Quarterly Review of Film and Video

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What is Film Atmosphere?

Robert Spadoni

To cite this article: Robert Spadoni (2019): What is Film Atmosphere?, Quarterly Review of Film
and Video, DOI: 10.1080/10509208.2019.1606558

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2019.1606558

Published online: 22 Jul 2019.

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QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO
https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2019.1606558

What is Film Atmosphere?

Robert Spadoni

There is no direct training in atmospherics in schools of architecture. It appears on

no syllabus.
—Mark Wigley, “The Architecture of Atmosphere”1

Many kinds of writing across the history of cinema exemplify the best
and worst tendencies in thinking about film atmosphere. This might seem
like the emptiest statement that could be made about any subject that has
been written about over such a long period, but I suggest that it holds
especially true for this topic. The number of times the word atmosphere
appears, in sources ranging from industry trade journals published at the
start of the previous century to works of theory published this year, attests
to the importance that film writers continuously attach to it—yet few have
paused to spell out why atmosphere matters or even to articulate what they
mean by the word.
This has started to change in recent years as scholars have begun taking
up atmosphere more directly as a topic of inquiry.2 This work shares with
older writing a tendency to view the phenomenon as primarily or exclu-
sively associated with an artwork’s environmental character—specifically, in
the case of a film, its settings, sounds, and depictions of weather.3 I chal-
lenge that view in this essay, and argue that film writing, even when it has
applied the concept unreflectively, hints at a much broader understanding
of what atmosphere consists of and what has been missed about its import-
ance. Such writing—often film reviews, and other works by writers who
indulge freely in impressionistic and opinionated prose—points to a diffi-
culty facing anyone who wants to describe and account for atmosphere
with some academic rigor, which is that much of the best thinking on the
topic has been unabashedly evaluative in nature. Disentangling the phe-
nomenon from this language of appraisal poses a challenge, in part because
it is not clear such a feat can be accomplished, and in part because it is not
clear it should be. In what follows, I do not entirely avoid this lan-
guage myself.

Robert Spadoni is Associate Professor at Case Western Reserve University, where he teaches film studies. He is
the author of Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre (University of
California Press, 2007) and essays on film atmosphere, horror films, and other topics.
ß 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
2 R. SPADONI

I begin by quickly surveying how film writers have invoked the term
atmosphere, asking specifically how they construe the relationship between
atmosphere and style. From these claims it will be possible to infer some
general propositions about the nature of film atmosphere, and tie these
points to writing by German philosopher Gernot B€ ohme, who considers
the atmosphere in such aesthetic works as theatrical stage sets and architec-
tural structures. B€
ohme, I argue, offers a robust and general definition of
the concept that sheds light on how atmosphere functions in films. Last, in
an attempt to show how his ideas can be applied in film studies, I sift
through some metaphors that have been used to characterize the atmos-
phere in films, and conclude by looking at one, breath, in relation to a film
that has probably been called “atmospheric” as often as any film ever
made: Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 I Walked with a Zombie.

Atmosphere and Style

In an unbearably moving death scene, in which the hero throws himself over the
moon of emotion, and the camera spills an oatmealish atmosphere around him, the
style is a cross between Hawks and Euripides, and the visual details are magnificent.
—Manny Farber on The Champion (Dir. Mark Robson, 1949)4

Many have viewed atmosphere as a thing apart from the other aspects of a
film. Here are three examples of this endemic thinking: 1) a 1910 advertise-
ment in The Moving Picture World promises that “the strength of this
story, the picturesque settings, live western atmosphere, and the highly art-
istic photography, make this picture among the best of our Western pro-
ducer’s recent dramatic offerings”;5 2) screenwriter Frances Marion
explains, in 1938, that practitioners of her craft churn out variations on
familiar story patterns by creating and manipulating “character, environ-
ment, atmosphere, time, relationship, motivation, and complications”;6 and
3) a 2007 book about horror films finds subgenres displaying “differences
at the levels of convention, narrative, iconography, atmosphere and
setting.”7 This inclination, to tick off a list of a film’s ingredients and
include atmosphere in it, suggests that it should be possible to identify
many parts of a film that play no appreciable role in creating and sustain-
ing its atmosphere.
This thinking can insert a wall between a film’s atmosphere and its style,
one we can observe operating at different levels of generality. At the highest
level, V. F. Perkins writes of a film that, “in terms of atmosphere the scene
is successful; it remains very questionable on the level of style”;8 not as
high, Graham Greene describes the “atmospherically correct” qualities of a
Sherlock Holmes film, then adds that “this is the atmosphere conveyed, I
should make clear, and not the effect of the photography”;9 and Lotte
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 3

Eisner sections off just one type of shot when she writes, of G. W. Pabst’s
1929 Pandora’s Box, that “it is the close-ups which determine the character
of the film; the flamboyant or phosphorescent atmosphere and the lumi-
nous mists of London remain throughout merely a kind of accompaniment
to these close-ups.”10
Such compartmentalizing thinking is widespread, even though many
of these same writers understand that it is ludicrous to try to separate a
film’s atmosphere from its style. I will begin with stylistic elements that
everyone agrees are inseparable from atmosphere, and work toward ones
that are less often explicitly recognized for the role they play.
Maybe foremost among the unquestioned contributors is mise en scene.
Lighting, for example, everyone knows, is atmospheric: in Carl Th. Dreyer’s
Vampyr (1932), “shadows cast by the staircase railings jerking crazily
around on the walls of the stairwell … are left an unexplained part of the
general uncanny atmosphere”;11 in Cat People (Dir. Jacques Tourneur,
1942), “the dappled and deceptive lighting, the rough texture of the wall
and the shadows of wind-blown leaves create a sinister atmosphere.”12
Noting walls and staircases, these writers identify another aspect of mise
en scene with a universally acknowledged connection to atmosphere: set-
tings. A 1926 description of a 1909 film reports that during production,
“incidental scenes for atmosphere were made, including campfires and the
like”;13 a 1950 book about Hollywood observes that, “if the actors do not
carry a romantic scene well, the director can shoot from them to a land-
scape bathed in a full moon and thus increase the romantic atmosphere”;14
and Dudley Andrew, a contemporary scholar who shows great sensitivity to
atmosphere, notes, of props in poetic realist films, that “coordinated light-
ing and set design … bathe these objects in an atmosphere that seems to
emanate from something deep inside them.”15
One reason the notion that settings help to create atmosphere seems self-
evident is that settings so obviously factor in the creation of cinematic
space—and atmosphere, which conjures up images of mist, vapor, strato-
spheric heights and vast stretches, and weather events of every kind gathering
and moving across these reaches—evokes space as well. This is also why, if I
may digress for a moment, atmosphere makes for a more productive name of
the phenomenon under examination than does mood, a word that has been
used interchangeably with atmosphere throughout film history. Rather than
anthropomorphize a film by giving it a mood, I suggest that it is preferable to
spatialize it, thus encouraging us to focus on formal aspects of the work. The
sense of a film as a dynamic, unfolding, volumetric entity is reinforced by one
of it possessing an atmosphere. The innate spatiality of a film renders set-
tings—and the things arrayed across them, such as props and lighting—
uncontroversially relevant to studying atmosphere.
4 R. SPADONI

The same reasoning renders diegetic sound straightforwardly relevant as

well. Most pertinent is ambient sound, a recognition underlined by the lan-
guage of sound technicians. A sound recording handbook, for example,
instructs technicians to supply “background atmosphere (‘atmos’ or ‘buzz
track’) at the same level and in sufficient quantity to cover any gaps that
may be introduced by editing or where there are more pictures than syn-
chronous sound.”16 Moreover, just as often touched upon in considerations
of atmosphere is, of course, nondiegetic music. One need look no further
than this music’s common synonym, “mood music,” but here are two more
recognitions of the basic connection: an encyclopedist of music for silent
films advises accompanists, when making selections, to “determine the geo-
graphic and national atmosphere of your picture”;17 and a composer of
scores for sound films writes that he “tries to find a musical ‘atmosphere’
that belongs to that film alone.”18
Cinematography offers up more techniques with readily apparent links
to atmosphere. In a silent film, tinting colors a film’s spaces when
“atmosphere is carefully sustained with the yellow candlelight, the gold
dawn, the pink firelight, the deep blue of the night.”19 A shot’s duration
figures in the equation also. In Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons
(1942), Andre Bazin finds a sequence shot emphasizing a kitchen’s clut-
tered surfaces, pressurizing a dramatic buildup that, when the scene reaches
its climax, discharges itself in a manner that resonates with the electrical
storm thundering outside;20 and in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List
(1993), another writes:
freneticism is conveyed by the camera’s rapid cuts and tracking shots as it follows
the women into the showers’ darkened interior; yet as they stare at the showerheads,
the camera pace appears to slow down and the mood intensifies, heightening an
atmosphere of tense anticipation.21

Third, and just as a long take will confer added weight to a setting, so will
a distant camera. A book on film acting notes that “the long shot is usually
taken to establish the atmosphere and setting of a scene.”22 Less prosaically,
Manny Farber reflects on Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949):
The movie’s almost antique, enervated tone comes from endless distance shots with
poetically caught atmosphere and terrain, glimpses of languid, lachrymose people
sweeping or combing their hair, and that limp Reed manner with actors, which
makes you feel you could push a finger straight through a head, and a sweater or a
hat has as much warmth and curiosity as the person wearing it.23

Farber, who identifies another synonym of atmosphere (tone), is another

who sees distant framings making atmosphere. Also, he helps us shift our
attention to stylistic elements that are less often acknowledged for the part
they play—for Farber also finds atmosphere fueled by performances,
including ones by actors in leading roles. He thus challenges a pervasive
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 5

and long-entrenched view in film studies, which is that atmosphere prop-

erly serves as a background and an accompaniment to a film’s characters,
turns of the plot, and other foregrounded elements. Here are two expres-
sions of this thinking: King Vidor, in the silent era, envisions a “motion
picture without a story. By that I mean a production in which the main
interest will center about the atmosphere and background rather than in
the acting or the plot”;24 and Alan Williams describes, in Hollywood sound
films, “a clear and reassuring hierarchy of sonic importance, and this is
reinforced by a kind of step-system of sonic presence, sounds being made
to seem either very close (important) or distant (‘atmosphere’).”25
One last point to note about this passage in Farber is his willingness to
explore how The Third Man makes him feel, his synesthetic grasp of the
most intimate contours and textures of the viewing experience. Without
this sensitivity, it is difficult to analyze, appreciate, and even perceive the
atmospheric character of a film.26 Here again is a challenge for film schol-
arship: How to maintain a disciplined perspective while not shying away
from these sensuous, and, as Farber shows repeatedly, specifically tactile
qualities of a film? I will address this question directly later on, and suggest
here only that we might look to Farber and some of his contemporaries for
examples and inspiration.
So much for the low-hanging fruit. I now want to show that writers—
despite their frequent claims and working assumptions to the contrary—
implicitly understand that no element of style can be isolated from
atmosphere. Take dialogue, which, many suppose, it is the atmosphere’s
function to support through its subservient appropriateness. Yet Julian
Hanich can find, in haunted house films, that “the dense, constricting, laby-
rinth-like atmosphere is not only evoked visually, but also through dialogue
passages.”27 Consider, too, close-ups, which shut out the environment, and,
Lotte Eisner suggests, compel viewers to focus on those foregrounds that it
is the atmosphere’s function merely to accompany.
First, close-ups do not necessarily shut out the environment. One might
be of a prop, and therefore magnify a detail of setting. For example, Sergei
Eisenstein identifies the kettle as the subject of the “most Griffithian of
close-ups,” and finds these shots soaking in a “Dickensian atmosphere.”28
The problem gets pricklier, though, when considering that more ubiquitous
subject of the close-up, the human face, which telegraphs character motiva-
tions and other psychology, and, when dialogue issues from it, parcels out
major quantities of narrative information.29 Yet it turns out that this car-
dinal fixture of the cinematic foreground is no different than a kettle in
this regard.
Referring to a scene in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), in which
a character says something to another under his breath, Farber writes that,
6 R. SPADONI

when “the camera moved in for a very close close-up, the atmosphere
became molecular and as though diseased.”30 Gilberto Perez, quoting
another writer, describes a moonlit close-up of the love-struck Ellie in
Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934), when “the camera briefly
catches a moist reflection of light in her eyes: ‘a gleam slight but clear’
that distills the ‘atmosphere of yearning’ suffusing the whole movie.”31
Imagine the routine perception of the relationship between narrative and
atmosphere to conform not to a foreground/background schema but
instead an inside/outside one, with the characters and story claiming the
bull’s-eye and the atmosphere relegated to the outer rings. Perez turns this
schema inside out when he sees an eye, that moist nucleus of a character’s
expression and emotionality, distilling an entire film’s atmosphere.
Perez can see an atmosphere distilled in an eye because atmosphere is
not merely space but its emotional coloration.32 This is why nondiegetic
music, so plainly linked to atmosphere—but, for all its association with the
cinematic “background,” less obviously linked to space—constitutes a
wedge that can help us pry the concept away from a film’s settings and
ambient sounds, for any element of style that can color a film’s emotional
tonality can be shown, and has been understood, to manufac-
ture atmosphere.
Not just distant and close views but every kind of view can stoke a film’s
atmospheric output. No facet of cinematography lies outside the reach of
this vast operation, including more and less mobile framings. In a film,
“apparently aimless camera movements enhance the claustrophobic atmos-
phere.”33 In another, featuring “limited camera movement and stationary
characters, the pacing is slow and atmospheric.”34 Camera angles pitch in
as well—when “well-chosen camera angles and memorable frame composi-
tions intelligently ‘tell’ the story while adding to the movie’s atmosphere”;35
and when another film uses “bizarre low angles and depth to signify a
threatening atmosphere.”36
Finally, editing might seem like the most airless component of film style
of all. But atmosphere is everywhere, and no part of a film does not con-
tribute to it. A Griffith film captures details of setting in “shots which were
not called for in the plot but which, when carefully edited, created an
atmosphere and background that greatly reinforced the narrative and action
of the story.”37 More abstractly—and breaking away from setting
altogether—another analyzes Griffith’s “ability to take advantage of the
atmosphere of speculation arising between shots.”38
Atmosphere refuses to stay in the backgrounds and outer rings. Far from
a support and an accompaniment, it is everywhere. To recognize this qual-
ity is to take a step toward revising our understanding of the place and
function of atmosphere within the total film viewing experience.
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 7

The Highly Global Nature of the Appraisal

This quality proper to the work … is a world atmosphere. How is it produced?
Through the ensemble from which it emanates. All the elements of the world
represented conspire to produce it.
—Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience39

Many writers, in addition to seeing atmosphere as subordinate and sup-

portive, do not hesitate to declare some films more atmospheric than
others, and some not atmospheric at all. Eugene Vale, in his 1944 screen-
writing handbook, draws this analogy:
Any place used or frequented predominantly by a characteristically distinct group or
class of people is likely to have atmosphere. For instance: a place which sells utensils
to fishermen who have been fishermen all their lives, has atmosphere. However, if it
is only a section in a department store, selling utensils to fishermen who go fishing
on Sundays, it is likely to have no atmosphere.40

Not asking whether the department store simply has a different atmosphere
than the fishing shop, Vale writes that “some places have atmosphere and
others have not.”41 Then, in a move highly characteristic of the term’s
application throughout film history, he wields it judgmentally: “Many
artists have tried to create atmosphere, some successfully, others not, and
some were able to create it occasionally.”42 Such reasoning suggests that it
should be possible to identify artworks that contain no atmos-
phere whatsoever.
More recent thinking reaches different conclusions. For architect and
architecture theorist Mark Wigley, even in cases of the most pragmatic and
austere designs, “atmospheric effects cannot be avoided.”43 This is so even
for that most pragmatic and austere architectural instrument—
the blueprint:
The cult of the abstract line constructs its own atmosphere. It defines a dream space
in which the architect works, a space in which atmospheric drawings or statements
can then be tolerated as subordinate excesses. The very rejection of atmosphere
constructs a particular atmosphere. Every small choice of representational technique
defines an atmosphere.44

In another sphere, every small choice of representational technique, taken

together, constitutes a film’s style. Wigley suggests that, in architecture and
cinema alike, these techniques cannot help but yield atmosphere, for that
outcome is intrinsic to their essence and operation. So construed, atmos-
phere becomes something different than a distinctive quality which some
films possess and others lack. Whether or not the artist is successful, and
indifferent to the judgments of critics, atmospheric effects cannot
be avoided.
Atmospheres are “global” entities, then, in two senses: every part of a
film helps create it; and every film has it. Returning to the first sense,
8 R. SPADONI

Gernot B€ ohme links this quality to the haziness that inescapably attaches
itself to the concept whenever someone tries to describe it:
Atmosphere is itself something extremely vague, indeterminate, intangible. The
reason is primarily that atmospheres are totalities: atmospheres imbue everything,
they tinge the whole of the world or a view, they bathe everything in a certain light,
unify a diversity of impressions in a single emotive state.45

Film writers who share this sense include Ed. S. Tan, who, summarizing
work by researchers on mood, writes that an “important characteristic is
the absence of an object and the highly global nature of the appraisal.
When you feel depressed, the whole world looks miserable. Moods are not
episodic and may last longer than the film.”46
More pragmatic thinkers understand this global nature as well. Especially
attuned to it are writers on film music. A New York Times correspondent,
writing in the midst of the coming of sound, predicted that film sound
would “provide ‘atmosphere’ instead of disconnected ‘incidental noises.’”47
This journalist intuits that soundtracks will do something more dispersed
and galvanizing than punctuate the odd moment here and there. Rick
Altman observes that, earlier, silent film accompanists came to the same
recognition.48 He quotes film music columnist Clarence E. Sinn, who, in
1910, identifies the accompanist’s primary obligation:
It is the general character of the picture which you must observe. Taken together, what
is the predominant feature? Is it pathetic, mysterious, tragical or comical? Work up to
this general effect whatever it is. The producer takes great pains to convey certain
impressions and preserve a certain atmosphere, and it is his due that these unities be
preserved so the audience may receive his story in the same spirit in which it is told.49

Pushing further, Aaron Copland understands that music must not only
preserve unities but also create them, defining this function of film scoring:
Building a sense of continuity. The picture editor knows better than anyone how
serviceable music can be in tying together a visual medium which is, by its very
nature, continually in danger of falling apart. One sees this most obviously in
montage scenes where the use of a unifying musical idea may save the quick flashes
of disconnected scenes from seeming merely chaotic.50

Atmosphere helps to save a film from the centrifugal force of its own het-
erogeneity. Binding, blanketing music makes this function explicit, although
I have argued that every part of a film feeds atmospheric production.
Writers on topics other than music who appreciate the global nature of
atmosphere include Perez, who sees an “‘atmosphere of yearning’ suffusing
the whole” of It Happened One Night; and Andrew, who perceives, in
French poetic realist films, “atmosphere as an effect of cinematic texture, as
a pervasive overtone emanating variously from cinematography, set design,
sound, music, script, and acting.”51 Perez and Andrew grasp atmosphere’s
relationship to the aesthetic totality.
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 9

Atmosphere is everywhere in a film, and no film is without it. But what

is it? What do people mean when they invoke the term? Just by cataloging
how they have done so, we already begin to see the outlines of a definition
taking shape. Yet, as even my brief survey shows, the word’s meaning is
anything but fixed. There are many kinds and senses of atmosphere, and a
definition broad enough to encompass them all will necessarily be an
accommodating one. The term is widely applicable, which makes its mean-
ing potentially slippery, and the phenomenon itself is as ubiquitous, inde-
terminate, and diffuse as air.52 These qualities make it especially important
to resist temptations to be vague and overly impressionistic when concep-
tualizing what atmosphere is and when approaching an individual film.
B€ohme provides guidance on both of these fronts.

Giant Sponges and Other Metaphors

TERRY GROSS, host: Jim Cameron, welcome to FRESH AIR. Can I ask you to give
us an example of a shot or two, or a scene, that epitomizes for you what you can do
with 3-D that you couldn’t do in a regular film?
Mr. JAMES CAMERON (Filmmaker, Avatar): Well, I think it’s sometimes as simple
as, you know, a shot in a snowstorm would feel so much more tactile to the viewer.
You’d actually feel like the snowflakes were falling on you and around you, you
know, that sort of thing, any time that the medium of the air between you and the
subject can be filled with something.
—Terry Gross, host, Fresh Air, National Public Radio53

Atmospheres are not backgrounds but totalities. B€ ohme extends this claim
by a leap, casting atmosphere’s reach outside the boundaries of the aes-
thetic text. He describes, as many film writers have done, senses of the phe-
nomenon as both space and emotional coloration, defining atmosphere “as
tuned space, i.e. a space with a certain mood.”54 But whose mood? The art-
work’s, as in a piece of “moody chamber music,” or the perceiver’s?
Crucially, it is both, because for B€ ohme, an atmosphere consists of every
particle of the aesthetic work and also the surrounding intersubjective
experience that binds perceivers to the work and perceivers to each other.
This makes intuitive sense, for what ultimately matters is the atmosphere
that engulfs not a film’s characters but its audience. When Tan writes that
a mood “may last longer than the film,” he has gestured beyond the film
and pointed toward its viewers. Recall, too, Clarence E. Sinn’s call for
accompanists to focus on the atmosphere the producer wanted, so “the
audience may receive his story in the same spirit in which it is told.”
Accompanists help push this “spirit” out into the auditorium. But music
only helps, for all the other elements are pushing, too, including settings:
Andrew, referring to French production designer Alexandre Trauner, writes
10 R. SPADONI

that “a general atmosphere suffuses each Trauner film, one so pervasive

that it beclouds the spectator.”55
Draw the circle of an atmosphere’s compass and it will encircle a film’s view-
ers. This helps to explain why so many have identified the locus of an atmos-
phere not in a film text but a theater auditorium. The press book for Victor
Halperin’s White Zombie (1932) includes this wishful account of a pre-
view screening:
A tense stillness pervaded the atmosphere. Eyes were riveted on the screen and every
now and then the stillness was punctuated by shrieks of horror at some thrilling
climax until the final exciting sequence practically lifted them from their seats and
left them limp.56

Another horror film, Andre de Toth’s House of Wax (1953), left a reviewer
feeling, when the film ended, that “if you had escaped the orgiastic partici-
pation you felt dirtied, as if in an atmosphere of perversion.”57 And Farber
paints this drippingly sensuous, if unpleasant, picture of the exhibition site,
tacking on a note about film atmosphere only at the end:
The hard-bitten action film finds its natural home in caves: the murky, congested
theaters, looking like glorified tattoo parlors on the outside and located near bus
terminals in big cities. These theaters roll action films in what, at first, seems like a
nightmarish atmosphere of shabby transience, prints that seem overgrown with jungle
moss, sound tracks infected with hiccups. The spectator watches two or three action
films go by and leaves feeling as though he were a pirate discharged from a giant sponge.
The cutthroat atmosphere in the itch house is reproduced in the movies
shown there.58

Atmosphere’s expansive reach and essential status make intuitive sense.

B€
ohme’s intervention is that he makes these attributes explicit terms of the
discussion, and this approach is overdue. He also accounts for the indeter-
minacy and diffuseness of atmosphere while simultaneously suggesting a
way that our analysis of it need not itself lack concreteness. He does this
by emphasizing atmosphere’s quality of betweenness. Atmospheres are an:
intermediate phenomenon, something between subject and object. That makes them,
as such, intangible, and means that … they have no secure ontological status. But for
that very reason it is rewarding to approach them from two sides, from the side of
subjects and from the side of objects, from the side of reception aesthetics and from
the side of production aesthetics.59

B€ohme brings together, under his umbrella concept, the circumscribed par-
ticulars of the aesthetic text with the ephemeral intangibles of its reception.
And so the steady and “objective” eye we bring to formal analysis can help
anchor the study of something more airy and elusive.
Some who register this quality of betweenness envision atmosphere as a
sort of viscous substance spread across a film’s surface. A film’s story is
“impressionistically coated with San Francisco’s oatmeal-gray atmosphere;”60
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 11

another’s bad music is “poured over the whole film like a sticky sauce;”61
another’s director and art director:
clothe everything in chiaroscuro and mist … Swirls of dust and smoke wreath the
dwellings of the beggar king and cling to the bare walls, where the wretches’ rags are
like ornamental blobs of paint, and hover in the nuptial shed on the docks, softening
the splendour of the tables brimming with fruit and silverware amid the reflections
of the gentle candlelight.62

These evocations of clothing, clinging, wreathing, brimming, and reflecting

affix our senses to edges and surfaces—including, when costumes become
paint blobs on canvas, the film’s surface, a membrane that simultaneously
demarcates and forms a seam of contact between the film’s world and its
viewers. That we can, as B€ohme notes, approach an atmosphere from two
sides is suggested in the way an atmosphere can adhere to a film’s walls
and costumes and wrap in the other direction with equal ease—as when
House of Wax deposits a residue on viewers, and another film’s “haunting
atmosphere clings onto you like steam in a bathhouse.”63 Atmosphere goes
both ways because its location can be pinpointed in neither the film nor its
viewers. It comes into being when these entities come together.

Our task is to concretize this uniqueness in its sensuous external features … so that
the screen manifests the “flesh” and the texture of the atmosphere.
—Andrei Tarkovsky on his 1972 film Solaris64

Atmospheres are vague, spread out, and ineffable, and so a writer can be
forgiven for resorting to figurative and even fanciful language when trying
to evoke one. This approach turns out, in fact, to be a valuable rhetorical
impulse, for such language casts light on atmosphere’s functioning, sources,
and character—including its liminality. A metaphor implied by the figura-
tions of atmosphere as a coating is atmosphere as a skin, a metaphor that
sends us into territory that has been explored by theorists who take a phe-
nomenological approach to cinema. Vivian Sobchack, Laura Marks,
Jennifer Barker, and others argue for decentering sight as the reigning
mode of perception for understanding film spectatorship, reimagining the
process as a form of touch. Sobchack construes spectatorship as “embodied
vision,” and places at the core of her theory a conception of the experience
as heavily intersubjective.65 Barker, in The Tactile Eye: Touch and the
Cinematic Experience, examines “the relation between the spectator’s lived-
body and that of the film.”66 Her emphasis on two bodies calls to mind a
vacillation described previously, whereby an atmosphere may stick to a film
or to its viewers. For Barker—and Laura Marks, for whom skin figures cen-
trally in her theory of haptic visuality67—atmosphere is not a key word, but
some of their concerns and priorities nevertheless dovetail with mine.
12 R. SPADONI

The overlap increases in work by Kristi McKim, who introduces another

metaphor. In Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change,
McKim asks how on-screen weather conditions shape and mirror “the wea-
ther of our screening experience.”68 Taking a cue from the roots of the
word atmosphere in meteorology, and asking how cinematic portrayals of
such environmental conditions as wind, rain, and snow infiltrate film view-
ing, McKim finds these conditions creating atmosphere in more substantive
ways than notions of weather as merely an appropriate backdrop would
suggest.69 Others recognize the importance of diegetic weather in making
atmosphere—Robert Bird, for example, who describes, in a Tarkovsky film,
“an atmosphere fed by the harsh sea wind that scours the landscape,
courses through open windows and carries the force of war.”70 Weather is
atmospheric—and, importantly, whether or not a film features much salient
weather at all, atmospheres are weather-like: Katie Trumpener finds, when
a musical transitions into or out of a number, viewers registering “a per-
ceptible shift in the atmosphere, the emotional ‘weather’ of a movie.”71
While the skin metaphor visualizes atmosphere’s betweenness, a benefit
of construing atmosphere as “emotional weather” is that it offers a model
of the phenomenon as airborne, and this is appropriate given its name; as
B€ohme writes, “atmospheres are moods, which one feels in the air.”72 What
is gained by thinking about atmosphere as an air one can feel? Something
not lost is a sense of the phenomenon as eminently shared by a film and
its viewers, as the James Cameron quote at the top of this section suggests.
Furthermore, once airborne, atmosphere lends itself to other metaphors
that illuminate the phenomenon’s intersubjectivity with special vividness.

The atmosphere reeks of compulsive wrongness.

—Anthony Lane, reviewing Robin Pront’s film The Ardennes (2017)73

There are types of air that, more than weather, enter and exit the body
freely, and demonstrate that the envelope separating a person from her sur-
roundings is nothing if not porous. One such air is aroma. Laura Marks, in
Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, explores how films by the
Brothers Quay arouse viewers’ sense of smell by confronting them with
rich textures and an “overwhelming presence of detail.”74 More mainstream
works evoke this sensation as well. For B€ ohme, “what is characteristic of
things is their tone, their ‘odor’ or emanation—that is to say, the way in
which they express their essence”;75 while for Bela Balasz, atmosphere is
“the air and the aroma that pervade every work of art.”76 Film atmospheres
that trigger experiences akin to olfactory sensations include one that carries
“a genuine aroma of Poe”;77 one featuring “exteriors with a tangy sharpness
that was practically three-dimensional”;78 and, two from James Agee—a
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 13

film with “an atmosphere you can all but get the temperature and cider fra-
grance and staidly sporty erotic tension of,”79 and one that exudes an
“oxygen-sharp, otherwise unattainable atmosphere, almost a smell,
of freedom.”80
Aromas enter and exit the body. The outside world coming in is com-
parable to the emotions that can grip and pervade a viewer, blurring the
line that objectively, although not experientially, tells us where a film leaves
off and its reception begins. Another air that suggests this permeability
is breath.81

Cinema Audiences Reproducibly Vary the Chemical Composition of Air During

Films, by Broadcasting Scene Specific Emissions on Breath
—Jonathan Williams et al. Report title in Scientific Reports82

Linking Walter Benjamin’s concept of the aura to atmosphere, B€ ohme writes

that an aura is “something which flows forth spatially, almost something like
a breath or a haze.”83 In film studies, one finds breathing to be another bod-
ily experience that phenomenologists, including Barker, explore for what it
can tell us about a process that theorists throughout film history have con-
strued overwhelmingly as an optical one.84 In The Place of Breath in Cinema,
Davina Quinlivan asks how some films highlight the “dualistic nature of
breathing which unsettles boundaries between ourselves and the outer
world.”85 Here again, a phenomenologist’s observations apply in a study of
atmosphere—where one detects two-way traffic across this boundary in writ-
ing that points, collectively, to two bodies breathing while a film unreels. In
a film, diegetic sound “breathes atmosphere into the tale;”86 another finds
ways “to intensify the real-life atmosphere in which the camera can
breathe;”87 in another, settings “breathe the atmosphere of an uncanny
ruin.”88 And so soundtracks, cameras, and settings are breathing. So are
whole films: Hans Janowitz, cowriter of The Cabinet of Caligari (1920),
directed by Robert Wiene, writes that “the atmosphere of the picture had to
breathe an air of unreality”;89 in another film, a close-up marks the moment
at which the film “holds its breath.”90 We can add to this list audiences, and
note that what they are inhaling is films: on a commercial airliner, “the flick-
ering screens that surround passengers create an atmosphere of images light-
ing the cabin and permeating the cabin, as if cinema becomes air to
breathe.”91 But, if audiences are breathing, it is not at every moment: in a
silent film, just before a gunshot is fired, the orchestra paused, “held its
breath with the patrons until the suspense had passed”;92 while in film scenes
characterized by dread and stillness, “viewers hardly dare to breathe.”93
Films and their audiences breathe each other. I suggest that one reason
breath, better than aroma, captures this sense of mutual intake and outflow
14 R. SPADONI

is that breathing is essential to life; and without atmosphere, likewise, there

is no film experience at all. And yet one cannot dispel the notion that
some films are more atmospheric than others quite so easily, in fact not
nearly so. All films have it, but some brew atmospheres that intoxicate and
linger. Again we return to evaluation, built into the DNA of the concept,
for Vale has a point when he claims that aficionados of atmosphere will
find the piquant specificity of a shop for dedicated anglers more enticing
than the bland countertops and smells of a department store. Both might
be, technically speaking, “atmospheric,” but qualities we associate with the
word waft more compellingly from the cluttered, dim, 40-year-old place
than from the Sears. All films have it, but some launch us into rhapsodic
celebrations of their atmospheres while most do not. I close with a film
that does.

I Walked with a Zombie

The dialogue is almost nothing but a commentary on past events, obsessively

revising itself, finally giving up the struggle to explain and surrendering to a mute
acceptance of the inexplicable. We watch the slow, atmospheric, lovingly detailed
scenes with delight and fascination, realizing at the end that we have seen nothing
but the traces of a conflict decided in advance.
—Chris Fujiwara on I Walked with a Zombie94

I Walked with a Zombie arouses sensations of touch, for one writer effusing
a “velvety lushness,” including in a scene in which “whispering slivers of
light streak through the slatted blinds of a Caribbean mansion, like fingers
reaching out in the darkness.”95 Moreover—and switching metaphors—if
the film rolls over its viewers like a fog, then the material of this advance is
not primarily narrative in nature, for—as Chris Fujiwara and J. P. Telotte96
note—the film’s narrative is oblique and thinly dispersed. It never explains
whether the root of zombieism is supernatural or physiological, but instead
provides dramatic setups that lack payoffs, and, in general, loosens up the
causal connections, making room for air we can feel.97 No sharply incised
twists and turns pull a viewer through this film. Instead, something more
consistent churns through every shot, giving rise to the hypnogogic experi-
ence that watching this film can induce.98 The film is no thrill ride but
69 minutes of what one admirer calls “an enveloping mood piece.”99
Narrative construction is one reason this modest film manifests a volumin-
ously and palpably diffuse nature. Others include light that streaks like fin-
gers, and qualities of a formal organization that are strongly characterized
by things that spread.
This quality of dispersal and diffuseness, and the morbid substance of
the film’s veil-like textures, are signaled early on, when a character, Paul
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 15

Holland (Tom Conway), on a boat slipping through the night, tells his new
employee, Betsy Connell (Frances Dee): “That luminous water—it takes its
gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies. The glitter of putrescence. There’s
no beauty here. Only death and decay.” Across the film, lattice-works of
shadows cast by tree branches and window blinds, and plant fronds that
splay out and coat the exterior as well as the interior settings, blend the
film’s spaces and wash over the frame, softening distinctions between fore-
ground and background, and inside and outside (Figures 1–2).
Simultaneously, studding the film are emblems anchoring vigorous motivic
constellations and parallels. A hanging gourd offshoots a link to a hanging
animal carcass, which connects to an animal skull suspended on a stick,
which connects to a human skull set into a circle of stones on the ground
(Figures 3–6); and Ti-Misery, the slave-ship masthead grimly ornamenting
a courtyard, sparks a link to the black, statue-like zombie Carrefour; and a
zombie woman in a diaphanous gown, pierced first by a sabre and later an
arrow, visually rhymes with her voodoo-doll counterpart, pierced by a pin,
all while circling us back to the arrow-pierced figurehead (Figures 7–10).
Death and decay imagery spreads over the film, while spreading over
and through it is an air that is restlessly, noisily moving. Wind blows
through the animal skull, making an eerie sound, and through the holes in
the gourd, making a doleful chime; and a conch shell, when blown into,

Figure 1. An example of the film’s approach to dispersing shadows finely across its settings.
16 R. SPADONI

Figure 2. Plants and shadows crowd an indoor space that is wide open to the night air.

Figure 3. A hanging gourd.

 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 17

Figure 4. A hanging animal carcass.

Figure 5. An animal skull on a stick.

18 R. SPADONI

Figure 6. A skull in a circle of stones.

Figure 7. The figurehead Ti-Misery.

 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 19

Figure 8. Carrefour guards the crossroads.

Figure 9. Pierced by a sabre, the zombie does not bleed.

20 R. SPADONI

Figure 10. The voodoo doll, pierced by a pin.

issues a call that summons the zombie woman to the houmfort—the voo-
doo temple that is the film’s center of death. Wind is seen and heard at
many moments, including when it disturbs the inside of the manor house,
where the characters dine. More strikingly, wind blows louder than we
have heard before, in a shot that marks the beginning of a journey to the
houmfort, as the camera tracks more dramatically than we have seen
before, sweeping past leaves that stir and rattle. The ensuing walk through
the cane field is accompanied by a constant wind that carries drumbeats
blowing from the characters’ destination. Back at the house, a character lis-
tens to the drums and complains: “For some reason, they always pick a
night like this. This hot wind even sets me on edge.” Hot and—we can
assume, in this tropical place—humid wind is like a breath that streams
from the characters, settings, and the themes not only of death and decay,
but, as Alexander Nemerov notes,100 an uncontainable sadness that is con-
centrated most potently in the weeping Ti-Misery. This breath intermingles
with that of viewers. Where the air comes from, and who or what inspires
and expires it, ceases to be clear. The mournful enchantment of the film
keeps expanding, and is not halted by the final credits.
Near the beginning, on the boat, Betsy says in a voiceover: “I looked at
those great glowing stars. I felt the warm wind on my cheek. I breathed
deep, and every bit of me inside myself said, ‘How beautiful.’” Holland
speaks up. “It’s not beautiful,” he says. Betsy replies, “You read my
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 21

thoughts, Mr. Holland.” The exchange dramatizes something atmosphere

does, and atmospheric films do with exemplary power. Floating on the
dreamy, meaning-charged, luminescent waves, a character reads another’s
thoughts. Thoughts and feelings crisscross and interfuse in the space
between. Interior things breach boundaries effortlessly, mysteriously. The
balmy air carries the emotional charge of the scene all the way to us.

Notes
1. Wigley, “The Architecture of Atmosphere,” in Daidalos p. 27.
2. See, for example, Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema; Groening Cinema
Beyond Territory: Inflight Entertainment and Atmospheres of Globalization, Spadoni,
“Carl Dreyer’s Corpse: Horror Film Atmosphere and Narrative,” in A Companion to
the Horror Film; and Spadoni, “Horror Film Atmosphere as Anti-Narrative (and
Vice Versa),” in Merchants of Menace: The Business of Horror Cinema.
3. See, for example, Pollmann “Kalte Stimmung, or the Mode of Mood: Ice and Snow
in Melodrama,” in Colloquia Germanica; McKim, Cinema as Weather: Stylistic
Screens and Atmospheric Change; Hanich, Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and
Thrillers: The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear; and, for an example from
literature study, Pizzo, “Atmospheric Exceptionalism in Jane Eyre: Charlotte Bront€e’s
Weather Wisdom,” in PMLA.
4. Farber, “Fight Films,” in The Nation [7 May 1949], reproduced in Polito, Farber on
Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, p. 314.
5. “Essanay Films—Comedy and Western—Two Big Releases” [advertisement], in
Moving Picture World, p. 159.
6. Marion, “Scenario Writing,” in Behind the Screen: How Films Are Made, p. 34.
7. Schneider, 100 European Horror Films, p. xxi.
8. Perkins, Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies, p. 87.
9. Greene, “Sherlock Holmes,” in The Spectator [8 March 1940], reproduced in Parkinson,
The Graham Green Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews, and Film Stories, p. 379.
10. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence
of Max Reinhardt, p. 300. On the strong tendency to section off film atmosphere
from narrative, see Spadoni, “Dreyer’s Corpse.”
11. Harrington, “Ghoulies and Ghosties,” in Horror Film Reader, p. 18.
12. Powell, Deleuze and Horror Film, p. 70.
13. Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture, p. 520.
14. Powdermaker, Hollywood, The Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the
Movie-Makers, p. 187.
15. Andrew, Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film, p. 37.
16. Nisbett, The Sound Studio: Audio Techniques for Radio, Television, Film and
Recording, p. 283. B€ohme returns to sound many times in his writing. See, for
example, B€ ohme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, pp. 129–132, 167–175.
17. Rapee, “Selections from Encyclopaedia of Music for Motion Pictures,” in Celluloid
Symphonies: Texts and Contexts in Film Music History, p. 87.
18. Burt, The Art of Film Music, p. 11.
19. Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, p. 290.
20. Bazin, Orson Welles: A Critical View, p. 80.
22 R. SPADONI

21. Picart and Frank, “Horror and the Holocaust: Genre Elements in Schindler’s List and
Psycho,” in The Horror Film, p. 212.
22. Marsh, Screen Acting, p. 91.
23. Farber, “The Third Man,” in The Nation [1 April 1950], reproduced in Polito, Farber
on Film, p. 331.
24. Trent, “Daily Film Chaff for the Fans,” in Morning Daily Telegraph.
25. Williams, “Godard’s Use of Sound,” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, pp. 336–7;
On atmosphere as background, see Spadoni, “Dreyer’s Corpse.”
26. On the high value Farber placed on emotional expression in films, see Bordwell, The
Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture, pp. 82–110.
27. Hanich, Cinematic Emotion, p. 173.
28. Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and Ourselves” in Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works,
vol. 3, Writings 1934–47, p. 195.
29. On how film narratives generate atmosphere, see Spadoni, “Dreyer’s Corpse.”
30. Farber, “The Gimp,” in Commentary [June 1952], reproduced in Polito, Farber on
Film, p. 389.
31. Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium, p. 10.
32. For B€ ohme on atmospheres as both emotional and spatial, see, for example,
Aesthetics of Atmospheres, p. 5.
33. S. Jacobs, The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock, p. 259.
34. Kelley, “‘A Revolution in the Atmosphere:’ The Dynamics of Site and Screen in
1940s Soundies,” in Cinema Journal, p. 78.
35. Johnson and Miller, The Christopher Lee Filmography: All Theatrical Releases,
1948–2003, p. 97.
36. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and
Mode of Production to 1960, p. 351.
37. L. Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History, pp. 109–110; note this
writer buying into the foreground/background view.
38. Jesionowski, Thinking in Pictures: Dramatic Structure in D. W. Griffith’s Biograph
Films, p. 67.
39. Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, p. 178.
40. Vale, The Technique of Screenplay Writing, p. 56.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Wigley, “Architecture of Atmosphere,” p. 27.
44. Ibid.
45. B€ohme, Aesthetics of Atmospheres, p. 29. On this passage, see also Spadoni, “Dreyer’s
Corpse,” pp. 164–5. On this quality of atmosphere, also see the Introduction,
subtitled “Not to Leave Vagueness (But to Stay in It in the Right Way),” in Griffero,
Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces, pp. 1–7; and Orsoni “Point of View: A
Question of Atmosphere,” in Vis A Vis International, p. 11.
46. Tan, Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine,
p. 204. On film atmosphere as “vague and elusive,” also see Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky,
pp. 10, 13, 211.
47. MacCormac, “Sound and Screen,” in New York Times, p. X3.
48. Altman notes that live music before 1910 tended to accentuate individual moments
and that “not until the teens would musicians regularly adopt an aesthetic of
continuous music matched not to transient images or actions but to each scene’s
overall atmosphere” (Altman, Silent Film Sound, p. 368).
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 23

49. Altman, Silent Film Sound, p. 243.

50. Copland, “Tip to Moviegoers: Take off Those Ear-Muffs,” in New York Times
Magazine, p. 30.
51. Andrew, Mists of Regret, p. 270.
52. On the many senses of atmosphere and on its indeterminacy, see, for example,
B€ohme, Aesthetics of Atmospheres, pp. 11–12, 28–29, 183; and Bird, Andrei
Tarkovsky, p. 211. On film atmosphere’s diffuseness, see Spadoni, “Dreyer’s Corpse.”
53. Cameron interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air, National Public Radio.
54. B€ohme, Aesthetics of Atmospheres, p. 2. Griffero refers to “the spatiality of feelings”
(Atmospheres, p. 73).
55. Andrew, Mists of Regret, p. 188.
56. “What ‘Scarface’ Meant to Gangster Films ‘White Zombie’ Means to Thrillers,” in
Exhibitors’ Campaign Book for White Zombie, 1932.
57. Sisk, “Passion in a New Dimension,” in Commonweal [26 October 1953], quoted in
Heffernan, Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie
Business, 1953–1968, p. 32.
58. Farber, “Underground Films,” in Commentary [November 1957], reproduced in
Polito, Farber on Film, p. 489. Mark Kermode suggests that, for an atmosphere to
cast its spell, the audience need neither be large nor in a theater:
At around 11:00, when everyone else was in bed, I would sneak down into the
family living room and sit entranced by a selection of creaky … horror flicks,
usually from the Hammer or Amicus stable. No matter that I had to have the
volume turned down so far that it was impossible to hear anything that was
being said: what was captivating was the electrifying atmosphere, the sense of
watching something that was forbidden, secretive, taboo” (“I Was a Teenage
Horror Fan, Or, ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Linda Blair,’” in Ill
Effects: The Media/Violence Debate, p. 57).
59. B€ohme, Aesthetics of Atmospheres, p. 29; also see, for example, p. 183; and Griffero,
Atmospheres, pp. 121–123.
60. Farber, “‘Best Films’ of 1951,” in The Nation [5 January 1952], cited in Polito, Farber
on Film, p. 376.
61. Prawer, Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror, p. 225.
62. Eisner, The Haunted Screen, p. 317.
63. L-A Marks, “Eastern Promises,” in Culture Compass.
64. Tarkovsky quoted in Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 117.
65. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture and The
Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience.
66. Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience, p. 20.
67. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses and
Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media.
68. McKim, Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change, p. 4.
69. For the word’s meteorological origins, also see, for example, B€ohme, Aesthetics of
Atmospheres, pp. 2, 25, 28, 163.
70. Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 210.
71. Trumpener, “The Rene Clair Moment and the Overlap Films of the Early 1930s:
Detlef Sierck’s April, April!” in Film Criticism, p. 39.
72. B€ohme, “Acoustic Atmospheres: A Contribution to the Study of Ecological
Aesthetics,” in Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology, p. 15. In the essay as it
24 R. SPADONI

appears in B€ohme’s 2017 book, the phrase becomes “atmospheres are moods
pervading the air” (p. 167).
73. Lane, “Family Packs” in New Yorker, p. 86.
74. Marks, Touch, pp. 132. Also see Davina Quinlivan’s analysis of David Cronenberg’s
Spider (2002) in relation to “olfactory trauma,” in Quinlivan, The Place of Breath in
Cinema, pp. 100–102; and B€ ohme, Aesthetics of Atmospheres, p. 125–6.
75. B€ohme, Aesthetics of Atmospheres, p. 32.
76. Balasz, Visible Man [1924] in Carter (editor) and Livingstone (translator), Bela
Balasz: Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, p. 22. For another
invocation of this metaphor in a description of atmosphere, see Orsini, Michel.
“Point of View,” p. 11.
77. Rigby, American Gothic: Sixty Years of Horror Cinema, p. 146.
78. Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, p. 221.
79. Agee, in The Nation [25 November 1944], reproduced in Agee, Agee on Film:
Criticism and Comment on the Movies, p. 113.
80. Agee, in The Nation [13 April 1946], reproduced in Agee, Agee on Film, p. 185.
81. On atmosphere and the olfactory, and the olfactory linked to breath, see Griffero,
Atmospheres, pp. 63–9.
82. Williams, St€ onner, Wicker, et al., “Cinema Audiences Reproducibly Vary the
Chemical Composition of Air During Films, by Broadcasting Scene Specific
Emissions on Breath,” in Scientific Reports.
83. B€ohme, Aesthetics of Atmospheres, p. 15.
84. Barker, Tactile Eye, pp. 145–157.
85. Quinlivan, Place of Breath, p. 91.
86. Andrew, Mists of Regret, p. 110.
87. Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 200.
88. Jacobs, Wrong House, p. 122.
89. Janowitz, “Caligari—The Story of a Famous Story (Excerpts)” in The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories, p. 236.
90. Eikhenbaum, “Problems of Cinema Stylistics,” in Russian Formalist Film Theory,
p. 75.
91. Groening, Cinema Beyond Territory, p. 11.
92. Beynon, Musical Presentation of Motion Pictures, pp. 137–8.
93. Hanich, Cinematic Emotion, p. 180.
94. Fujiwara, Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall, pp. 86–7.
95. Zacharek, “Val Lewton Horror Collection,” in New York Times, p. A56. On how
another film, John Llewellyn Moxey’s The City of the Dead (1960), evokes tactile
sensations in ways that thicken its atmosphere, see Spadoni, “Horror Film
Atmosphere,” pp. 118–21.
96. Fujiwara, Jacques Tourneur, p. 85–97; Telotte, Dreams of Darkness: Fantasy and the
Films of Val Lewton, p. 52.
97. On how a weak narrative can make a film more atmospheric, see Spadoni, “Horror
Film Atmosphere.”
98. A fan refers to the “poetic and somewhat dreamy pacing of this tale of doomed
romance and voodoo” (Arena, Fright Night on Channel 9: Saturday Night Horror
Films on New York’s WOR–TV, 1973–1987, p. 115).
99. Sragow, “Scare Tactics,” in New Yorker, p. 24.
100. Nemerov, Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures, pp. 97–131.
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 25

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Library, 2000).
Altman, Rick. Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
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NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
Arena, James. Fright Night on Channel 9: Saturday Night Horror Films on New York’s
WOR–TV, 1973–1987 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012).
Balasz, Bela. Visible Man (1924), in Bela Balasz: Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The
Spirit of Film, Erica Carter, editor, and Rodney Livingstone, translator (New York:
Berghahn, 2010).
Barker, Jennifer M. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2009).
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1921).
Bird, Robert. Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (London: Reaktion, 2008).
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Routledge, 2017).
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Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press,
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Bordwell, David. The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
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3, Writings 1934–47, edited by Richard Taylor, translated by William Powell (London: I.
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26 R. SPADONI

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