Motion Pictures: Politics of Perception

Marta Zarzycka and Bettina Papenburg

Movement, Stillness, Affect, and Emotion

This special issue examines the capacity of images—be they still or

mobile—to move us as viewers. We wish to foreground the capacity
of motion to induce affect and to spark emotional response. In this
we tarry with recent scholarship on affect that insists upon sharply
differentiating affect from emotion. Brian Massumi and Steven
Shaviro, for example, both see emotion as contained by the subject
and affect as existing in excess of the subject. Massumi insists that
affect is presubjective and unqualiied sensation, whereas emotion
is situated perception: subjectivized, formed, and qualiied inten-
sity.1 He stresses the “irreducibly bodily and autonomic nature of
affect” while asserting that an “emotion is a subjective content, the
sociolinguistic ixing of the quality of an experience which is from
that point onward deined as personal.”2 In the same vein, Shaviro
afirms that “[e]motion is affect captured by a subject, or tamed
and reduced to the extent that it becomes commensurate with that
subject.”3 While affect is a force or intensity lowing through sub-
jects, an emotion becomes property of the subject, or as Shaviro
puts it, “Subjects are overwhelmed and traversed by affect, but they
have or possess their own emotions.”4 Yet as both Massumi and Sha-
viro admit, affect and emotion are closely related: while emotion

Discourse, 35.2, Spring 2013, pp. 163–176.

Copyright © 2014 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321.
164 Marta Zarzycka and Bettina Papenburg

conines affect, it does not exhaust affect. Shaviro emphasizes that

“emotion can never entirely separate itself from the affect from
which it is derived.”5 Similarly, the inner movement that we experi-
ence and articulate as emotion contains the various types of physi-
cal movement that are involved in the process of production and
reception of images ranging from camera motion to the lickering
of our eyelids. We therefore propose the term “movement” as
encompassing both affect and emotion.
If motion links to emotion, our second term—“stillness,” or
“inner stillness”—signiies neither simply the reverse nor the lack
of inner movement, nor does it signify passivity. Rather, the emo-
tional state of becoming still, which may be facilitated through both
still and moving images, is the state of retreat, rest, and contempla-
tion and of subtly connecting to the outside world while being in
touch with one’s sense of interiority. Stillness and movement are
vital components of the rendering of both still and moving images
as well as of their perception and their projection. Camera motion
and the movement of bodies and objects in front of the camera
lens shape the process of production of footage. The movement
and stillness of our bodies—when sitting in the dark room of the
movie theater or when holding a photograph—reign over the per-
ception of images. Movement is also a key constituent of projec-
tion in the form of a celluloid strip moving through a projector
or when it comes to the projector emitting light waves and parti-
cles. Motion pictures draw us in by way of their movement, facilitating
identiication with ilm characters as well as bringing about immer-
sion into a projected setting and evoking empathy with characters,
objects, rooms, and landscapes in addition to forms and shapes
onscreen. Both moving and still images have the power to move us
but also to still us with their capacity to invite a state of contempla-
tion and arrest—particularly infrequent in current times that value
movement as a sign of activity, vitality, and advancement.
The threshold between still and moving images—both the dia-
lectical tension between these terms and the indeterminate space
where one becomes another—is particularly enticing.6 Contempo-
rary attempts to engage this threshold are numerous: digital images
that unfold in time across electronic screens, YouTube clips that
can be paused and reanimated at any moment, still images inserted
into a sequence of a ilm, and slow-motion and stop-motion tech-
niques employed in ilm editing. Via remote control and keystroke,
viewers encountering digital images can control the progression
of stilled moments, disrupting temporal linearity. This may lead
to what Laura Mulvey calls a “delayed cinema,” a cinema resisting
the rush toward the future and reaching back to the past.7 Mobile
Motion Pictures: Politics of Perception 165

devices using free apps and sharing images via social media net-
works further confound the lines between stasis and motion and
between frozen moment and duration in time: although still, the
photographs stored in our phones and tablets are on the move
with us. Online platforms such as Magnum in Motion and Media
Storm, showing documentary footage of war, conlict, and poverty,
present photographs animated by music and soundscapes as well
as by the so-called Ken Burns effect: the slow zooming in and out
on certain elements of a photograph, panning rotations in a hori-
zontal plane of an image, and fading transitions between frames.
These “moving stills” incorporate discontinuity of static images
into continuous low of time.8
The threshold of movement and stillness in contemporary
visual practices cannot be conceptualized purely as a result of
special effects or solely as a theme to be represented. They must
be thought of as kinesthetic and affective forces shaping the
engagement between images and their viewers. Giuliana Bruno
aptly emphasizes the capacity of images to move their spectators
when she stresses the haptic roots of affect, asserting that “motion,
indeed, produces emotion and that, correlatively, emotion contains
movement.”9 Bruno alludes to the complex entanglement of physi-
cal movement and inner movement. We follow the etymology of
motion that Bruno provides in Atlas of Emotion, where she convinc-
ingly shows the close intermingling of physical exchange and emo-
tional movement. Bruno alerts us to the Latin root emovere, which
comprises movere (“to move”) and e (“out”) that is at the heart of
the words “movement” and “emotion,” signaling the expression of
feelings toward the outside, our gestures sparking communal expe-
rience. The Greek word for cinema, kinema, likewise encompasses
“motion” and “emotion.” The etymological meaning appositely
hints at cinema’s capacity to carry us away.
Our capacity to be carried away largely depends on the motion
and stasis that happens within and around images; the effect that
images have on us is propelled by their capacity to transmit affect.
The transmission of affect is itself the low, vibration, frequency,
and circulation that creates resonances. To feel, it is often said, is
to feel moved—through encounters, relationships, reciprocations,
resonances, intervals, and harmonies.10 Affect refers to a palpable
intensity that effectively mediates between embodied conditions
and culturally shaped meanings and also connects either arrested
spectators and moving images or moving viewers and still images.
An image that vividly exempliies this in one of the essays is the
disabled protagonist of James Cameron’s Avatar, directing an “ava-
tar” body, an arrested body initiating movement. This image is
166 Marta Zarzycka and Bettina Papenburg

emblematic of the need to animate, enliven, set into motion as an

expression of our desire for (inter)human connection or for “feel-
ing alive.” Following Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi, Steven
Shaviro points to the interweaving of this desire and media proit
in the late capitalist era. In his deinition of affect’s relationship
to moving image media, Shaviro emphasizes this entanglement:
“Films and music videos like other media works are machines for
generating affect, and for capitalizing upon, or extracting value from
this affect.”11 While this critical stance on the exploitation of affect
resonates well with the contributions to this issue, our authors also
attend to the more positive, critical, and generative potentials of
mediated affect.

Politics of Perception

We take inspiration from the most recent feminist investment in

the political potentials of affect, emotion, and feeling. In Depres-
sion: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich underlines the political power
of a condition, which, in medical and public contexts, is gener-
ally understood as private and closely linked to withdrawal and
isolation of the subject affected by it. Instead, Cvetkovich convinc-
ingly argues that sharing that feeling—brought about by the fact
of being a citizen of a nation at war, by the current attack on the
humanities, or by the quotidian pressures of academic life—can
lead to collective political action targeting those circumstances
that are experienced as depressing.12 One method for doing this
is by way of artistic practice. From the context of trauma and
memory studies, Jill Bennett, drawing on the work of French poet
and Holocaust survivor Charlotte Delbo, compellingly shows how
artistic practice can transform individual “sense memory” or “deep
memory” into shared “common memory” or “ordinary memory”
rendering communicable traumatic experience.13 In a similar
vein, Jacques Rancière advances a notion of spectatorship that cuts
across psychological, physical, and social registers when he calls
for a conception of spectators as actively constituting agents.14 For
Rancière, this idea of aesthetic experience implies a utopian vision
of a “community of narrators and translators.”15 This dynamics of
feeling and witnessing feeling is what we are after when we speak
about “politics of perception”: the private and the personal becom-
ing the pivot of communal experience and engendering change
on a public scale.
We approach the problem of perceiving movement with the
conceptual tools developed in Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery
Motion Pictures: Politics of Perception 167

and Feminist Politics, where we have mapped out a shift in the ongo-
ing discussion on aesthetics and visual culture in ields such as gen-
der studies, media studies, and ilm studies.16 There, we have given
a different spin to the politics of representation—modes of visual
and verbal production reinforcing and subverting the cultural
perception of social groups—by approaching artworks through
the lens of (multi)sensory perception (aisthesis), or our intimate,
embodied, and sustainable relationship with images. Challenging
the historically grounded primacy of vision, our approach has been
inspired by the anthropology of the senses17 and by recent schol-
arship in ilm studies engaging the phenomenology of aesthetic
experience.18
This special issue ties in with our enduring focus on the mul-
tisensorial engagement with images and seeks to strengthen our
speciic approach to visual culture by foregrounding the politics of
perception whereby the viewer is no longer only a viewer but is also
the subject of an embodied, mobile encounter and is thus directly
implicated in and by the act of perception. While the politics of
representation seeks to uncover the representational strategies
employed to reproduce stereotypical depictions, ixing subjects
in power differentials, and to spark alternatives to clichéd repre-
sentations, our speciic intervention is to bring to the fore the full
sensorium and hence draw attention to the embodiment of the
perceiver. From this perspective, movement becomes a speciic
quality of images and, more important, a particular way of our
engaging with them. Situating the bodies of viewers and subjects
and objects in relation to one another, this approach to movement
theorizes the tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive engagement
with images.
All of these dimensions are addressed by the cover photo-
graph, showing the magniied close-up of an eye projected on the
screen of a grand old movie theater. The theater is empty. We, view-
ers of the photograph, begin to imagine spectators watching the
huge eye move and the eye blinking and watching them arrested
in their seats. The photograph is a stilled detail from the installa-
tion The Paradise Institute by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller,
originally created for the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
in 2001. Visitors were invited to take a seat on the balcony overlook-
ing the model of a miniature movie theater in which emblematic
scenes from various movie genres were projected. Via headphones,
visitors heard both the sounds emanating from the projected ilm
and the sounds produced by a ictive cinema audience. In doing
so, the installation staged a communal, multisensory experience
encompassing vision, sound, and proprioception. The work vividly
168 Marta Zarzycka and Bettina Papenburg

embraced the politics of perception: arrested spectators encoun-

tering moving images and mobile viewers animating still images
challenge the boundary we are accustomed to drawing between
stillness and movement.
Politics of perception highlights the implications of our affec-
tive and emotional response to images at the intersection of move-
ment and stillness. What is called for is a language of the “both . . .
and . . . ,” allowing us to come to terms with experience exceed-
ing binary categories, such as the capacity of images to both move
and still us. Drawing on approaches from a variety of ields such
as studies of sentimentalism, emotion and affect studies, cultural
studies, spatial art practices, and ilm theory, each essay that fol-
lows shows how movement and stillness affectively engage bodies
in particular relations. Where other recent studies on movement
and stillness have predominantly focused on the differences of
photography and cinema,19 the essays assembled here emphasize
the ethical and political dimensions of the expanded, multisensory
concept of representation by including the questions of motion
and stasis and how they affect viewers and their relationship to
the represented subjects. Attention is given to formal strategies,
including 3-D effects, soundtrack, digital navigation tools, spatial
involvement, and randomness of camera movement, that trans-
form viewers’ affective multisensory capacities, engendering ques-
tions of immersion, intensity, and vulnerability.20 Movement and
stillness are understood as modes of relating to contemporary visual
culture at large.

Movement and Power

The question of who moves and by what means is ethically

charged.21 In the visual realm of the twenty-irst century, mobil-
ity has become not only “the uppermost among coveted values”
but also an obligation.22 There is a generalized imperative to move
images, to move with images, and to be moved by them—to copy or
paste them, to share them, to “like” them (or hate them?), to tweet
them. Images gain new meanings in the processes in which users,
spectators, viewers, and perceivers use (and misuse) them, opening
up pressing questions of their accountability toward the subjects
represented and our ownership of them (or lack thereof). Move-
ment intervenes at every stage of making and perceiving images,
including the recording, processing, circulation, display, and expe-
rience of images. The process of transmitting visually rendered
data between servers worldwide creates movement. “Copies in
Motion Pictures: Politics of Perception 169

motion,” as Hito Steyerl calls contemporary low resolution iles,23

circulate globally as the digital connection accelerates and slows
down; compressed, reproduced, fractured, and previewed images
endlessly travel through digital archives, shifting resolution, for-
mat, speed, and media.
At the same time, power differentials govern the capacities of
individuals to move and determine the restriction of movement
of social groups. In the context of the colonial era, movement
through space signiied travel and exploration in addition to the
privilege of exploring “nature,” “unknown territories,” and “unciv-
ilized peoples,” shaping the relations of power and subjugation.
Since the Enlightenment the right to move has been an inalien-
able right of the citizen, although immobility, stasis, and exclusion
from geopolitical spaces are the destiny of ethnic groups today.
Consequently, restriction of movement is a practice of penalization
and of social exclusion, coming to bear in practices ranging from
the lawful imprisonment at sites such as Guantánamo Bay and the
entry regulations of countries and economic areas enjoying rela-
tive prosperity (referred to by the term “Alien Law”) to the laws
curbing the freedom of movement of immigrants and speciically
of asylum seekers. One can also note, however, in cases such as with
Aboriginal populations or Palestine, that both mobility and stillness
are, contextually, rights: the refusal of occupied people to leave a
territory is as much a right as the will to mobility.
Movement offers the illusion of universal progress, change,
and aliveneness.24 However, contemporary (virtual) tourism and
job mobility make us acutely aware that subjects are positioned dif-
ferently when it comes to their capacities and resources to move at
will. The widespread practice of commuting and the breakdown
of movement in space that we witness in the standstill of trafic
in ubiquitous urban gridlock presents one of the challenges that
societies are facing nowadays. Modes of transportation, ranging
from cycling to supersonic transport, and modes of communica-
tion, from snail mail to e-mail, signify economic progress and social
change yet incite a host of social and ecological issues. Moreover,
while transportation may raise a fantasy of freedom from the limi-
tations of the body, access to the means of transportation at cyber
speed remains a privilege for particular subjects only. “[T]he free-
dom to move through space has been and is still prized in an era
of digital media.”25
All of our contributors speciically attend to the situatedness of
both images and their viewers in particular sociocultural contexts
of mobility and immobility. Adopting an approach that is sensi-
tive to the particularities of social differentiation and examining
170 Marta Zarzycka and Bettina Papenburg

concepts of ethnicity, race, gender, class, geopolitical location, and

disability, the essays demonstrate that movement cannot be under-
stood outside of the complex cultural dynamics that shape subjects
and objects.26

Contributions

Each of the assembled essays addresses the politics and ethics of

the interplay between static and moving images from a distinct per-
spective. The essays aim to mobilize critical interventions into the
study of movement, stillness, multisensoriality, affect, and gender
in visual media through linking diverse lines of the relationship
between movement and stimulating interconnections between dis-
tinct theoretical and methodological traditions. This collection of
essays encompasses the heterogeneous array of corporeal, mate-
rial, and social mobilities that we encounter in our multisensory
experiencing of the visual. The essays are also attentive to how
motion and stasis—both of subjects represented onscreen and of
audiences in front of the screen—shape our sensorial, affective,
and ethical engagement with images.
Kyla Schuller’s “Avatar and the Movements of Neocolonial Sen-
timental Cinema” takes Avatar, a Hollywood production that gained
millions of fans worldwide, partly due to its larger-than-life rendi-
tions of movement, as an example of a new kind of twenty-irst cen-
tury sentimentalism, an Enlightenment epistemology and aesthetic
mode that forges deep affective connections between the work of
iction and its audiences. In this iteration of the sentimental mode,
adapted to late capitalist conditions and neoliberal ideals, diverse
movements link the onscreen characters and their viewers through
emotional shifts, sensory stimulations, and affective responses.
Continuing a long-standing colonialist and evolutionary trope of
the life-changing encounter between the overcivilized subject and
the savage, Avatar associates movement with vitality and progress
(and, consequently, the lack of movement with degeneration and
decay). At the same time, the ilm’s imaging technology, particu-
larly striking in its 3-D versions, enacts the dynamic in which the
viewers experience sensory movements that are similar to those of
the protagonists, therefore adopting an avatar body themselves.
Ultimately, this immersive spectacle of computer-generated images
sparks affective movements among responsive, sympathetic bodies
of the viewers, often at the cost of the “savage” characters, which
are represented as racially, bodily, and evolutionarily different.
Movement, seen widely as an uncorrupted, promising resource
Motion Pictures: Politics of Perception 171

in ilmmaking, is exposed in Schuller’s essay as compromised and

colonizing, a strategic commodiication of sensory and emotional
operations.
The dynamics of visual representation, “racial differences,”
and movement is also at the center of Jennifer M. Barker’s contri-
bution “Be-hold: Touch, Temporality, and the Cinematic Thumb-
nail Image,” albeit in regard to movement’s opposite: stillness.
Barker argues that the cinematic trope of thumbnail images—that
is, images of photographs inserted in a ilm sequence in which we
see the hands of a ilm character holding a photograph—incites us
to reassess the widespread distinction between still images (pho-
tography) and moving images (ilm). The copresence of photo-
graph and human hands complicates the relationship between the
character who is physically holding an image, the character who is
represented in the image, the one who captured the image, and us,
spectators who are looking at someone else looking. Barker, in her
close reading of the single thumbnail image in the 1959 ilm Imita-
tion of Life, initiates relection about the racial dynamics at work
both in the ilm and in postwar U.S. society. In this image we see
the ingers of a black mother holding and looking at a snapshot
of her teenage daughter who could pass as white. Barker proposes
conceiving the act of the handling of this photographic image of
another as a “be-holding,” as at once a moving with the Other and
a moving away from the Other. While the tactile encounter dif-
ferentiates between self and Other, more important it opens up
possibilities of connecting, of “being with” the Other. Extending
Raymond Bellour’s idea of “the pensive spectator,”27 Barker argues
that the thumbnail image exhibits “not only a pensive gaze but also
a pensive grasp.”
Barker’s lucid relections on the complex interplay of looking
and holding in the staging of critical relections on racial identity
resonate well with Christine Ross’s essay “Movement That Mat-
ters Historically: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s 2012
Alter Bahnhof Video Walk” in which she discusses how the audi-
ences’ sensorimotor involvement with a speciic place opens up
an ethical horizon. While Barker is interested in the thumbnail
image’s capacity to make spectators pause and think about the
space between the binary racial categories of “black” and “white,”
Ross points out how “the participant’s capacity to be affectively
moved through movement” remains crucial in creating histori-
cal awareness and intensity. Ross examines the Alter Bahnhof Video
Walk by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, an art installation
made for the 2012 dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel. This work explores
movement and mobility as an undertaking by which a speciic
172 Marta Zarzycka and Bettina Papenburg

place (the Hauptbahnhof train station in Kassel, from which Jews

were deported by freight trains to extermination camps during
World War II) is affectively historicized. Visitors are invited to
circulate in the space, equipped with a screen that broadcasts a
video of the station as it once was and a headset that transmits
prerecorded sounds of trains and people rushing through the
station as well as the artist’s voice. The manifold occurrences of
movement—the movement of the walker in space, the mobility of
media devices, the movement of the image and sound, the partici-
pant’s capacity to be affectively moved when walking—makes the
participant receptive to the otherwise imperceptible complexity
of the historical and contemporary space. Combining an autobio-
graphical narrative with the elements of ilm noir and the histori-
cal signiicance of the artwork’s context, the video walk densely
merges the audible and the visible, the ictional and the real, and
the past and the present as Ross guides us through the experience
of a walker, “moving in space has been transformed into being
moved by space.”
While Schuller, Barker, and Ross pinpoint the ethical implica-
tions of our moving with images, Jon Inge Faldalen contributes to
a “natural history” of creation and perception of still and moving
images. He approaches the key theme of this special issue in “Still
Einstellung: Stillmoving Imagenesis”—that is, movement by refocus-
ing the question of how images move and still us. Faldalen asks how
we are “stilling (with) images.” The author discusses two case stud-
ies: Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), an example
of 3-D cinema featuring prehistoric rock paintings in the Chauvet
cave in the Ardèche Valley of Southern France, and Richard Wil-
son’s 20:50, a room-illing sculpture made of steel and recycled
engine oil that creates an expansive and indeinable virtual space
that clinically absorbs and mirrors the gallery architecture. Fal-
dalen reads the depictions of igures on solid rock surfaces in the
cave, which are animated by both reverberations of ire and camera
movements, and the relections of still architecture and moving
visitors on the oil illing in the gallery space as instances of what
he calls “imagenesis.” Taking his cue from the Latin word imago
and from the Greek term genesis, Faldalen explores the question of
image creation on rock surfaces as well as on oil and water surfaces.
Focusing on relections and shadows, he proposes to collapse the
analytical distinction between still and moving images and instead
suggests investigating “stillmoving imageability,” that is, a material’s
ability to produce an image. Faldalen borrows from Gertrud Koch
the provocative concept of Einstellung, a German term referring
to both the positioning of bodies and objects in front of a movie
Motion Pictures: Politics of Perception 173

camera and the real-life, value-laden attitude assumed by social

actors vis-à-vis social groups.28 The double meaning of the German
term, which Koch wittily highlights, suggests that the ilm shot con-
veys a social attitude. Faldalen proposes the concept of Einstellung
to articulate the capacity of materials such as rock and oil to both
move and still us.
While Faldalen considers the emergence or nascency of
images at the threshold between movement and stillness, Anu Koi-
vunen in her essay “Uncanny Motions: Facing Death, Morphing
Life” ponders the representation of aging as movement toward
death. Koivunen studies the short video loop titled Metamorphosis,
an animated rendition of thirteen self-portraits of the Finnish artist
Helene Schjerfbeck, that she encountered in the context of the art-
ist’s postmortem show in 2012. The experience of watching a series
of subsequent images seamlessly morphing into each other, span-
ning the life cycle from youth to old age, allows viewers to bring
questions of body, selfhood, and spirit to the fore and throws into
sharp relief the movement that the self and its uttermost form of
expression, the face, perform throughout the life cycle. While ani-
mating the still images and bringing them back from the past, the
loop shows movement as effacement and de-individuation.
In all of the essays assembled in this special issue, both aes-
thetics and ethics of movement are connected, at least partly, to
ilmmakers’ and visual artists’ intentionality and their (creative)
choices or strategies. Contrarily, Florian Leitner’s “On Robots and
Turtles: A Posthuman Perspective on Camera and Image Move-
ment after Michael Snow’s La région centrale” focuses on two cases
of nonhuman camera movements: an underwater ilm made by a
sea turtle when the animal hit the release button on a lost (and
later retrieved) digital camera and Michael Snow’s 1971 experi-
mental ilm shot by a 16mm camera mounted on a robotic arm
rotating on a number of different axes at various speeds and set
up on a Canadian mountaintop. Leitner points to striking similari-
ties between both kinds of footage made by the nonhuman actors,
particularly in respect to camera movement; both the turtle and
the robotic arm put the camera into a seemingly chaotic, endless
rotation around itself. Leitner’s essay takes these similarities as a
point of departure to stress how the two ilms break out of cin-
ematic conventions by divorcing the camera’s gaze from human
gestures and arguing for a nonhuman motion-gaze: a dynamics in
which looking and moving become inseparable. By challenging the
traditional idea that subjectivity and the gaze are located at a single
point, Leitner transfers agency from a human creator subject to a
luid, mobile, dispersed actor-network.
174 Marta Zarzycka and Bettina Papenburg

Collectively these essays argue that movement—a kinesthetic

process; an organized or spontaneous action; a phenomenologi-
cal, historical, or cultural occurrence; an imaginative or material/
corporeal affective phenomenon evoked through images, sounds,
or narratives; a continuous, repetitive, or random intensity, aiming
at proximity or distance—is happening all the time in our minds
and in our bodies. Even stillness (and how it extends to silence) in
this volume becomes a product of movement to the extent that we
associate it with “becoming still” or “slowing down.”
Two and a half millennia after Heraclitus and a century after
the theory of relativity, our knowledge of movement and stasis and
the threshold between them is far from exhausted. It is the chal-
lenge of this issue to insist that we not take these terms for granted
and that we theorize them locally and across registers for the man-
ner in which they produce continuities while remaining dynamic.
We believe that the current interest in mobile media studies and
the renewed attention to art history and ilm theory will continue
to reconnect movement and stillness with the politics of percep-
tion, ethics, and social relations. An aesthetic conception of motion
pictures, which entails the spatial, the temporal, the affective, and
the political, provokes us to rethink the sociocultural practices of
movement in media and art and invites us to see it as a pivotal fac-
tor in the production of contemporary notions of subjectivity and
political agency.

Notes
We wish to warmly thank the editors of Discourse, James Leo Cahill and Genevieve
Yue, for their expert guidance and for their invaluable editorial feedback with regard
to both this introduction and this special issue as a whole.
1.
Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” in Parables for the Virtual: Movement,
Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 23–45.
2.
Ibid., 28.
3.
Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Hants: Zero Books, 2010), 3, emphasis
in original.
4.
Ibid., 3.
5.
Ibid., 4, emphasis in original. In an earlier book publication where he engages
Alfred North Whitehead’s theory of feelings, Shaviro to some extent disengages from
differentiating between affect and emotion. Steven Shaviro, “Pulses of Emotion,” in
Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2009), 47–70; see especially 47n1.
Motion Pictures: Politics of Perception 175

6.
Speciically, we are indebted to Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, eds., Still Moving:
Between Cinema and Photography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
7.
Laura Mulvey, Death 24X a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London:
Reaction Books, 2006).
8.
Ingrid Hoelzl, “Moving Stills: Images That Are No Longer Immobile,” Photog-
raphies 3, no. 1 (2010): 99–108.
9.
Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New
York: Verso, 2007), 6.
10.
These contributions have most signiicantly informed our understanding of
the concept of affect in contemporary cultural theory: Teresa Brennan, The Transmis-
sion of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Patricia T. Clough and Jean
Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2007); and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
11.
Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect, 2–3, emphasis in original.
12.
Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2012), 1–3.
13.
Jill Bennett, “Insides, Outsides: Trauma, Affect, and Art,” in Empathic Vision:
Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005),
25–26.
14.
Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, translated by Gregory Elliot
(London: Verso, 2009), 13.
15.
Ibid., 22.
16.
Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzycka, eds., Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive
Imagery and Feminist Politics (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013).
17.
Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across
Cultures (London: Routledge, 1993); Constance Classen, “Foundations for an
Anthropology of the Senses,” International Social Science Journal, September, no. 153
(1997): 401–12; Constance Classen, The Book of Touch (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2005);
Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, Aroma: The Cultural History
of Smell (New York: Routledge, 1994); Paul Stoller, The Taste of Ethnographic Things:
The Senses in Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); Paul
Stoller, Sensuous Scholarship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997);
and Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York:
Routledge, 1993).
18.
Vivian Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision
in the Flesh,” in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), 67–72; Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch
and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Martine
Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Edinburgh,
UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); Elena del Río, “The Body as Foundation
of the Screen: Allegories of Technology in Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts,” Camera
Obscura 38 (1996): 92–115; and Bruce Elder, A Body of Vision: Representations of the Body
in Recent Film and Poetry (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998).
19.
Sigrid Leyssen and Pirkko Rathgeber, eds., Bilder animierter Bewegung [Images
of Animate Movement] (Paderborn: Fink, 2013); Laurent Guido and Olivier Lugon,
176 Marta Zarzycka and Bettina Papenburg

Between Still and Moving Images: Photography and Cinema in the 20th Century (London:
John Libbey, 2012); Eivind Røssaak, ed., Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography,
Algorithms (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012); and Karen Beckman,
Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010).
20.
Among the works that have inspired our engagement with these questions are
Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2010); Erin Manning, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); and Laura U. Marks, The Skin of
the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2000).
21.
Lisa Nakamura, “Where Do You Want to Go Today? Cybernetic Tourism, the
Internet, and Transnationality,” in Race in Cyberspace, edited by Beth E. Kolko, Lisa
Nakamura, and Gilbert Rodman (New York: Routledge, 2000), 15–26.
22.
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (London: Wiley, 2000), 2.
23.
Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” E-Flux, no. 10 (2009), www.e-lux.
com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/.
24.
See Vivian Sobchack, ed., Meta Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture
of Quick-Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Vivian Sobchack,
Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 2004); and Sally Banes and Andre Lepecki, eds., The Senses in Performance
(New York: Routledge, 2007).
25.
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 244.
26.
For further research along these lines, see Bettina Papenburg and Marta
Zarzycka, eds., Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics (London:
I. B. Tauris, 2013), and Davide Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2009).
27.
Raymond Bellour, “The Pensive Spectator,” Wide Angle 9, no. 1 (1987): 6–10.
28.
Gertrud Koch, Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung: Visuelle Konstruktionen des
Judentums (Berlin: Edition Suhrkamp, 1992).
 Avatar and the Movements of
Neocolonial Sentimental Cinema

Kyla Schuller

Modes of literature, art, and ilm animate the body and accultur-
ate its movements. Sentimentalism, an Enlightenment epistemol-
ogy and aesthetic mode that remains a viable form in commercial
cinema, makes the audience’s embodied connection with the
characters onscreen central to the pleasure of viewing. In the pres-
ent moment, something is often dismissively called “sentimental”
when its lagrant and seemingly feminized indulgence in emotion
appears rather more cliché than heartfelt. Sentimental approaches
to knowledge production position self-relective feelings as the
individual’s most reliable indicator of truth. As an aesthetic mode,
sentimental texts seek to elicit emotional and physiological feelings
in audiences that mirror those of the characters, most famously in
the form of melodrama’s shared tears.1 Yet while sentimentality in
cinema serves as a particularly useful resource for thinking about
how images move the viewer’s body, all modes create patterns of
sensory and motor response. Building on Kara Keeling’s notion of
cinematic “common sense,” a set of habituated sensorimotor move-
ments and collective images shared by contemporary consumers
of ilm, I suggest that modes function as a political organization of
the senses.2 Modes train sensorimotor responses in the context of
speciic social relations such that they function as a political orga-
nization of affective response.

Discourse, 35.2, Spring 2013, pp. 177–193.

Copyright © 2014 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321.