a
body, a friend, a world) (1997).
References
Abel, Marco. 2007. Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique after
Representation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Bentes, Ivana. 2007. Sertes e Favelas no Cinema Brasileiro Contemporneo:
Esttica e Cosmtica da Fome [Barrens and Slums in Contemporary
Brazilian Cinema: Aesthetics and Cosmetics of Hunger]. Alceu Vol. 8
No. 15: 242255.
Brenez, Nicole. 1997. The Ultimate Journey: Remarks on Contemporary
Theory. Screening the Past 2.
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/reruns/brenez.html. (Last
accessed 01.03.2013.)
Debs, Sylvie. 2004. El cine brasileo de la reativacin [Brazilian Cinema
Revival]. Cinmas DAmrique Latine, No. 12. Paris-France: ed. Press
Universitaires Du Mirail (PUM).
Del Rio, Elena. 2008. Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers
of Affection. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2011. Sobrevivncia dos vaga lumes. Belo
Horizonte: UFMG.
Ramayana Lira 267
FERNANDO CANET
Introduction
What is more real in our universe than a mans life, and how can we
hope to preserve it better than in a realistic film? These words are Albert
Camuss, and with this quote Roy Armes opens the first part of his book
titled Patterns of Realism, which he wrote about Italian Neo-Realism in
1971. With his rhetorical question, Camus identifies two of the main
bastions upholding any Realist project: on the one hand, the object of
study is reality itself, which is the reference point throughout the creative
process; and on the other, reality is constructed according to certain
expressive codes that define a particular style, which is known in the
different forms of artistic expression painting, literature and film as the
Realist style. This is all with the intention of representing as accurately as
possible, returning to the words of Camus, the reality that has aroused the
interest of an author who, for whatever reason, has been drawn to it.
Nevertheless, although it may be among the authors intentions to
capture reality as honestly as possible, that representation can never be an
exact reproduction of reality, as the nature of representation in itself
prevents this. Thus, Andr Bazin (1971, 26) speaks of the illusion of
reality; however, that illusion, according to the predicates of the French
critic himself, should be as close as possible to its referent, of course
within the limits of the logical demands of cinematographic narrative and
of the current limits of technique, since, as Colin MacCabe notes (1976,
1
The research for this article was enabled with the support of the Research Project
Study and analysis for development of Research Network on Film Studies
through Web 2.0 platforms, financed by the National R+D+i Plan of the Spanish
Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (code HAR2010-18648).
270 The New Realistic Trend in Contemporary World Cinema
9), for Bazin, as for almost all Realist theorists (among others, Lapsley
and Westlakem 1988, Bill Nichols 1991, and Brian Winston 1995), what
is in question is not just a rendering of reality but the rendering of a reality
made more real by the use of aesthetic device. Thus, according to these
theorists, Realism is a set of conventions and norms for representing
reality transparently, thereby achieving what Stephen Prince (1996, 31)
calls the reality effect. This set of codes is known as the Realist style.
It is an undeniable fact that over the last two decades the international
film scene has seen a significant number of independent films with an
authorial tone that have taken the real world as their point of reference,
approaching that real world through the application of a Realist style.
These films have had a notable impact both at major festivals and with
international critics. An example of the latter is the article written by A. O.
Scott (2009) of The New York Times titled Neo-Neo Realism. In this
article, Scott, one of the most renowned critics in New York City, echoing
the expression used to define Italian cinema of the post-war era, describes
the new Realist trend in contemporary American independent cinema as
Neo-Neo Realism.2 This new movement began in the early 1990s and
although it would have a worldwide impact, it developed mainly as a
national trend in certain countries. Perhaps the one that has had the
greatest impact has been the Iranian movement, with internationally
acclaimed directors like Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Jafar
Panahi. As will be discussed below, Iranian films have been among the
main sources of inspiration for the director of the film examined in this
article.
As noted above, the main point of reference for this type of film is the
work of Italian filmmakers such as Roberto Rosellini, Luchino Visconti
and Vittorio de Sica, who, after the end of World War II, by taking their
cameras out into the streets and forgetting the dead rules of conventional
film-making, come face to face with reality again (Armes 1971, 20).
Thus, the dramas were found on the streets of a Europe destroyed after the
war; all that was needed was the ability to observe this mutilated reality to
find the seeds of possible stories that told of the terrible consequences for
a society torn apart by military conflict. It must be said and herein lies
the main ongoing influence of Italian Neo-Realism these directors knew
how to approach reality the right way. They did this through a Realist style
that could both reproduce and represent reality on the screen in an
2
Scotts critique focuses mainly on productions released in 2008 and 2009, made,
among others, by So Yong Kim, Ramin Bahrani, Lance Hammer, Anna Boden,
Ryan Fleck and Kelly Riechardt.
Fernando Canet 271
the next decade. Bahrani himself acknowledges this influence through his
desire to make an Iranian-style movie here in New York.3
3
This quote is taken from an interview with Scott, and is quoted in Scotts article.
274 The New Realistic Trend in Contemporary World Cinema
friends and getting respect from adults to the point that, as the director
says, People in the Iron Triangle thought we were making a documentary
about Ale, a boy who worked there, because theyd really seen him
working there for so long. [Fig. 6.]
We can find the narrative of the child growing up on the street who has
to struggle with a hostile environment in Vittorio de Sicas Shoeshine
(Sciusci, 1946), Roberto Rossellinis Germany Year Zero (Germania
anno zero, 1948), and Luis Buuels Los Olvidados (The Forgotten Ones,
1950). As Bahrani himself recognizes, if [Luis Bunuels] Los Olvidados
were to be made today in America, it would be made here, referring to
Willets Point. Moreover, Ale reminds us of Alexandre Napoleon Ulysses
Latour in Flahertys Louisiana Story (1948), or, more recently, the leading
children in contemporary Iranian Realism, for instance, Ahmed in Abbas
Kiarostamis Where is the Friends Home? (1987), Mina in Jafar Panahis
The Mirror (1997), Massoumeh and Zahra Naderi in Samira
Makhmalbafs The Apple (1998), to name a few. All of these children are
real people from the reality that has been selected as subject, who are
picked out to become the protagonists of the plots developed in the film.
As Bazin notes (1971, 24), The non-professionals are naturally chosen for
their suitability for the part, either because they fit physically or because
there is some parallel between the role and their lives. Bazins words can
be applied to anybody, whether an adult or a child. In the specific case of
children, given their innocence and lower level of awareness of the
mechanism of filmmaking, their performance may prove much more
spontaneous and therefore more genuine. It is therefore no surprise that a
film genre that aims for naturalness in its representation should have a
preference for stories in which children are the protagonists.
Another hallmark that defines the Realist style is the focus on everyday
routine. As Bill Nichols notes (1991, 165), Realism builds upon a
presentation of things as they appear to the eye and the ear in everyday
life. Thus, in Chop Shop, through the point of view of Ale, the audience
can see how the characters break up, sand, polish and paint cars, change
tyres or lure customers to their shops and also show people in their time
off, having fun playing dice or enjoying barbecues, while the ever-present
Latin music can be heard blaring out in the background. As Bordwell
points out (2009), Chop Shop features a greater sense of dailiness.
278 The New Realistic Trend in Contemporary World Cinema
4
On characters goals, see Greg M. Smith, Film Structure and the Emotion System,
(Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Carl R. Plantinga, Moving Viewers:
American Film and the Spectator's Experience (University of California Press,
2009).
Fernando Canet 279
and so he works hard to save money to buy a van, which will be repaired
to convert it into a push cart to sell food on the street. From this emotional
turning-point to the end of the film, the characters situation goes from bad
to worse. As is very common in classical narrative, the crisis unfolds in the
climax, the peak dramatic moment, when Ale is faced with the most
emotionally charged situation.
Ale ultimately decides to face the situation involving Isamar. Having
so decided, he heads off again to the truck stop with the intention of
putting a stop to his sisters activity. The moment is filled with emotion,
mainly due to the fact that what is at stake for Ale is of vital importance to
him, because, as Ed S. Tan notes (2009, 44) without concerns, there can
be no emotion; conversely, emotion signifies that some concern of the
individual has been affected. At the same time, the scene seems real. And
this is due mainly to Bahranis style of direction. With the purpose of
eliciting an authentic reaction from Ale, Bahrani took advantage of an
incident that the youth had experienced when he was only nine years old.
At that age, he witnessed a murder that seriously disturbed him. Bahrani
thus took a fake gun and gave it to the man who was enjoying Isamar's
services, telling him to put it to Isamars head in order to add an element
of terror to the situation. The strategy achieved its aim, striking an
emotional chord in Ale. The anger provoked by his memory resulted in an
aggressive response to the man with the fake gun. As Bahrani (Richard
Porton 2008, 46) himself wonders: is Ales reaction acting or is it a
documentary reaction to an event? It doesnt matter. Theres only one
question that matters: does it work and is it a good story?
After this intense moment, Bahrani allows time to go by for the
situation to cool down. Time for both Ale and Isamar to reflect about their
situation; time to allow not only the external actions but also the internal
action of the characters to unfold. Time for what Robert Bresson calls
(1997) sculpting the invisible winds through the motion of waves; in
other words, to make visible what is invisible, in this case the emotions of
the characters. Thus, after the stormy night, the new day brings calm. With
the dawn, a hopeful situation arises. A moment charged with emotion for
the characters has passed, and reconciliation is extremely important to
both. As Nichols points out (1991, 155), emotional realism selects
aspects of a scene in accordance with their emotional importance to
characters. Just a few seconds are necessary to provoke this emotive
moment, for three main reasons: firstly, as already stated, what is at stake
for the characters is very important; secondly, after a series of negative
situations, the mood of the narrative needs to be broken with a positive one
(that is, after conflicts, a moment of pleasure is experienced at the end,
280 The New Realistic Trend in Contemporary World Cinema
start shaping the dialogues and actions, but also to begin structuring the
plot to be acted out by the three children in this reality chosen as the
context for the plot. Thus, in addition to allowing the children to begin
assuming their roles in the story and establishing the relationships between
them, the rehearsals helped them to begin adapting to the environment so
that to some extent they begin to feel part of the reality of Willets Point. At
the same time, the rehearsals were performed on camera, thereby
mitigating the dreaded camera effect. This is a key point, especially in
cases where the characters are being performed by non-professionals.
Thus, in Chop Shop the rehearsals also served to accustom the three
children to the film equipment so as to reduce their consciousness of its
presence during shooting. One of the essential purposes of all this
preliminary work is to achieve the highest degree of naturalness and
authenticity possible in the final product.
As Vertov believes, the only way to make the sequence more real is
precisely through spontaneity. Nonetheless, spontaneity was not the only
strategy that Bahrani used during shooting; control was also extremely
important. As Scott points out (2009), transparency, immediacy and a
sense of immersion in life are not the automatic results of turning on a
camera but rather effects achieved through the painstaking application of
craft. Thus, the camera movements, composition and details into the
frame were also adjusted and controlled by director and crew. Therefore,
another of the hallmarks of the Realist style is the tension between scripted
situations, which are acted out by the characters, and unscripted situations
that arise from the spontaneity of the moment. This is particularly true in
unstaged public scenes where the only controlled aspect is the action of the
main character. This happens in the scenes in which Ale and his friend,
Carlos sell candy on the subway, or when Ale is waiting for his sister on
the platform. In the first case, a small crew with a hand-held camera is the
only way to shoot the scene without altering the environment in which the
action unfolds. [Fig. 7.] In the second case, the effect is achieved by using
lenses in a selective approach that keeps Ale in focus at all times, even
though he often disappears into the crowd waiting for the train. [Fig. 8.]
Both scenes are especially reminiscent of the Neorealist scenes. As Roy
Armes (1971, 191) notes, streets, crowds and railway-stations, the
countryside and the sea all provide marvelously expressive backgrounds
for the film to use and the sense of life going on beyond the limits of the
frame is one of the great qualities of this new cinema. Bazin, (2004, 313)
referring to such scenes, said: The subtlety and flexibility of the camera
movements in these tight and crowded spaces, and the natural behavior of
282 The New Realistic Trend in Contemporary World Cinema
all persons in frame, are the main reasons that make these scenes the
highlights of Italian cinema.
Conclusion
Chop Shop is a film that exemplifies the rebirth in the last two decades
of a Realist trend in contemporary world cinema based on a belief in the
ontological power of reality. This is the seed of the story, which is
nurtured and grown through the contact that its author has with this reality
throughout the creative process. Moreover, this reality is the real
background in which the plot unfolds. And this reality can also become the
foreground of the film, and can even change the plot during shooting.
Thus, the tension between reality and fiction is one of the key aspects of
Realism. Indeed, the question of how to integrate fiction into the real
world without undermining the viewers impression of reality is one of the
main concerns of cinematic Realism, as the foremost purpose of this type
of cinema is to make the film look real. To achieve this, filmmakers apply
the Realist style, a set of conventions and norms which tell the story in the
context of the real world, using devices that are closer historically to the
documentary genre and which allow the reproduction of reality so that
what is filmed doesnt seem staged, but has the appearance of life
unfolding before the camera. I refer here to the documentarys impulse for
attaining that utopia of authenticity: making the film look real. On the
other hand, this style also involves the dramatisation of reality using
devices from fiction to achieve character engagement (on this topic see the
work of cognitive film theorists, especially Murray Smith [2004], Nol
Carroll [2007], and Amy Coplans works [2009]), which is central to the
spectators emotional response to a film. The proper balance between
these two devices is crucial to the success of the Realist approach to
reality, since the more realistic the effect achieved in the film, the truer the
emotions that surface on the screen.
References
Andrew, Dudley, ed. 2011. Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and its
Afterlife. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Armes, Roy. 1971. Patterns of Realism. A Study of Italian Neo-Realist
Cinema. New York: A.S. Barmes.
Auerbach, Erich. 1946. Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western
Literature. Bern: Francke.
Fernando Canet 283
the instant (Godard 1958, 2). The Swedish director demonstrated not only
the desire to use the cinematographic means in virtue of its fundamental
ability to mold time, but also and above all, of the possibility it offers to
subject time to a continuous metamorphosis which captures it qualitatively
and develops it quantitatively by acquiring, mastering, and giving new
meaning to conventional and proven narrative structures (for example, the
flashback) and to a spatial dimension involving the mise-en-scne and the
shots, above all of the face. This paper is based on the conviction that,
even though Bergmans films are populated with figures who embody
Time (in particular, the representation of Death, a pervasive presence in
the Swedish directors filmography), the focal point of a reflection on the
possibility of analyzing temporality in film lies in how the body and, more
specifically, the face are represented.
Jacques Aumont suggests that Ingmar Bergmans mature filmmaking
phase coincided with his invention of forms showing the process of
possession and abstraction of the face, which no longer refers to a purely
physical dimension but also embodies a subsequent level of the persons
alteration. To Aumont, Bergman perfected these staging techniques of
close-ups and full close-ups in his tetralogy of films shot on the island of
Fr characterized by his study of neurosis in its relation to the mental
image, establishing a parallel between practices of stylization and
abstraction aimed at defining a limit of the subjective and memory-based
dimension (represented by qualitative time), and its relationship with a
spatial dimension as characteristic as that of the close-up (Aumont 2003,
170).
Bergmans creation consisted in perfecting what Aumont defined as
the hyper-close-up, in which the identifying form of a person (the face)
is spatially constrained within the edges of the frame, thus liberating its
clarity and expressivity (Aumont 2003, 170). [Fig. 1.] The Swedish
filmmakers opus progressively distanced itself from psychologizing ways
of representing the human face and created a new way of staging the
spatiality of the actors body that also influenced the temporal dimension.
Two frames are emblematic of the evolution in Bergmans use of the
close-up in his reflections on time: the first features Maj-Britt Nilson (in
the role of Mrta) and is taken from Waiting Women (Kvinnor vntan,
1952); the second is from Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop, 1972)
and shows Liv Ullmann (in the role of Maria) visiting her bedridden sister
in Agness resurrection scene. [Figs. 23.] The narrative, psychological
dimension prevails in Waiting Women; on the other hand, Cries and
Whispers is based on the juxtaposition and clash between the
deconstruction of the story and the characters, and the intensification of
Fabio Pezzetti Tonion 287
Figures 14. Close-ups in Persona (1966), Waiting Women (1952), Cries and
Whispers (1972), and Winter Light (1963).
288 The Sensation of Time in Bergmans Poetics of Bodies and Minds
It also occurs in the close-up of Mrta reading the letter in Winter Light
(Nattvardsgsterna, 1963), a close-up which blends together not just
different temporalities but different experiential situations as well (that of
Mrta and that of Tomas Ericsson). Thus, faced with what can technically
be considered two equivalent planes, Bergman introduced a sideslip which
tempers the passage from one form of mise-en-scne to another and
renders time visible through close-ups of the face (cf. Aumont 1992, 100).
[Fig. 4.]
The method used by Bergman to make time perceptible is to insist on
the body, denuding it through a process of painful unveiling which is often
accompanied by monologues, with the character gazing at the mirror
image of his own conscience or that of others. A mirror which is not only
metaphorical, since it becomes the tangible and privileged object in which
the characters reflect themselves and reflect on themselves. The mirror is
the instrument which separates face from body, isolating it. It enables one
to choose the unique, identitary cipher of the body, isolating it and
insisting on it: in Bergmans films, the face becomes a sensorial space on
which the directors camera registers the passing of the instants. But, in his
films, images of the face are not always accompanied by the use of a
mirror: this might be the instrument which thematizes the use of the face,
but its function is, in fact, to focus the gaze on what is being reflected. An
equivalency can be established between the techniques used to stage the
reflected image of the characters (which doubles the subjects, making
them unstable, forcing them to confront themselves) and that of the full-
face close-up shot of the characters. Thus, just like a mirror offers its own
evidence to the person looking into it, the full-face shot offers the
spectator the naked evidence of the character, providing a mirror-effect
which tends to reflect a vision of pure time, objectively correlated to a
distressing idea of mortality, of impending death.
Winter Light is perhaps the most evident example of this practice. In
this film, Bergman proposes interesting stylistic features in his portrayal of
temporality: the long scene in which the letter is re-cited by Mrta
Lundberg is, in the body-time of the film, a moment of otherness which,
rather than interrupting the chronologically linear dimension of the film
and its unity of time-place-action, indicates instead a possible and concrete
elsewhere. That is, Bergman creates a double level of temporality, a fringe
of the past that becomes crystallized in the present and places it under
constant tension. Through this tension, he makes time manifest: it is as
though he can visualize time and make it perceptible in the concrete
experience of its flow. Regarding the relationship of cinema with time and
becoming, Paolo Bertetto writes that the filmic image is [] a moving
Fabio Pezzetti Tonion 289
image which shows the flows of things in space and time, produced by the
mise-en-scne; these images are able to also show in a clear manner the
temporal character of people and things. Everything that is visible appears
in a temporal articulation and the things are distributed along the
temporality of the flow. The moving image, therefore, very clearly
articulates the procedural fluidity and the spatial transfer of things, as well
as the temporal character of the flow, of its state of being chronos
(Bertetto 2010, 159160).
An austere and stringent film, Winter Light marks a radical break in
Ingmar Bergmans cinematographic style: striving for intense stylistic
perfection that revolves round the aesthetic pole of realism (Donner
1970, 119), forced into the three unities of time, place, and action, the
film nonetheless tends toward a dimension of the abstraction of
phenomenological reality which finds particular relevance in the
filmmakers pondered use of the close-up and its associated temporality.
In fact, even when the mise-en-scne disallows the close-up, it is evoked
by its very absence, as in the long scene in which the body of Jonas
Persson, who committed suicide, is found. Filmed as a long shot bearing
detached and objective witness, the scene depicts the impossibility of
communication between individuals. [Fig. 5.]
Figure 5. Winter Light (1963): a close-up evoked by its very absence. Figure 6.
The pain, in its visual effects on the body, marks the inexorable passage of time
which consumes and destroys.
inevitable focal point of a plane which tends to annul itself in the void): to
the characters in this film, time is pain; in fact, if the objective use of space
contributes to creating a feeling of isolation, the subjective perception of
time highlights the crisis of the present, which is full of suffering and
doubt.
Bergman, through his work on space and the actors body, achieved a
more aware and mature confrontation with the possibilities of representing
time. Time becomes flesh, it assumes a physical, emotional, and spiritual
concreteness in bodies whose actions and decay are brazenly flaunted by
the director. [Fig. 6.] The many ill characters (in whom the illness
undermining the physique is also the metaphor of an infirmity of the soul
and refers to a spiritual dimension that is able to transcend the confessional
and religious limits which have often been used to interpret Bergmans
cinema) populating his films embody a private pain which is often viewed
as universal. This pain, in its visual effects on the body, marks the
inexorable passage of time which consumes and destroys, and which often
does not even leave the illusory comfort of memory, because even
memories are often bent to a logic of lies which reflects the inevitable
moral, relational, and human defeat of the characters. The pastor Tomas
Ericsson is emblematic of this approach; he constructs a fictitious memory
that is a far cry from the reality of his personal relationship with his
defunct wife. The inability to accept the painful evidence of the failure of
human and emotional relationships is the theme of Cries and Whispers, a
film which is entirely constructed on the resurfacing of memories which
are irreconcilable with the defensive reality which the protagonists have
tried to erect around themselves.
Mrta Lundbergs blistered hands in Winter Light, Esters body
wracked by consumption in The Silence (Tystnaden, 1963), and Agness
cancer-riddled body in Cries and Whispers are only a few of the most
obvious examples of an opus that is able to render the physicality of pain
concrete and perceptible, of the mise-en-scne of bodies consumed by time
and consecrated to consuming themselves in death. This ability of
Bergman is even more exceptional if one takes into account that these
three films belong to the period in his career during which he consciously
espoused techniques of explicit stylization. If the mise-en-scne tends
toward sobriety in the adopted solutions, these solutions insist on the
actors (the true measure of Bergmans cinema), exalting their possibilities
and capturing (and transfiguring) their physical concreteness. Thanks to
his experience in the theatre (where what counts is the here and now of the
unrepeatable presence of a body determined by time and performing
within a space), Bergman transferred to his films an awareness of their
Fabio Pezzetti Tonion 291
clearly reveals the theoretic deviation which the filmmaker would imprint
on his opus from then on. Wild Strawberries is the laboratory in which he
experiments in depth with possible ways to render the constant fluctuation
between the quantitative and the qualitative dimensions in how time is
experienced. For example, observe how his flashbacks have more than just
an evident dramaturgical function; they are also endowed with an added
significance because his structuring of the film creates a virtual confusion
in its temporal levels. In other words, Bergman gives the flashback a
double role: it ferries the story from one temporal dimension to another,
dimensions which are nonetheless characterized by a quantitative acceptance
(time which has passed, which can be measured), and, at the same time, it
creates a fracture in the chronological dimension, into which he inserts the
qualitative experience of time. Moreover, in Wild Strawberries, Bergman
begins to consciously display his own desire to create a type of cinema
which studies the possibility of comprehending the many levels of reality:
in fact, the filmmaker held that if cinema can pay attention to a strictly
phenomenological dimension of reality (through a mechanism that exploits
the illusion), it can also create a surreal dimension. In other words, a
dimension that contains phenomenological reality, but which is difficult to
perceive. This highlighting of the surreal derives from cinemas ability to
deal with a plurality of times, above all with qualitative times which define
the experiential horizon of the characters.
Let us now consider the construction of the film, Hour of the Wolf, in
order to try to understand how Bergmans work on temporality led to the
re-definition of a particular type of film image which is characterized by
its relationship to the ambiguous dimension of fantastic temporality. This
re-definition is a type of confirmation, an institutionalization of a
constitutive process whose traces can be found in past experiments since,
as Jacques Aumont notes, already with Persona Bergman invents a new
statute of the filmic image: no longer an indication, a trace which is
ontologically coupled to the appearance of reality, no longer fantasies or
pure extravaganza, but rather the enchanted realism of interior images
(Aumont 2003, 161162).
Hour of the Wolf, which is born in a dimension of problematic and
hallucinated realism, which develops in the ambiguous confrontation of
the realities of the two protagonists (Johan and his wife Alma), which
clashes and concludes with a horrific dimension that has almost an
expressionist matrix, takes the intuitions of Persona and pushes them
toward the outer limit of obscurity. The light treatment in this film is
carefully calibrated: the characters are engulfed and swallowed up by
darkness, and light is constantly battling obscurity. Moreover, when light
Fabio Pezzetti Tonion 295
After the sequence described above, a sharp cut presents us with Johan
wandering through the corridors of von Merkenss castle. Here he
encounters various characters he had previously met and who now present
themselves with their spectral and fantastic attributes: the Baron walks on
the walls and the ceiling; Lindhorst takes on the guise of an enormous bird
after conducting Borg to the door of Veronica Voglers room; Veronica
appears to be dead but then she reawakens, as all the guests of the castle
observe her and Johan, and laugh. It is the moment of the final and
definitive confession (in a film which is constructed like a continuous
confession), when the masks fall. But the confession is interior, it takes
place in the intimacy of the mans mind, which has come unhinged; he
now only sees what he wants to see. This is made clear by the way time is
treated: after the end of this sequence of painful humiliation, there is a cut
and we return to Alma as she starts telling her story once again to an
invisible listener. The woman says that after Johan shot at her, he left the
house but returned a few minutes later and then wrote in his diary for
hours. Thus, there is a temporal incongruence between the sequence in the
castle and the womans story. Therefore, what we saw is a form of time
which depicts the temporal dimension of the mans interiority. And this
300 The Sensation of Time in Bergmans Poetics of Bodies and Minds
References
Aumont, Jacques. 1992. Du visage au cinma [Face in the Cinema]. Paris:
Editions de lEtoile/Cahiers du Cinma.
. 2003. Ingmar Bergman. Mes films sont lexplication de mes images.
[Ingmar Bergman. My Films Are the Explanation of My Images.]
Paris: Cahiers du Cinma.
Branger, Jean. 1957. Les trois mtamorphoses dIngmar Bergman [The
Three Metamorphoses of Ingmar Bergman]. Cahiers du Cinma No.
74 (August/September): 1928.
Bertetto, Paolo. 2010. La macchina del cinema [The Machine of Cinema].
Roma-Bari: Laterza.
Donner, Jrn. 1970. Ingmar Bergman. Paris: Editions Seghers.
Douchet, Jean. 1959. Linstant privilgi [The Pregnant Moment]. Cahiers
du Cinma No. 95 (May): 5153.
Estve, Michel. 1966. Nattvardgsterna (Les Communiants) ou le silence
de Dieu [Nattvardgsterna (The Communicants) or the Silence of
God]. tudes cinmatographiques No. 4647 (1st trimester).
Gervais, Marc. 1999. Ingmar Bergman. Magician and Prophet. Montreal
& Kingston/London/Ithaca: McGill-Quenns University Press.
Godard, Jean-Luc. 1958. Bergmanorama. Cahiers du Cinma No. 85
(July): 15.
Hoveyda, Fereydoun. 1959. Le plus grand anneau de la spirale [The
Largest Ring of the Spiral]. Cahiers du Cinma No. 95 (May): 4047.
Narboni, Jean. 1967. Ingmar Bergman: Le festin de laraigne [The Feast
of Blood]. Cahiers du Cinma No. 193 (September): 3441.
Neyrat, Cyril. 2007. Le dompteur de dmons [The Tamer of Demons].
Cahiers du Cinma. Hors-srie: 1113.
Rohmer, Eric. 1956. Prsentation dIngmar Bergman [Presentation of
Ingmar Bergman]. Cahiers du Cinma No. 61 (July): 79.
Steene, Birgitta. 2005. Ingmar Bergman. A Reference Guide. Amsterdam:
302 The Sensation of Time in Bergmans Poetics of Bodies and Minds
KATALIN SNDOR
1
This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of National
Education, CNCS UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-ID-PCE-2012-4-0573.
304 Own Deaths
2
Streitberger and van Gelder point out that with the advent of digital technology,
the boundaries between the photographic and the filmic image are constantly
blurred, both technically in drawing on the same software and hardware
engineering and perceptively in leaving the spectator in doubt of the
(photographic or filmic) nature of the image (2010, 48). Therefore they agree
with David Greens view according to which the distinctions between the filmic
and the photographic, between the moving and the still image [] will wither in
the face of these profound shifts in the complex technology of the visual (Green,
quoted in Streitberger van Gelder 2010, 48).
3
Sobchack following Ryan Bishops and John Phillipss approach perceives
slowness not as qualitatively opposed to speed, but as a relative category: thus
slow and fast should be regarded as relative powers of the single category
speed. (Bishop Philips quoted in Sobchack 2006, 338.) For Sobchack slow
and fast are not abstractions: as relative powers, they are always beholden for
their specific ascription not only to each other but also to the embodied and
situated subjects who sense them as such (2006, 338).
306 Own Deaths
4
The book was first published in German (2002), and then in Hungarian (2004).
Katalin Sndor 307
5
Orsolya Milin considers that these white spaces are the visible, typographic
breaths of the text that relate to the narrators breaths or loss of air, to the
interruptions of the fragmented narrative or to the invisible breathing and
temporality of reading itself (2007, 9293).
6
The universe as sensual phenomenon is entirely familiar while it remains
beyond reach for concepts [] With a life rich in conceptual thinking behind me, I
look back at what, for lack of concepts, I cannot think, since it happens for the first
time. (Ndas 2006, 211.)
308 Own Deaths
7
A vast amount of literature deals with the relationship between photography and
death: Roland Barthes, Andr Bazin, Hans Belting, Susan Sontag etc. to mention
only a few.
8
In Hans Beltings anthropological approach photographs do not render the world
but rather our gaze cast at it. Thus a photograph is actually a medium between two
gazes, two looks: the one recorded by the photo and our own way of looking at it
(Belting 2011, 145167).
Katalin Sndor 309
Figures 12. Photographs, white spaces, isolated sentences folding unto each
other. (Pter Ndas: Own Death.)
The unnamable in Own Death is not only a thematic issue (e. g. related
to body, illness, death) but also the unsaid, the unspeakable within
language. The book format does not only speak about the loss of concepts,
about the narrators reluctance to reestablish social orientation, about his
desire for the ungraspable such as the memory of a perfume or the
experience of some lack and absence, but the large white spaces, the
empty pages visualize silence, amplify interruption and rupture within
representation itself. The photographs resist any caption, and their presence
cannot be domesticated by adjusting them to the logic of the text. The
interrupted sentences of the text, the interruptions themselves, as well as
the non-semantic but meaningfully quiet, airy white spaces withholding
the words (or taking a breath), the continual return and the displacement
of the photographs can be addressed as an instance of sensable
intermediality exposing the book as a corpus working through the otherness
of the body, through the unnamable experience of (dis)embodiment and
passing.
9
The film won the Grand Prize for Experimental Films at the 2008 Hungarian
Film Week.
10
In the English version of the film the text is recited by Peter Meikle Moor.
Katalin Sndor 311
11
A double vision that comes almost inevitably with my profession often
impaired my sense of reality, and so I had to be on guard against my own
perception. (Ndas 2006, 93.) It proved to be an amusing little advantage, useful
in interpretation, that in my previous life I had been not only a writer dealing with
the value and evaluation of words, but also a photographer who deals with the
nature of light. (Ndas 2006, 221.)
12
My other self wanted to have firm control over this delicate matter. (Ndas
2006, 93.)
312 Own Deaths
image throughout the film) occupying the whole frame, shown while the
mother of all narrations (Ndas 2006, 169), Polymnia is evoked in the
text to help the narrator cross the Styx.13 The film, while exploring figures
of proximity and touch through a camera palpating the pores or the
sweat of the skin, also adopts the perspective of double or multiple vision,
of detachment, of gentle irony or reflexivity in dealing with the in-
betweenness of birth and death or in reinterpreting certain cultural and
literary metaphors, quotes or concepts. The text reflecting on passing, on
exit, on the moment of leaving ones life is accompanied by the eroticism
of slowness, delay, and partial disclosure in the found footage (?) showing
the process of pulling down the zipper on a womans dress.14
Figures 34. Text-layers on the image: suspending the transparency of the film.
Figures 56. In-between image and text, pain and pleasure: the slow sequence of
pulling down a zipper accompanying the text about leaving ones life.
13
Mother of all narrations, Polymnia, hear my plea, let me cross the Styx with
common words. (Ndas 2006, 169.)
14
Ndas writes about the ambiguous commensurability of the experience of
totality with religious or amorous ecstasy: You are granted an experience of
totality to which, in this vale of tears, only the ecstasy of religion or love can come
close. And probably giving birth, for women. The more courageous of them will
tell you that in those moments pain and pleasure melt into each other, turning the
whole thing into a great cosmic, erotic adventure. (Ndas 2006, 201.)
Katalin Sndor 313
15
According to Scott Macdonald, Forgcss film is formally reminiscent of
Markers La Jete (Macdonald 2011, 8).
314 Own Deaths
Figures 78. Blurred images mediating the disturbance of vision and exposing the
medium in its opacity.
16
Laura Mulvey uses the terms film or filmic in a somewhat different way
with a media-referential meaning when she discusses film time and cinema
time: This affects the opposition between film time, the inscription of an image
onto the still frames of celluloid, and cinema time, the structure of significance
and flow that constitutes the temporal aesthetic of any movie, fiction or
documentary. Usually, the second conceals the first, but when the forward
movement is halted the balance changes. The time of the films original moment of
registration can suddenly burst through its narrative time. (2006, 3031.) Cf. sie
funktioniert einmal kinematographisch, also medien-referentiell auf die
Fotografie bezogen, und filmisch, indem sie tematisch-sujethafte Aspekte
(mentale Aufmerksamkeitsstrungen z. B.) formuliert (Paech 2008, 350).
Katalin Sndor 315
Figures 1718. A hand opening a window: the visual paradox of stillness in/of
motion.
17
There was no air in the air: that was my problem. (Ndas 2006, 91.)
318 Own Deaths
images of the film show the moments of a birth. The slow motion black
and white shots do not document the biological moment of coming into
life: the monochromatic quality and the slowness of the images
denaturalize and de-mystify the body and the moment of birth (shown as
both amazing and violent). The scene is exposed as the image of life and
birth to look at in a film in which a body is about to deliver its death,
resembling nevertheless a re-birth into the (cosmic) impersonality of
being.
In the book the narrator alludes to Andrea Mantegnas painting,
Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c. 14801490), which is well-known
not only for the famous foreshortened perspective but also for the close-
up aspect of the image of the body in which even the hardened, dried skin
around the wounds is visible, showing not an ethereal but an embodied,
human, physical body of Christ. In Ndass Mantegna-allusion the
perspective is inversed; the narrator is looking out on himself in an almost
grotesque perspectival foreshortening (Ndas 2006, 231). This visual
experience is linked through the figure of double vision to the
techniques of observation: to photographic seeing and the awareness of an
imagined camera-position beyond the conceptual world, higher than his
own actual position, a distance that articulates the visual experience of the
own body or subjectivity as other. The narratorial position and the
modality of self-perception are shaped by a technical apparatus of seeing
that requires distance and points to the unavoidably mediated aspect of the
liminal experience. In the book the Mantegna-allusion is rethought not
only in relation to the technical-photographic mode of observation but also
in relation to medical discourses and technologies that ultimately
reanimate the body: They have burned the stamp of reanimation into the
very flesh of my chest (Ndas 2006, 255). Cultural, religious, and
medical discourses intersect in the almost palpable textual figure of the
burnt seal on the body, the imprint of a technically assisted, secular
resuscitation. The film also incorporates the Mantegna-allusion and its
inverse: the painting is re-enacted through bodies and through photo-filmic
images. [Figs. 1920.] The head is not fully visible whereas in Mantegnas
work the composition, the foreshortening leads to the head of Christ (and
according to some also to his genitalia). The partial, distorted, blurred re-
enactment of the painting can also be linked to the secularizing re-
appropriation of the iconographic and cultural tradition in which the carnal
and the filmic body are the media of re-animation. Due to the unusual
perspective and the significance of foreshortening, the Mantegna-allusion
foregrounds the interconnectedness of viewpoint, representation and self-
Katalin Sndor 319
Figures 1920. The re-enactment of Mantegnas Dead Christ through the medium
of the body and film.
18
The foundation is a unique collection of amateur films founded by Forgcs
himself in 1983.
320 Own Deaths
References
Belting, Hans. 2011. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body.
Princeton University Press.
Borbly Szilrd. 2007. tbillenni, tbukni, tfordulni, levlni... (Lers
Ndas Pter Sajt hall cm knyvrl) [To Tilt Over, to Tumble
Over, to Turn Over, to Peel Off]. In Testre szabott let. rsok
Ndas Pter Sajt hall s Prhuzamos trtnetek cm mveirl
[Customized Life. Writings About Pter Ndass Own Death and
Parallel Stories], ed. Rcz I. Pter, 4064. Budapest: Kijrat.
Kiss Nomi. 2007. A fotogrfia, az let negatvja [Photography, the
Negative of Life]. In Testre szabott let. rsok Ndas Pter Sajt hall
s Prhuzamos trtnetek cm mveirl [Customized Life. Writings
About Pter Ndass Own Death and Parallel Stories], ed. Rcz I.
Pter, 7991. Budapest: Kijrat.
Macdonald, Scott. 2011. Pter Forgcs. An Interview. In Cinemas
Alchemist. The Films of Pter Forgcs, eds. Bill Nichols and Michael
Renov, 338. Minneapolis London: University of Minnesota Press.
Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema,
Embodiment and the Senses. DurhamLondon: Duke University Press.
19
Bellours helpful and inspiring term pensive spectator and the way Mulvey
uses it emphasizes rather the intellectual, cerebral aspect of the spectatorial
activity.
322 Own Deaths
JUDIT PIELDNER
1
This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of National
Education, CNCS UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-ID-PCE-2012-4-0573.
2
I use here Tom Gunnings (1992) term referring to early films character of
displaying a series of images rather than narrating stories, arousing the wonder and
astonishment of the spectators through the power of representation.
3
It was the fascination of the unconditioned spectacle that determined the
spectatorial experience of the legendary film entitled Arrival of a Train at La
Ciotat (lArrive dun train en gare de La Ciotat, Auguste Lumire and Louis
Lumire, 1895).
324 Remediating Past Images
Bdy.4 The set of images I recall are damaged, deteriorated, grainy from
the outset, situated on the boundary between assertion and erasure,
transparence and opacity, representation and dissolution [Figs. 12]. It is
these (non-)images, however, that redeem the auratic quality of cinema in
the age of technical reproduction as carriers of embodied perception, of an
intimate, private connection with the cinematic image.
4
Gbor Bdy (19461985), charismatic figure of the Hungarian filmmaking of the
1970s and 1980s, created his first films in the Bla Balzs Studio; he was the first
to direct films in the BBS already before graduating the College of Theatre and
Film Art. He founded the Film Language Series, the first experimental film project
of the studio, then he created his diploma film, American Torso (Amerikai anzix,
1975). He presented himself in front of the large public with his feature film
Narcissus and Psyche (Nrcisz s Psych, 1980), a screen adaptation expanded
into a self-reflexive and intermedial hypernarrative. On his initiative the first
international video magazine was founded; he established the experimental section
of the MAFILM. He held lectures on film theory; in his theoretical writings he
elaborated his views on serialism and the attribution of meaning in motion picture.
He himself acted the main role of his third and last feature film entitled Dogs
Night Song (Kutya ji dala, 1983), characterized by manifold generic and
intermedial transgressions.
326 Remediating Past Images
5
As for the difference between archival footage and found footage, I resort to
Michael Zyrds distinction: The found footage film is a specific subgenre of
experimental (or avant-garde) cinema that integrates previously shot film material
into new productions. The etymology of the phrase suggests its devotion to
uncovering hidden meanings in film material. [] Found footage is different
from archival footage: the archive is an official record from the outtake; much of
the material used in experimental found footage films is not archived but from
private collections, commercial stock shot agencies, junk stores and garbage bins,
or has literally been found in the street. Found footage filmmakers play at the
margins, whether with the obscurity of the ephemeral footage itself (filmmaker
Nathaniel Dorsky likes to call it lost footage) or with the countercultural
meanings excavated from culturally iconic footage. Found footage filmmaking is a
metahistorical form commenting on the cultural discourses and narrative patterns
behind history. Whether picking through the detritus of the mass mediascape or
redefining (through image processing and optical printing) the new in the familiar,
the found footage artist critically investigates the history behind the image,
discursively embedded within its history of production, circulation, and
consumption. (Zyrd 2003, 4142.)
Judit Pieldner 327
6
It has to be noted here that documentary consciousness, as Vivian Sobchack puts
it, goes beyond the generic distinction between fiction and documentary; the terms
fiction and documentary designate subjective relations rather than cinematic
objects. In Toward a Phenomenology of Nonfictional Film Experience she defines
documentary as less a thing than an experience and the term names not only a
cinematic object, but also the experienced difference or sufficiency of a specific
mode of consciousness and identification with the cinematic image (Sobchack
1999, 241, emphases in the original). In the chapter entitled The Charge of the
Real. Embodied Knowledge and Cinematic Consciousness of her volume Carnal
Thoughts. Embodiment and Moving Image Culture she thinks further the
phenomenological model of cinematic identification, stating that fiction and
documentary, as supposedly different logical types as genres, are reducible to the
same logical types as cinematic images (Sobchack 2004, 260, emphases in the
original). Thus what Sobchack calls the charge of the real is not particularly
related to documentary as a genre, but it is the specificity of the phenomenological
experience of the cinema.
Judit Pieldner 329
the part of one of the protagonists (Lszl Fldes acting the role of the
other) and he was also the script-writer of the film. The young agitator
whose role is acted by Bdy asks the question in the heat of the party
debate: What kind of reality? [Mifle valsg?] this question will echo
for long in Hungarian film history, significantly determining, together with
the double-coded reflections on the dialectics of theory and practice,
politics and art, revolution and counter-revolution, also the evolution of
the trend of experimental documentarism as well as of Bdys career as a
filmmaker.
In the disguise of the historical film dealing with a controversial
episode of Hungarian history, namely the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic,
the Agitators provides a profound analysis of the model of revolution at
an abstract level, applicable to further examples of revolution in the
twentieth century. In line with the historical theme, Dezs Magyars film
includes indexical archival material, but with a subversive stance: the
ideological purport of the film is juxtaposed with figures of the second
publicity, artists and intellectuals of the end of the 1960s, and presented
in such an excessive, exaggerated way that it becomes the target of its own
criticism. The film material is elaborated in the style of the embedded
archival material, revealing the intent of offering the film as if it had been
recorded in 1919. Thus, a peculiar interaction is created between the actual
film recordings and the inserted indexical archival material, undermining
the grand narrative and ideological discourse of the historical past;
recording the film in the style of the archival material releases a potential
of creative freedom that will inseminate films to come, also including
Gbor Bdys experimenting with film language and attribution of
meaning.
The remediation of found/archival footage will be central to Gbor
Bdys reflexive-analytical filmmaking and film-theoretical thinking.
Moved also by the ethical responsibility of preservation, but more
intensely by the film language researchers curiosity, he turns towards
found footage as a suitable means with the help of which the very nature
of the moving image can be analysed, and also as a peculiar material
suitable to displace the passive, uneventful spectatorial gaze. In my paper I
wish to argue that it is the very usage of found footage and fake found
footage that brings Bdys conceptualization close to an inherent sensuous
theory of the film experience.
On a careful re-reading of Bdys theoretical writings on film, we can
discover references to a hidden, underlying sensuous approach to the
cinematic experience. Besides the linguistic and semiotic approaches to
film in line with the leading theories of the age, there is a covert
Judit Pieldner 331
7
The translations from Bdys texts and other Hungarian essays are my own
throughout the article.
332 Remediating Past Images
8
We can encounter an archaeological orientation and ardent interest in the origins
in Bdys theoretical writings; in his writing entitled Infinite Image and Reflection
he writes: It is evident that the farther we advance in time, the closer we get to the
origins with our continuously changing intellect. (Zaln 2006, 120.)
Judit Pieldner 333
Figures 34. Light cutting the auratic quality of the disappearing image
film: After all, was it not cinema that invented empty shots, strange
angles, bodies alluringly fragmented or shot in close-up? The fragmentation
of figures is a well-known cinematic device, and there has been much
analysis of the monstrosity of the close-up. Deframing is a less widespread
effect, in spite of movement of the camera. But if deframing is an
exemplary cinematic effect, it is precisely because of movement and the
diachronic progress of the films images, which allow for its absorption
into the film as much as for the deployment of its emptiness effect.
(Bonitzer 2000, 199.)
Figures 78. The clash of immediacy and hypermediacy of experience in the non-
identical superimposition of the cross-hairs of the theodolite and the image of the
cross.
9
In her study (Re)Mediating the Real. Paradoxes of an Intermedial Cinema of
Immediacy gnes Peth discusses types and cases when the cinematic image
simultaneously triggers both the immediacy and hypermediacy of experience and
points at the ways the most transparent techniques can also end up as
remediations (2009, 47).
338 Remediating Past Images
10
In my view, the return to the pre-cinematic age through the use of fake found
footage connects Bdys interest in the gaze, in the relationship between the gaze
and the medium, to the paradigm shift taking place in the nineteenth century from
classical optics to the making of the observer: The notion of a modernist visual
revolution depends on the presence of a subject with a detached viewpoint from
which modernism whether as style, as cultural resistance, or as ideological
practice can be isolated against the background of a normative vision. (Crary
1992, 45.)
Judit Pieldner 339
In the process of redirecting the gaze to the reality of the medium, the
moving image becomes a writable surface, welcoming the film director as
a land surveyor, a cartographer of the cinematic medium [Figs. 1112].
Ultimately, Bdys torso experiment, compromising the idea of the
wholeness and integrity of the images, calls forth an embodied perception of
the cinema.
340 Remediating Past Images
Conclusions
By now, the experimental endeavours of the 1970s and 1980s have
become themselves archival documents of the cinema preceding the digital
era, transmitting a sense of mythical origins for todays altered media
culture. Gbor Bdys work, labelled as a torso, has become the
legendary non-perfect film of Hungarian cinema history. Interestingly, the
experimentation with the cinematic imaginary, the exploration of the non-
existent archives of Hungarian historical consciousness, manifests as the
confrontation of the medium with its subconscious, while a decade later,
overseas experimentations with actual found footage, as present in Ken
Jacobs experimental filmmaking practice, will be labelled as downright
the Perfect Film, suggesting a distinct approach to the role found footage
may fulfil in cinematic experience.11
Through the poetics of fake found footage formulated in American Torso
Gbor Bdy challenges (film-)historical consciousness, pointing at the
unreflected ways in which mainstream historical films create under the
slogan of authentic representations of reality/history totally inauthentic
fictitious narratives. As Klra Muhi writes about the film: It is evident that
behind all destructive gestures and generic denials of the Torso there is the
fight for the authenticity of the image. This unique experiment in an
otherwise not too fruitful moment of film history can be connected to
Bdys ambition to release film from under the rule of genres, of image
recording confined into rigid clichs, as well as of the destructive daily
practice of faceless, industrial filmmaking (Muhi 1999). Thus the
archaeological intent present in Bdys experiment resists the obligatory
representational modes of official history and reveals a more intimate
relationship with both the historical past and the history of the cinematic
medium itself. By evoking the virtual images of the past or time-images in
the Deleuzian sense of the term, the film reorders our sense of the past by
reconfiguring the sense of presence of the medium. Besides the historical
consciousness that American Torso appeals to, the film also urges us to
rearrange our expectations and perceptual modes, to accept the invitation
that Laura U. Marks formulates as thinking like a carpet,12 that is, the
11
See Ken Jacobss Perfect Film (1985), a film actually composed of found film
reels, about which Tom Gunning (2009) says: In uncovering meanings that were
never intended to be revealed, Jacobs enters an uncanny dimension of the cinema
akin to psychoanalysis.
12
Thus our bodies can indeed respond to non-figurative works, like carpets with
shock and a feeling of coming undone. We may feel ourselves being rearranged,
becoming less molar and more molecular; we may feel ourselves as masses of
Judit Pieldner 341
References
Anderson, Steve F. 2011. Technologies of History: Visual Media and the
Eccentricity of the Past. University Press of New England.
Ballhausen, Thomas. 2008. On the History and Function of Film Archives.
http://www.efgproject.eu/downloads/Ballhausen%20-
%20On%20the%20History%20and%20Function%20of%20Film%20A
rchives.pdf. (Last accessed 11. 04. 2014.)
Barthes, Roland. 1981. [1980.] Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography.
New York: Hill and Wang.
Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. 2000. Remediation. Understanding
New Media. Cambridge, MA London: The MIT Press.
Bonitzer, Pascal. 2000 [1978]. Deframings. In Cahiers du Cinema.
Volume Four: 19731978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle, ed.
David Wilson, 196203. London and New York: Routledge.
Crary, Jonathan. 1988. Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and
Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, Massachussets
London: MIT Press.
Forgcs va. 1994. Az ellopott pillanat. [The Stolen Moment.] Ars Longa
series. Pcs: Jelenkor.
Gelencsr Gbor. 2004. nagyonfilmezk. [Directors Filming Themselves
to Death.] In N/ma? Tanulmnyok a magyar neoavantgrd krbl
[N/ma? Studies on the Hungarian Neo-Avant-Garde], eds. Pl Derky
and Andrs Mllner, 205226. Budapest: Rci.
Gunning, Tom. 1992. The Cinema of Attractions. Early Film, Its Spectator
and the Avant-Garde. In Early Cinema, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, 5662.
London: BFI.
. 2009. Films That Tell Time. The Paradoxes of the Cinema of Ken
Jacobs. http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/films-that-tell-time-
20090206 (Last accessed 11. 04. 2014.)
living points that connect to the entire universe. We may find ourselves thinking
like a carpet. (Marks 2013, 19.)
342 Remediating Past Images
ANDREA VIRGINS
1
This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Education,
CNCS UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-RU-PD-2012-3 0199.
2
In Sobchacks formulation the major visual impulse of all SF films is to
pictorialize the unfamiliar, the nonexistent, the strange and the totally alien and
to do so with a verisimilitude which is, at times, documentary in flavour and style.
[] To make us believe in the possibility, if not probability, of the alien things we
see, the visual surfaces of the films are inextricably linked to and dependent upon
the familiar; from the wondrous, and strange and imagined, the cameras fall back
on images either so familiar they are often downright dull, or neutralize the alien
by treating it so reductively that it becomes ordinary and comprehensible
(Sobchack 2001, 8788).
344 Embodied Genetics in Science-Fiction, Big-Budget to Low-Budget
must highlight the fact that both the territories of the genetic and the
digital are closed to the five basic human senses: sight, hearing, smell,
taste, and touch. This constellation leads to specific methods, solutions and
outcomes concerning the genetic and the digitals introduction as well as
representation within particular filmic diegetic worlds.
Sobchack devotes particular attention to how what she calls the
reduction of humanistic perception or the expansion of perception
beyond the human is instrumentalized on the level of cinematic solutions.
A propos the aliens double view both their view on us, humans, but
also our view of them she differentiates between three types of science
fiction films: big-budget optimistic, low-budget pessimistic, and
wondrous middle-ground films. She writes the following, starting with
the description of the impassive third-person camera-eye that in its
flatness, its balanced and symmetrical attention to both the real and the
imaginary, creates a wonder which is unique. It arises not from the visual
transformation of the alien into something known as does the optimistic
visual conquest of the big-budget science fiction film. Nor does it arise
from the conversion of the ordinary into the alien as does the pessimistic
visual subversiveness of low-budget science-fiction. Rather this third
group of much-maligned SF film balances and equates the ordinary and
the alien in a vision neither humanly optimistic nor pessimistic. [] What
is unique about this last group of SF films is that its visual style
demonstrates simultaneously both the unremitting banality and the
inconceivable terror (Sobchack 2001, 14445).
These two directions of thought presented by Sobchack the aliens
double view, as well as the three types of science fiction films deduced
from various cinematic depictions involving the alien are fundamental
for the present article. Its argumentation engages in analysing the double
view of genetically defined and, in many cases, digitally created aliens in
various contemporary (1990s/2000s) films and artworks, ranging from
big-budget optimism (Jeunets 1997 Alien: Resurrection) (on) to
wondrous middle-ground (Natalis 2009 Splice, Kormkurs 2006 Jar
City) and ending with the low-budget pessimist side of the continuum
(Fliegaufs 2010 Womb or Piccininis 2008 Foundling and The Fitzroy
Series). The basic unity of analysis, engendered by the idea of a genetic
and digital aliens double view, are first encounters in diegetic (also, in
most of the cases, closed) spaces, of such human heroes and genetically
modified aliens who share some of their DNA (a science-fiction narrative),
and if not, then intense (and positive) emotional investment on the part of
the humans is present (a detection narrative).
Andrea Virgins 345
The last part of the Alien-series to date,3 the 1997 Alien: Resurrection,
was directed by French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet. He has been
manifesting a keen interest for fantastic environments and plots in his
films: the movie preceding Alien: Resurrection was The City of Lost
Children in 1995, and the one following it was the fairytale Le fabuleux
destin dAmlie Poulain in 2001. However, the Alien-sequel is a singular
foray on Jeunets part the popular French director more on the arthouse
side into big-budget, optimistic science-fiction.
In Alien: Resurrection Ellen Ripley is cloned to life in an outer space
laboratory in order to offer an adequate linkage to well-known aliens, who
subsequently are also cloned and bred in the hope of industrial-commercial
exploitation. Ripley is as agile as ever, and several of her interactions with
the environment around (throwing a basket-ball, thrusting a nail through
her hand) early in the film suggest that she possesses capacities miraculous
for a simple human being. The specific sequence I am quoting here
follows the moment when she joins the band of illegal pirates and they,
being the last ones on the space station invaded by the ferocious aliens, are
trying to embark on the spaceship. A door with the numbers 17 attracts
Ripleys attention, since she has a number 8 tattooed on her arm: while the
others are proceeding, she enters through the door alone.
This space could be called the museum gallery of further Ripley-clones
on display [Fig. 1], clones which have gone wrong in the process of
mixing human and alien DNA, actually the process of making the new
type of Ripley while cloning to life her DNA already infected with the
alien DNA. The different Ripley/alien versions are shown standing in
cylindrical glass jars full of greenish transparent amniotic liquid, in which
the various hybrid bodies float, seem to be sleeping, or secluded from
onlookers and the outside world, and thus Ripley also (even though earlier
versions of her body and herself). The climactic point of the scene is her
coming face to face with the painfully living and suffering being no. 7
[Fig. 2], who has Ripleys face, but the aliens legs, and who, quite
inadequately, is showing embarrassment for two reasons: 1. she is
uncovered, and she has to protect her modesty; 2. she is experiencing
extreme pains, the pains of existing in-between bodies and species. Samuel
A. Kimball comments on the scene thus: An incoherent assemblage of
parts that are not viable on their own, this corporeal frame nevertheless
houses, imprisons rather, a self-reflexive consciousness. [] Approaching
the suffering creature without a word, Ripley, fighting back tears, touches
3
Unless we consider Ridley Scotts 2012 Prometheus as a variation on the same
theme.
346 Embodied Genetics in Science-Fiction, Big-Budget to Low-Budget
the sheet that partially covers her (Kimball 2002, 9798). According to
the conventions of action science-fiction, after a moment of empathy, the
sequence ends with Ripley shooting clone number 7, at her request.
Figures 12. The hall of Ripley-clones and Ripley facing clone nr. 7 (Jean-Pierre
Jeunet: Alien: Resurrection, 1997).
beings and/or their earthly remains. I wish to direct our attention to the
moment of encounter between the detective and the genetically
problematic brain on display [Fig. 4]: touch and close observation are
repeatedly in the choreography. Erlendur takes from the shelf the jar
containing the child brain infected with neurofibromatosis, and the slowly
constructed series of movements, the half-light glittering through and on
the glasses around, as well as Erlendurs pensive mimics suggest a
peaceful atmosphere adequate for contemplation rather than fright or
disgust because of the genetically other.
Figures 34. Genetic deviations on display (Balthasar Kormkur: Jar City, 2006).
348 Embodied Genetics in Science-Fiction, Big-Budget to Low-Budget
4
These are the words of actor Johnny Depp, characterizing Eva Green in an
interview published in the Hungarian national daily Npszabadsg on May 19,
2012.
Andrea Virgins 349
Figures 910. Foundling (2008, silicon, human hair, polyester, wool, plastic, wire,
41 x 66 x 37cm), and Laura (with Surrogate) by Patricia Piccinini (2006, graphite
on paper, 57 x 77 cm), images by courtesy of the artist.
5
This endeavour makes Piccininis highly conceptual and perceptually rather
stimulating artworks resemble, or indeed join such computer simulations that
belong to the Artificial Life strand of theoretical biology as explained by Katherine
Hayless quoting Christopher Langton: Artificial Life is the study of man-made
systems that exhibit behaviors characteristic of natural living systems. It
complements the traditional biological sciences concerned with the analysis of
living organisms by attempting to synthesize life-like behaviours within computers
and other artificial media. By extending the empirical foundation upon which
biology is based beyond the carbon-chain life that has evolved on Earth, Artificial
Life can contribute to theoretical biology by locating life-as-we-know-it within the
larger picture of life-as-it-could-be (Langton quoted by Hayles 1999, 232).
350 Embodied Genetics in Science-Fiction, Big-Budget to Low-Budget
barely lit, closed and messy place a nice young girl peacefully waits while
a non-classifiable, alien body is searching or looking into a bin [Fig. 11].
The last example is Canadian director Vincenzo Natalis Splice (2009), in
which the experimental genetic scientist, Elsa (played by Sarah Polley)
makes the first encounter and as she calls it, imprinting (making
friendship) with the being that is combining her own DNA with further
animal DNA segments [Fig. 12]. The creature, later calling herself Dren, is
simultaneously the experimenting woman scientist, her daughter, and also
a fundamentally alien other allowing for Elsas being defined as a potent
and active woman scientist.
6
These surface differences, if completed by rigorous textual (narrative and
iconographic) analyses, would allow one to speak about a mutation in
contemporary science-fiction, where arthouse, European-type, or American
independent filmic characteristics are being mixed (hybridized?) with mainstream
science-fiction features.
354 Embodied Genetics in Science-Fiction, Big-Budget to Low-Budget
7
As explained in a detailed manner in J. C. Avises study (2012).
8
Last accessed on the artists webpage,
http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/writing/32/114/57, 8. 09. 2014.
Andrea Virgins 355
and Stalker, is also involved in this project and one chief method in this
respect is the one that the scenes chosen for examination represent. In
these sequences the active protagonist the figure of main spectatorial
identification in the action-driven narratives is put in a contemplative
situation by entering a space of (laboratory) exhibition and forced,
knowingly or unintentionally, to exist in the company of genetic
anomalies, hybrids and mutants. Furthermore, it is not only the reactions,
or mode of play of the actors that guide our attitudes while living through
these scenes, but the dynamics, choreography and spatial structuring of the
scenes are also of a paramount importance. It is important to emphasize
that these are diegetic encounters between the active heroes and the
anomalous bodies, encounters that therefore might lay claim to such
affects being played out and felt as empathy, understanding and even
sympathy thanks to the mutual mirroring poses, gestures and mimics
acted out and represented in the compositional structures of the scenes. In
this manner, room is created for what Vivian Sobchack refers to as the
sensation of living a body, in this specific case living a body partially,
but not fully alien to us, humans: The focus here is on what it is to live
ones body, not merely to look at bodies although vision, visuality, and
visibility are as central to the subjective dimension of embodied existence
as they are to its objective dimension (Sobchack 2004, 2).
As the title also shows, this article uses the notion of embodiment in
the most literal sense of the word: having a body, and living through and
thanks to that body, a body which may be shown, heard, smelt or touched
in the audiovisual environment of figurative representation. Bodies in
question, however, are not real bodies in the sense of having corresponding
referents in a material reality existing in the pre- or postproduction period
of the creations they inhabit: they are not bodies of human or animal
beings shot for the sake of films and photographs, or captured in drawings.
These bodies are fully and totally fictional, existing only within the
conventions of the respective figurative representations. However, the
bodies I have made reference to are, at the same time, radically related to
flesh-and-bone existence as we know it, being theoretical extensions of
scientific possibilities constantly experimented and researched in
connection to the human and animal body. In other words, these bodies (or
body parts) are realisations of such biologically possible, yet currently
either non-existent or hardly perceivable and/or sensible (i.e. non-
embodied) concepts as hereditary genetic disease, offspring resulted from
cloning rather than sexed reproduction, and finally hybrid beings that
combine/splice the genetic material of various biological entities (from
humans to animals). Certainly, by concentrating on the unique, these
356 Embodied Genetics in Science-Fiction, Big-Budget to Low-Budget
bodies that stand for hereditary genetic diseases, clones, and hybrid splices
in the context of specific conventions of figurative representation such as
black-and-white drawing in pencil, digital colour photography, science
fiction movie, detection movie may be considered as looking for what is
sensational, scary, not ordinary, or even disgusting to some extent.
Two opinions must be cited that have circumscribed and limited my
ideas. In her 2007 book, The Poetics of DNA, Judith Roof is writing about
all the burdens that have been put on the concept of DNA, and I quote her:
The three acronymic letters, then, like the chemical itself, have come to
signify a vast number of processes, undifferentiated to the non-scientist
and rendered intelligible by a series of metaphors or comparisons. These
include such analogies as the secret of life, the code, the book, the
alphabet, sentences, words, chapters, histories, the Rosetta stone, the Holy
Grail, the recipe, the blueprint, the text, the map, the homunculus,
software, and others. None of these analogies is accurate in terms of how
DNA works or even what it accomplishes. All of them import values,
meanings, mechanisms, and possibilities that are not at all a part of DNA.
The effect is that DNA has always stood for much more than what it is
(Roof 2007, 7). In this respect, my reasoning about genetics and genetic
concepts on screen basically reducible to how the DNA and the gene are
conceptualized through involving such dramaturgical and narrative lines as
inheritance, cloning, splicing, as well as their audiovisualizations is
perhaps falling in the same trap of creating further, not too useful or
enlightening metaphors and comparisons.
In an article about the contemporary persistence of genetic thinking,
Vesta da Silva is even more explicit about how the DNA and the gene, as
abstract and non-sensible concepts, have nevertheless pervaded our
realities full of sensations thanks to the much publicized method of DNA
fingerprinting.9 Da Silva, quoting a number of experts, also summarizes
the situation when we tend to link identity, soul, and moral standpoint,
ones past and future to the DNA a human body carries and is built up
from: DNA has taken on the social and cultural functions of the soul. It is
the essential entity, the location of the true self, in the narratives of
biological determinism (...) the truth of who someone is, forensically,
medically, athletically, and otherwise, is to be found nearer to rather than
farther from the genome (Da Silva 2005, 107).
9
Indeed, with the advent and acceptance of DNA fingerprinting, we set up a
situation in which our genetic residue (left behind us wherever we go in the form
of eyelashes, skin cells, etc.) has metonymically replaced our bodies as the
ultimate seat of our identity (Da Silva 2007, 106).
Andrea Virgins 357
References
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Oddities Offer Evolutionary Lessons on Reproduction. Journal of
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Eleftheriotis, Dimitris. 2002. Global Visions and European Perspectives.
In Aliens R Us. The Other in Science Fiction Cinema, eds. Ziauddin
Sardar and Sean Cubbitt, 164180. London, Virginia: Pluto Press,
2002.
Hayles N., Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies
in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago & London:
University of Chicago Press.
Jameson, Fredric. 2005. The Alien Body. In Archaeologies of the Future.
The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, 119141.
London, New York: Verso.
Kimball, Samuel A. 2002. Conceptions and Contraceptions of the Future:
Terminator 2, The Matrix, and Alien Resurrection. Camera Obscura
Vol. 17 No. 4 (50): 69107.
Piccinini, Patricia. Webpage. http://www.patriciapiccinini.net. (Last
accessed 08. 09. 2014.)
Andrea Virgins 359
for ten years he taught philosophy of language and cognitive science at the
Department of Philosophy of the University of Pcs. At present he teaches
aesthetics and film theory at the University Pcs. His main research
interests are French phenomenology, cognitive studies, film theory, and
argumentation. He is the co-author of The Recognition of Specificity and
Social Cognition (Peter Lang, 2004). He has published articles in English
and in Hungarian in the journals Degrs, Journal of Cinema Studies,
Apertra, Magyar Filozfiai Szemle, Passim, and Metropolis. He has also
translated two books by the French philosopher Emmanuel Lvinas.